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conulyThis is factually untrue - I just finished a new book yesterday - but it does feel that way.
Recommend something to me! Especially nonfiction - I really don't read much of that, so I can promise that I'll never have read whatever you recommend! (Whereas if you recommend anything kidlit or YA there's better than even odds that I've read it.)
Later I'll post up my own list of random recommendations for everybody, but right now I really must dash.
Recommend something to me! Especially nonfiction - I really don't read much of that, so I can promise that I'll never have read whatever you recommend! (Whereas if you recommend anything kidlit or YA there's better than even odds that I've read it.)
Later I'll post up my own list of random recommendations for everybody, but right now I really must dash.
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Date: 2017-08-17 07:20 pm (UTC)Nonfic Recs
Date: 2017-08-17 07:27 pm (UTC)David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years is available online for free, although not in the most readable format.
James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me and Sundown Towns are both wonderful US history books.
Henry Jenkins's Textual Poachers is about transformative fandom; it's one of the earliest (and still one of the few) academic looks at the fanfic world.
Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing covers many of the common excuse for making sure young women don't decide "author" is the career for them.
John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling expands on the concepts in his article, The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher.
Lewis Hyde's The Gift (which is currently subtitled "reativity and the Artist in the Modern World" but when I first read it, it was "Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property") is a terrific exploration of the cultural side of economic norms.
Paul Williams (not that Paul Williams) Das Energi is a 70's "self-help"-ish philosophy/hippie-ish-thoughts book in the same genre as Be Here Now, whatever that is; there's a handful of segments of this that are still ringing in my head years after I first read them.
Nonfic Recs
Date: 2017-08-17 08:40 pm (UTC)On Writing by Stephen King
Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences by Sarah Schulman
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties by Mike Marqusee
On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation by Robert Whitaker
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss
Born a Crime: Stories from a South Afican Childhood by Trevor Noah
James Tiptree Jr. The Double life of Alice B Sheldon by Julie Phillips
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
by Lawrence Wright
My Weeds: A Gardener's Botany by Sara Bonnett Stein
Waiting for First Light: My Ongoing Battle with PTSD by Romeo Dallaire
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Date: 2017-08-17 08:52 pm (UTC)Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It by Gina Kolata - one of those Science Mystery-type books.
Rites of Spring : The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins - one of those cool books that makes cool connections one wouldn't necessarily have identified.
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Date: 2017-08-17 09:29 pm (UTC)#1 recommendation of the year: October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville. Absolutely the best book I've read on the Russian Revolution, which is saying a lot given how much I read about the Russian Revolution.
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil. Basically how algorithms destroy our lives. Very accessible even if one knows nothing about the subject.
Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner: A Story About Women and Economics by Katrine Marçal. Okay, so I read economic books for fun, but this is really good. Spoiler: Adam Smith's mother cooked his dinner and basically provided a bunch of invisible labour that was not factored into his economic theories at all.
The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia by Laura Miller. Pretty much what it says on the tin. Nostalgic, whimsical, and critical all at once.
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber. Why right-wing governments rail against bureaucracy and red tape and yet you still have to arrive at the airport three hours early and get strip searched.
Neoreaction a Basilisk by Phil Sandifer. It's very timely as it's about the alt-right like two years before they were called that. Also takes some interesting turns involving William Blake because that's how Sandifer is.
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Date: 2017-08-17 11:43 pm (UTC)You like powerful, intelligent women? Can't get better than the lead character of David Bodanis's Passionate Minds: Emilie du Châtelet, Voltaire, and the Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment. She translated Newton's Principia, but added notes herself based on her friendship with Leibniz, who also invented calculus; these notes gave the French an edge in even understanding Newton. Oh, and she would have discovered infrared 80 years earlier, had that petty Voltaire not hogged all the thermometers for his own experiments. Seriously, great book.
Greg Mitchell's The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics is fascinating. As a person, Sinclair (who wrote about 80 books and other stuffs, not just The Jungle) had the popularity of Swartzaneger and the politics of a left-leaning Bernie Sanders. The dirty tricks invented for that campaign remain with us today.
Quite readable, Mark Blyth's Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea shows how Hitler rose to power not because of hyperinflation, but because of attempts at austerity seven years after the hyperinflation (which was deliberate) ended. Lots of irony, considering Germany's positions today.
Jane Brox's Brilliant is an easy read, but, er illuminating. It covers the history of artificial lighting. Stuff was amazingly expensive, back in the day.
Andrew Nikiforuk's The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the new Servitude is also good. Covers why the ancient Romans, Greeks, Egyptians and others didn't bother inventing mechanized stuff; they had humans!
Speaking of mechanization, William Rosen's The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention is just fun. Steam engine development from the first patents onward.
I'll stop now.
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Date: 2017-08-17 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-17 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-17 11:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-18 12:10 am (UTC)Family Properties -- Beryl Satter. How black people were systematically prevented from acquiring the wealth that white people enjoy in owning housing.
Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation -- David Crystal: very funny exploration of how punctuation rules are continually changing.
The Periodic Table -- Primo Levi: collected sketches organized by elements. Many touch on Levi's time in Nazi prison camps.
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Date: 2017-08-18 02:07 am (UTC)The Law of Superheroes by James Daily and Ryan Davison is an exploration of how current US law might apply to superheroes. Some chapters drag a little, but some are very interesting. The authors have a blog of the same name if you want to see a sample of how they write and what they address. They mostly stick to superheroes that most people are familiar with.
Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? by James Sutherland. The author has two or three books that collect essays trying to figure out tiny puzzles from classic English language literature (mostly British but some from the US). The title essay here is addressing the question of how Mr Darcy's relatives found out that something might, maybe, happen between him and Elizabeth Bennet.
What If? by Randall Munroe. Again, there's blog by the same name. Some of the essays in the collection come from there while others are original to the book. Munroe takes ridiculous questions and follows them to the likely conclusions if they were real. A surprising number of them end in the destruction of our planet. An example question is what would happen if a baseball pitcher could throw at the speed of light. I laugh when I reread these.
The Poison King by Adrienne Mayor is both fascinating and frustrating. It's a biography of a king who was a contemporary of Julius Caesar. The frustrating part is that, toward the end, the author launches into pure fiction/wishful thinking by talking about how this man might have lived on after his official death and a few other things that are clearly what she wants to have been true rather than anything she has any evidence for at all.
Shinsengumi: the Shogun's Last Samurai Corps by Romulus Hillsborough is another history book that's fascinating and frustrating. The Shinsengumi were a paramilitary group during the Japanese civil war in the mid-nineteenth century. They supported the Shogun, so they were on the losing side, but they're a big thing in Japanese popular culture (there are a lot of anime/manga series that use some of them as characters). This is, as far as I have been able to discover, the only book about them in English. The problem is that Hillsborough is kind of a fanboy of the other side in the war. That doesn't mean that the Shinsengumi weren't occasionally (or even often) terrible, but it does mean that he hammers on certain points that he thinks are particularly damning to the point that I could almost recite certain bits of repeated phrasing from memory.
The Secret History of the Mongol Queens by J. McIver Weatherford looks at Genghis Khan's daughters and granddaughters. It skips back and forth in time a bit, and many of the people involved came to really miserable ends (conquest and politics and inheritance will do that). The author's thesis is that none of Genghis Khan's sons were competent to inherit his empire and that his daughters, daughters-in-law, etc. were crucial in holding things together. Weatherford has written at least one other book about the Mongols.
Red Land, Black Land by Barbara Mertz is an attempt to piece together the evidence that we have for how ordinary Egyptians lived in the days of the Pharaohs.
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Date: 2017-08-18 03:25 am (UTC)The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice is a really fascinating biography of civil rights activist Pauli Murray with some Roosevelt and heartwarming friendship stuff woven in.
Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof by Alisa Solomon gave me more feelings than any nonfiction book about a Broadway musical has a right to, in my opinion; it's one of the best books I read last year.
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Date: 2017-08-18 03:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-18 04:12 am (UTC)The Destiny of the Republic and The River of Doubt, both by Candice Millard. (nonfiction)
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. (nonfiction)
The Rook and Stiletto by Daniel O'Malley (fiction) It's rather like Harry Potter for grownups.
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) By Dennis E Taylor (fiction) Space exploration through the POV of a cloned brainship(s).
Borderline by Mishell Baker. (fiction) A mentally ill former movie director gets hired to be a liaison between worlds.
Have you read the Peter Grant/Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch?
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Date: 2017-08-18 04:14 am (UTC)https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24942434-scene-of-the-crime
...it is possible I might have some specialized non-fiction tendencies. >_>
(Edit: Or then there's my other hobby, which would lead to things like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2567125/ , which might arguably be NSFW.)
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Date: 2017-08-18 05:28 am (UTC)Yeah, that's because my ability to talk about what I like ebbs away. Even a benign statement like "Yes, I watched that big popular show that everybody watched" is sometimes too much for me. Social anxiety? Dunno, but when it's around, it's a big thing. And even when it's not, the habit is hard to break. I've been working really hard at it lately, but it's still baby steps :)
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) By Dennis E Taylor (fiction) Space exploration through the POV of a cloned brainship(s).
That sounds fascinating.
Have you read the Peter Grant/Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch?
Not yet!
Re: Nonfic Recs
Date: 2017-08-18 05:30 am (UTC)Did you ever read her LJ? I miss her, still. We lost her entirely too soon.
Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing covers many of the common excuse for making sure young women don't decide "author" is the career for them.
How odd. I would've thought it's a very common career for young women - but then, that might be an artifact of the genres I mostly read.
Re: Nonfic Recs
Date: 2017-08-18 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-18 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-18 05:32 am (UTC)I didn't know he wrote nonfiction!
I sometimes find his fiction a little tough to get into - I have this problem a lot with British speculative fiction authors, actually, and it will take me several tries before I can get into the groove. (This usually pays off, which is why I bother, but I have got to be in the right mood to try again.) Is his nonfiction in a similar style?
Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner: A Story About Women and Economics by Katrine Marçal. Okay, so I read economic books for fun, but this is really good. Spoiler: Adam Smith's mother cooked his dinner and basically provided a bunch of invisible labour that was not factored into his economic theories at all.
Who could ever have seen that spoiler coming!?
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Date: 2017-08-18 05:34 am (UTC)Oooh!
I'll stop now.
No, no, go on.
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Date: 2017-08-18 05:36 am (UTC)Sounds like a serious read. I'm slightly wary about Holocaust books - I read entirely too many of them in my youth, and they stuck with me in some very unpredictable ways. How, um, how serious are those segments? (God, that's such a stupid way to ask, but I mean, do they focus on acts and moments unexpected humanity, or on the horror, or is it a mix?)
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Date: 2017-08-18 05:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-18 05:37 am (UTC)High praise! Putting it in my wishlist right now.
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Date: 2017-08-18 05:38 am (UTC)Haven't clicked yet, but so long as the covers aren't embarrassing, I'm good. (Wait, that's an advantage of Kindles - no covers!)