October!

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First off, happy Halloween!  Happy Witch Week!!  I hope everything is suitably spooky in your neighborhood.

Wow, I feel like I've done quite a bit of reading lately....but what I have not done is finish anything much.  I think I am 30 - 50% through ten or so books!  There are books all over my coffee table; it's a disaster.

  • How Democracies Die, by Levitsky and Ziblatt 
  • I Served the Kind of England, by Bohumil Hrabal
  • The Cancelling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott
  • Overreach, by Owen Matthews (oh my gosh so heavy-duty)
  • The Lost 116 Pages, by Don Bradley
  • A Land, by Janetta Hawkes
  • Sexy but Psycho, by Dr Jessica Taylor  (fascinating and I think goes a bit too far)
  • London Diary, by James Boswell  (why yes he has picked up an STD, again)
  • Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
  • Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter, by Katharine Coldiron  (I love this book)
So, I'm in kind of a ridiculous place right now.  But here are the three books I've managed to actually finish in the last few weeks...

 The Secret Passage, by Nina Bawden: I enjoyed Carrie's War a lot, and picked up a couple more of Bawden's titles in ebook form.  The Secret Passage was Bawden's first published story, and a lot of fun.  John, Mary, and Ben have led a happy life with their parents in Kenya, until a disaster robs them of their home and their mother, and they're shipped off to live with Aunt Mabel in England.  It's cold, Aunt Mabel worries about money, and they're not sure what to do with themselves.  John becomes preoccupied with the house next door, which has been locked up for a couple of years, and when the children find a secret passage in the cellar (which sounds extremely dangerous), they start to explore.  And they're not the only ones entering the house...

A fun domestic adventure story, and includes some good stuff about perceptions vs. reality.



 The Naked Clone: A Nick Nolte Mystery, by Conor Lastowka et al.  Okay let me explain.  I am a big fan of Rifftrax, which is one of the modern versions of MST3000.  I will happily listen to Kevin, Mike, and Bill all day.  And they have a running gag about Nick Nolte, and five of the show writers decided to just write one of those consecutive stories, where each person produces the next chapter, and this voyage of insanity is the result.  I'm not sure it can be summarized, but it's a wild ride and I had a good time.  Definitely meant for fans. 

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, by Fredrik deBoer: This guy does a lot of writing about politics and education, and here are his thoughts on what Dems/liberals/the Left ought to do about being more effective, appealing to more people, and generally getting things done -- in particular, wresting Left discourse out of the hands of Ivy-educated elite people who mostly worry about language and symbolism, and finding more solidarity with working people who are looking for concrete gains.  If everybody's in a flurry about the latest tweet or whether the world 'field' is objectionable in the social sciences -- well, that's not putting food on anybody's table or getting better medical care to the poor.  Over and over again, deBoer points out that the Left has this tendency to slice people into smaller and smaller identity groups, which is "fine for academic analysis, but ruinous for taking action."  You want to get stuff done, you need to appeal to wider groups and convince a lot of people that they have a stake in this too.  Thus the saying that the Left eats its own. 

Interesting stuff, and engaging writing.  Plus, an unbeatable title.

 

 

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