What are you reading at the moment?

[PhilosopherX]

High School

I'm making a point of rereading (or reading for the first time) books that were assigned to me in high school that I either failed to appreciate or just ignored all together. Right now I'm reading Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. A much different book to read near 40 than at 16.

 

[TamLin01]

I'm reading "The King in Yellow" (again) because I'm writing a story based on it (again), and I'm alternating between that and "The Terror", which is research for another story I'm working on set during the French Revolution.

 

[sethp]

Gardens of the moon. It hasn't grabbed me yet and I'm already on page 10. we'll see.

 

[trysail]

"The Passage of Power". It's the fourth volume in Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson.

Caro wanted to write a work about politics in 20th century America, and settled on Johnson as his subject because he held every federal elected office - representative, senator (and senate majority leader for 6 years), vice president, and president. He was probably the most accomplished legislator in American history. He made the senate during his 6 years as majority leader a real focus of power, as it had not been before that.

As majority leader his desk on the senate floor was front and center, and when it came to roll call votes on bills he would be at that desk and it was almost as if he were conducting an orchestra. On some occasions he knew the vote had to be taken quickly to get the result he wanted and would signal to the sergeant-at-arms calling the roll to hurry up. At other times he knew the roll call had to be read slowly to allow the senators with the votes he needed to get to the chamber, or senators who were still mulling his arm-twisting and coming around to the right vote time to think, and he slowed the roll call down to a snail's pace.

While JFK had a lot of successes in foreign affairs, his domestic agenda (principlly a tax cut bill and a civil rights bill) went nowhere. But after JFK was assassinated and Johnson became president he was able to get those bills through - working around southern conservative democratic senators who could keep the bills locked up in their committees or kill them off through the filibuster.

The book is fascinating (assuming you like politics and history), not just about power, but how LBJ's childhood shaped the adult he became and affected his search for the presidency. By 1960 he'd concluded that he would never be elected president - he was too much a southern conservative politician, who, in order to stay in office, had had to vote against civil rights legislation often (even though personally he was ardently for civil rights). So he knew that in an open convention he'd likely never be nominated for president, and if nominated would likely never win an election. So, by 1960 he actively lobbied to be JFK's vice president (and Kennedy - in a move that shocked most of the party - added him to the ticket, realizing he was unlikely to win without Texas and few other southern states). But Johnson lobbied so hard because he actually calculated that there had been X number of presidents and X number of them had died in office, and so there was an X percentage chance, in spite of JFK's youth, that he might died in office, and that would be LBJ's only viable road to the presidency.

Really engrossing. You couldn't write believable fiction this good.

I've been reading Caro's serial biography of Johnson since the first volume appeared in 1982. It has been the mother of all eye-openers.

Caro has established beyond any doubt that Lyndon Johnson was completely crooked— a liar, a cheat, a blackmailer and a thief.



________________

For Lyndon Johnson, determination had to include belief.

He understood that all his life- as is shown by the fact that as a small boy "he was always repeating" the salesman's creed that "You've got to believe in what you're selling," and that decades later, in his retirement, he would say: "What convinces is conviction. You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing: if you don't, you're as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn't there..." And Lyndon Johnson could make himself believe in an argument even if he had never believed in it before, even if he had believed in an opposite argument- and even if the argument did not accord with the facts. A devotee like Joseph Califano would write that Johnson "would quickly come to believe what he was saying even if it was clearly not true."

When Lyndon Johnson came to believe in something, moreover, he came to believe in it totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs or of the facts in the matter, came to believe in it so absolutely that, George Reedy says, "I believe that he acted out of pure motives regardless of their origins. He had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act... He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the 'truth' which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of his enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality." Califano, listening to Johnson tell a story which Califano knew was not true, and which Califano knew that Johnson himself knew, or at least had known at one time, was not true, writes of "the authentic increase in the President's conviction each time he recited it." The phrase used to describe the process by long time Texas associates like Ed Clark- the "revving up" or the "working up"- was homier, but it was the same process: "He could start talking about something and convince himself it was right, and get all worked up, all worked up and emotional, and work all day and all night, and sacrifice, and say, 'Follow me for the cause! - let's do this because it's right." And, Clark says, Johnson would believe it was right- no matter what he had believed before.​

-Robert A. Caro
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of The Senate.
New York, 2002.


Lyndon Johnson never won a fair election in his life, going all the way back to his third-rate college where he employed blackmail and rigged his election as student body president. He cheated in virtually every election when he stood for public office. The most notorious was his 1948 election to the U.S. Senate where upwards of 10,000 ballots fraudulently submitted in Duval and Bexar Counties enabled his statewide victory margin of 87 votes.

 

[Dual_Triode]

Heading Out To Wonderful, Robert Goolrick. Algonquin Books (c) 2012.

I was hooked on page one. A devastating narrative with stunningly descriptive prose. Excellent reviews.

 

[litfan10]

Felix Palma's The Map of Time.

After reading excellent reviews I wanted to read this time travel novel set in the Victorian Age with H.G. Wells as one of the characters. Halfway through and I'm not disappointed at all. It's very well translated from Spanish making it a very smooth read.

Book two of the trilogy, The Map of the Sky features Edgar Allan Poe which I'm very much looking forward to reading.

 

[topace]

"Master of Legendaries" - a Pokemon fan fiction story at FanFiction.Net as well as updates to stories as they arrive in my Gmail's inbox.

 

[UnfoundSearcher]

Hello, from a newbie...

I just finished Christopher Moore's latest, Sacre Bleu, and it was fantastic. It's set in France at the end of the 19th century and follows a number of painters. Moore obviously did his homework and it's both a wonderful satire and an homage to art.

 

[Balke7612]

I'm reading 'Embracing The Wide Sky' by Daniel Tammet. It's about how our minds work and what they can do.

I started reading it ages ago but stopped for various reasons. I really liked his first book: 'Born On A Blue Day' in which he wrote about his life as an autistic savant and 'Wide Sky' is shaping up to be just as enjoyable.

 

[UnfoundSearcher]

Having just finished Sacre Bleu, I've picked up Clark's Strange and Norrell again. It's always entertaining and I swear I'll finish it one of these days...

 

[voluptuary_manque]

The Long Earth, Pratchett and Baxter.

 

[UnfoundSearcher]

I've got The Long Earth coming as we speak. I'm very excited for it.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I fear you will be disappointed. The idea may be Pratchett's but the story is Baxter's. I probably won't finish it. It lacks an over-riding plot, interesting characters and humor. Other than that, it's fine.

 

[desertslave]

Just finished "Shadows of Night" by Deborah Harkness (2nd in a trilogy, lord help me!) and I'm partway through "Redshirts" by John Scalzi. I keep hooting with laughter then deferring explanations because it's just too complicated. LOL

 

[RodenAddison]

.....

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Interesting! Is that still in print? I could justify buying it just because . . .

 

[UnfoundSearcher]

I fear you will be disappointed. The idea may be Pratchett's but the story is Baxter's. I probably won't finish it. It lacks an over-riding plot, interesting characters and humor. Other than that, it's fine.

That's a shame. I felt that way about Unseen Academicals, really, though I chalked it up to my not being a football fan.

 

[Handley_Page]

"Mr J G Reeder returns"; Edgar Rice Burrows.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

That's a shame. I felt that way about Unseen Academicals, really, though I chalked it up to my not being a football fan.

I'm no football fan, either, but I quite enjoyed UA. I think being on the periphery of the worlds of art and fashion as well as a career academic was what kept me interested. And I always love Ridcully.

 

[avrgblkgrl]

A non-fiction book by John Kerr, "A Most Dangerous Method: The story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein." It was written in the 90's, but the private lives of extreme thinkers fascinate me.

 

[Tzara]

Morte d'Urban by J. F. Powers

 

[NeverEndMe]

reading...

I'm currently reading a book called Grave Mercy, by Robin Lafevers. Very exciting. It involves assassins, Gods of Death, a convent, and a little romance. <3 I love it!

 

[trysail]

...It was the Hanseatic League that established a proper footing for commercial fishing in the North Atlantic. The popularity of the highly nutritious and economical cold-water fish prompted the Hansa merchants to order the construction of two fleets of vessels to exploit the massive shoals of fish in two distinct Atlantic fishing grounds: the so-called Scania waters off southern Sweden, where there were plenty of herring; and the Lofoten Islands, above the Arctic Circle in northern Norway, where there were unimaginably large stocks of Gadus morhua, the Atlantic cod.

The importance of this remarkable white-fleshed, protein-rich, almost fat-free fish in the Atlantic's history can hardly be gainsaid. It dominated the trade of the Hansa; it stimulated the transoceanic adventuring of the Basques; it provided hundreds of thousands of Britons with work and tens of millions of Britons with food; and for decades it formed the central plank of the economics of all of maritime Canada and the coastal states of New England.

Cod is a demersal fish, meaning that it likes to swim close to the seabed in shallowish waters— a fondness it shares with flatfish like sole, flounder, plaice, and halibut and with other fellow five-finned gadiforms like haddock, pollock, hake, and whiting. (The second broad division into which oceanic fish are divided is that of the pelagic types, which swim in the surface waters or the middle depths: the herring is a pelagic fish, as is the sardine, the anchovy, the mackerel, the infamous South African snoek*, and the currently endangered bluefin tuna). Cod was also once very numerous (Alexandre Dumas joked that the female was so fertile that if all cod eggs survived and hatched, within three years one could walk clear across the Atlantic by standing on the fishes' backs), until recent times most of the adult fish caught were large and muscular with dozens of pounds of white, motherly, nourishing flesh.

_______________
* Though popular in southern Africa, few Britons still care for it, as a consequence of the importation of millions of tons of canned Atlantic snoek during the Second World War and a highly ineffectual campaign by the then Ministry of Food to persuade people to eat it. It was found to be oily, bony, and bad, and despite entreaties for cooks to prepare such dishes as snoek piquante (when it was clearly piquante enough already, once the can was opened), most remained unsold. In the 1950s the sudden appearance on shelves of similarly sized containers of cat food suggested its eventual fate...


​

-Simon Winchester
Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and A Vast Ocean of A Million Stories
New York, N.Y. 2010.



I've read a lot of Simon Winchester's oeuvre on subjects as diverse as madmen, dictionaries, volcanoes, geology, earthquakes and China. He has yet to disappoint.

Having said that, this is not his best work. That's not to say the book wasn't engaging; it's a good book to take along on a summer holiday. It's possible that so much of the material in this book is general knowledge that the element of discovery that marked his previous books is missing. After all, the world is not in desperate need of another account of Trafalgar or the great voyages of discovery. Sad to say, there were several instances where Winchester's prose fell apart. Who knows, perhaps the pressure of a deadline or some other press of time led to a number of awkward sentences that left me struggling to identify subject and verb? That certainly is not the Winchester I've come to know.

 

[WaywardandLost]

Morning Glories by Nick Spencer

 

[WaywardandLost]

The Vanishing by Bentley Little