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What are you reading?

In the middle of The Four Legged Lottery, Frank Hardy.

I've never actually read Power Without Glory, to my shame. I'll have to, now.
 
Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece by Ashley Kahn. Just what it says. An intelligent account of Miles' 50s career, leading up to the sessions that created the five hypnotically captivating tracks that make up Kind of Blue. Almost anything/everything you'd want to know is here.
 
Reading Gravity, Tess Gerritsen.

Infinitely better than the bits of the film I've seen. The two don't seem to be more than superficially related.


Just finished The Awakening, Kate Chopin.

Madame Bovary set in the south of the US with more beautiful language and a character I can care about.
 
All We Are Saying (2000) is an updated edition of The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which were taped around September, 1980. The interviewer was David Sheff. It's a good, fast read, with all of the sorrow that hindsight provides. One drawback: Sheff can't let go of the needless questions about a Beatles reunion; he bugs Lennon about that for a couple of pages, despite mentioning early in the book that a fan had yelled to John on the street, "When will you get back with the Beatles?" and John replied, "When are you going back to high school?" Major plus: Lennon's take on dozens of Beatles songs. Essential reading if you're into the Beatles or John/Yoko.
 
I've embarked on the mammoth task of reading everything published of H. P. Lovecraft. It's hard to put my finger on why it is so good. Because he breaks all the rules. Lots of purple prose. He tells and doesn't show. He has questionable moral values (read The Street if you need convincing). There's zero uplifting feel good. It's all despair. His descriptions often make no sense. It's still amazing. Nobody can string together a sentence as masterfully as good ol' ultra racist H. P. L.
 
I just had a realisation about the Cthulhu mythos. Lovecraft talking about atheism. Just like Nietzsche he was raised Christian, was scientificaly minded and saw how Christianity had lost its magic. Not only did he not believe, but it didn't inspire him anymore. The universe isn't guided by benevolence. Its out to get us. The Cthulhu mythos is his "For God is dead and we have killed him". Both Nietzsche and Lovecraft were atheists and hated it.

These were of course thoughts very much in the minds of people of that era. The intellectuals could see God and religion dying. Some rejoiced and could see the dawn of a new man. Some were mostly just terrified of what was about to come
 
Othello

Holy Fuck whoever wrote that could write!

For a lover of poetry, it's like say you're a hetero guy and you get to have sex with Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe, Cheryl Ladd, Ginger and Mary Ann, all the moms on all the classic sitcoms, AND Salma Hayek, all at the same time, while having a manicure and a haircut, eating prime rib, and listening to your own personal symphony orchestra on a beach in the Caribbean, all at the same time.

:joy:
 
An interesting one I'm reading right now - A History of China by Wolfram Eberhard. It's a complete history of China that I picked up at one of our locals a number of months ago. Originally published in 1950, and apparently considered an important work.

It's interesting seeing such a long history stuffed into a small volume, also interesting given the published date. At the moment I've been skipping through and reading the cultural / social oriented sections.
 
fromderinside said:
Pinker "The Better Angels of our Nature Why Violence has Declined", again. Nothing like an apparent exception to the rule to force reconsideration of drivers to social direction of behavior.
Click to expand...

I own and enjoyed The Blank Slate, but have hesitated to read the above. Does it boil down to much more than 'we've leveraged massive amounts of energy to create lawful, organized, abundant societies'?
 
I've been flipping through The Moral Animal by Robert Wright lately, which is a book on evolutionary psychology published in 1994. I read a digital version a few years ago, and found a hard copy recently to add to my collection. It's a surprisingly enjoyable read. Lately I'm finding myself drawn back to the precision of the natural sciences, and am taking another look at old ideas through a new perspective.
 
rousseau said:
fromderinside said:
Pinker "The Better Angels of our Nature Why Violence has Declined", again. Nothing like an apparent exception to the rule to force reconsideration of drivers to social direction of behavior.
Click to expand...

I own and enjoyed The Blank Slate, but have hesitated to read the above. Does it boil down to much more than 'we've leveraged massive amounts of energy to create lawful, organized, abundant societies'?
Click to expand...

It's a bit more than that. Pinker ties in elements you've never thought of to explain why violence has declined. Such as the rising popularity of fiction, and why it's considered bad manners to eat peas with a knife.

As you would expect, he has to spend a lot of pages explaining why his thesis stands in the face of the 20th-century atrocities.
 
For holiday reading, Otto Rothert's The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock, a reprint of a 1924 history of the highwaymen of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, at the end of the 18th and start of the 19th centuries. A good (and grisly) retelling of the saga of the Harpe brothers, who were perhaps America's first serial killers. They roamed through KY, TN, and MS, with three debauched women, killing and robbing -- sometimes just killing. They were apparently possessed of a real blood lust, because their victims included infants and children. (Their first arrest -- of several -- was Christmas Day, 1798!) Noel.
 
I'm now in the middle of Etta James' autobiography, Rage to Survive, a salty, downhome memoir. Tons of stories of early r&b show biz tours, including a lot about her tours of the Jim Crow South. In one episode, she uses the white restroom at a Texas gas station, and the owner confronts her in a cold fury. Etta says, "Fuck you," to him, and he pulls out a pistol. No spoilers here -- you'll have to read pg. 59 of the book to find out how it ended.
 
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Some people -- in this thread, I'm thinking -- have been recommending The Expanse, so I'm listening to the audio book.

Thank you for recommending it. It's beautiful.
 
I happened on the 6th one in the library and read it out of order - and that was a bad idea, but having just finished the first, I agree.
 
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. An American psychologist ca 1900 discusses religion in a series of lectures made at the University of Edinburgh. I'm enjoying it mainly because of the period it came from - the early twentieth century was an interesting time for science.
 
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. Lovely writing and good story.

Also reading The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante with such a different voice but one that is entirely hers. I recognize this voice inside me.
 
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