What book are you reading?

[tijlover]

Are you in the mood to get really depressed? Then I've got the book for you: Paradise Falls/Keith O'Brien, the True Story of an Environmental Disaster/Love Canal/Niagra Falls.

Before the EPA was created, there were 28,000 toxic waste dumps around the country, and one of those was Love Canal. Hooker Chemical dumped 5 gallon drums of various chemicals, including the most dangerous, Dioxin, into this site, and incredibly, over time, they built houses, a school and an apartment building on this site. It was a recipe for a disaster. Eventually, they were all bought out, moved elsewhere, and with various medical conditions.

It was quite a journey for the community to come together and get sufficient attention from the state and Congress. Al Gore and Jane Fonda went to bat for them.

The site has now been cleaned up after many decades.

[KiwiKate]

I'm just a few pages into The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt. I think I'm going to like it! The Amazon synopsis says:

Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed.

Behind Bob Comet’s straight-man façade is the story of an unhappy child’s runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian’s vocation, and of the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Bob’s experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsize players to welcome onto the stage of his life.

[Mayvenne]

I read Go As A River and thought it was excellent. I've seen people say if you liked Crawdad, this is for you.
I can certainly see the similarities and why they would come to mind together.
It was a very good story, beautifully written, There were some necessary leaps of faith in my eyes, but I can do that if I'm invested in the story and I was. I think it would be a great book to discuss for a book club, and I would rate it between 4 and 5 stars.

[CA4Now]

Originally Posted by ClaraC

Abide With Me by Elizabeth Strout.

I really loved it. Funny, I wouldn't have kept reading it after the beginning if I'd had something else to read while staying with family over Christmas, so I was kind of stuck with that book.

About 1/2 way through, the characters had been developed enough to all gel, and the story's nuances could begin to take off.

I just finished this and loved it. I'd forgotten that Strout had written Olive Kitteredge, since this book had come out a couple of years before she wrote that.

[specificcandlelight]

The Terminal List (audiobook)

[jbgusa]

From the book under review, by Canada's former PM, Stephen J. Harper,Right Here, Right Now: Politics and Leadership in the Age or Disruption, an excerpt:

Originally Posted by Stephen Harper

One can call this "populist conservatism" or "applied conservatism," but, to my mind, it is really just conservatism. Conservatism, dating back to Edmund Burke, was never about ideological rigidity.

In fact, Burke was rejecting the philosophical dogmatism that marked other thinkers and thinking in his era-including, by the way, those who reflexively defended the status quo. Conservatism is about seeing the world as it is and applying the lessons of experience to new challenges. It is inherently populist in the sense that it is necessarily concerned with people rather than theories.

Quite the tour d' force, the book amply reviews and summarizes American and, to a lesser extent Canadian sociology, philosophy and political history from approximately 1980 through a portion of the Trump era. He clearly styles himself as a latter-day Edmund Burke, an eminent political philosopher from shortly before the American Revolution through the late 1790's. Harper sees conservatism as pragmatic and flexible as opposed to atavistic.

This book is a short but highly accurate guide to the modern political era, and aptly explains how we wind up with Trump, for better or worse. I reluctantly give "five stars" and this is one such occasion.

[katharsis]

I am reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time (halfway through it now) after seeing it mentioned more than a few times in the P&OC forum. Many similarities to what actually happened in 2021 and 2022 in some ways. Very thought-provoking, but also infuriating in some ways. Many flaws, imo, but definitely interesting.

[animalcrazy]

We are in the final chapter of Liz Chaney's audio book "Oath and Honor." I would recommend it. It's really well written and informative.

[ClaraC]

Originally Posted by katharsis

I am reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time (halfway through it now) after seeing it mentioned more than a few times in the P&OC forum. Many similarities to what actually happened in 2021 and 2022 in some ways. Very thought-provoking, but also infuriating in some ways. Many flaws, imo, but definitely interesting.

I tried to read that a couple years ago, after also seeing it on lists all my life as one of the best books to read. I just couldn't get through it - it was just too "dense". I bought the CliffsNotes and read them instead, and that was good.

[ClaraC]

The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult. It's long - just under 500 pages, but excellent.

Set in current times, a young woman who works in a bakery in a small New England town befriends a very old man who confesses to her that he was a Nazi Officer in the SS, in Auschwitz.

So thought-provoking, and well-written.