Whatcha reading?

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Flex
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Flex »

Dr. Medulla wrote:
24 Dec 2018, 8:37pm
Edelman was one of RFK's aides and, semi-famously, resigned from the Clinton administration over Bill's betrayal of America's underclass during welfare "reform."
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Silent Majority
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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She Comes First - Paul Kerner. Been meeting some new people, got this weird mix of useful tips, middlebrow pretension and hectoring you to want to go down on a woman. Mate, I've already bought your book, I'm sold on the idea, clearly.

The Ethical Slut - Janet W Hardy and Dossie Easton. Audiobook, read by the authors. A great guide to polyamory, great advice for relationships in general.

James Buchanan - Jean H Baker. Ahhh, Pre-Civil War bastards all wrapped up before 2019. A good book that concentrated on why Buchanan was so shit even with all his experience in government.

Always Look On the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography by Eric Idle. Audiobook, read by the author. Charming and lightweight, if repetitive at times.
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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Silent Majority wrote:
26 Dec 2018, 7:42pm
James Buchanan - Jean H Baker. Ahhh, Pre-Civil War bastards all wrapped up before 2019. A good book that concentrated on why Buchanan was so shit even with all his experience in government.
Kinda cool that we're witnessing his successor as worst president of all time.

Speaking of whom, after over a month, I finally finished listening to Halberstam's The Fifties this morning, so tomorrow I'll be listening to this:
Image

I listened to Unger's book about the Bush family's ties to the Saudi royal family maybe fifteen years ago. It's muckraker kinda stuff. I expect the listening experience to be more therapeutic—spleen venting—than intellectually engaging, but whatever.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Silent Majority »

Dr. Medulla wrote:
26 Dec 2018, 8:10pm
Silent Majority wrote:
26 Dec 2018, 7:42pm
James Buchanan - Jean H Baker. Ahhh, Pre-Civil War bastards all wrapped up before 2019. A good book that concentrated on why Buchanan was so shit even with all his experience in government.
Kinda cool that we're witnessing his successor as worst president of all time.

Speaking of whom, after over a month, I finally finished listening to Halberstam's The Fifties this morning, so tomorrow I'll be listening to this:
Image

I listened to Unger's book about the Bush family's ties to the Saudi royal family maybe fifteen years ago. It's muckraker kinda stuff. I expect the listening experience to be more therapeutic—spleen venting—than intellectually engaging, but whatever.
Gotta burn some of the stress and hate off somewhere, muck raking is as good a way as any.
a lifetime serving one machine
Is ten times worse than prison


www.pexlives.libsyn.com/

Dr. Medulla
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Dr. Medulla »

Tub book:
Image

Given my enjoyment of, however simultaneously repulsed by, Ellroy's work, it's strange that I've never read this. I've also never seen the movie. I honestly can't explain the gap for either (I mean, I've seen that god awful DePalma adaptation of The Black Dahlia). Anyway, it's gorgeous romantic ugliness.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Silent Majority »

Dr. Medulla wrote:
01 Jan 2019, 9:18pm
Tub book:
Image

Given my enjoyment of, however simultaneously repulsed by, Ellroy's work, it's strange that I've never read this. I've also never seen the movie. I honestly can't explain the gap for either (I mean, I've seen that god awful DePalma adaptation of The Black Dahlia). Anyway, it's gorgeous romantic ugliness.
Not read it, but the film is one I'll always watch if it's on TV.
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Dr. Medulla »

Silent Majority wrote:
02 Jan 2019, 4:16am
Dr. Medulla wrote:
01 Jan 2019, 9:18pm
Tub book:
Image

Given my enjoyment of, however simultaneously repulsed by, Ellroy's work, it's strange that I've never read this. I've also never seen the movie. I honestly can't explain the gap for either (I mean, I've seen that god awful DePalma adaptation of The Black Dahlia). Anyway, it's gorgeous romantic ugliness.
Not read it, but the film is one I'll always watch if it's on TV.
Gotta make a point of watching it in the next week or so. If you've never read any Ellroy, I can't recommend highly enough American Tabloid, the first volume of a trilogy that relates the intersection of national politics and organized crime in the 60s. That first book deals with JFK. The subsequent two volumes are very good but don't have the same driving focus of events that culminate in Dallas.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Silent Majority »

Dr. Medulla wrote:
02 Jan 2019, 7:31am
Silent Majority wrote:
02 Jan 2019, 4:16am
Dr. Medulla wrote:
01 Jan 2019, 9:18pm
Tub book:
Image

Given my enjoyment of, however simultaneously repulsed by, Ellroy's work, it's strange that I've never read this. I've also never seen the movie. I honestly can't explain the gap for either (I mean, I've seen that god awful DePalma adaptation of The Black Dahlia). Anyway, it's gorgeous romantic ugliness.
Not read it, but the film is one I'll always watch if it's on TV.
Gotta make a point of watching it in the next week or so. If you've never read any Ellroy, I can't recommend highly enough American Tabloid, the first volume of a trilogy that relates the intersection of national politics and organized crime in the 60s. That first book deals with JFK. The subsequent two volumes are very good but don't have the same driving focus of events that culminate in Dallas.
I got American Tabloid borrowed from a neighbour, must read it and get it back to her.
a lifetime serving one machine
Is ten times worse than prison


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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Silent Majority »

1) Fab: A Life of Paul McCartney by Howard Sounes. Kindle. Lots to dislike here. Sounes has no gift for prose and has set out to give all McCartney's eras equal attention. Makes sense? Not when the Beatles' peak years are given the same amount of pages as Paul's relationship and divorce from Heather Mills. There's a nasty, Daily Mail snobbishness on show at times, as well as the fucking baffling instance on referring to Ringo as Ritchie. Everytime he refers to John, Paul, George and Ritchie I wanted to put the book down. Sounes' critical faculties are pretty intact and catching up on Macca's solo discography confirms the author's opinion of his post-Beatles work as mostly inessential.
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Dr. Medulla »

Silent Majority wrote:
02 Jan 2019, 8:58am
1) Fab: A Life of Paul McCartney by Howard Sounes. Kindle. Lots to dislike here. Sounes has no gift for prose and has set out to give all McCartney's eras equal attention. Makes sense? Not when the Beatles' peak years are given the same amount of pages as Paul's relationship and divorce from Heather Mills. There's a nasty, Daily Mail snobbishness on show at times, as well as the fucking baffling instance on referring to Ringo as Ritchie. Everytime he refers to John, Paul, George and Ritchie I wanted to put the book down. Sounes' critical faculties are pretty intact and catching up on Macca's solo discography confirms the author's opinion of his post-Beatles work as mostly inessential.
I look forward to chatting with you again once Inder ends your suspension.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Inder »

I seem to recall enjoying the Sounes book when it first came out. Some interesting bits like the story of Macca drunkenly clobbering a Sun ghoul/the McCartney Pension/etc — I suppose I was reading more for his research than his prose.

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Re: Whatcha reading?

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Image

Just started this book which contends that—contrary to the idea that changes early on in the earth's history would have created a domino effect of different and strange evolutionary solutions—evolution should actually follow a fairly predictable path. If you want to have animals that swim quickly, there's only a couple ways to do that, as evidenced by sharks looking relatively the same as dolphins, icthyosaurs, etc.
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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Kory wrote:
02 Jan 2019, 1:58pm
Image

Just started this book which contends that—contrary to the idea that changes early on in the earth's history would have created a domino effect of different and strange evolutionary solutions—evolution should actually follow a fairly predictable path. If you want to have animals that swim quickly, there's only a couple ways to do that, as evidenced by sharks looking relatively the same as dolphins, icthyosaurs, etc.
My initial reaction to that hypothesis is that it seem a close cousin of what is known as the historian's fallacies, which is the temptation to think that just because events unfolded in a certain way, they had to unfold that way.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Kory »

Dr. Medulla wrote:
02 Jan 2019, 3:08pm
Kory wrote:
02 Jan 2019, 1:58pm
Image

Just started this book which contends that—contrary to the idea that changes early on in the earth's history would have created a domino effect of different and strange evolutionary solutions—evolution should actually follow a fairly predictable path. If you want to have animals that swim quickly, there's only a couple ways to do that, as evidenced by sharks looking relatively the same as dolphins, icthyosaurs, etc.
My initial reaction to that hypothesis is that it seem a close cousin of what is known as the historian's fallacies, which is the temptation to think that just because events unfolded in a certain way, they had to unfold that way.
I'll let you know how he arrives at this conclusion. It seems as though it's going to be fairly scientific in approach, based on experimentation and observation of convergence in nature, but I'm only through the preface and introduction so far. The author is Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Curator in Herpetology, Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, for whatever that might be worth.
"Suck our Earth dick, Martians!" —Doc

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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by WestwayKid »

EVICTED3Dcoversquare-r-1000x1000.jpg
Just finished this one. Written by a social science professor from Harvard - it's a depressing, yet eye opening look at the housing crisis facing the urban poor in America. It's also extremely well written - thoughtful and non-judgmental, though he clearly is making a case for how broken the system is. The kicker for me is that he chose my hometown of Milwaukee as the setting for his book and actually spent a year living in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city (Milwaukee is actually the 4th poorest big city in America) to really get to know the people he featured in his book.

The cycle of poverty and eviction is staggering. There were several instances where one of the individuals finally found housing - only to lose it weeks later due to bad luck, poor choices, or both. I'd read it and struggle to grasp how they could "toss away" their housing, but then I realized that finding a house is not a sudden cure for the societal problems that create poverty.

Milwaukee is a great city, but besides being the 4th poorest in the United States, it is also the most segregated and it's also the home to the zip code with the highest incarceration rate for African-American males in the entire country, yet for those of us who don't live in the inner city (and actually the book also did cover a poor white trailer park on the south side) - we never see any of this. We insulate ourselves so much from what we don't want to know about.
"They don't think it be like it is, but it do." - Oscar Gamble

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