Just starting the Wheel of Time literary universe and already we have a Third Age of the World, Misty Mountains, and spooky black riders. I’m digging it, but does it get any less blatantly Tolkeinish?
Finally read Dune, it was ok I didn’t love it but it kept me interested enough to finish it pretty quickly. Started Dune Messiah and it really sucks, any point in reading the other books in the series if I feel like that about Messiah?
Messiah and Children are about the same. God Emperor is a real slog that few finish. But I really enjoyed books 5 and 6 - Heretics and Chapterhouse. They’re the last two Herbert wrote and they take place thousands of years after the others.
Granted, expecting people to make it through two meh books and then an interminable one is a bit much.
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I am trying to read all the Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction. Just finished the amazing adventures of clay and kavalier by chabon
I really enjoyed it. The vibe reminded me of the goldfinch
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It really picks up once you get to “Refregirator Repairmen of Dune”
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I love God Emperor, but that may be because I see a lot of myself in Leto.
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Unimportant factoid from Tulsa’s downtown library: Sandwiched in between books about Thomas Paine and Malcom X is…Uprising: The Awakening of Diamond and Silk.
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Preparing for my trip to Philippines at Christmas I wanted a light read so I picked up the first Jack Reacher novel.
7 weeks and 25 books later I’m up to where the author hands them off to his brother and im starting to lose interest.
Would definitely recommend the series tho
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Reading Three Body Problem now, about halfway through, and have yet to find it interesting. So far not seeing anything in the story to warrant all the acclaim it has gotten.
Does it get better toward the end, or am I just too much of a dullard to “get it”?
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I thought the first was kinda bad but just interesting enough to keep me reading it. The second was absolutely terrible. You’re not missing anything at all if you tap out now imo. If there’s anything in the third book to justify the hype, I’ll never find out what it was.
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Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower
7/10
Took me a while to get through this as the beginning part was a bit dry and history books really need a throughline and some kind of hook to really draw you into the story, but the more I got into it the better it became.
Book obviously covers Japan from the day of Emperor Hirohito’s announcement of defeat until the end of US occupation. It moves chronologically but each chapter deals with different aspects of Japan, so the beginning deals with cultural aspects right at the beginner, while the ending chapter deals with economic leaders towards the end of the occupation.
The book first starts with the pure devastation of japan. Whole cities gone, millions on the streets begging for money, may people dying of starvations. The economy did start picking up but the first couple of years were extremely tough
One through line of the book is that Japan really did do a miraculous transformation in cultural, artistic, political, and economic spheres, but all of which were tempered by politics, namely The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers ( SCAP) top down oversight of the occupation, the exempting of the emperor from any kind of culpability from the war, the rising tide of left wingers in politics, and eventually the Korean War.
The book goes into various details in the cultural sphere. One was the obvious hypocrisy of the sudden shift in politics from elites, who just days before were calling for the deaths of all Westerns, to praising peace and non aggression as deep commitments of society. How the two most praised and most hated figures in the occupation were the pan-pan women; a combination of prostitutes and consort to the occupying GI. Japan even set up a brothels for American GIs under the auspices of Recreation and Amusement Association but the General got wind of it and canceled it. The pan pan women were looked with a mix of envy and hate. They usually rode around with GIs, got gifts. etc while the country was in ruin. The other scoundrel was the black market selling who became a mythical free market icon, out there hustling bestowing gifts to those less fortune or breaking bones of those who didn’t pay up.
It talked about exempting the emperor from any kind admission of crimes. The US occupation thought the removing him would cause the whole country to fall apart. In reality there were plenty of people who thought he should be tried as a war criminal or least he should abdicate, but the US said no, and the emperor wasn’t going to disagree. This lead to funny situations during the War Crime Tribunal were people say they ran the plan by the emperor and he disapproved of the plan and pushed for peace with America and then the general would do the original plan. It’s not like no one noticed that the Emperor kept coming into the war room and kept pushing for peace but somehow the war kept going on? The obvious answer was that the Emperor and commanders were both intertwined and both were for the war.
The anti war amendment to the constitution was genuinely amazing, but true fidelity as been haphazard
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Here is another terrific, highly readable book about post-war Japan, with a focus on the emergence of the yakuza from the post-war black markets on which the populace depended to get a hold of food and other scarce life essentials.
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Added to my to buy list. Do you have any recommendations on books for the Meiji restoration period? It was mentioned a lot as a comparison of constitutions, but didn’t go into any depth around the period.
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I watch a ton of historical dramas that cover the Meiji period and the avalanche of changes to Japan that occurred during this time, but I’m afraid I don’t have any go-to books to suggest on he subject.
However, if you like Tokyo Underworld, then Tokyo Junkie by the same author, his biographical account of changing postwar Japan during his 50 years in the country, is also a good read, as is Tokyo Vice, a unique modern look at Japan’s underworld by a foreigner who was a newspaper reporter for one of Japan’s biggest dailies, which was extremely rare. This book is being made into a TV drama as well.
Finally, I would also recommend Musashi as an epic fictional account of Japan’s most famous swordsman right at the beginning of Japan’s Edo period, loosely based on real-life events.
Really enjoying The Origins of Political Order - Wikipedia by Francis Fukuyama.
Very ambitious work with lots of interesting history. It’s kind of a comparative history of human political society. If you buy on Amazon the audible version is available for like $6.
The Lincoln Highway
In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the work farm where he has just served a year for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head west where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future.
Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.
This book ended up on just about everybody’s Best Of list for 2021. I’m usually a bit let down and underwhelmed by heavily hyped novels but I thought this one was pretty darn good.
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https://www.amazon.com/Gap-Crossing-Deadliest-Greatest-Migration/dp/0578360071/
I’ve read 50-60 books in researching for the book I’m writing. As it works out this is probably the last one, and it was by far the one that most sucked me in to where I couldn’t put it down.
The author is basically a 20-something travel bum who decided to finally do something meaningful and follow a group of migrants through the Darien Gap from Columbia to Panama. Their stories are utterly heartbreaking. This book is going to stay with me for a while.
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I noticed this today, by which I don’t mean to say that any of you in particular needs therapy, or anti-depressants or anything like that:
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Re-reading this (for about the 4th or 5th time) and it’s just as good as I remembered.
I started reading “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” since I always meant to and it was free on Amazon. Not liking how often I can relate to liberal Weimar Germans. It reads more like a blueprint being used now rather than a history.
The author’s homophobia is also problematic.