Current Reading - Books best thread

[Amor de Cosmos]

I acquired the much anticipated The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber & David Wengrow on Tuesday, it's North American publication date. I've strictly an amateur's interest in anthropology, and this book is being discussed seriously as a corrective to the generally accepted view of early human development propounded by Diamond, Harari, Singer and others. I'm only a few pages in but it's certainly well written and... umm... bracing in its criticisms. More later.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Interesting. Just checked out a review of that in The Atlantic.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

And it's prompted me to check out David Graeber more generally, starting with his Wiki page. I have to say that both "Debt - the first 5,000 years" and "Bullshit jobs" sound like fascinating books.

[ursus arctos]

I ordered Dawn of Everything yesterday

I have read portions of Bullshit Jobs, but have a feeling that I am going to end up owning all three.

[Amor de Cosmos]

I suspect everything else I'm reading will go on hold until I finish it.

[WOM]

Is there a definitive but readable book on the electrification of US / North America? Not specifically the rural electrification project, but the whole social and economic change that electricity ushered in?

Or a cheap romance novel? Either is fine.

[ursus arctos]

WOM, there's this

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrifying-america

It is a case study (of Muncie, Indiana), rather than a broad survey, but otherwise on point.

[WOM]

Yeah, that looks like a good place to dive in. Thank you.

[WOM]

And just $6.90 hardcover on Abe.

[ursus arctos]

Unsurprisingly, MIT Press has a bit of a specialty in such books.

There is a more recent one on the development of the grid.

[Sam]

Saw the same review of The Dawn of Everything on Monday night, and stuck it straight on my Amazon wish list (I'll keep an eye on it to see whether the price comes down a bit, as it often does on Kindle not too long after release). It sounds very good indeed, and it's a shame the planned second and third parts won't be published (or at least that if they are, it won't be with Graeber's input).

[RobW]

I finished Variations by Juliet Jacques on my way up to Sheffield on Saturday. A wonderful collection of short stories tracing the history of transgender Britain from the 1840s to 2010s using 'found material', blog posts, personal diaries, film scripts etc and inspired in part by real life stories. It's a measure of how much I enjoyed it that I read in a week, as i'm a pretty slow reader at the best of times.

Back to non fiction now and reading Paul Preston's The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge (80th Anniversary edition). I studied the origins of the civil war in my last year at uni, but due to the method of teaching (one 2 hour long tutorial a week) and not liking the tutor, I didn't find myself engrossed in it as I should have been.

[ale]

Frostquake-Juliet Nicolson. Disappointingly this social history doesnt deliver on its premise of how the winter freeze 1962/63 permanently changed Britain.Part memoir (although the author was only 8 years old at the time) dealing with the death of her grand-mother Vita Sackville-West the weather forms only a backdrop to the tumultuous events of the period-the Beatles largely unknown in autumn 1962 are the most famous band in country by summer 1963,the events leading to the exposure of the Profumo scandal are in full flow during the winter,Sylvia Plath commits suicide, the world has just stepped back from the Cuban crisis but what the author doesnt do is offer any connection to how the weather influenced these events. The snow started falling on Boxing Day 1962 & interspersed throughout the book the effect on the population of a 10 week ice age is referenced but not in any consequential detail-the wildlife on Dartmoor gets as much attention as the UK island society. Not without its merits but not enlightening.

[Gangster Octopus]

And I had pneumonia...

[Amor de Cosmos]

I remember trudging around in snow and slush delivering newspapers a 6:00am. Traipsing to Top Field to find Hitchin's Boxing Day match with Grays Athletic had been canceled. (We didn't have a phone so I couldn't call to find out.) And the smell of a Winters-worth of dog-shit after all the snow melted.

[Gangster Octopus]

To follow up on my earlier post, me and my sister, who was also poorly, got given Beatrix Potter books to read whilst we were in bed, I got The Taylor Of Gloucester and she got Pigling Bland.

[Giggler]

Someone on another forum I read mentioned one of the short stories in The Goalkeeper’s Revenge by Bill Naughton and it took me right back to my primary school days. I ordered a print on demand copy from Waterstones and am going through it at the moment. I must have struggled with the dialect a fair bit when I was 9.

[WOM]

Just done The Bomber Mafia by Gladwell. I was thoroughly disappointed. This is totally my thing, so I should have loved it, but I didn't find it compelling nor could I really tell you what his thesis was. Lots of interesting little facts and details, but the sort of stuff you've read elsewhere a few times already.

[ursus arctos]

There were a number of dismissive reviews by actual historians that struck me as almost certainly more entertaining than the book itself

[ad hoc]

I generally enjoy his podcast but the three whole episodes he devoted to this (pre publication of the book) were by some distance the worst 3 episodes of the whole however many episodes there have so far been. I was stunned when the book came out. No way I'd waste my time with it. Gladwell has reached that point in his career where he really really needs people to say no to him rather than indulging every little thing he starts getting into

[Lang Spoon]

There were a number of dismissive reviews by actual historians that struck me as almost certainly more entertaining than the book itself

Somehow I'm not shocked that Mr 10,000 hours doesn't know what he's talking about.

[ursus arctos]

Quite.

It isn't a recent development.

[WOM]

Near as I can tell at three days' remove, it's about 'competing ideas on the efficacy of bombing in WWII', without reaching any sort of conclusion.

[Lang Spoon]

Him and Pinker need to fuck right off. Any pop science Bros really.

[Incandenza]

Pinker for more reasons than others.

Finished the novel Breasts and Eggs by Meiko Kawakami. It was actually originally more of a novella, then she rewrote it entirely (though with the same characters and settings) to have it be part of a novel, with the story being the opening and the second, longer part of the book being a sort of sequel. This novel was published under a new title (roughly translated into English as "Summer Stories"). Europa Editions translated the complete novel, but published it under the original title--of the two, "Breasts and Eggs" certainly does get your attention more (and it very much fits the bigger novel).

I thought it was pretty good, but it's also a bit of a challenge--the first half moves back and forth from the narrator and her niece's journal. The second half is only from the narrator, and the tone and style seems more flat and conversational. But I'm not sure how much of that is from the author, and how much is because of the translation. There are a few times in the book when people comment on the narrator, who is an author, writing in her Osaka dialect, which is apparently a more rough and slangy version of Japanese. Kawakami wrote the book in the dialect, so that's what readers of the Japanese version get (when the novella won a prestigious literary prize, some in Japan were angry). But the translators didn't attempt to try to capture any of that on the page. So I feel like we're reading a completely different version of the book more so than with other translated novels. This Guardian review covers that: https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...male-condition