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Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 10 Aug 2020, 2:15am
by Silent Majority
Dr. Medulla wrote:
09 Aug 2020, 10:29am
Silent Majority wrote:
09 Aug 2020, 9:22am
55) Stan Lee: A Marvellous Life - Danny Fingeroth. Audiobook. 2019. A fun run through of the life of a cheerful survivor. Surprised to learn he'd been in the industry for twenty years before the Fantastic Four kicked off the Marvel age of comics. Like Kirk whimpered in Spock's eulogy, he was the most human. Flawed but well meaning. He genuinely believed that the characters were his own creation, despite Ditko and Kirby's massive contributions. On the whole, he led a happy life, though there was the well publicised downturn in quality of life after his wife died which is still hard to read even at this remove.
Completely agree. I listened to that book last year. He was a corny booster, but I think it was sincere. He saw his life as proof that anyone could be successful.
I also love reading about active nonagenarians, always leaves me hopeful.

Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 13 Aug 2020, 6:12pm
by Dr. Medulla
Image
After taking off a couple weeks to revise lecture notes for a class I didn't expect to teach, I'm back to reading for my planned punk seminar. This isn't exclusively punk, but certainly in spirit. Plus my ambition is that instead of a term paper, students will produce a zine as the big project, so I'm hoping it's also inspirational.

edit: Passage from the book:
Arielle Greenberg compares her certainly not Puritan but instead traditional Orthodox Jewish upbringing with her current punk rocker identity in a comic in Mazel-Tov Cocktail. In it she points out—only half in jest—the similarities between the two species: bizarre hairstyles. grim expressions, and self-righteous literature (the Torah and Maximumrocknroll, respectively)
1) Mazel-Tov Cocktail is genius wordplay.
2) She's not wrong about the comparison.

Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 23 Aug 2020, 11:23am
by Silent Majority
56) Grant - Ron Chernow. Audiobook. 2017. In the annals of history, you find the same murkiness and complications you would in the modern world.
And why wouldn't you? History is just the modern world but earlier. However, there are two great actions from the last two centuries that
leap out to me as satisfactory justice brought to great evil, in that whatever real crimes were committed and wrong done en route to blameless
civilians, you can't help but see them as moral good affixing great ill. The more recent is the Red Army's terrible (in all senses of the word)
invasion of Berlin in 1945 and the first is the Union Army shattering the arrogant Confederacy. For that reason, I can only admire Ulysses S
Grant for being the man who headed that army up. This is the third and best bio of Grant that I've read. The first was a garbage piece of shit by that hack HW Brands, the second was a good one by Ronald C White, who also wrote what's seen as the definitive single volume on Lincoln. This one really got to the heart of the guy who started out looking like a failure who grew into his capacity thanks to the terrible wrenching of the American Civil War. His gifts did not extend to judging people well, he was pretty much a complete and total rube, open to every careerbuilder and conman who crossed his path. Whatever the issues with his Presidency (he was a capitalist through and through in the gilded age, his eyes closed to the inequality that the professional men of the still-new Republican party was allowing to flourish), he remained a foe to his old enemy and crushed the KKK as they tried to deny the black man the vote, a decent life, or anything at all that wasn't slavery. As he was dying, he wrote an excellent memoir to ensure his family could live comfortably after he had been taken for a mark one last time. He had conquered his alcoholism while President and refused brandy as medicine for the throat cancer which killed him. On the whole, there are many qualities of the man to admire, but you've got to be careful not to admire a whole man.

Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 24 Aug 2020, 9:32am
by Silent Majority
57) Zen and the Art of Writing - Ray Bradbury. Audiobook. 1990. A collection of essays on creativity, filled with a lovely, inspiring enthusiasm. For all of his dressing up (and since Something Wicked This Way Comes, I'm not actually the biggest fan of his "the boys danced in a night as dark, as black, as black as fiery obsidian raven framed against the twinkling stars" style of prose and a dialogue style that seems like it was written rather than spoken by a character) his message is the same as Joe Strummer's; Get on with it. Good time for me to read it.

Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 28 Aug 2020, 9:56am
by Silent Majority
58) Every Day Is an Atheist Holiday! - Penn Jillette. Audiobook. 2014. My man uses enough of the same material and style to allow me to reuse my notes on his last book. "Despite his bullshit Randian politics, I like Penn. I had a good time listening to him yelling away in this cheap cash in from the last gasps of new Atheism. It's a rambling memoir above all else. He's a likable arsehole with a massive personality." Just the same, with more celeb anecdotes (including pre-President Trump being arsehole lecturing the b-list stars of celebrity apprentice for hours about a shitty comment he found online about him) and stuff about interesting magicians. He's got another book I'll listen to at some point when I need distracting from work.

Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 28 Aug 2020, 11:22am
by Silent Majority
59) Mr. Midshipman Hornblower - C.S. Forester. 1950. Audiobook. This is the first in the chronological series of books about a guy who does well in the British navy over 11 novels. The first one was written in 1937, but this is the prequel that becomes the first in the sequence. I've been meaning to read this series because I like Star Trek and all this hunk of garbage was a huge influence on it. It's good stuff, actually. Well-written, episodic (more a collection of sequential short stories, really), and written with a panache that I didn't expect. Honest about people, the characters seem real, and it is exciting at times. There's something of this style in the Bond books, Fleming must have been a fan. Unlike Bond, this character ages as time goes on, which is a tension I like. I felt kind of lame hearing some of the "rigged fore and aft" talk while walking through contemporary Birmingham being asked for change, it does all seem very... middle class, but I think I'll finish this series off. The main character does feel like Picard to me and he starts here at the bottom and then makes his way up to Admiral which I think will be an interesting sequence.

Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 28 Aug 2020, 11:27am
by tepista
Hooks, did you say you didn't like Doctor Sleep? I'm like 60 pages in and I can't put it down. I know it's established that I like garbage, but still.

Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 28 Aug 2020, 12:04pm
by Dr. Medulla
tepista wrote:
28 Aug 2020, 11:27am
Hooks, did you say you didn't like Doctor Sleep? I'm like 60 pages in and I can't put it down. I know it's established that I like garbage, but still.
Yeah, bored the fuck out of me. King used to have a pretty easy-going prose, but he tries too hard now.

Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 29 Aug 2020, 9:15pm
by tepista
Dr. Medulla wrote:
28 Aug 2020, 12:04pm
tepista wrote:
28 Aug 2020, 11:27am
Hooks, did you say you didn't like Doctor Sleep? I'm like 60 pages in and I can't put it down. I know it's established that I like garbage, but still.
Yeah, bored the fuck out of me. King used to have a pretty easy-going prose, but he tries too hard now.
in the first 150 pages there's like 10 baseball references and a rectum joke! It's like he wrote this for you.

Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 29 Aug 2020, 10:18pm
by Dr. Medulla
tepista wrote:
29 Aug 2020, 9:15pm
Dr. Medulla wrote:
28 Aug 2020, 12:04pm
tepista wrote:
28 Aug 2020, 11:27am
Hooks, did you say you didn't like Doctor Sleep? I'm like 60 pages in and I can't put it down. I know it's established that I like garbage, but still.
Yeah, bored the fuck out of me. King used to have a pretty easy-going prose, but he tries too hard now.
in the first 150 pages there's like 10 baseball references and a rectum joke! It's like he wrote this for you.
My gravestone: “He liked baseball and rectum jokes.”

Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 29 Aug 2020, 11:41pm
by Wolter
Dr. Medulla wrote:
29 Aug 2020, 10:18pm
tepista wrote:
29 Aug 2020, 9:15pm
Dr. Medulla wrote:
28 Aug 2020, 12:04pm
tepista wrote:
28 Aug 2020, 11:27am
Hooks, did you say you didn't like Doctor Sleep? I'm like 60 pages in and I can't put it down. I know it's established that I like garbage, but still.
Yeah, bored the fuck out of me. King used to have a pretty easy-going prose, but he tries too hard now.
in the first 150 pages there's like 10 baseball references and a rectum joke! It's like he wrote this for you.
My gravestone: “He liked baseball and rectum jokes.”
“Damn near killed him.”

Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 29 Aug 2020, 11:42pm
by tepista
Dr. Medulla wrote:
29 Aug 2020, 10:18pm
tepista wrote:
29 Aug 2020, 9:15pm
Dr. Medulla wrote:
28 Aug 2020, 12:04pm
tepista wrote:
28 Aug 2020, 11:27am
Hooks, did you say you didn't like Doctor Sleep? I'm like 60 pages in and I can't put it down. I know it's established that I like garbage, but still.
Yeah, bored the fuck out of me. King used to have a pretty easy-going prose, but he tries too hard now.
in the first 150 pages there's like 10 baseball references and a rectum joke! It's like he wrote this for you.
My gravestone: “He liked baseball and rectum jokes.”
Can I speak at your funeral? "(insert affliction that you die from), it certainly rectum. In fact, it killed him.

Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 30 Aug 2020, 7:03am
by Dr. Medulla
:lol: Neither of you let me down. :cool:

Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 31 Aug 2020, 3:15am
by Silent Majority
60) Sandman vol 1: Preludes & Nocturnes - Neil Gaiman. 1989. Comic. I was having an excellent time with this, all the way through. I thought it was an imaginative take on an old myth and opened up a whole vista of underexplored storytelling. I liked the artwork and the in-universe rules and I'm a huge fan of looking at the personality of anthropomorphic representations. Then, like many trade paperbacks, it closed with a note from the author and Gaiman was all "I'm embarrassed by these, cringe to read it, but it was a start." and I was like fuck this comic then.

Re: Whatcha reading?

Posted: 31 Aug 2020, 4:10pm
by Kory
Silent Majority wrote:
31 Aug 2020, 3:15am
60) Sandman vol 1: Preludes & Nocturnes - Neil Gaiman. 1989. Comic. I was having an excellent time with this, all the way through. I thought it was an imaginative take on an old myth and opened up a whole vista of underexplored storytelling. I liked the artwork and the in-universe rules and I'm a huge fan of looking at the personality of anthropomorphic representations. Then, like many trade paperbacks, it closed with a note from the author and Gaiman was all "I'm embarrassed by these, cringe to read it, but it was a start." and I was like fuck this comic then.
No, no, keep going