What are you reading this week of May 14, 2017?

[hermetic]

Happy Mother's Day, if that's how you self-identify...



I shall be reading "a classic of technological prophecy and timeless narrative enchantment," The Stars, My Destination by Alfred Bester. What is your destination this week?

[TexasProgresive]

1. After reading "Lost City of the Monkey God"

I need the peaceful repast of murder. I'm reading where it starts for Alan Banks, Gallow's View by Peter Robinson.

[hermetic]

2. Ah, yes

An oldie but a goodie.

Lost City was rather intense then?

[TexasProgresive]

5. I guess because it is non-fiction.

The author and several of the team members were infected with leishmaniasis, a parasitic protozoan disease transmitted to mammals by sand fly bites. Mr. Preston believes that global climate change is causing diseases like this to enter our country. There have been cases in Texas but the worrisome ones were in Oklahoma. Two people were infected in a small Oklahoma community who did not travel outside their region much less to the tropics. We worry about rising sea levels and increased violent weather but the migration of disease organisms may be the one that affects us the worst.

I won't post images of leishmaniasis. If you have a strong stomach do a search.

[Blindingly apparent]

3. Bloodlands Europe between Hitler and Stalin by timothy Snyder

Last edited Sun May 14, 2017, 06:50 PM - Edit history (1)

I am listening to the audio book format. Do I am listening to the audio book format because I no longer have the ability to read. This is one book that sure could use some photographs. It's heartbreaking

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. Tell Me How This Ends Well by David Samuel Levinson.

It's 2020, anti-Semitism has infected the world, especially the United States. Three grown children are together in Los Angeles for Passover, and they're planning on killing their father who quite frankly deserves it.

I'm almost done and it's very good.

[pscot]

6. The Nightingale by Kristen Hannah

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders and Feet of Clay by Sir Terry Pratchett.

The Nightingale has been given a 4.8 rating by 35,000 Amazon reviewers. I hated it. The voice is supposedly that of a French woman born in the 1920's, who behaved heroically during WWII, but the tone is 21st century American through and through and for me, at least, not at all believable. The anachronisms begin on page one and are a pervasive irritant. The writing seemed flat, the characters all sounded the same. The plot is based, in detail, on real people and events that probably should have been credited in the forward. If the book were well written this wouldn't matter, but here it seems like one more strike. I'm in a tiny minority here. Most people loved it.

The Bardo is a place of infinite possibility where the soul awaits rebirth. It's not a nice place and one's experience there determines whether one moves up or down the chain of being. Willie Lincoln is in the Bardo and his father can't let go. Some readers found this Joycean, but the style reminded reminded me of Dos Pasos' USA Trilogy with many voices clamoring for attention. I'm not liking it as much as I had hoped. There is some rough language; souls in limbo are trying to find themselves and aren't much concerned with proprieties.

Feet of Clay Old men are dying. Golems are implicated. The watch is on the case.

Cheers.

[PoorMonger]

7. The Gargoyle Hunters by John Freeman Gill

Hilarious and poignant, The Gargoyle Hunters is a love letter to a vanishing city, and a deeply emotional story of fathers and sons. Intimately portraying New York’s elbow-jostling relationship with time, the novel solves the mystery of a brazen and seemingly impossible architectural heist—the theft of an entire historic Manhattan building—that stunned the city and made the front page of The New York Times in 1974.

With both his family and his city fracturing, thirteen-year-old Griffin Watts is recruited into his estranged father’s illicit and dangerous architectural salvage business. Small and nimble, Griffin is charged with stealing exuberantly expressive nineteenth-century architectural sculptures—gargoyles—right off the faces of unsung tenements and iconic skyscrapers all over town. As his father explains it, these gargoyles, carved and cast by immigrant artisans during the city’s architectural glory days, are an endangered species in this era of sweeping urban renewal.
Desperate both to connect with his father and to raise cash to pay the mortgage on the brownstone where he lives with his mother and sister, Griffin is slow to recognize that his father’s deepening obsession with preserving the architectural treasures of Beaux Arts New York is also a destructive force, imperiling Griffin’s friendships, his relationship with his very first girlfriend, and even his life.
As his father grows increasingly possessive of both Griffin’s mother and his scavenged touchstones of the lost city, Griffin must learn how to build himself into the person he wants to become and discover which parts of his life can be salvaged—and which parts must be let go. Maybe loss, he reflects, is the only thing no one can ever take away from you.
Tender, funny, and achingly sad, The Gargoyle Hunters introduces an extraordinary new novelist.

[PoorMonger]

9. Musical Suggestion - 'Grave Architecture'

https://m.

From Pavement's 'Wowee Zowee'

[PoorMonger]

8. The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge

From the award-winning author and New Yorker contributor, a riveting novel about secrets and scandals, psychiatry and pulp fiction, inspired by the lives of H.P. Lovecraft and his circle.

Marina Willett, M.D., has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends--or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears. The police say it's suicide. Marina is a psychiatrist, and she doesn't believe them.

A tour-de-force of storytelling, The Night Ocean follows the lives of some extraordinary people: Lovecraft, the most influential American horror writer of the 20th century, whose stories continue to win new acolytes, even as his racist views provoke new critics; Barlow, a seminal scholar of Mexican culture who killed himself after being blackmailed for his homosexuality (and who collaborated with Lovecraft on the beautiful story "The Night Ocean&quot ; his student, future Beat writer William S. Burroughs; and L.C. Spinks, a kindly Canadian appliance salesman and science-fiction fan -- the only person who knows the origins of The Erotonomicon, purported to be the intimate diary of Lovecraft himself.

As a heartbroken Marina follows her missing husband's trail in an attempt to learn the truth, the novel moves across the decades and along the length of the continent, from a remote Ontario town, through New York and Florida to Mexico City. The Night Ocean is about love and deception -- about the way that stories earn our trust, and betray it.

[hermetic]

11. Big Lovecraft fan here

as well as William S. Burroughs, so I have for sure put this one on my must read list.

I'm thinking Sea of Love, an oldie that Robert Plant did a nice job of a few years ago.

[PoorMonger]

14. Nice One Hermetic !

I appreciate you getting into my little extracurricular fun. However I fear that the song choice is too sweet for the plot.

[PoorMonger]

15. Song Suggestion - 'Undertow'

https://m.

From Warpaint's 2010 debut album The Fool.

[hermetic]

16. Wow

I never heard that group before. When I first started listening I was thinking it sounded rather sweet, too, but then paying attention to the lyrics I found it quite sad, if not a little disturbing. Now I am really enjoying them. Nice sound. I'm really liking songs from the "Rough Trade Sessions."

[PoorMonger]

17. Glad to Share Something New

They are probably my favorite 'girl band' their harmonizing is unlike anyone else I know of - plus they can really shred when they want to. One of the groups I would most like to see live someday.

[eissa]

10. Just finished "Ines of my Soul"

by Isabel Allende. Truly fascinating semi-fictional account of Ines Suarez, one of the Conquistadors of Chile. My feelings for her see-sawed between admiration for her audacity (refusing to spend her entire life in black-clad widowhood in Spain) and revulsion for her role in wiping out the indigenous people of Chile. While the book is rooted in historical facts, Allende does take liberties in filling in the gaps with her storytelling. For those who are fans of Allende's writing, you will truly enjoy this work. I personally enjoy her books, but her writing style can be a bit over the top for me, and there definitely is some of that in this book.

[hermetic]

12. Sounds fascinating

Thanks for sharing.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

13. I have just finished "The Private Lives of the Tudors"

by Tracy Borman. Excellent. Full of details I never knew before.

I've read a lot about that era and those people, and I learned new things from this book. It focuses totally and only on their private lives. Political aspects are mentioned only as they connect to the private lives. Very interesting.