What are you reading?

[Martina]

I just finished John Cleese's memoir So Anyway. The parts about his early life were great. I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, a YA novel about a 15-year-old British boy who has Asperger's. I had to read that for a class, but I liked it. I've been rereading a book about WWII because the first go through I was so appalled I don't think I took it all in.

I can't recall what else. More classic mysteries, mostly Rex Stout.

[dark_crystal]

Recently finished The Expanse (series), by S.A. Corey, Infinite Detail: A Novel, by Tim Maughan, A Stranger in Olondria: a novel, by Sofia Samatar, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, by Jon Krakauer

Am in the middle of Indentured: The Battle to End the Exploitation of College Athletes, by Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss and The Bear and the Nightingale: A Novel (Winternight Trilogy Book 1), by Katherine Arden

[dark_crystal]

This week i finished...

So You Want to Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo

Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy--from police brutality to the mass incarceration of African Americans--have made it impossible to ignore the issue of race. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair--and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend?

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women, by Kate Moore

The Curies' newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War.

Meanwhile, hundreds of girls toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. The glittering chemical covers their bodies from head to toe; they light up the night like industrious fireflies. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" are the luckiest alive — until they begin to fall mysteriously ill.

But the factories that once offered golden opportunities are now ignoring all claims of the gruesome side effects, and the women's cries of corruption. And as the fatal poison of the radium takes hold, the brave shining girls find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest scandals of America's early 20th century, and in a groundbreaking battle for workers' rights that will echo for centuries to come.

So You Want to Talk About Race did not really teach me any facts that i had not learned reading Between the World and Me. The author also provided tips on how white people should discuss white supremacy with each other and i am going to have to assume those tips work on a time delay and do not bear fruit until the conversation has been over for a few months. My white people do not listen to me at all.

The Radium Girls was really good but very sad. Those "girls" were eaten alive with radium poisoning, with their bones crumbling inside their bodies, in constant pain, and they dragged themselves-- or had themselves carried-- to courtroom after courtroom seeking justice and compensation that was never going to help them even if they won. Eventually their bones were so brittle and their skin so weak that the court had to come to their homes. Even when they could not open their eyes or raise their heads from the pillow they testified, because they knew thousands of girls weren't sick yet, but would be.

[Martina]

I've been reading trash mostly. I read the Arrows trilogy by Mercedes Lackey. I'm sure I read it in the past, but I had forgotten it all. Good, but it got a bit old by the end as series often do.

I read Crazy Rich Asians, China Rich Girlfriend, and Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan. OMG, they were bad, but I couldn't stop reading them. After I finished, that story about Yusi Zhao hit the headlines and made it more real. She's the young woman whose family paid $6.3 million to get her into Stanford in the college cheating scandal. Some of the details in the books could not be fake though. Way stranger than fiction. What a subculture. The books are occasionally very funny.

Currently reading Greek to Me: Adventures of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris and Pompeii by Robert Harris.

Seems like I read something else, but I can't remember. More trash, I am sure.

[Kobi]

The dream of a United States of Europe is unraveling in the wake of several crises now afflicting the continent.

The single Euro currency threatens to break apart amid bitter arguments between rich northern creditors and poor southern debtors.

Russia is back as an aggressive power, annexing Crimea, supporting rebels in eastern Ukraine, and waging media and cyber warfare against the West.

Marine Le Pen's National Front won a record 34 percent of the French presidential vote despite the election of Emmanuel Macron. Europe struggles to cope with nearly two million refugees who fled conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa.

Britain has voted to leave the European Union after forty-three years, the first time a member state has opted to quit the world's leading commercial bloc.

At the same time, President Trump has vowed to pursue America First policies that may curtail U.S. security guarantees and provoke trade conflicts with its allies abroad.

These developments and a growing backlash against globalization have contributed to a loss of faith in mainstream ruling parties throughout the West.

Voters in the United States and Europe are abandoning traditional ways of governing in favor of authoritarian, populist, and nationalist alternatives, raising a profound threat to the future of our democracies.

In Fractured Continent, William Drozdiak, the former foreign editor of The Washington Post, persuasively argues that these events have dramatic consequences for Americans as well as Europeans, changing the nature of our relationships with longtime allies and even threatening global security. By speaking with world leaders from Brussels to Berlin, Rome to Riga, Drozdiak describes the crises. the proposed solutions, and considers where Europe and America go from here. The result is a timely character- and narrative-driven book about this tumultuous phase of contemporary European history.

-------------------------

Fascinating book. Good for those with a rudimentary understanding of the EU to get current on what the EU is, what it is trying to accomplish, how it is trying to do it, and why it is facing backlash from the people of various countries.

[dark_crystal]

This week i have been listening to

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, by William L. Shirer

No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third Reich. When the bitter war was over, and before the Nazis could destroy their files, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender produced an almost hour-by-hour record of the nightmare empire built by Adolph Hitler. This record included the testimony of Nazi leaders and of concentration camp inmates, the diaries of officials, transcripts of secret conferences, army orders, private letters—all the vast paperwork behind Hitler's drive to conquer the world.

The famed foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, spent five and a half years sifting through this massive documentation. The result is a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind.

It really is a VERY THOROUGH record and a WILD RIDE. Hitler was not subtle AT ALL and never had anything going for him besides his ability to give speeches that stirred up the crowd. Which is all our current President ever had, so...

[homoe]

by Hulse, Carl

The Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times presents a richly detailed, changing look at the unprecedented political fight to fill the Supreme Court seat made vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death—using it to explain the paralyzing and all but irreversible dysfunction across all three branches in the nation’s capital.



My only complaint is that he waited until way to late, the last few chapters, to get into the whole Kavanaugh debacle!

[jools66]

Hi everyone, am going to be starting this book soon. I haven't heard of her before, but her life and what she did sounds so inspirational.
Paris, 1925. Over the course of a single evening, the Mississippi-born dancer Josephine Baker becomes the darling of the Roaring Twenties. Some audience members in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees are scandalised by the African American's performance in La Revue Negre, but the city's discerning cultural figures - among them Picasso and Cocteau - are enchanted by her exotic, bold and uninhibited style. When her adopted country grants her citizenship in 1939, Josephine sees her fame as a means of helping the French resistance. She takes advantage of her globe-trotting lifestyle to pass on messages and to gather information. Years later, she is awarded the Legion d'honneur by Charles de Gaulle. In the 1950s, installed in a palatial 15th century chateau, Josephine adopts 12 children from different ethnic backgrounds. Her 'Rainbow Tribe', as she often called them, was a living, breathing symbol of a happy and harmonious multicultural society. In Josephine Baker, Catel and Bocquet paint a glorious portrait of a spirited, principled and thoroughly modern woman, capturing the heady glamour of 1920s Paris in beautifully expressive detail

[Wrang1er]

I just finished The Honey Bus by Meredith May. I LOVED this book. I highly recommend it.

I am just starting Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami.

[C0LLETTE]

I'm reading 'The Polish Officer". If you like suspenseful espionage filled stories set on the cusp of WWII ( or just beyond ) in Paris and in the backwaters of Eastern Europe, Alan Furst is for you. He's the best at evocative novels setting the tensions and the atmosphere of war in the shadows.. He really is very very good at it.

I've recommended his books to many people and never lost a friend over it . lol

[RebelDyke]

Articles from the Journal of Homosexuality

[Bèsame*]

Nothing yet. But...

I do have 3 books on hold at the library. Various book club recommendations. Hurry, the summer will be over...

[Wrang1er]

Originally Posted by Wrang1er

I just finished The Honey Bus by Meredith May. I LOVED this book. I highly recommend it.

I am just starting Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami.

I finally finished Norwegian Wood. It took me forever to get into the book. I actually stopped and read a few other books instead. However, I did pick it up again and finally it held my interest. I found myself wondering throughout the book where it was all headed. I can't say I've read anything like it before. The very end is bizarre. I actually googled it to see how others interpreted it. I would read this author again now that I am more prepared for his writing style.

Greco...you were right!

[homoe]

~~
November issue of Chicago Magazine......

[dark_crystal]

A lot of sci-fi this week. Just finished these 2 (first via audio, second via print)

The Future of Another Timeline, By Annalee Newitz

From Annalee Newitz, founding editor of io9, comes a story of time travel, murder, and the lengths we'll go to protect the ones we love.

1992: After a confrontation at a riot grrl concert, seventeen-year-old Beth finds herself in a car with her friend's abusive boyfriend dead in the backseat, agreeing to help her friends hide the body. This murder sets Beth and her friends on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize many other young women in the world need protecting too.

2022: Determined to use time travel to create a safer future, Tess has dedicated her life to visiting key moments in history and fighting for change. But rewriting the timeline isn’t as simple as editing one person or event. And just when Tess believes she's found a way to make an edit that actually sticks, she encounters a group of dangerous travelers bent on stopping her at any cost.

Tess and Beth’s lives intertwine as war breaks out across the timeline--a war that threatens to destroy time travel and leave only a small group of elites with the power to shape the past, present, and future. Against the vast and intricate forces of history and humanity, is it possible for a single person’s actions to echo throughout the timeline?

The Quiet War, By Paul Mcauley

Twenty-third century Earth, ravaged by climate change, looks backwards to the holy ideal of a pre-industrial Eden. Political power has been grabbed by a few powerful families and their green saints. Millions of people are imprisoned in teeming cities; millions more labour on Pharaonic projects to rebuild ruined ecosystems. On the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the Outers, descendants of refugees from Earth's repressive regimes, have constructed a wild variety of self-sufficient cities and settlements: scientific utopias crammed with exuberant creations of the genetic arts; the last outposts of every kind of democratic tradition.

The fragile detente between the Outer cities and the dynasties of Earth is threatened by the ambitions of the rising generation of Outers, who want to break free of their cosy, inward-looking pocket paradises, colonise the rest of the Solar System, and drive human evolution in a hundred new directions. On Earth, many demand pre-emptive action against the Outers before it's too late; others want to exploit the talents of their scientists and gene wizards. Amid campaigns for peace and reconciliation, political machinations, crude displays of military might, and espionage by cunningly wrought agents, the two branches of humanity edge towards war . . .