Bag of Bones is a banger.
Grief is like a drunk relative, always coming back in for one more goodbye hug
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Didnt even know goodreads is owned by amazon and I went there to check about their ratings for several books if I found the amazon numbers unrealistic.
Listening to the Bag of Bones audiobook by Stephen King again and itâs as magical, romantic, and unsettling as ever.
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Listening to this on audible. How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower: Goldsworthy, Adrian: 9780300164268: Amazon.com: Books
IMO, most Rome books Iâve come across either have too much detail or donât give a good picture of the society generally and how its culture and organization developed and relate to events. This book, by a noted expert, does a great job of finding a middle ground, where I feel like I understand Rome from a 5000 foot perspective, rather than a 100 foot or 30,000 foot. Some real detail but always keeps an eye on the big picture. Iâm listening on audible, and if you are not a Rome pro but want some detail, this is a great book.
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I read his bio of Caesar last year and thought it was good
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Just finished Dead Manâs walk. Going to read all 4 lonesome dove books again this year.
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Still reading suzzer book and enjoying. Takes me like one hour to read ten pages though.
Arrived in Merida this chapter and spent 30 minutes reading up on all the architecture and the ruins.
If anyone here hasnât bought it yet you should.
If anyone likes Jason Pargin, the author of John Dies in the End and a quality social media poster, his latest, Iâm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, is on sale today only for $3 (Kindle).
The Woman Who Fooled the World, by Beau Donnely and Nick Toscana
I went to a music festival over the long weekend that is about 6.5 hours drive each way from where I live, and on the way there and back my gf and I listened to this book.
This is about Belle Gibson, an Australian âwellness guruâ who 10 years ago was one of the original Instagram influencers. She claimed to have brain cancer (and later other cancers) and to be holding back their progression with natural treatments. It transpired that she never had brain cancer; she made the whole thing up. Not only that, she claimed to be donating a whole bunch of money to charity which was never received. The book is written by a couple of journalists for the Melbourne Age, the newspaper which originally uncovered her deception.
I like stories like this, because compulsive liars of this type baffle me, and I like trying to get inside their heads. I liked a somewhat similar Australian book, âFakeâ by Stephanie Wood, which is about how she spent some 18 months enmeshed in a relationship with a pathological liar. I think most people imagine that the inner life of one of these people looks much like their own, just with added evil intent. But thereâs a scene in this book where Belle is confronted by a couple of friends in an âinterventionâ, where they accuse her of lying about her health and urge her to come clean. A short time later, she is at a launch for her cookbook and gets up and gives a speech about overcoming her illness that makes much of the room cry, WITH ONE OF THOSE FRIENDS PRESENT. I would be compressed into a diamond live on stage by the pressure of stress if I tried this. I donât know what itâs like to be one of these people, but I donât think itâs like being me.
Major criticism first: the book is way too long and feels padded out like a high school essay that has to reach 2000 words. Thereâs way too much repetition and pointless digression. The core of the story is enough to fit one long-form article, is the truth.
We do get some exploration of Belleâs past, where it is made fairly clear that her (estranged) mother is also a nutcase and compulsive liar and is probably the source of Belleâs issues. I thought the book did an OK job of this.
There are a couple of chapters of people giving glowing quotes about Belle: how sheâs âamazingâ, âinspirationalâ, âempoweringâ, about her incredible âjourneyâ and so on, and in probably the most effective part of the book, it dives straight from that into a profile of a young woman called Monique who really does have brain cancer. She drags herself from treatment to treatment, totally aware that she is living under a death sentence (brain cancer is incurable) with no money to do anything but scrape out an existence, trying to live a little longer for the sake of her young daughters. This really lays bare how gross it is to worship someone like Belle. Sorry, is Moniqueâs story not âempoweringâ enough for you? You donât feel like sheâs on a âjourneyâ? Doesnât make you feel good?
I can understand how people just diagnosed with terminal cancer are vulnerable to this sort of thing, but I have little time for âtoxic positivityâ types who label someone as âinspiringâ and âempoweringâ based solely on how well that person is able to reassure them of a lie. Namely, that if their number is up and they get a malignant cancer or similar, as long as they hold themselves to some divine standard, they wonât have to suffer and die. But they will. Even if Belle Gibsonâs story had somehow been completely true in the facts, it is still fundamentally a lie in the way that it denies this. Iâve quoted Pema Chodronâs book âWhen Things Fall Apartâ here before:
The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesnât mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we donât have to feel itâs happening because we personally made the wrong move. In reality, however, when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong. As long as weâre addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow⌠This is where renunciation enters the pictureâ renunciation of the hope that our experience could be different, renunciation of the hope that we could be better⌠the real thing that we renounce is the tenacious hope that we could be saved from being who we are. Renunciation is a teaching to inspire us to investigate whatâs happening every time we grab something because we canât stand to face whatâs coming.
This is the beginning of real empowerment, real compassion. It has to start with this.
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Cascade Failure by L.M. Sagas
Which sounds like an alias now that I write it out. First book in a space opera series and so far it is pretty good. Likable characters, interesting world building, and ambiguity in peopleâs motivations. Hope it can finish as strong as it has started.
Dark Imperium by Guy Haley
5/10
I was excited to start getting into the Warhammer universe but if this is how the books are, Iâll pass. The book is about 400 pages but almost nothing happens and what does happen is straightforward. Everyone is doing assigned roles. Thereâs very little intrigue. Only positive is itâs very heavy on descriptions which puts meat on the worldview and the scenes involving Nurgleâs demons were interesting
Full dark no stars is my fav short collection, so good.
Different seasons is quite good too
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All Systems Red
By Martha Wells
8/10
A good read. Very good world building. The story was short but didnât feel rushed
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Enjoyed this video
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Connie: A Memoir
By Connie Chung
7/10
I guess you can be an accomplished person in your field and breaking barriers left and right and not actually be that interesting. I donât mean this in a bad way. Connie Chung by her own admission was a teacherâs pet, straight laced, ambitious person who didnât really drink with the news boys, was in bed by 10, extremely devoted to her husband and family and didnât even know how you took cocaine. All of this made her a good news anchor, a good person, and a role model for Asian women, but it makes for a boring memoir. The most affecting part was her talking this article
Why Are There So Many Asian American Women Named Connie? Opinion | I Got My Name From Connie Chung. So Did They. - The New York Times
And how she was amazed at all the Asian women named Connie in honor of her and what it meant to them and to herself.
Though she was straight laced she did have a sense of humor. Her last paragraph in the book is dedicated to reading off the sales pitch for a strain of weed named after herself.
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Check out the movie. I think with only 50 pages left youve gotten to THE scene, but if you havent youll know it when you do, and the movie does an amazing job bringing it to life
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Love full Dark, No Stars. Both the most despair filled and uplifting of his book collections
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In this sense, donât forget the third part of the trilogy âRose Madder.â Rosie is likely the most badass of the three main leads, and its a toss up on which of the three survives the worst ordeals.
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In King of the Hill, the Laotian neighbor mom is named Connie.
Read the entire Invincible series. Holy smokes what a fantastic story. Very curious to see how the rest of the TV series adapts the remaining issues.