Read it when it was new a few years back and really enjoyed it. Am looking forward to the movie. I liked how the "problem" provided a key ingredient for finding the solution. Two technical problems overcome with one device!
The Shadow on Wall Street by Jon Jordan I think it’s important to read indie pub and self pub books from time to time because not everyone can secure a deal with Random House or Simon & Schuster. This one is a self pub from a veteran SEC attorney. The major problem is that he was trying to combine two genres that should never be combined: financial thriller and paranormal/horror. It started off OK with some intrigue but then took a dark turn into voodoo and witch doctors in Haiti. After that digression, he got my attention again and it was a pretty compelling page turner until the final chapter when it all fell apart. Can’t recommend.
Here is my year-end reading roundup: 1) American Scary by Jeremy Dauber - Haven't finished this one yet. I'm reading it piecemeal for my research paper. But it's a light, breezy and enjoyable read for a research book. 2) Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature by James Hartman - Another research book, this one much drier, but the information is key and it focuses on an area rarely studied in American literature. 3) Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca - An appropriately chilling collection of stories. The title story is the best of the bunch. 4) Goth by Otsuichi - Like a Manga in novel form. Good read, highly unsettling. 5) Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw - Probably my biggest disappointment of the year. I felt bad about donating it and inflicting it on another poor soul. 6) Fox by Joyce Carol Oates - A good, disturbing book that should have been at least 100 pages shorter. Oates works better when she restricts herself to short fiction, but i still enjoyed it overall. 7) The Auctioneer by Joan Samson - An odd choice for the "Paperbacks From Hell" imprint, but I liked it. I got some similar vibes as from Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery". 8) Psycho by Robert Bloch - Finally got around to reading this. I liked it. The film followed it very closely, but Bates is a lot less sympathetic in the book (as it should be). 9) Harbor by John Lindqvist - I'm really enjoying his books. This is the 4th of his I've read, and I'm eager to read another. This probably had the happiest ending of any of his stories I've read, which is really saying something considering the body count. 10) The captivity If Mary Rowlandson and My Captivity Amongst the Sioux by Fanny Kelly - The two most well- known American captivity narratives. I wouldn't have read then if I wasn't doing a paper on them, but Rowlandson's is definitely the superior one. By the time Kelly write hers, the genre was well and truly worn out. 11) You Like It Darker by Stephen King - Eh. I usually really enjoy King's short stories, but this collection left me cold. 12) Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay - pretty good, very atmospheric, but I often felt like Tremblay was a little too pretentious for his own good. But that may have been part of the satirical element of the novel. I'll have to reread it sometime to really digest it. 13) The Queen by Nick Cutter - I've enjoyed the books I've read from Cutter, though I still prefer The Troop, but this is a close second. Every though I hate the flash-forward trope the book uses at the beginning, the rest of it was strong enough for me to really enjoy it. 14) The Ritual by Adam Nevill - Loved the film, then read the book and loved the book even more (not surprise). Looking forward to reading more from Nevill. 15) Holly by Stephen King - I don't know how King managed to make such a disturbing premise so dull. He managed to suck every bit of terror and suspense out of it. If it weren't for Blackened Teeth, this would be my biggest disappointment. 16) How to Sell A Haunted House by Grady Hendrix - I feel like Hendrix's stuff is starting to become formulaic. What was novel and intriguing in his earlier books has now become almost a stereotype. It doesn't help that the book seemed to forget it's premise about a quarter of the way into itself. 17) Your Utopia by Bora Chung - A good correction of sci-fi and horror-adjacent stories. I think I'll use one of them as an assignment for my lit students next semester. 18) Gone To See The River Man by Kristopher Triana - Probably one of the best "extreme horror" novels I've read aside from Jack Ketchum. Every disturbing part serves the story, nothing is there for the sake of being sensational. A surprisingly restrained amount of gore,and a very unusual departure in Lovecraftian horror at the end. Great stuff. So that's my reading list for the year. I'm still finishing up a few others, and if I get through them by the 31st I'll post them too: 1) The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood 2) Sacrificial Animals by Kailee Pederson 3) Shadow on the Sun by Richard Matheson
Oh, no way! I'm going all the way down the Lovecraft rebuttal-quel rabbit hole, and she did a couple about a sentient Shoggoth. If you've read 'em, don't spoil 'em.
Oh, fun fact on that front: Lovecraft created the imaginary Miskatonic river for his universe. Stephen King has Miskatonic be the river in "IT" so his Maine connects to Lovecraft's Massachusetts. "The Dead Zone" predicted Trump, and Lovecraft was a Hitler-kisser, so "Dead Zone" is the first rebuttal-quel before the big millennial fad in the 2010's. Way to go, Unca Stevie!!
The Ottomans by Marc David Baer This is a single volume history of the Ottoman Empire, from its founding (c.1299) up to its abolition in 1923. Author Baer, a professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, has a lot of territory to cover: from the rise of one among many Turco-Mongol chieftains in Anatolia, through the conquest of the Roman (Byzantine) Empire, Egypt, and the Hijaz, through cycles of reform and fundamentalism, through decadence, through imperial collapse, and finally to a terminal civil war. He sets out to dispel misconceptions and prejudices--mostly successfully, I thought--and to show how the Ottomans were, in many ways, very similar to European empires, even suggesting that the Ottomans should be seen as European. Along the way, one finds out why the harem wasn't necessarily as much fun for the sultan as you thought (spoiler: it was very regimented, and his mother picked the girls). The history is too long to adequately recount, but here are a few interesting random facts I gathered from the reading. The founder of the empire was a chieftain called Osman, whose name in Arabic is 'Uthman, whence we get the word Ottoman. For the first 300 years of the empire, new sultans practiced ruthless fratricide: they killed any brothers--and there were many because of concubinage--since brothers were potential rivals. Sufism--a mystical strain within Islam--had many adherents among the Ottomans, and a particular order called the Mevlevi engage in a ritualistic spinning dance and so are known as the Whirling Dervishes. Christian boys in the conquered Balkans were taken from their families (in the devshirme, or "collection") and trained to be Janissaries (elite warriors) or administrators; this manifested in many high-ranking officials being of European origin (though all were converted to Islam). Sabbatai Zevi, a 17th Century Jewish kabbalist, claimed to be the Messiah and gathered a large following, but converted to Islam under threat of death; though his movement largely dissipated, it spawned an outwardly Muslim/secretly Jewish religious sect that still survives today. Considerable space is given (thankfully) to the Ottoman treatment of its Armenian population during World War I. The Turks and their defenders will argue that the country was at war, and the Armenians--many allied with the Ottoman's perennial enemy Russia--were rebelling and constituted an existential threat. That's not altogether false, but the evidence is clear that the Ottoman leadership was using the situation for ethnic cleansing, and the circumstances of the Armenian removal are indefensible. I'll spare the horrific details, but the TLDR version is: the Ottomans rounded up the Armenians, shot the men, and death-marched the women to a remote Syrian location, abusing them mercilessly and leaving their children to die along the way, and killing any who actually made it to the destination. Somewhere around 700,000 were killed. I'm gonna say: yeah, genocide. Given the choice between Auschwitz or one of these death marches, you'd probably find Auschwitz the kinder, gentler option. Baer clearly considers the Ottoman Empire to be a European phenomenon. He points out that the Ottomans acquired Roman (Byzantine) territory and subjects in Asia Minor and southeastern Europe and considered themselves the successors to Rome, even calling themselves Rumi (Roman). He shows that many of the excesses, transgressions, and violent episodes so vividly associated with the Ottomans are either over-stated or were often little different from European practice at the same time. In a few places, he seems a little too determined to cast blame on Europe for the faults of the Ottomans (e.g., the Ottomans "internalized" European Orientalist attitudes leading to their superior or condescending attitude towards their own populations, the Young Turks developed their political ideology while in exile in Paris and Geneva and got their justification for genocide from the thinking of the German military). I will say this: I would've pooh-poohed the idea of the Ottomans as European before reading this book; after, I'm still not convinced, but the argument is not without merit. This has all invited me to ruminate on the question of what it means for something (a person, a culture, an idea, etc.) to be European. Is it geographical, simply something that arose on the continent of Europe? Is it linguistic, encompassing Indo-European language speakers on the continent (though that's problematic for Hungary and Finland)? Is it what arises from the territories of the Roman, Byzantine, or Holy Roman Empires? Is it religious, from the territories that were historically Christianized? Is it the ideas of rationalism, the Enlightenment, the scientific method, democracy, secularism? Can the definition of Europe be large enough to include the Ottoman Empire (and by extension, modern Turkey) without abandoning any accepted unifying principle? This is, of course, a modern political question--Turkey's prospective but increasingly unlikely membership in the E.U. has been hotly debated--but it's an important one. The book provides a solid overview of the course of the Ottoman Empire, though covering 600+ years in 470 pages means a lot of density. But having read it, I definitely have a better understanding of Turkish history, and, through it a better sense of connected events that I had insufficient knowledge of. It's inspired me to look into related topics (e.g., the Venice Republic and the Fourth Crusade, the Crimean War, the Armenian assassination of the CUP leaders responsible for the genocide). It's a comfortable read, if occasionally repetitive and necessarily a bit dry in stretches, but I'd recommend it for anyone interested in the topic.
Religion in Human Evolution by Robert Bellah Having read a few books about religion and theology in our recent millennia, this attracted me as a work that promised to go back further in time and describe how what we're familiar with came to be. Bellah was widely respected for his efforts in this area. He begins by finding the origins of religion deep within pre-human evolution, specifically in the notion of "play", which is defined as anything that organisms do which isn't connected directly to their survival. While other mammals are capable only of episodic play (reacting to immediate surroundings) in humans it takes more complex forms. Specifically, it develops through the a mimetic phase (which was pre-linguistic) to a narrative phase (with myths and legends) to a theoretic one. The last of these can be seen as "thinking about thinking" and developed in several regions of the world during the Axial Age in the 1st millennium BCE. Much of the book is spent describing developments in the Axial Age. It's very detailed and I was somewhat lost by the time he got to China and India, lacking the cultural reference points that I had for the sections on Greece and Israel. Yet one learns a lot, including how material, political and philosophical factors affected each other in the different societies. Bellah is a big advocate for Plato, and for Buddha. It's an impressive and vast multi-disciplinary effort which clearly strains the ability of one author to cover (see his not quite accurate description of cosmological history and I was irked by his embrace of NOMA and relativism in an early chapter, even if it didn't affect the rest of the book). It takes an effort but worth it is you need reminding how rich the cultural tapestry is that led to our current world.
Checks, Balances & Proper Procedure In Monster Hunting - Sean O'Boyle Pretty good for a free Kindle offering. A harried, disenchanted clerk in the Central Bureaucracy in Fantasy Bureaucracy Land has to handle a dispute between a true believer citizen and a graceless monster hunter from Lawlesslandia who has quite the yarn to tell. There's some amusing squabbling and action and world-building, and really "amusing" is a good word for this one. Contains many forms and the phrase Fenestration Parliament.
We Did Okay, Kid - Anthony Hopkins I don't usually read books about show business personalities. When I read something film-related, it's usually from a technical or historical perspective. But, as a long-time fan of actor Anthony Hopkins (and someone who's often enjoyed seeing him interviewed), I decided to read his new memoir and found it quite insightful. Hopkins mainly tells his story chronologically, looping back only now and again, and covers his entire biography: early childhood in Port Talbot, Wales, an awkward and unpromising adolescence, early jobs as a stage manager, military service, an early period of promising but undisciplined acting, enrollment at the Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts, big opportunities on the stage, incipient film career, steady work on film and in television, breakthrough roles in film, successful later career, and embrace of aging up to the present. Many celebrities are encountered along the way: Richard Burton (from the same county in Wales as Hopkins), Laurence Olivier, Katherine Hepburn, Peter O'Toole, Jodie Foster, Oliver Stone, Steven Spielberg, Chris Hemsworth, Kenneth Branagh, all seen mainly positively by Hopkins. One person who comes off odiously: Paul Sorvino, who played Kissinger alongside Hopkins in Nixon, and is presented as envious and thoroughly unsupportive of Hopkins. Hopkins references a few others critically or harshly, but doesn't name them. There's even--yes!--an amusing bit where Anthony Hopkins is mistaken for Anthony Perkins! (I confess that when I was very young, I often got the two of them confused, mainly because I hadn't seen very many films with either one.) Hopkins is quite insightful and forthcoming. He relates that he wasn't a very bright student, developed a "dumb insolence" as a defense mechanism, and was prone to impulsive outbursts of outrageous--and even violent--behavior. He was also plagued by self-doubt and an inner voice that told him constantly to expect failure. Hopkins recounts his growing struggles with alcoholism, his denial of the problem in the face of plentiful painful evidence, and his choice to embrace sobriety (which he has maintained for 50+ years). There are a couple of failed marriages along the way, and the estrangement of Hopkins from his daughter, who he shamefully admits he abandoned (at least in the 'being present in her life' sense). A thread running through it all is his relationship with his father, whose attitudes Hopkins simultaneously emulates and rejects. Hopkins makes it clear that he absorbed his father's stoicism and fatalistic outlook, but that he also possesses an imaginative side his father lacked, and so was able to escape simply being a baker's son in a Welsh steel town. Now in his 80s, Hopkins spends the final pages ruminating on death and in embracing life. A few similarities to my own life made parts of the narrative quite resonant with me. I don't know how much of this may have been ghost written, but I'm quite impressed with the prose's ability to capture Hopkins' speaking voice; I could often hear it in his distinctive Welsh accent. The book is a fairly quick read, 318 pages plus an appendix with a collection of poetry pertaining to the text's themes. If you're a fan of the actor, I'd highly recommend it.
The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle An oldie but a goodie. I read this when I was in high school and was recently reminded of it by a chance Youtube video. So I got the Kindle version and read it again. Hoyle was an actual scientist. Astronomer. His novel (actually more of a novella, given its brevity) posits the arrival in the solar system of a black cloud of dust and gas which turns out to be (spoilers) an intelligent life form. It unintentionally wreaks a lot of havoc on Earth before the brave scientists figure out a way to communicate with it. Hoyle writes like a scientist . . . very dry and straightforward prose, little in the way of characterization, and the main character is quite clearly a Mary Sue. Hoyle also repeatedly demonstrates his contempt for the political class with his portrayal of various government officials and their responses to the crisis. It's a quick read, and relatively fun. What really propels it is the central idea of an intelligent gas cloud traipsing around the galaxy.
Okay. So this is the end of the year (fuck you I was visiting a LDP). So probably the book that ‘enlightened’ me the most was the extremely boringly named: Central Asia. https://www.audible.com/pd/0691228507?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=pdp This book for real made me appreciate the Soviet ideology the most since Chernobyl. Compared to the ChiComs the Soviets were freaking saints when dealing with ethnic minorities. Now it is a 17 and a half hour long book. But well worth it, IMO. Fuck the Han.
The Grand Alliance - Winston Churchill Volume 3 brings us all the way to January 1942, through tussles with Rommel in Africa, success and disaster in the Mediterranean, the Bismarck, Germany turning on the USSR, and Pearl Harbor finally bringing the United States fully into the war. Churchill speaks highly of Harry Hopkins and Wendell Wilkie, highly of British cohesion of thought and purpose among themselves and with the Americans, and as highly as he can of anyone under his direction. Lord Beaverbrook is particularly called out for spurring British and American industry. The USSR is another matter, as Stalin seems uninterested in the coziness Churchill has with FDR. While the Soviets are happy to concede on some questions, they are less than fully transparent about their own military situation and insist on demanding awkward political concessions from the British while sapping supplies that could be powering the British war machine. Mistrustful misunderstandings also crop up. Churchill is always laudatory of their fighting spirit but clearly frustrated at the lack of hand-in-glove cooperation. Things go smoothly in Iran and poorly in Greece. Germany overruns Crete at the cost of their parachute power. Churchill in the bulk of the book stays mainly positive, admitting that the loss of the Prince of Wales and Repulse to the initial Japanese onslaught was his worst shock of the war. Without any capital ships in the Indian or Pacific Ocean, Britain was then forced to adopt a slow, wearing-down retreat before Japan's advances, with occasional raids. Churchill looks at the forces that brought Japan to war, with an oil embargo, a less than fully receptive US, and Tojo and the popular, nationalist Japanese army getting their way over the more cautious navy. On the French side, Churchill keeps pressure on Vichy, but gives up on Weygand and favors de Gaulle more with support. Churchill goes to America several times to meet with FDR and address Canada. We see FDR amusing himself with preparing cocktails. Churchill enjoys a seaplane ride to Bermuda so much that he and several fellow VIPs immediately fly all the way home, coming in off course enough to almost blunder into enemy batteries and look like a raider on friendly radar. This was written about 1950, so evidently the actual goings-on at Bletchley Park were still highly secret. Churchill alludes to a raid on Lofoten, for example, but with no mention of the Enigma equipment recovered by it. Enough has already been written about the war as a whole, however, that Churchill feels the need to explode the false idea that he was totally against landing on the continent in force: he just felt that not until the summer of 1943 would the time be ripe for coordinating amphibious assaults with local uprisings. The minutes included at the end show more of the less glowing side of the war, with Churchill addressing failures of secrecy, reducing committee count, shortening telegrams, economic copper warfare, the handling of women volunteers, and balancing potatoes vs. sugar beets and meat vs. bread. New words: Msus, glozed, veer and haul.
Eh, sure, why not bump this. In Chicago over the holidays, I went to Myopic Books, a giant used bookstore with books crammed into every square inch of ... I'm not actually sure how many levels, because it gives every appearance of being made up of multiple buildings whose floors were originally all of different heights, opened up onto each other and awkwardly connected to each other by a retired shop teacher using lumber he happened to have lying around the garage. So in other words, the ideal used bookstore. The best thing about used bookstores is that they are terrible places to find anything specific, but great places to find things it would never have occurred to you to look for. In this case one of the things I happened across was And Another Thing, Eoin Colfer's sixth installment to the Hitchhiker's trilogy, apparently based on some of Douglas Adams' notes. I started it today, and on the one hand, for somebody who grew up on Douglas Adams, reading anything written in his style is a little like throwing on a comfortable sweatshirt at the end of the day. On the other hand, the author often falls into what I assume is a very tempting trap for somebody attempting to carry on another's work — "when in doubt, just reach for the most recognizable stylistic quirk of the author you're trying to emulate, and milk it for all it's worth." The result is a whole lot of lengthy parentheticals about the 18-armed Floobnorpian Glorblefloppers of Foom, or whatever. While Adams used that trope a lot, and was good at it, he also knew when to give it a rest. Overall it's reasonably entertaining though.
The Entropy Effect by Vonda McIntyre The novelization of The Motion Picture was the first Trek Pocket Book and this was the second one, published in 1981. This is pretty standard time travel fare. Kirk is killed by a mad scientist (a former professor of Spock’s) about a third of the way through the book, and it’s no big secret since that event is described on the back cover. Trek fans know the timeline is going to be “restored” and Kirk will live so I wasn’t all that invested in the storyline. Spock does some unSpockly things to set the timeline right and McCoy comes across as bumbling at times. What I found interesting were the fan fiction elements Vonda McIntyre got published. Sulu hot tubs with a female commander and they later have sex. A member of the security team with an unpronounceable name is described as catlike and furred. We find out Kirk was invited into some sort of polyamorous group family which he declined due to his career commitments. I’m sure I missed a few others. I’ll be interested to see if those fan fic elements make it into more contemporary Trek books as I read them.
Speaking my Mind by Leo Varadkar Despite being at odds with him politically, I've always quite liked Leo Varadkar on a personal level due to his tendency to say what he means in an intelligent way rather than resort to poltico-waffle. He was Taoiseach (PM) in Ireland on two occasions in recent years before resigning unexpectedly in 2024. It is unfortunate then that his political memoir is a little bit bland. Varadkar is from quite a privileged background and apparently wanted to be a political leader from early in childhood. That's certainly atypical - but none of what he says is striking for him having put much thought into it. He simply went with Fine Gael (sometimes called the Irish Tories) by default and found a lot of doors open to him due to his social class. It works as a diverting insider look at recent Irish history and gives some insight to the machinations of power - but there's just not that much that one would consider surprising about any of it. He predictably hates the left and some of the media, but regards his coalition partners (who are also opponents in a sense) as decent people. His coming out as gay is given a lot of time as are the leaking investigations which eventually cleared his name. But where's the deeper analysis of the rise of populism as he deals with figures such as Trump and Johnson? Has he still got one eye on the fortunes of his colleagues still in government, and doesn't want to upset the applecart? Perhaps taking a wider view, because Varadkar had hidden very little, there is nothing new to reveal - no more substantial private figure behind the one we've known.
Comedy and Conscience After the Restoration - Joseph Wood Krutch The more things change . . . English comedies of the late 1600s were amoral to say the least. The comedy of manners was inevitably a wild romp about heartless rakes chasing faithless women, wittily mocking marriage and other virtues and blaspheming at every opportunity. However, at the turn of the 1700s, the form was changing drastically. Comedies became wholesome, full of reformed lovers and poetic justice, and increasingly devoid of actual humour. So what happened? This very scholarly, decidedly dry book from 1924 answers that question, both broadly and deeply. Fashionable society after Charles II was Restored to the throne in 1660 mirrored his court's free spirit. Being cynical, amoral, and out for a good time was patriotism, a way to stick it to those dumb, defeated Puritans. The Restoration comedy reflected this reality without necessarily passing judgment. Marriages were portrayed as unhappy and tiresome. Dissolute characters bluntly, but wittily, rationalized their debauchery, with a hard, intellectual, cruel attitude toward other characters and toward life. Courtship was a game of gallantry at best. There were, however, still many of the middle and lower class who were puritanical or at least deeply religious. And there was born about the 1670s the industry of literary criticism, with the recognizable types who were fully convinced they knew exactly how to create art and loudly and angrily denounced everything that fell short of their ideal. Between changing monarchs and a cooling public mood, this allowed for a backlash against Restoration comedy around 1696. It was led by certain religious/ascetic and critical pamphleteers but supported by the public and Queen Anne herself, pursuing Christian purity and the rigid dogma the critics took from the classics. The new entertainment, sentimental comedy, used pure language, gave obvious morals, showed romantic love, and exchanged wit for empathizing with the characters' shallow emotions. It also undermined itself constantly by caving to the dogmatists' insistence on poetic justice. So the noble sacrifices always turned out fine because e.g. the poor heroine turned out to be secretly rich anyway. John "steal my thunder" Dennis is perhaps the original Angry Drama Nerd and an early example of a content creator, taking every chance he could to comment on everything that came to hand. But a lot of critics pop up as the century progresses. They chat in the new coffeehouses or publish little pamphlets about individual plays instead of Youtubing their 90-minute reactions sponsored by NordVPN. It's kind of adorable to picture. It came to be believed that "nature's chief master-piece is writing well" and so criticism became a serious field. A lot of critics turned to the classics for guidance, and adopted ideas like the dramatic unities or sticking rigidly to Platonically idealized character types. Like someone today believing that their favorite franchise has to keep doing things the exact same way forever, and then getting mad on the internet when the creators ignore them. They didn't cause much change until the reformers used their ideas to convince the less than ardently religious. Where Restoration culture prized sophistication, the mddle class cared more about what was said, not how it was said. Their preference was now felt, with a backlash against wit for wit's sake, like we have a reaction against "MCU dialogue" right now. With the heat on from religious and other sources, Queen Anne compromises by giving a theatre license to someone she expects everyone to find palatable. The new theatre immediately pulls a John Lennon by essentially declaring in its first play that the theatre is more popular than Jesus. If you put this stuff in a movie, people would roll their eyes. Also present are the equivalent of Time Magazine lookbacks at dead celebrities, as people put out fraudulent biographies of recently dead people as a cash-in. In the end, the author finds that there would have been a shift away from Restoration comedy anyway, but the reformers and critics pushed it along faster. Both groups also made the resulting sentimental comedy worse. New words: orange girl, vizard mask, ruelle, oglio, plackets, catch-penny
An historical book (102 years old!) about an historical mode of comedy! It sounds like a wave anti-puritanism made comedy a cracking bit of fun, before the re-assertion of public morality made it respectable again! Just curious: what drew your interest to this book?
"Patton's Vanguard: The United States Army Fourth Armored Division" by Don M. Fox. I'm literally reading this. Aloud. Into recording software. It's a massive (some 25 hours) recounting of the exploits of the 4th Armored division, which was at the tip of the spear for the Third Army after the D-Day invasion. If you're a fan of the movie Patton (that doesn't mean you have to be a Patton fanboy) the story fleshes out what really happened in the drive to relieve the Battered Bastards of Bastogne and highlights some of the "ordinary" men who did extraordinary things when the fate of the world hung in the balance. BTW: the author is one of the founders of the Firehouse Subs restaurant chain.
It was sitting all lonely on a used bookstore's last chance shelf for $2 and I thought it would be a chance to learn about a historical society, creatives being creative, and the interface between the two. I read that Year of Lear book some years back and hoped for more of the same.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick This was on my Kindle for a while and I decided now would be a good time to read it. Something on this board must have prompted me, no idea what that could be. Initial observation: ever notice a lot of the dystopian futuristic novels operate under the assumption that everyone’s lives will be absolutely miserable? So everyone needs mood altering drugs or mood altering devices to make it somewhat tolerable. Enter Rick Deckard. He’s a bounty hunter in a post-WWT (“Terminus”) San Francisco. He has a wife at home who is depressed and listless. And a pet sheep that isn’t real but electric, much to his chagrin. Rick is on the trail of androids that need to be retired aka killed. From what I understood, the androids on Earth are escapees from Mars, where they are human servants. As the book unfolded I found myself sympathizing with the androids. They would do something incredibly intelligent and then follow it up with something incredibly stupid. Isn’t that a human trait? I saw Blade Runner so long ago that I wasn’t trying to compare the book with the movie. I think they both stand on their own just fine. Will look for more Philip K. Dick in the future - I think I have a copy of The Man in the High Castle.
I have a couple of other books to read that I got for my birthday and Christmas, but I think this one will be next: A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
