What are you reading?

[Ravenshire]

Recently catching up on my Special Agent Pendergast books. Finished book 18, "Verses for the Dead." A bit of a bittersweet read since it was the last Pendergast book read by Rene Auberjonois (Constable Odo, Deep Space Nine) before his passing in 2019.

The Pendergast series is based around the rather unbelievable character Aloysius X. L. Pendergast. While the main character is burden to the suspension of disbelief, Messrs. Preston and Child spin such entertaining yarns that much can be forgiven. Pendergast is a multi-millionaire FBI agent (real world, that money would make him a huge national security risk) with nearly supernatural inductive and deductive abilities, but it's the messes he finds himself in and the author's ability to believably extract him from them, without utilizing du ex machina, is what makes the good reads.

[Angrboda]

The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

The collected works of Will Cuppy (‘The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody’, ‘How To Become Extinct’, ‘How To Attract The Wombat’, etc).

Boru

[Istvan]

I was really impressed by a recent rereading of William Barrett's Irrational Man. We need to be reminded that there are many constructs and institutions that only exist to dehumanize us and dismiss our experience of Being as illusion or wishful thinking. His thesis is just as powerful and relevant today as in the 1950s:

"Existentialism is the counter-Enlightenment come at last to philosophic expression; and it demonstrates beyond anything else that the ideology of the Enlightenment is thin, abstract, and therefore dangerous. (I say its "ideology," for the practical task of the Enlightenment is still with us: In everyday life we must continue to be critics of a social order that is still based everywhere on oppression, injustice, and even savagery—such being the peculiar tension of mind that we as responsible human beings have to maintain today.) The finitude of man, as established by Heidegger, is perhaps the death blow to the ideology of the Enlightenment, for to recognize this finitude is to acknowledge that man will always exist in untruth as well as truth. Utopians who still look forward to a future when all shadows will be dispersed and mankind will dwell in a resplendent Crystal Palace will find this recognition disheartening. But on second thought , it may not be such a bad thing to free ourselves once and for all from the worship of the idol of progress; for utopianism—whether the brand of Marx or of Nietzsche—by locating the meaning of man in the future leaves human beings here and now, as well as all mankind up to this point, without their own meaning. If man is to be given meaning the Existentialists have shown us, it must be here and now; and to think this insight through is to recast the whole tradition of Western thought. The realization that all human truth must not only shine against an enveloping darkness, but that such truth is even shot through with its own darkness may be depressing, and not only to utopians. But it has the virtue of restoring to man his sense of the primal mystery surrounding all things, a sense of mystery from which the glittering world of his technology estranges him, but without which he is not truly human."

[Thumpalumpacus]

Finished the other day "Utmost Savagery",about the American conquest of Tarawa in 1943. Savage indeed, 16 Japanese survivors out of a garrison of almost 5000. USMC lost 1000 KIA and another 3000 injured in 3 days of battle.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Vol 46:

Record of Air Operations

(PHILIPPINE Operations, 2nd Phase)

Oct. 1946
First Demobilization Board

This award was written on the basis of the memory and fragmentary materials of Col. MATSUMAE, a senior staff of the 4th Army Air Force, who took part in the PHILIPPINE Operations.

[Fake Messiah]

Relatively recently I've read "Calling Dr Horowitz" (1977) which is a memoir on which the movie "Bad Medicine" was based upon.

I always kind of wanted to read this book because the movie is kind of insane (if not offensive). It features American students who had bad grades so they couldn't get into any medical school in the US and thus went to study in Mexico. The movie rips on Mexicans making them look primitive: like they spit on sick people three times to "heal" them and the medical students steal bodies from the graveyard so that they can have something to dissect during classes.

So I wondered how much of this was true. It turns out very little. Surprisingly, only a small part is in Mexico. There is (was) a scheme that underachieving students used to go to Mexico, but only for like a year, after which they would transfer to Canada and then to the US. And only the part about stealing the "fresh" corpses from the graveyard was true.

[MR. Macabre 666]

My Effin' Life from GEDDY LEE, bassist, keyboards and synth, rhythm guitarist, and vocalist from RUSH, the best band of all time IMO.
His parents both survived the Holocaust in WWll before emigrating to Canada after the war.
Amazing so far.

[no one]

The writing on the wall.

[arewethereyet]

Pat Conroy's The Great Santini. I like his books but think I missed this one along the way. I am not real thrilled with the narrator but and so far into it now that I am going to see it through.

Been doing a lot of sewing lately and listening to audiobooks is a great entertainment while doing that.