Reading that challenges

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midcan5

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Some suggestions for reading in the new year, please be aware should you accept the challenge of reading a few of the books listed below you will be changed. Proceed with caution. Great Holiday gifts too.

“One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” Cassandra Clare

Alpha order. Various topics.

'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle' by Daniel L. Everett
'Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis' by J. D. Vance
'House of cards : psychology and psychotherapy built on myth' by Robyn M. Dawes
'Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain' David Eagleman
'Merchants of Doubt' by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. M. Conway
'On Human Nature' by Edward O. Wilson
'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century' by Timothy Snyder
'One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway - and Its Aftermath' by Seierstad, Åsne and Sarah Death
'Paul Farmer: Servant to the Poor' by Jennie Weiss Block
'Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind' by Colin Renfrew
'The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark' Carl Sagan
'The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century' by Peter Watson
'The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy' Albert O. Hirschman
'The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science' by Will Storr
'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
'World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech' by Franklin Foer
'Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance' By Robert Pirsig

Check Goodreads for reviews, many of the books are challenging and they will change you and change the way you see.


"The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading." David Bailey
 
No suggestions or complaints?

Now to fiction:

"It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect." Dorothy Allison

Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Wolfe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Baldwin, Robert Pirsig, Arthur Koestler, Susan Sontag, Wallace Stegner, Ralph Ellison, André Malraux, Theodore Dreiser, Graham Greene, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.

Modern writers worth reading, Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, William Vollman, Richard Powers, Don Delillo, Richard Ford, Paul Auster, and the books below are all excellent.

'The Brothers Karamazov' Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky - New translation

An American Tragedy By Theodore Dreiser
Angle Of Repose By Wallace Stegner
Darkness At Noon By Arthur Koestler
Go Tell It On The Mountain By James Baldwin
Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley
Invisible Man By Ralph Ellison
Man's Fate, André Malraux
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
Sophie's Choice By William Styron
The Echo Maker, Richard Powers
The Fall, The Plague, Albert Camus
The Heart Of The Matter By Graham Greene
The Sound And The Fury By William Faulkner
To The Lighthouse By Virginia Woolf


Note: If you have read any of the above, comments welcome, or add some favorites.


"Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning." Dorothy Allison
 
midcan5 said:
Some suggestions for reading in the new year, please be aware should you accept the challenge of reading a few of the books listed below you will be changed. Proceed with caution. Great Holiday gifts too.

“One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” Cassandra Clare

Alpha order. Various topics.

'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle' by Daniel L. Everett
'Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis' by J. D. Vance
'House of cards : psychology and psychotherapy built on myth' by Robyn M. Dawes
'Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain' David Eagleman
'Merchants of Doubt' by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. M. Conway
'On Human Nature' by Edward O. Wilson
'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century' by Timothy Snyder
'One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway - and Its Aftermath' by Seierstad, Åsne and Sarah Death
'Paul Farmer: Servant to the Poor' by Jennie Weiss Block
'Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind' by Colin Renfrew
'The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark' Carl Sagan
'The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century' by Peter Watson
'The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy' Albert O. Hirschman
'The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science' by Will Storr
'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
'World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech' by Franklin Foer
'Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance' By Robert Pirsig

Check Goodreads for reviews, many of the books are challenging and they will change you and change the way you see.


"The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading." David Bailey
Click to expand...
I strongly recommend reading Hillbilly Elegy. I'm very, very familiar with the area and the culture of the people the author is writing about and the book, though I don't think the author intended it as such, is strong evidence that a wall should be built on the North Shore of the Ohio River to keep these immigrants out of our State. One only has to visit Middletown for a few hours to see what these Hillbilly's have done to our communities in Southwest Ohio. We need a wall!!!
 
midcan5 said:
Some suggestions for reading in the new year, please be aware should you accept the challenge of reading a few of the books listed below you will be changed. Proceed with caution. Great Holiday gifts too.

“One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” Cassandra Clare

Alpha order. Various topics.

'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle' by Daniel L. Everett
'Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis' by J. D. Vance
'House of cards : psychology and psychotherapy built on myth' by Robyn M. Dawes
'Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain' David Eagleman
'Merchants of Doubt' by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. M. Conway
'On Human Nature' by Edward O. Wilson
'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century' by Timothy Snyder
'One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway - and Its Aftermath' by Seierstad, Åsne and Sarah Death
'Paul Farmer: Servant to the Poor' by Jennie Weiss Block
'Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind' by Colin Renfrew
'The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark' Carl Sagan
'The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century' by Peter Watson
'The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy' Albert O. Hirschman
'The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science' by Will Storr
'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
'World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech' by Franklin Foer
'Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance' By Robert Pirsig

Check Goodreads for reviews, many of the books are challenging and they will change you and change the way you see.


"The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading." David Bailey
Click to expand...

Oh...and I've already read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and it would be hard to believe that any book on that list would be better. It's probably the best book on your list. Great read!
 
One writer I missed in the list above is Robyn M. Dawes' 'House of cards : psychology and psychotherapy built on myth'. Fascinating read on a topic that enters the lives of so many families.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1304574.House_of_cards_

Also check out 'Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making' Reid Hasti / Robyn M. Dawes. If that topic is of interest.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/173932.Rational_Choice_in_an_Uncertain_World

And humor is a must if we are to remain human. I liked George Saunders early stuff but later work seems strained. Saw this today, Sam Lipsyte, 'Hark' may check it out. Kurt Vonnegut is still funny and readable too. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40538674-hark?from_search=true

I love books on life and work different from ours, may check this out, Doug Bock Clark, 'The Last Whalers'.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43374244-the-last-whalers

This site was inspiration for repost: https://lithub.com/13-books-you-should-read-this-january/

Advice - Read: https://lithub.com/whats-needed-is-magic-writing-advice-from-haruki-murakami/

PS see advice thread in app.
 
I am currently reading three books which is often my wont. I do the same with movies on Amazon Prime. Wanna see a fascinating movie, watch 'Don't worry he won't get far on foot'. Joaquin Phoenix is amazing in his role as John Callahan. But back to books, I read Szasz long ago, as well as Arendt and both create a hard question mark on human behavior and acts of evil. Check out this OP and see books below, you won't be able to put down 'One Of Us'.

"It taught me, at an early age, the lesson that it can be dangerous to be wrong, but, to be right, when society regards the majority’s falsehood as truth, could be fatal. This principle is especially true with respect to false truths that form an important part of an entire society’s belief system. In the past, such basic false truths were religious in nature. In the modern world, they are medical and political in nature." Thomas Szasz

https://aeon.co/essays/the-psychiatrist-who-didn-t-believe-in-mental-illness


"You know the left think that I am conservative, and the conservatives sometimes think I am left or I am a maverick or god knows what. And I must say I couldn’t care less." Hannah Arendt


'One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway'
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22237163-one-of-us

'Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil'
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52090.Eichmann_in_Jerusalem
 
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I want to add three books to my list of must reads for the thinker and the explorer. Vonnegut will blow your mind.

'Fates Worse Than Death' by Kurt Vonnegut
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4988.Fates_Worse_Than_Death

'The Last Novel' by David Markson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195603.The_Last_Novel

'That's Not What They Meant!' by Michael Austin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15897043-that-s-not-what-they-meant



"The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading." David Bailey
 
If you want a real challenge I have an author - I should have listed above not sure how I had missed him - for you all. William T. Vollmann. I have been re-reading 'Rising up, Rising Down'. The abridged edition. Vollmann will challenge you in a way you have never been challenged before. I've read several of his other books, but I'll leave it there for now.


https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45637.Rising_Up_and_Rising_Down

"Just for the hell of it, try to love someone as unlike you as possible." William T. Vollmann


Some readers mention Ayn Rand so I thought I'd add this review.

"Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible." Whittaker Chambers

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2705853/posts
 
""To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing," the Canadian poet Anne Carson once said. With Trump, America finds itself at the end of its myth.

To talk about the frontier is also to talk about capitalism, about its power and possibility and its promise of boundlessness. Donald Trump figured out that to talk about the border -and to promise a wall- was a way to acknowledge capitalism's limits, its pain, without having to challenge capitalism's terms. Trump ran promising to end the wars and to reverse the extreme anti-regulatory and free-market program of his party. Once in office, though, he accelerated deregulation, increased military spending, and expanded the wars. But he kept talking about his wall.

That wall might or might not be built. But even if it remains only in its phantasmagorical, budgetary stage, a perpetual negotiating chip between Congress and the White House, the promise of a two-thousand-mile-long, thirty-foot-high ribbon of concrete and steel running along the United States' southern border serves its purpose. It's America's new myth, a monument to the final closing of the frontier. It is a symbol of a nation that used to believe that it had escaped history, or at least strode atop history, bur now finds itself trapped by history, and of a people who used to think they were captains of the future, but now are prisoners of the past." Introduction p8-9

'The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America' by Greg Grandin

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36743029-the-end-of-the-myth

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." Dwight D. Eisenhower
 
How did the rich get so rich and the majority of people barely getting by. While this book is about now it details how we got to now, Read it read read it. Learn.


"What began as advertising is now a threat to freedom and democracy argues the author and scholar. Time to wake up - and fight for a different digital future"

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...talism-assault-human-automomy-digital-privacy


'High tech is watching you'

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/st...eillance-capitalism-is-undermining-democracy/


'You Are Now Remotely Controlled'

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/opinion/sunday/surveillance-capitalism.html


Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26195941-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism



"So he lent her books. After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I've drunk." William T. Vollmann
 
Books are what you see in the background of MSNBC skype interviews.
That's why they don't put many pachys on the air.
The background would be well-worn VHS porno tapes on the shelves.
 
"We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom." IW

I am finally back to this history after reading 'Hoax' Which covers Fox v Trump. I recommend both. Wilkerson's book is deep, it reminds me of James Baldwin's work. Race is a myth but caste is a reality. Read it.

"Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things."

'Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents' Isabel Wilkerson

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51152447-caste


"Slavery was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant caste and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences."


"If people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?" Taylor Branch


Read Hoax too, it is an easy read and fascinating. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53345186-hoax
 
Readings for those who like to think.


https://www.edge.org/summer-reading-from-the-archive


'To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.'


Added this too:


'Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy'

"“Having enabled Trumpism and thoroughly condoned—or joined in on—white-nationalist campaign rhetoric, the GOP finds itself uniquely unable to fend off the incursion; it is akin to someone who starves a hound, lets it loose to savage the neighbors, then finds himself surprised when the red-jawed hound turns at last on its owner.”

Talia Lavin, 'Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy'

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50997978-culture-warlords

https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Warlords-Journey-White-Supremacy-ebook/dp/B084FXPHM3
 
midcan5 said:
Some suggestions for reading in the new year, please be aware should you accept the challenge of reading a few of the books listed below you will be changed. Proceed with caution. Great Holiday gifts too.

“One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” Cassandra Clare

Alpha order. Various topics.

'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle' by Daniel L. Everett
'Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis' by J. D. Vance
'House of cards : psychology and psychotherapy built on myth' by Robyn M. Dawes
'Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain' David Eagleman
'Merchants of Doubt' by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. M. Conway
'On Human Nature' by Edward O. Wilson
'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century' by Timothy Snyder
'One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway - and Its Aftermath' by Seierstad, Åsne and Sarah Death
'Paul Farmer: Servant to the Poor' by Jennie Weiss Block
'Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind' by Colin Renfrew
'The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark' Carl Sagan
'The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century' by Peter Watson
'The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy' Albert O. Hirschman
'The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science' by Will Storr
'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
'World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech' by Franklin Foer
'Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance' By Robert Pirsig

Check Goodreads for reviews, many of the books are challenging and they will change you and change the way you see.


"The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading." David Bailey
Click to expand...

I have read Hillbilly elegy. Good read. I can relate as I lived in Middletown, OH for a little over a year. Left at the earliest opportunity. What a shit hole. Damned Hillbillies ruined the place.
 
"You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." Ray Bradbury


'How Democracies Die' Steven Levitsky And Daniel Ziblatt'

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/...es-die-by-steven-levitsky-and-daniel-ziblatt/

'Named One Of The Best Books Of The Year by The Washington Post • Time • Foreign Affairs • WBUR • Paste.'

https://soundcloud.com/penguin-audio/how-democracies-die-by-steven


"Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps."
 
Americans take notice, quote from above book.

'How Democracies Die'

"Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy-packing and "weaponizing" the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy's assassins use the very institutions of democracy-gradually, subtly, and even legally-to kill it.

America failed the first test in November 2016, when we elected a president with a dubious allegiance to democratic norms. Donald Trump's surprise victory was made possible not only by public disaffection but also by the Republican Party's failure to keep an extremist demagogue within its own ranks from gaining the nomination.

How serious is the threat now? Many observers take comfort in our Constitution, which was designed precisely to thwart and contain demagogues like Donald Trump. Our Madisonian system of checks and balances has endured for more than two centuries. It survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and Watergate. Surely, then, it will be able to survive Trump.

We are less certain. Historically, our system of checks and balances has worked pretty well-but not, or not entirely, because of the constitutional system designed by the founders. Democracies work best-and survive longer,-where constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms. Two basic norms have preserved America's checks and balances in ways we have come to take for granted: mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives. These two norms undergirded American democracy for most of the twentieth century. Leaders of the two major parties accepted one another as legitimate and resisted the temptation to use their temporary control of institutions to maximum partisan advantage. Norms of toleration and restraint served as the soft guardrails of American democracy, helping it avoid the kind of partisan fight to the death that has destroyed democracies elsewhere in the world, including Europe in the 1930s and South America in the 1960s and 1970s.

Today, however, the guardrails of American democracy are weakening. The erosion of our democratic norms began in the 1980s and 1990s and accelerated in the 2000s. By the time Barack Obama became president, many Republicans, in particular, questioned the legitimacy of their Democratic rivals and had abandoned forbearance for a strategy of winning by any means necessary. Donald Trump may have accelerated this process, but he didn't cause it. The challenges facing American democracy run deeper. The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization-one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture. America's efforts to achieve racial equality as our society grows increasingly diverse have fueled an insidious reaction and intensifying polarization. And if one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it's that extreme polarization can kill democracies.

There are, therefore, reasons for alarm. Not only did Americans elect a demagogue in 2016, but we did so at a time when .....

pps 8-9 'How Democracies Die' By Steven Levitsky And Daniel Ziblatt



Podcast: https://www.npr.org/2018/01/22/5796...ors-say-trump-is-a-symptom-of-deeper-problems
 
There seems to be two separate democracies . Agreed there is extreme polarization and I’d divide it into urban and rural. Rural just wants to live in peace with protection from violent crime. Urban has become more and more tolerant of violent and street crime.
Just read an article where several eastern Oregon counties have voted to secede from Oregon and incorporate into Idaho where the values are similar. Seems like a viable solution to me.
 
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