So what are you reading?
Me?
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End - by Atul Gawande
A look at what matters with aging, independence, and planning. Told through experiences of a doctor in short narratives related individual journeys into senior years. Rather interesting read in how we perceive death, dying, aging, independence, and autonomy. I really have enjoyed this.
I’m about to start a book called Beautiful Boy, also reading a book about atheism and Alcoholics Anonymous.
A more fun read I finished recently was Lauren Graham’s new memoir. I even cried a bit towards the end.
I’ve been reading a lot about Georges Braque the cubist painter lately.
He was also a great printmaker, sculpter and collage artist as well.
How the Irish saved civilization
Just finished How to fail at almost everything and still win big (Scott Adams, Dilbert)
I’ll Take You There- Wally Lamb–
Than most likely History of Wolves-Emily Fredlund or a bio of Diane Arbus.
How is this thread not more popular?
I’m re-reading my favorite book, love is a mixtape, for the 5th or 6th time. I recommended it to my coworker and she ordered it, so I felt compelled to read through again with her.
It’s fun to read again because I feel like I learn more about music each time I read. And it reminds me to listen to more Pavement.
My book club did the new Lauren Graham. I listened to it, and she did a great job narrating. It wasn’t my favorite but we had read her fiction book when it came out, so, I enjoyed hearing her writing process. I am supposed to be reading Devil in the White City next, but am trying to finish The Witches: Salem, 1692. It’s pretty good.
Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters: Annie Dillard. Probably my 3rd read in the past 10 years. Good book.
Take a gander: http://theessayexperiencefall2013.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2013/12/total-eclipse_annie-dillard.pdf
Zeroville - Steve Erickson. A writer I forget about occasionally, but whom I have been reading for over 25 years. Anyway, I missed this 2007 novel and, coincidentally, as the cover announces “Soon to be a major motion picture starring James Franco”. Not sure if that is a good thing or not. Hard to say how to describe Erickson’s writing. It has been called surrealism, if that helps. Apparently his newest novel, Shadowbahn, just came out, so I will have to get a hold of that.
weird, I just posted about this book in the other thread about books. I read it many years ago, need to re-read it too.
By the New York Times bestselling author of Manson, the comprehensive, authoritative, and tragic story of preacher Jim Jones, who was responsible for the Jonestown Massacre—the largest murder-suicide in American history.
In the 1950s, a young Indianapolis minister named Jim Jones preached a curious blend of the gospel and Marxism. His congregation was racially integrated, and he was a much-lauded leader in the contemporary civil rights movement. Eventually, Jones moved his church, Peoples Temple, to northern California. He became involved in electoral politics, and soon was a prominent Bay Area leader.
In this riveting narrative, Jeff Guinn examines Jones’s life, from his extramarital affairs, drug use, and fraudulent faith healing to the fraught decision to move almost a thousand of his followers to a settlement in the jungles of Guyana in South America. Guinn provides stunning new details of the events leading to the fatal day in November, 1978 when more than nine hundred people died—including almost three hundred infants and children—after being ordered to swallow a cyanide-laced drink.
Guinn examined thousands of pages of FBI files on the case, including material released during the course of his research. He traveled to Jones’s Indiana hometown, where he spoke to people never previously interviewed, and uncovered fresh information from Jonestown survivors. He even visited the Jonestown site with the same pilot who flew there the day that Congressman Leo Ryan was murdered on Jones’s orders. The Road to Jonestown is the definitive book about Jim Jones and the events that led to the tragedy at Jonestown.
It’s good so far. I heard about it on this NPR author interview and it pulled me in.
http://www.npr.org/books/titles/523349900/the-road-to-jonestown-jim-jones-and-peoples-temple