What book are you reading?

[Joe the Photog]

I just got "The Visible Man" by Chuck Klosterman in the mail today. I got it on eBay last week. It originally came out in 2011. I technically have not started reading it yet. According to Wiki, the plot is about Victoria Vick, a therapist living in Austin, Texas, who writes a book about her experience with a former client, Y___, a man whose name the reader never learns, a man who believes his his the ability to be invisible. She thinks he is delusional and dangerous, Most of the novel takes the form of transcripts of their sessions based on recordings or memory."

[nightcrawler]

I started last night Buck Brinson, "Okefenokee Moon", this is his 4th book,
it is like a continuing saga and a lot of the same characters in all the books.



I have read all his books:
The Knowing Tree
Footfalls on the Trembling Earth - Boone Russell Book 1

The Staircase - Boone Russel Book 2




I don't even know how I had stumbled upon him, as I have said before, I am really trying to read books outside my box, and so far i am doing pretty good. I seem to like his stories.




I had just finished and the mountains echoed, khaleed Hoseini, which i read all his books also.

[farm108]

"The Autobiography of a Yogi", by Paramahansa Yogananda.

[burdell]

I just read two recent histories of America's involvement in Vietnam: Year of the hawk: America's descent into Vietnam,1965 by James A Warren and The long reckoning: a story of war, peace, and redemption in Vietnam by George Black.


While I never believed it was our war to fight, things brought to light by FOIA requests make me wish those who took us there with few if any good reasons were still alive and held responsible.

[pathrunner]

Cormac McCarthy passed away today. Couldn't help but notice that his influences were Faulkner and Hemingway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy

Stephen King tweeted about McCarthy today:
@StephenKing
3h
Cormac McCarthy, maybe the greatest American novelist of my time, has passed away at 89. He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing.

[KB4]

Re-reading Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer.

[Mark S.]

Originally Posted by pathrunner

Cormac McCarthy passed away today. Couldn't help but notice that his influences were Faulkner and Hemingway

McCarthy was better than both. Although his bullheaded resistance to punctuation still irks me every time I read one of his books.

[jbgusa]

Originally Posted by vaughanwilliams

"The Tiger-A True Story of Vengeance and Survival" by John Vaillant. Not only is the story line of the hunt for a man eating Siberian Tiger thrilling, but the detailed history of the people and wildlife of the Russian Far East was fascinating. Vaillant also goes into detail about everyday life in Russia after perestroika. Recommended.

Thanks for the recommendation. I am now almost finished with The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant. Stay tuned for my writeup.

[vaughanwilliams]

"A Strange and Blighted Land-Gettysburg: The Aftermath of a Battle" by Gregory Coco. There's tons of books about the Battle of Gettysburg itself but this is the only one I know of that speaks directly about the horrible carnage left behind and the efforts of trying to bury and identify the 7000 fatalities, figuring out what happened to the 10,000+ MIAs and dealing with over 5000 dead horses and mules.

From grieving families (both Northern and Southern) searching for lost loved ones to "Battlefield Ghouls" intent on robbing the dead to the mobs of tourists who came out just for a look around, the book is fascinating and heartbreaking.

[jbgusa]

On the recommendation of vaughanwilliams above, see What book are you reading, I just finished reading The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant. A real page-turner, no question.

While the title and the alleged subject is a man-eating Amur (Siberian) Tiger that was terrorizing a far Eastern village, the real subject is Russia, through the lens of this story. A personal note; much of my ancestry is from Czarist Russia, and what I read, both here and elsewhere, makes me glad that I'm here, not there. An excerpt that should not be a spoiler:

Originally Posted by John Vaillant - The Tiger, Excerpts from pp. 73-75

The Chapter starts with a quote by Confucious, comforting a grieving widow and parent, whose father, husband and son were killed by tigers: “Remember tha, my students, Callous government is more ravenous than tigers," and then continues:

BY THE MID-1980S, THE SOVIET UNION HAD BEGUN TO UNRAVEL AS THE pros inefficiencies of central planning began manifesting themselves in painfully obvious ways. However, the country was far too unstable and encumbered by its own history to allow a gradual transition toward a market economy, or the democracy such a transition was supposed to bring about. Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt to open the Soviet Union resembled Pandora's attempt to open her box: there was simply no way to do it gradually. Once that lid was cracked, it blew off altogether. In Russia's case, the walls fell down, too. As the Communist Bloc disintegrated, decades, generations entire lifetimes of frustration, discontent, stifled rage, and raw ambition came boiling out, never to be contained again. The vast majority of Russians were completely unprepared for the ensuing free-for-all....

On Yeltsin's watch, the ignorance of many, combined with the cleverness of a few, allowed for the biggest, fastest, and most egregiously unjust reallocation of wealth and resources in the history of the world. It was klepto-capitalism on a monumental scale, but it wasn't the first time. The Bolsheviks had done something similar under Lenin.

The scale of theft following the October Revolution of 1917 was equally grand for its time, but the motives and methods were even more ruthless. During the heady and violent period following the Revolution, there was a mass pillaging of privately held lands and property....

Under both Lenin and Yeltsin, it was a small elite with close res to the Kremlin who controlled these acquisitions and identified the beneficiaries. In part because of the abuses of power perpetrated during Soviet times,

John Valliant skillfully uses three villagers as foils for the history and sociology of Russia. Two of these were killed by this tiger and one of whom had a major role in killing the tiger.

This book can be read on many levels, that of a nature lover, history buff or as a cultural study. Or all three levels. If the book were only about the tigers hunting villagers, and the tiger hunt,it would have merited about forty pages. The book was gripping and interesting all the way through. I highly recommend this book.