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What are you reading?

Does it make me a bad person that I laughed, and laughed.

I've just finished

How Not to be a Boy. Robert Webb,
The Journeys of Socrates. Dan Millman,
A Jerk on One End. Robert Hughes.

I don't know what I was thinking several years ago, or if it's pure coincidence, but the next 2 books on the pile were both heavily Christian propaganda oriented stories.

Bomber Grounded, Runway Closed. Ciaron O'Reilly and The Shack, Wm. Paul Young. I will not be finishing either, and have recently changed my stance on book burning. I know what I'll be lighting my fires with for a week or so.
I laughed and laughed as he read it to me.
 
Just finished Swearing Is Good For You by Emma Byrnes and Trees by Percival Everett.

The first book reports the biological, psychological, sociological and historical research on the benefits and drivers of swearing along with differences between languages, cultures, genders, classes and social situations. Well written in a conversational style combining wit with information.

Trees is a hilarious deeply satirical sci fi whodunnit look at racism in the USA.
 
I love coming to this thread. There are lots of recommendations for future reading, all stored in the one place. I don't have to jot them down on bits of scrap paper, which I subsequently lose.

Everything else is on hold while I read Elder Race, another Adrian Tchaikovsky. Science fiction, but the sciences are anthropology, sociology, psychology, and it takes some pretty accurate shots at academic rigour.

I won't open a vein when I read the last of his books, but I will feel like it.
 
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon, and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis (2018)
Giving the title in full saves me the trouble of explaining the main contents of this entertaining book. If you lived through the early 70s, you will revisit through this book many of the curious features of that time. Leary was doing a 10-year stretch in a California prison after police found two roaches in his car (!) He was in a minimum security prison and got over the wall by pulling himself hand over hand across a power cable. The Weathermen helped him get out of the country, and he fled to Algeria, where his first refuge was with the Black Panthers, headed by Eldridge Cleaver -- not a fun guy at all, in this account. Nixon, meanwhile, was trying to bolster his law and order image, and gave various federal agencies the task of bringing Leary back to the states. The chase went on for nearly two and a half years, and Leary's adventures in the underground took him to Egypt, Lebanon, Switzerland, and Afghanistan. The undercurrent of the book is humor. Dr. Leary comes off as a shallow hedonist, pathetically eager to be Captain Trips to the youngsters. Nixon is just Nixon, playing up the War on Drugs, which as we all know was a knockout of a government program. The book reads fast, and it's as pleasant a pastime as eating a double-scoop chocolate chip ice cream cone. Two tidbits to entice more readers to this title:
1- There is a good deal of description of the Black Panthers compound in Algeria. If you're female, you'll count yourself lucky to not have been one of the wives or mistresses of Cleaver and the other men who ran the place.
2- My favorite scene concerns an extradition flight near the end of the book, and how two prisoners decided to celebrate their last couple of hours of freedom. I don't often laugh out loud while reading, but the authors' wording here is killer.
 
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