Weekly "what are you reading" Thread #73

The foid is making me read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Sounds like she's calling u a lazy b-word

Empire of Pain, the story of the Sackler family and Oxycontin

(They got away completely btw, one of the granddaughters of the family patriarchs is a director that makes documentaries on how bad charter schools and prisons are, the rest are hiding out in Europe or doing business in China)

Still reading the Bible, plus the Dominions 6 manual. Was reading about the end of the world in Dominions 6 but briefly was confused because I thought I was in Revelations.

On a lighter note, I've been ordering a bunch of rare books that are out of print and republishing them. Not like, crazy shit but mostly books by leaders of nations and shit that could be relevant to contemporary geopolitics. French has lots of materials in print because they're always open to listening to some Arab talk about Israel, but it would be awkward for me because I don't, and won't, speak or read French.

This all weaves into my PhD studies that I'm toying with pursuing, because I'm wondering if I should concentrate in LATAM or the Russosphere. I think LATAM is likely more profitable, because you know, I'm never going to teach or be a professor as a white guy.

@nuclearshill is busy (more like bussy) so I'm running this for a month

Lazy bastard

I've been on a spree of absolute shit books.

How To Sell A Haunted House by Grady Hendrix starts out with a 34 year old loser by the name of Louise getting knocked up out of wedlock and struggling with how to tell her parents. She laments the fact that they're traditional and goes over all the ways she's better than them and her loser brother (who actually is a big frick-up loser). Unsurprisingly, her parents are very happy and want to spend time with her and her new baby! And generally that was the crux of my issue with the book; a loser with a superiority complex, which honestly isn't all that uncommon in modern fiction. But then, we fast-forward to the spookies happening and.... It's puppets. The spookies are puppets. Which was dumb enough to be enjoyable, but still I fricking hate Louise and her brother.

The Pallbearer's Club by Paul Tremblay. This author is generally divisive because his endings are ambiguous, but I've read a couple of his books and enjoyed them so I thought I'd try another, and wouldn't you know, the main character of this book is sad-sack, sourpuss, loser with a huge fricking superiority complex. But the book starts with him in highschool so it's not so bad to be the worst version of yourself! Well, actually no, because it's written like memoirs, so we're to believe the text we're reading is 50 years in the future and he still believes his music and politics and leather jacket and his bleeding heart makes him better than everyone around him. It's all just complaining and lamenting and complaining and complaining and so goddarned boring. I wish his scoliosis had turned in on itself and become a tight enough spiral to wink out of existence. Still have 2 chapters to go, hopefully a nuke goes off and anyone that had the displeasure of interacting with this fricking loser is mercifully killed.

I need to be better and dropping shitty books.

I read White Fragility and made a post about it. Overall, it's not a good book, though it does make some interesting observations.

White people, why people?

Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood by Joshua Keating

It's about unrecognized countries, border disputes, and how the world map could change.

Paradise lost is reminding me I'm a brainlet

I coincidentally just finished the second thriller/mystery novel that I have read this month about a person who goes to Ireland and gets caught up something sinister. This is just random coincidence, but the two books make a stark contrast, are both recent, so I will review them in relation to one another.

The first "go to Ireland, get sucked into a thriller" book that I read earlier this month was The Guest List, by Lucy Foley. This is a made-for-the-movies page-turner about a destination wedding between B-list celebrities who book a remote and rustic Island off the coast of Ireland, and who invite a ribald mix of toxic relatives, old school-friends, disinterested siblings, and high-society types. The novel starts out with a scene of a dark and stormy night, with post-wedding revelry interrupted by an electricity blackout and a shocking report of a dead body. It then cycles through a series of flashbacks and time-jumps to gradually reveal all of the old rivalries and secret grudges between the people on the guest-list, in classic locked-room murder-mystery fashion (or, in this case, "isolated-island murder-mystery"). The time-jumping mechanic is well-executed, and the novel is a serious page-turner, where complex motivations and sordid histories get revealed with a tight, fast-paced building of suspense and intrigue. The setup is lurid and intense, and there is almost no fat on the pacing. It's an outstanding thriller/gothic/murder-mystery for the first 3/4. It's well-written and well-edited, but the inevitable movie will probably be almost as good.

The payoff and denouement are not bad, but are nowhere near the superb quality of the setup. The ending is mercifully fast, and reasonably satisfying to the questions and suspicions raised in the buildup, but it's a bit schlocky and overblown. Excellent beach read, fast-paced page-turner. If the payoff were as good as the setup, it would be an instant classic. But the payoff is only "pretty good", compared with the spectacular setup. Not bad enough to ruin the book, but enough of a softening in quality to relegate it from "must read" to "recommended, if you are in the mood".

The second "person who went to Ireland and got sucked into a mystery" book that I just finished is The Searcher, by Tana French. And it could hardly be more different.

The Searcher starts out slow, sparse, and laconic, with a middle-aged American divorcee who has moved to rural Ireland, almost on impulse, to try and start a new life, with little more than a mattress and a cheap dilapidated cottage. The writing style is somewhere between Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King, and it is only very gradually that we find out that the protagonist is a retired Chicago cop. The pacing is very gradual and loping. The writing is tight and vivid enough that it's never quite boring, but the central conflict of the book is not revealed until about chapter ten. And then, two chapters later, there is a pivot point where I was like "why are we wasting a whole chapter on some random guys hanging out in a pub?" where a huge reveal of an underlying conspiracy changes the whole tone of the book and the prior chapters. The world that seemed quaint and jovial and innocent takes on dark and sinister undertones, and the disappearance of a disaffected teenager from a broken home, some months prior, moves from "sure, who wouldn't want to leave this place" into "wait, what happened to Brendan?"

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Things Fall Apart

I've been reading the Warlord Trilogy, a grounded(ish) take on Arthurian legend with a focus on the ethnic and religious conflicts of ancient Britain that tend to get smoothed out of modern retellings. The first book sticks close to historical fiction, while the second (so far) appears to brush closer to fantasy/mystical elements.

At first I was kind of annoyed by the amount of gratuitous r*pe, murder, pedophilia, etc, but I think that by the end it helped serve the purpose of shocking the reader out of their modern perspective, while replacing it with a richly drawn setting that's more than just the edgelord elements. There are characters here who are concerned with justice, but their worldviews still feel convincingly foreign to us.