Books Read 2021

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Holman
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Zarathud wrote: Thu Mar 18, 2021 12:06 am The endings of 2 of the 3 Culture books were so infuriating and heavy handed that I almost threw my kindle across the room — twice.

He’s like Philip K Dick — great ideas but frequently flawed writing. But Dick never was an asshole about the characters in his stories being meaningless.
Banks was one of those writers who sometimes seems interested in testing and torturing his readers.

He published his SF as "Iain M. Banks," but as "Iain Banks" his first novel was The Wasp Factory, a gruesome psychological thriller(?) that actually gave me nightmares.

I think his SF is brilliant, though, even when it's uneven.
Much prefer my Nazis Nuremberged.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Jaymann wrote: Thu Mar 18, 2021 7:30 pm
Isgrimnur wrote: Tue Mar 09, 2021 12:31 am
Isgrimnur wrote:Sniper on the Eastern Front: The Memoirs of Sepp Allerberger, Knight's Cross

The story of an Austrian enlisted in the service of the Wehrmacht. It's a very unvarnished look at the war with graphic descriptions of wounds and atrocities committed during the war.
This was somehow showing as unread on my Kindle, so I read it again.
The OO Effect got me. Received my copy today and it is next up on my TBR list. I need a break from fantasy and sci-fi.
does anyone know any military history readers that are women?

(i can't think of any, of allllll of the reading population i have ever known. and if you take something approaching the converse ... say, 'romance' ... there are in fact at least two male romance readers on this very forum)

tangentially related article: https://eidolon.pub/there-are-more-wome ... c26f62f2d4
Overall, I would argue that women’s work on military history, whether ancient or modern, exemplifies the best of what historians now call “New Military History” — the study of war that looks beyond battles and campaigns. Acknowledging that war was a horrific and painful process that affected real people, women’s scholarship on war is much more likely than the scholarship of men to deal with those issues related to suffering and trauma to both combatants and civilians. As a result, also, many women scholars who work on war consider gender issues as they relate to war. Others look at the impact of war on society more broadly.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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I'm trying REAL hard to get through the audio version of Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire but I don't think I can make it. Seriously considering trying to just read it instead, but unsure whether it's the AWFUL voice acting for some characters that is killing it for me, or the pretty terrible writing. Could be both?

Someone convince me that this is as great as the 18 billion positive Amazon reviews says it is! To be fair, SOME of the voices are truly amazing. The problem is that the main characters are NOT voiced by whoever is doing the really great ones. :(
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Dreams of El Dorado by HW Brands

This is basically a history of the American West starting with the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Brands covers a lot of ground and so there are times when he seems to zip right thru things, and to leave things out. He tells most of the story thru the lives of people who lived at the time, which is interesting. We learn of the wagon trains going to Oregon and the Native Americans reaction to them. The book ends with the Oklahoma Land Rush.

Overall I would say you could learn much more from individual books which cover the events in this book in more detail, but for an overview this isn't bad. Brands himself has written many books on the west and is a easy interesting read.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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John Milton - Paradise Lost : book of genesis fanfic
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers by Michael Barone (hardcover): This is about the events leading up to the "Glorious" or "Bloodless" British revolution of 1688-1689. The author believes this revolution was vital for the American Revolution a hundred years later, though it's not until the last couple of chapters that he explains how. The book is mostly about the scheming and interplay between King Charles II of Britain, who tried to remain pragmatic, tolerant, and not beheaded like his father; his ebullient brother James, Duke of York (and New York City's namesake), whose conversion to Catholicism worried many; the taciturn Prince William III of Orange, who led the quasi-federal United Provinces of the Netherlands and wanted to use Britain in his war against France; and King Louis XIV of France, the Darth Vader of Europe of who liked to keep everyone on their toes.

It's a pretty interesting read about a little-discussed subject, and helped fill gaps in my knowledge of European history. Ultimately, it makes a good case for how the Glorious Revolution had unintended and lasting reverberations that shaped Britain's and America's laws, political systems, economies, and foreign policies.

I'll mention a couple of gripes. They are too minor to expound upon, but I enjoy being petty.
  • Chapter 8, bottom of page 202: While discussing the passage of the Toleration Act, the book says "The Devil Tavern Club group was in accord, and William gave his consent on May 24." Um, what was the Devil Tavern Club group? The author never explains this and doesn't mention it again. It's not listed in the index, and the endnote just references some other book I don't have, so no help there. All I can ascertain from a little Googling is that the Devil Tavern Club was a group of some 200 Parliamentarians, named after the Devil Tavern that was a popular hangout for these idiots.
  • Chapter 10, page 241: While talking about how the Glorious Revolution led to Britain and America practicing balance-of-power to contain foreign hegemonies, the book says "Then, after September 11, 2001, the United States with Britain among many others on its side, found itself at war with Islamofascist terrorists, believers in a totalitarian ideology seeking weapons of mass destruction and determined to inflict terrible damage on the democratic and tolerant West." Sheesh! For a Fox News commentator, the author manages to keep his book free of frothy conservative nonsense, but he slips up here. The post-9/11 global war on terror is a lousy example of balance of power. If Britain and America really cared about containing the growing Islamofascist hegemony (which they helped establish in the first place), they wouldn't have waited until 9/11 to do so.
Finally, though this is well beyond the scope of the book, it made me reflect on how Western Europe was in a constant state of war for a thousand years, often because of religion. It wasn't until the end of World War II that Europeans became tired of fighting and started embracing peace, democracy, and secularism.

Rating: 6 out of 8 pamphlets
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Jenny Hval - Paradise Rot : a "moist eco-gothic" novella. JeffV will hate it. really recommend the albums she's released on Sacred Bones records.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day : some reviewer i saw mentioned this was one of the best novels written in the 1980s, and i might well be inclined to agree. it addresses multiple themes on several levels and satisfyingly addresses them (or raises the open questions) as the narrative progresses. i've always felt Ishiguro was a masterful writer, and this one does not disappoint. i only wish i had come around to this one sooner, but i am sure it would not have been as fully comprehended if i'd read this three decades ago, instead of now.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Jeff V wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 12:33 pm
River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey (A) :binky: :binky: :binky: :binky:
The Taste of Marrow by Sarah Gailey (A) :binky: :binky: :binky: :binky:

These two books can be described as a western, set in the south, with hippos instead of horses. You see, shortly before the Civil War broke out, Martin Van Buren bought into the notion that converting the southern swamps into hippo ranches was the perfect solution to a meat shortage. What follows is a drama set in this world where ranchers ride tame (and loyal) hippos and fight against anarchists who would destroy the barriers keeping wild hippos bottled up (think of it as if someone was actively trying to release Asian carp into the Great Lakes). If you like your settings to be strange, this might do it for you.
This morning there was a news story about "cocaine hippos" wreaking ecological havoc in Colombia. What started as 4 pets for Pablo Escobar and now multiplied to 100 and within a few years are expected to reach 1000.

I guess the premise of these books wasn't so silly after all. :shock:
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Duped by Stephen Maitland-Lewis (K) :binky: :binky: :binky: :binky: :binky: :binky: :binky:

We are all familiar with the Nigerian scam. An unsolicited email offers you a chance to make millions by abetting the transfer of large sums of money out of Nigeria. The premise of this story is a couple of marginally successful businessmen get caught up in the scheme, and soon find themselves in Lagos trying to broker the scheme in a way where they won't get scammed.

Unfortunately for the businessmen, Sam and Tony, there's an even bigger scam being perpetrated at the same time at a might higher level. This brings in the CIA and Mosad, as well as crossing paths with the powerful brother of one of the three men the scam would help leave the country with millions. The odd thing is that the scan could have worked, if it wasn't for this complication.

The atmosphere and tension was spot-on, particularly in Lagos. My only complaint was the author dropped one of the character storylines for some reason. The Department of Energy secretary is instrumental setting up the plot that proves to spoil the scam, but I'd have liked to have seen a few chapters from his viewpoint when his plot starts to go south. He did have his own chapters early on as that storyline was being established.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

This is about the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. Obviously I was interested in reading this to compare to our current pandemic. It's a pretty good book, but in part because of the scope vs. its length (it covers the pandemic, the times leading up to it, and its aftermath everywhere in the world in ~ 300 pages) it doesn't get that much into depth. Like, it discusses whether the Spanish Flu was decisive in the outcome of WW1, and covers it in about 2 pages - basically there's some indication that it may have impacted the Central Powers more than the Allies (because the Central Powers were more malnourished due to the blockade), which is an interesting question but can't really be explored in depth in the amount of time that's given it. That's indicative of the book in general - in many ways it reads as more of a compilation of articles about the Spanish Flu less of a book about the Spanish Flu.

Anyway, it is well written and pretty interesting, and I learned a lot about the way that the flu virus works.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Years ago I read The Great Influenza by John Barry. It is all about the Spanish Flu pandemic. As I haven't read the one you did I can't tell you if it was better or not but it was very educational. It also touches a moment in history that I would bet few people were aware of until the current pandemic, and even then most probably have no true idea of the scale of the thing.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Shadow of the Wind : i feel like i should have been into this, but there were many impediments - mainly that i didn't care for the translation (or was the original writing off to begin with?) and there were many (too many) attempts at witticisms and quipping. read a criticism that the whole plotline gets wrapped up in an epistolary infodump near the end, but that was typical for the average gothic novel back in the day (and which this book consciously emulates) so i won't hold that against it. i mentioned Terry Gilliam somewhere earlier in this thread and i certainly could visualize his film adaptation.
Spoiler:
what is up with the string of novels i've read with incestuous relationship plot hinges?
unrelated, this also was not at all the book i imagined and hoped it was, which made me wish i were a capable novelist so i could write it myself. i really want to read a brooder of a Gothic magical-realist art-deco-by-the-way-of-Patrick-Nagel urban detective story.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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hitbyambulance wrote: Thu Mar 18, 2021 9:19 pm does anyone know any military history readers that are women?

(i can't think of any, of allllll of the reading population i have ever known. and if you take something approaching the converse ... say, 'romance' ... there are in fact at least two male romance readers on this very forum)

tangentially related article: https://eidolon.pub/there-are-more-wome ... c26f62f2d4
Overall, I would argue that women’s work on military history, whether ancient or modern, exemplifies the best of what historians now call “New Military History” — the study of war that looks beyond battles and campaigns. Acknowledging that war was a horrific and painful process that affected real people, women’s scholarship on war is much more likely than the scholarship of men to deal with those issues related to suffering and trauma to both combatants and civilians. As a result, also, many women scholars who work on war consider gender issues as they relate to war. Others look at the impact of war on society more broadly.
A lot of "military history" is purely narrative, often with an emphasis on heroic stories and very little attention to any issues other than the actions of the soldiers and the leaders involved. Even when all of those issues are based on factual research, they're still telling battlefield stories more than doing historical inquiry. A lot of it carries a whiff of nostalgia for war about it.

I think the "New Military History" actually goes back to at least the 1970s/80s, when military historians (along with much else of academia) began to be more interdisciplinary. A serious study of (e.g.) how the Vietnam War was understood differently in different countries is pretty far from the story of how the 1st Cav fought in Ia Drang.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Executed by RR Haywood. The second book in the Extracted Series.

This book picks up right where the first book left off and pretty much keeps running for the entire book. Haywood isn't the best with the quiet moments but he is very good at ramping up the action. With this book we get notice that something big is up, and that something big takes over the last 25% of the book. The book does end in a way that could have made for an end to the series, but then you wouldn't have a trilogy, and what author doesn't want to write a trilogy nowadays. But after book 2, I am ready to move on to book 3.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (audiobook): A lonely and unhappy little boy finds solace in his friend Hettie, who lives down the road and calls the duck pond an ocean. As things get stranger in his and Hettie's homes, the story brings loads of magic, some horror, and a bit of sci-fi.

The author narrates the audiobook and wonderfully voices the young protagonist as he takes in a world of great terrors and simple pleasures. But this short novel was originally going to be a short story, and it kind of shows. There's not much character development, and little that emotionally resonated with me. Weird things happen just because, without much explanation or depth. So, though I loved the other Gaiman book I've read (American Gods), this one disappointed me.

Rating: 4 out of 8 kittens.
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I read this, and I wanted some Gaiman without a huge commitment, and it met that. I wasn't disappointed per se, but I can't remember how it concluded, and it didn't especially leave me wanting more.

4.5 kittens.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Jaymann wrote: Tue Mar 30, 2021 10:30 pm 4.5 kittens.
That poor half-kitten! :animals-cat:
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Hipolito wrote: Tue Mar 30, 2021 10:35 pm
Jaymann wrote: Tue Mar 30, 2021 10:30 pm 4.5 kittens.
That poor half-kitten! :animals-cat:
Schroedinger would be proud.
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That's not how that works!
It's almost as if people are the problem.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Isgrimnur wrote: Tue Mar 30, 2021 10:39 pm That's not how that works!
You are just pouting because you got the back half of the kitten.

I read that book several years ago and thought it a drag.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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There was a catastrophe pun just lying there for you.
It's almost as if people are the problem.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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currently reading Morrissey's Autobiography (why is this on Penguin Classics??) and the rambling might well do me in. six pages on BBC TV shows from the 1960s...
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Finished If It Bleeds by Stephen King. This is four novellas by King, and they're all pretty good. The real star, though, is the title story, which brings us back into the world of Holly Gibney, a central character in the Bill Hodges Trilogy and The Outsider. It takes up probably half of the book, but the other three stories are worth the time, too.

Up next is Wild Dog by Serge Joncour. This is a shot in the dark. When I bought a book for curbside pickup from my (since closed) local bookstore, they stuck this advance copy in my bag. It's a translation from French that tells the parallel stories in a remote French town in 1914 (at the onset of WWI) and 2017. We'll see how it goes.
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Re: Books Read 2021

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William Shakespeare - Titus Andronicus : this was dumb
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hitbyambulance wrote: Fri Apr 02, 2021 2:29 pm William Shakespeare - Titus Andronicus : this was dumb
Shakespeare's worst play!
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Apparently even Francis Bacon could occasionally have a bad day.
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WS probably collaborated with somebody named George Peele on Titus Andronicus. Maybe Peele sucked.

Then, within a year or two, Shakespeare wrote Richard III and began a nearly unbroken string of masterpieces.

I'm biased as an English teacher I know, but imagine someone writing one or two *Shakespeare plays* every year for the next two decades.
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The Brandon Sanderson of playwrights.
It's almost as if people are the problem.
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Isgrimnur wrote: Fri Apr 02, 2021 6:05 pm The Brandon Sanderson of playwrights.
Good thing he wasn't the Patrick Rothfuss.
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Or the Robert Jordan.
It's almost as if people are the problem.
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With Rothfuss we would have ended up with Richard III and Henry IV, followed by decades of fan convention appearances at Statford-on-Avon.
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From Shakespeare in Love:



(John Webster was the Quentin Tarantino of the early 17th-century stage.)
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Hot Seat: What I Learned Leading a Great American Company (audiobook), by Jeff Immelt.

This is by Jeff Immelt, who was CEO of GE (succeeding Jack Welch), from 2001 - 2017. It's styled as a leadership book, drawing on his experiences with GE. It's fine. It's kind of funny that Immelt styles this as a no holds barred "warts and all" type book on his time there, given that in substance it's 90% a "Jeff Immelt is great" book. The vast majority of it is "I had this great idea, I thought it was important to do, some people said that I shouldn't, but I went ahead, and with the help of [X GE executive] it went great." The only interesting parts of it were the chapters on 9/11, the financial crisis, and the end of his time at GE (this last part is really the only part where he admits to mistakes, and even then the "mistakes" part is just "I didn't fire the head of GE Power, who is the one who messed everything up."

I think it's really just a rehabilitation effort after everything that's gone wrong at GE over the past few years, and in particular in response to the WSJ book that savaged Immelt's tenure.

I'm curious whether business students and the like would find this book compelling, but I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone who's not already interested in GE.
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got an abused/broken copy of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell from a LFL (it's a 1000 page paperback, and the spine is split cleanly through the middle of the book, so it was held together with a rubber band) - i've been meaning to read this at some point, so on a whim i started on Friday and it's made me push all my other novels aside for the time being. the writing is pretty enjoyable.
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LFL = Lingerie Football League?
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Jaymann wrote: Mon Apr 05, 2021 5:07 pm LFL = Lingerie Football League?
https://littlefreelibrary.org/
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Re: Books Read 2021

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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (hardcover): the Pulitzer-winning author argues that the problem should not be called racism, but casteism. Caste is the hierarchical ranking of groups of people based on their traits, with rigidly enforced boundaries that favor the upper caste and stigmatize the lower castes. Caste is coded into us from youth, and we enforce it against ourselves and each other without being conscious of it. Like the Matrix, the caste system is invisible, making it stronger. We serve it without seeing it.

The book studies three caste systems: the religion-based one of India, the one defined by Nazi Germany, and, most of all, the 400-year-old one in the U.S. that is rooted in slavery. It's rich in history and scientific findings. It also shows how caste is the culprit in many shocking headlines as well as the mistreatment the author has endured while doing mundane things like flying on an airplane and eating in a restaurant.

This book is a great companion to How to Be an Antiracist and better in some ways. It's more readable and less doctrinaire. It gave me a better understanding of why the world is the way it is, and why people are the way they are. But it's a little too easy and tempting to blame every mishap on caste, so I have to keep that mentality in check.

I had a lot of takeaways from this book, but will whittle them down to just these:
  1. In 2008, whites reacted strongly to the Presidential victory of Obama (a member of the lowest caste) and to the news that they would become a minority by 2042. To preserve their dominance, they engaged in birtherism, physical assaults/mass shootings, the Tea Party, Republican opposition to everything Obama did, changing election laws to make it harder to vote, and increased surveillance and interference with the daily lives of blacks (hence the Karen meme). There is a real question of whether whites will continue to allow America to be governed by majority rule when they become a minority.
  2. We wonder why working-class whites vote against their own interests by electing Republicans. But they are not voting against their own interests; their chief interest is being members of the dominant white caste. Because they lack wealth, they have a much stronger need to feel dominant than rich whites. The feeling of dominance is their only spiritual nourishment, and they prioritize it over all other issues including health care, national defense, public education, and the economy. When the illusion of their superiority dies, so do they, as evidenced by the 2015 report of increased deaths among middle-aged low-educated whites from suicide, drinking, and drugs, a phenomenon not seen in any other rich country. (This also explains why white women voted the way they did in 2016; staying in the dominant caste is more important to them than female empowerment.)
  3. The dominant group sees caste as a zero-sum game. If a lower-caste person rises, an upper-caste person falls. That's why the New Deal reforms initially excluded blacks at the urging of Southerners, and did so until the Civil Rights movement. Thus, after decades that enriched whites and neglected blacks, whites saw blacks as "entitled" and undeserving, not realizing the advantage that whites had had all along.
  4. When the Nazis were ironing out their legal framework for racial subjugation, they looked for other racist countries they could emulate. They found that America was the most racist by far. The racist legal arguments of Southern lawyers were indistinguishable from Nazi ideology. The Nazis even thought that some Jim Crow laws were unreasonably excessive. Americans who pride themselves for defeating Hitler need to realize that they created Hitler.
  5. In the U.S., there are about 1,700 Confederacy monuments. In Germany, there are no Nazi monuments. Hitler's gravesite was paved over. Germany pays restitution to Holocaust survivors. Berlin has countless, conspicuous memorials to the victims. If Germans feel annoyed or punished by seeing these memorials everywhere, then the memorials are working as intended.
  6. It's not enough to let the older generation of bigots die out, because generations of insecurity and resentment can, at any time and in anyone, easily become hate. To help heal the wrongs caused by the caste system, and to eventually destroy the caste system, those in the favored caste must practice radical empathy. They must educate themselves by humbly listening to the disfavored. Until they do, they will continue to choose leaders who waste resources on maintaining divisions rather than solving human problems.
Rating: 7 out of 8 Dalit Panthers
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Hipolito
Posts: 2186
Joined: Thu Oct 21, 2004 2:00 pm
Location: Chicago, Illinois

Re: Books Read 2021

Post by Hipolito »

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The Wheel of Time, Book 6: Lord of Chaos by Robert Jordan (hardcover + audiobook): There is good stuff here like a detailed dance scene with a charismatic barmaid named Betse Silvin, wetlander women culturally appropriating from Aiel spear maidens, an academy of eccentric scholars and inventors, a new faction of black-clad battlemagefarmers, an Ogier trying to avoid getting hitched, a warp-speed horseback ride through the realm of dreams, forbidden romance in Cairhien, a topless coronation, and a ruler trying to hold court while a woman sits on his lap. (This stuff is erotic.)

But this book was an even bigger slog than its predecessors. Although I found it helpful to read the book while listening to the audiobook, I was still annoyed by repetitive scenes of indistinct characters getting on each other's nerves for no reason. This book took me the longest to read of any in the series so far. (7 months!) I was ready to tell you that I hated it.

But then ... the ending. The final 50 pages of heartstopping, gory comeuppance, culminating in poetic, ass-kicking words that will change the world. It rivals book 2 for best ending yet and made the whole damned read almost worthwhile.

Rating: 4 out of 8 gai'shain who stay beyond their year of servitude just to annoy you.
Last edited by Hipolito on Sat Oct 30, 2021 12:53 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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El Guapo
Posts: 41243
Joined: Sat Jul 09, 2005 4:01 pm
Location: Boston

Re: Books Read 2021

Post by El Guapo »

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, by Randall Monroe

Pretty sure that most people here are familiar with this book. xkcd guy wrote a book on various crazy scenarios and how they'd play out, like what if the Earth stopped spinning all of the sudden. It's pretty funny and well written, and I love this kind of thinking something weird through 1,000 steps. Really enjoyed it (and also a good palate cleanser after the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic book).
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