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Post by Dellarigg on Apr 23, 2023 5:44:47 GMT -5
Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72, Hunter S Thompson
I first read this in the 90s, when my interest in US politics wasn't as deep as it is now. My interest in Hunter S. Thompson just about got me through, but I remember thinking it was a slog at times.
Coming back to it now, what struck me most was how much he sounds like Philip Roth, with the same long, rollicking sentences that seem about to veer out of control, but somehow don't. It's hard to think of a voice that better matched the time. But it's also pretty clear that he'd reached the high watermark and things would get erratic from here on out, not helped by his chaotic habits, amply alluded to (my favourite is him being late for an interview with McGovern because a girl was arrested in his hotel room at 8 in the morning). Not a small part of this towards the end is a blown assignment or two, with writing replaced by mere transcripts of interviews. It wasn't long after that Rolling Stone sent him to cover the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire and he stayed drinking and smoking in the hotel pool instead of sitting ringside.
Still, it's well worth another look, if only to see how little changes: there's talk of abortion, and terrible picks for Supreme Court judges, with peace protestors standing in for the woke of today.
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Post by Jimmy James on Apr 26, 2023 7:53:20 GMT -5
Henry George, Progress and Poverty
George's treatise in favor of a single land-value tax, which he lays out with fervor and fairly convincingly. The premise is straightforward- land and resources, anything 'freely given by nature' should belong equally to everyone, so any private ownership of such things should be taxed accordingly with the taxes providing for the common good. Improvements are not counted, so basically my landlord would not gain any money from simply owning the land a house sits on, but could gain a profit from maintaining a building that I pay her for the use of. The assessed value of land includes its proximity to other people, Manhattan real estate is valuable because of its proximity to everyone else in Manhattan but that's not value the owner of that landed added to it in the same way as if they erected a skyscraper.
Reportedly, this book outsold every other except the Bible in the 1880's and a 1906 survey of parliamentarians rated George as more popular than Shakespeare. Henry George societies popped up in the UK and the USA to promote his economic theories- at some point in the 1940's my grandfather came across a flyer for "Free Economics Lectures!" when he was living in New York and actually signed up and went, which I have a hard time picturing myself doing.
It sounds appealing, with a land value tax being progressive by dint of only being levied on wealthy landowners. It's also inherently a very free-market kind of scheme since this land value tax would replace taxes on income or sales which might disincentivize activity. I'm wondering how well you could do politically running on such a platform since it's possible you could pull support from both the left and the right with the simultaneous progressive and free-market characteristics. It turns out after some research that some Pennsylvania cities, including Pittsburgh, use a split-rate scheme that taxes land value at a different, higher, rate than it taxes improvements (not being a landowner I was unaware of this) and this may have helped stimulate growth when rust belt cities in other states were struggling.
I was frustrated a bit because my main question, that of how to assess the value of land for taxation, is quickly hand-waved away. This is potentially the Achilles' heel of such a scheme, but on the other hand it's not as though any other taxation scheme doesn't have possibilities for unfairness or cheating. Also thinking of how you would update the underlying rationale for the 21st century. George was writing post-Industrial Revolution but still thinking largely in terms of an agrarian economy. But how would taxation of land, or of freely available resources, apply to social media companies? Like land in a city, Facebook or Twitter is only valuable because of the access to other people it provides, but they exist in virtual spaces those companies built rather than on a plot of land in the physical world. To what extent would it be classified as an improvement they have built instead?
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Apr 26, 2023 10:38:19 GMT -5
Henry George, Progress and PovertyGeorge's treatise in favor of a single land-value tax, which he lays out with fervor and fairly convincingly. The premise is straightforward- land and resources, anything 'freely given by nature' should belong equally to everyone, so any private ownership of such things should be taxed accordingly with the taxes providing for the common good. Improvements are not counted, so basically my landlord would not gain any money from simply owning the land a house sits on, but could gain a profit from maintaining a building that I pay her for the use of. The assessed value of land includes its proximity to other people, Manhattan real estate is valuable because of its proximity to everyone else in Manhattan but that's not value the owner of that landed added to it in the same way as if they erected a skyscraper. Reportedly, this book outsold every other except the Bible in the 1880's and a 1906 survey of parliamentarians rated George as more popular than Shakespeare. Henry George societies popped up in the UK and the USA to promote his economic theories- at some point in the 1940's my grandfather came across a flyer for "Free Economics Lectures!" when he was living in New York and actually signed up and went, which I have a hard time picturing myself doing. It sounds appealing, with a land value tax being progressive by dint of only being levied on wealthy landowners. It's also inherently a very free-market kind of scheme since this land value tax would replace taxes on income or sales which might disincentivize activity. I'm wondering how well you could do politically running on such a platform since it's possible you could pull support from both the left and the right with the simultaneous progressive and free-market characteristics. It turns out after some research that some Pennsylvania cities, including Pittsburgh, use a split-rate scheme that taxes land value at a different, higher, rate than it taxes improvements (not being a landowner I was unaware of this) and this may have helped stimulate growth when rust belt cities in other states were struggling. I was frustrated a bit because my main question, that of how to assess the value of land for taxation, is quickly hand-waved away. This is potentially the Achilles' heel of such a scheme, but on the other hand it's not as though any other taxation scheme doesn't have possibilities for unfairness or cheating. Also thinking of how you would update the underlying rationale for the 21st century. George was writing post-Industrial Revolution but still thinking largely in terms of an agrarian economy. But how would taxation of land, or of freely available resources, apply to social media companies? Like land in a city, Facebook or Twitter is only valuable because of the access to other people it provides, but they exist in virtual spaces those companies built rather than on a plot of land in the physical world. To what extent would it be classified as an improvement they have built instead? Does George get really racist against Chinese immigrants in the book, or was that something he avoided in this particular text? Also, have you read Resurrection, Tolstoy’s novel about how much he loved Georgism?
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Post by Jimmy James on Apr 26, 2023 11:37:00 GMT -5
Does George get really racist against Chinese immigrants in the book, or was that something he avoided in this particular text? Also, have you read Resurrection, Tolstoy’s novel about how much he loved Georgism? Nothing about that in this text- it seems at odds with his overall progressive viewpoint and I'm surprised to hear about that. There were a few lines that struck me as prejudiced outdated in their attitudes, but he was forward-thinking enough to call out British imperialism in India and Ireland.
I have not read Resurrection (Not sure I've actually read any Tolstoy novels) but the "notable Recognition" section of the book's wikipedia page cites Tolstoy alongside an impressive list of Einstein, Shaw, Wells, Helen Keller, etc.
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Apr 26, 2023 12:37:03 GMT -5
Does George get really racist against Chinese immigrants in the book, or was that something he avoided in this particular text? Also, have you read Resurrection, Tolstoy’s novel about how much he loved Georgism? Nothing about that in this text- it seems at odds with his overall progressive viewpoint and I'm surprised to hear about that. There were a few lines that struck me as prejudiced outdated in their attitudes, but he was forward-thinking enough to call out British imperialism in India and Ireland.
I have not read Resurrection (Not sure I've actually read any Tolstoy novels) but the "notable Recognition" section of the book's wikipedia page cites Tolstoy alongside an impressive list of Einstein, Shaw, Wells, Helen Keller, etc. I'm no expert on the subject, but there was a lot of anti-Chinese racism among various reform movements in America, particularly in the American west, in George's time, including a lot of the ones that we would generally consider to be more left-wing, like labor unions or Georgists. And George himself did support excluding Chinese immigration to the United States. On the other hand, I'm not sure how many white Americans with politics that were relatviely good by Gilded Age standards were calling out Sinophobic attitudes and immigration policy; George's racism was obviously not unique. I haven't read it either (the only Tolstoy I've read is Death of Ivan Ilych and the first ~2/3 of Anna Karenina), but my understanding is that the reason that Resurrection is not as well-known as Tolstoy's other two massive novels is that it's not as good.
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Post by King Charles’s Butterfly on Apr 27, 2023 17:58:37 GMT -5
Yeah what little practical opposition to Chinese exclusion came from upper class liberal New Englanders, usually with abolitionist backgrounds. I think IWW was against it too.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on May 4, 2023 10:44:21 GMT -5
Skeleton Crew, Stephen King
Came across a nice hardback of this, inspiring me to reread the whole dang thing from beginning to end, which I can't have done since my teens. Dipped in and out of it a lot over the years, though.
Hands down King's best collection, and one of his overall career high points. Lots of my favourites are in here, from The Mist and Survivor Type to Gramma and The Jaunt. I also particularly enjoy The Wedding Gig, about a 1920s jazz band caught up in gangland warfare, and the two connected Milkman* stories, which see King at his most experimental (or coke-addled, if you prefer). The only weak spots are a couple of early stories, rewritten but not salvaged. Pallid things, they don't take up much space. Elsewhere, the invention and scope of imagination is formidable, especially considering the bulk of the stories are from a fairly narrow period of five or six years. Popular fiction at its absolute best.
*It always tickled me that said milkman is named Spike Milligan. This might not mean much to our American readers, but Spike Milligan was a hugely famous and formative comedian over here, a precursor to Monty Python while the Python team were still in their prep schools. King must've picked up the name when he was living in London in the early 80s.
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on May 4, 2023 10:47:21 GMT -5
Skeleton Crew, Stephen KingCame across a nice hardback of this, inspiring me to reread the whole dang thing from beginning to end, which I can't have done since my teens. Dipped in and out of it a lot over the years, though. Hands down King's best collection, and one of his overall career high points. Lots of my favourites are in here, from The Mist and Survivor Type to Gramma and The Jaunt. I also particularly enjoy The Wedding Gig, about a 1920s jazz band caught up in gangland warfare, and the two connected Milkman* stories, which see King at his most experimental (or coke-addled, if you prefer). The only weak spots are a couple of early stories, rewritten but not salvaged. Pallid things, they don't take up much space. Elsewhere, the invention and scope of imagination is formidable, especially considering the bulk of the stories are from a fairly narrow period of five or six years. Popular fiction at its absolute best. *It always tickled me that said milkman is named Spike Milligan. This might not mean much to our American readers, but Spike Milligan was a hugely famous and formative comedian over here, a precursor to Monty Python while the Python team were still in their prep schools. King must've picked up the name when he was living in London in the early 80s. Have you read The Stars My Destination, and does King acknowledge that he got the idea for “The Jaunt” from there?
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Post by Dellarigg on May 4, 2023 10:55:22 GMT -5
Skeleton Crew, Stephen KingCame across a nice hardback of this, inspiring me to reread the whole dang thing from beginning to end, which I can't have done since my teens. Dipped in and out of it a lot over the years, though. Hands down King's best collection, and one of his overall career high points. Lots of my favourites are in here, from The Mist and Survivor Type to Gramma and The Jaunt. I also particularly enjoy The Wedding Gig, about a 1920s jazz band caught up in gangland warfare, and the two connected Milkman* stories, which see King at his most experimental (or coke-addled, if you prefer). The only weak spots are a couple of early stories, rewritten but not salvaged. Pallid things, they don't take up much space. Elsewhere, the invention and scope of imagination is formidable, especially considering the bulk of the stories are from a fairly narrow period of five or six years. Popular fiction at its absolute best. *It always tickled me that said milkman is named Spike Milligan. This might not mean much to our American readers, but Spike Milligan was a hugely famous and formative comedian over here, a precursor to Monty Python while the Python team were still in their prep schools. King must've picked up the name when he was living in London in the early 80s. Have you read The Stars My Destination, and does King acknowledge that he got the idea for “The Jaunt” from there? He actually mentions it in the story itself. Halfway down p. 205, if you have a copy to hand.
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Post by Dellarigg on May 11, 2023 5:07:09 GMT -5
I have 71 books by Stephen King. Even I'm slightly taken aback by that.
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Post by Dellarigg on May 11, 2023 11:09:26 GMT -5
A few other totals while I'm here -
Martin Amis: 24 Nabokov: 24 Philip Roth: 22 Hemingway: 21 Dickens: 21 Rushdie: 20
The Dickens are all Oxford Illustrated hardback editions, and very luxurious, even if I did get them cheap.
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Post by The Sensational She-Hulk on May 11, 2023 11:36:55 GMT -5
I got halfway through Liz Hyder's The Gifts: A Novel before I decided I was not enjoying it and returned it to the library. Jesus, how many five-page chapters can one person use to hammer home the point that Victorian-era doctors were unethical and everyone hated women? I wasn't sticking around for 300 more pages to see how the main characters finally converged on each other. I also didn't like that the perspectives would literally change mid-chapter, and the characters were not particularly compelling anyway. It was so, so much "tell" instead of "show" that I was thoroughly unsurprised to discover the author is known for her YA work. Great idea, terrible execution.
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Post by Albert Fish Taco on May 11, 2023 13:07:25 GMT -5
Chasing that Aubrey-Maturin high, I've now started Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe series. They're...fine. Very dad-lit. Kind of what I expected the Aubrey-Maturin books to be before discovering they were really delightfully fussy character studies with some naval battles thrown in. Sharpe, on the other hand, is James Bond with a gloss of historical realism. I'm entertained, and I admire Cornwell's attention to historical detail, but thus far the books haven't risen much above potboiler-level. According to Wikipedia, O'Brien dismissed Cornwell's (and Forester's) style as "too much plot, not enough lifestyle," which, yeah, spot on. Have to say I really wanted to like “Master & Commander”, but felt I needed a Napoleonic Era Nautical Gibberish to English translation for a lot of it. There’s a stretch early on where Aubrey’s just taking out the Sophie on a half day cruise to test out the 12 pounders and masts and stuff and while I did get that the cannons were too big all the stuff about yard arms, sails, mast parts and so forth made it indecipherable to this landlubber. That said I can see why these books are loved. You don’t get that many characters giddily geeking out over stuff in these types of novels as you do with Aubrey. I’m curious if a lot of his character growth in the series is just getting over the sense that a Captain has to keep his personality and exuberance buttoned up for propriety’s sake.
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Post by Mrs David Tennant on May 11, 2023 16:23:56 GMT -5
A few other totals while I'm here - Martin Amis: 24 Nabokov: 24 Philip Roth: 22 Hemingway: 21 Dickens: 21 Rushdie: 20 The Dickens are all Oxford Illustrated hardback editions, and very luxurious, even if I did get them cheap. I have 39 books by Dell Shannon, 12 by Lesley Egan, and 14 by Elizabeth Linington. These are all the same author.
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ABz B👹anaz
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Post by ABz B👹anaz on May 11, 2023 16:37:47 GMT -5
A few other totals while I'm here - Martin Amis: 24 Nabokov: 24 Philip Roth: 22 Hemingway: 21 Dickens: 21 Rushdie: 20 The Dickens are all Oxford Illustrated hardback editions, and very luxurious, even if I did get them cheap. I have 39 books by Dell Shannon, 12 by Lesley Egan, and 14 by Elizabeth Linington. These are all the same author. Going by Wikipedia, you own 76.5% of this author's entire catalog, with 95% of Dell Shannon's and 87.5% of Elizabeth Linington's. Nice!
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Post by Mrs David Tennant on May 11, 2023 16:47:12 GMT -5
I have 39 books by Dell Shannon, 12 by Lesley Egan, and 14 by Elizabeth Linington. These are all the same author. Going by Wikipedia, you own 76.5% of this author's entire catalog, with 95% of Dell Shannon's and 87.5% of Elizabeth Linington's. Nice! I spent years going to Half Price Books with a list in hand. Right now they are all in a box because I'm not ready for a re-read yet. I usually read the whole series about every 5 years or so.
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ABz B👹anaz
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Post by ABz B👹anaz on May 11, 2023 17:22:59 GMT -5
Going by Wikipedia, you own 76.5% of this author's entire catalog, with 95% of Dell Shannon's and 87.5% of Elizabeth Linington's. Nice! I spent years going to Half Price Books with a list in hand. Right now they are all in a box because I'm not ready for a re-read yet. I usually read the whole series about every 5 years or so. Which ones are you missing (if any)? There's a Half Price Books here too, I could take a peek next time I'm there.
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Post by MrsLangdonAlger on May 11, 2023 18:07:37 GMT -5
I own every single Pratchett book.
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Post by Mrs David Tennant on May 11, 2023 18:39:52 GMT -5
I spent years going to Half Price Books with a list in hand. Right now they are all in a box because I'm not ready for a re-read yet. I usually read the whole series about every 5 years or so. Which ones are you missing (if any)? There's a Half Price Books here too, I could take a peek next time I'm there. Let me see if I can find my list somewhere!
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Post by Ben Grimm on May 11, 2023 20:22:20 GMT -5
I own every single Pratchett book. Ditto. I probably average around two and a bit copies of each. I may have a problem.
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on May 11, 2023 22:01:54 GMT -5
I own probably like 3/4 of PKD's output at this point. He's probably the prolific writer whose work I have the most of.
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Post by King Charles’s Butterfly on May 15, 2023 20:25:33 GMT -5
For me the most I have is from Italo Calvino and Stanislav Lem, probably having all the major works from both except some early, quasi-disowned stuff from Lem and his memoirs of his childhood (which I gave to my mom since aspects of his childhood personality were a lot like mine).
I just finished Alexander Danchev’s biography of Georges Braque, the other, non-Picasso cubist and a pretty cool guy, one who managed to avoid the sturm and drang of Picasso’s life while still being a part of some interesting scenes (the whole early 20th century Parisian milieu, WWI, allied with the French Resistance though he wasn’t too active). Picasso envied Braque because Braque could just be himself without any outsized performance so it’s actually a pretty inspiring biography, stable but full and interesting. Danchev also wrote a biography of Magritte that I picked up, but I’m probably getting rid of it. For one thing I’ve had it too long without reading, for another Magritte also had a very stable life, but one that seems almost exagerratedly uninteresting compared to Braque’s.
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Post by Dellarigg on May 22, 2023 9:40:57 GMT -5
Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens
So it comes to this: the only Dickens novel left to read. And now I've read it. All that remains are a few short stories and travelogues.
I didn't particularly leave this one to last, it just shook out that way, but I was aware that its reputation wasn't the highest. But, like lesser-loved Shakespeare plays such as All's Well That Ends Well and Measure For Measure that turn out to be fantastic, lesser Dickens is still pretty darn good. It has significant problems, but such is his skill that even they become interesting.
Mr Dombey is a wealthy businessman. In the opening scene, his wife gives birth to the longed-for son, and then, job done, up and dies. There is an older daughter, Florence, but she counts for nothing in Mr Dombey's eyes, and is stoutly ignored. Unfortunately, young Paul doesn't grow up to take over the family firm, as Dombey fervently wishes; he doesn't grow up at all. Paul dies around a quarter of the way into the book, and it's fair to say he takes the most interesting aspect with him. Apparently Dickens wanted to then shift attention to Florence and her romantic entanglement with a boy who turned out to be a dissolute wrong'un, but he abandoned that before he embarked on it, and instead rigged up a second marriage for Mr Dombey that goes to the bad. This is fairly satisfactory, and there isn't too much huffing and puffing to get us through the remaining 600 pages, though we're a far cry from the riches of David Copperfield and Bleak House.
What's interesting is this sense of absence and hollowness, of paths thwarted both inside the book and in the conception of it. Young Paul is excellently handled, a sickly child with - almost literally - half of himself already in the next world. While there's some sentimentality in his passing, the whole thing is more ghostly and strange than treacly. Mr Dombey himself is denied any interiority until very late in the proceedings, so also seems to be in the book and half out of it, a background presence even when he's in the foreground. The usual cast of Dickensian grotesques wreath themselves round the action to compensate for the distance we feel, and there are some sparks of comedy, but for the most part it's unlike anything Dickens had written before or would write again. His audience, sadly, weren't keen, and sales weren't amazing.
As a side note, this must be one of the first novels to feature those new-fangled trains - and, naturally, to have a character offed by one of them. And there's a very good dog in it, yes there is.
Best names: Cousin Feenix, Juliana MacStinger.
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Post by Dellarigg on May 26, 2023 4:22:23 GMT -5
Night Train, Martin Amis
There had to be a reread, of course, but which one, was the question? I wanted it to be fiction rather than the journalism. After Dickens, I wanted it to be short. And I wanted it to be something I hadn't read to absolute rags over the years. This one seemed a good choice, all that in mind.
It's an experimental sort of novella. Not only is Amis writing in the first person as a woman (albeit one called Mike), she's an American woman: z for s in lots of words, double speech marks, capital letters after colons, and so on. Though this is not much of a stretch for him: his whole thing in Money was transplanting American rhythms and energies into the moribund British novel. She's also a cop. This is his take on the hard-boiled crime fiction of Elmore Leonard, who he admired a lot. I say 'take' rather than 'parody' because, like his old man Kingsley in the late 60s early 70s, it's a very respectful genre exercise, with no laughs derived from its conventions. Which isn't to say there's no stretching of the formula going on. Mike is given the job of investigating the apparent suicide of the daughter of her boss. A beautiful woman with a good career in astro-physics and in a loving relationship, she nevertheless managed to put three bullets in her head. Mike is an ex-alcoholic, I should add.
As ever with Amis, it divides opinion. I like it, without putting it in the top tier of his work, and without quite knowing (but able to guess) what the end is all about.
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Post by Desert Dweller on May 28, 2023 1:17:12 GMT -5
Had a few 2023 books on hold at the library that are now finally coming available.
First up, Confidence, Rafael Frumkin
This is a book about two guys who meet as teenagers, and basically ruin each other's life. The two grow up poor. Both start running minor scams on people. Their parents send them to a Last Chance facility for boys to avoid prison, which is where they meet. This was very unfortunate for both of them! The narrator is a guy named Ezra. The other guy is named Orson. Orson is a supreme manipulator and con artist. Ezra falls in love with him, and is completely mesmerized by him. Orson realizes Ezra is really smart and people actually believe what he says. So, Orson uses Ezra to help him scam people.
Unfortunately, Ezra takes a very, very, very long time to realize that Orson is using him. It is waaaaaaay too late when he finally realizes this. I'm honestly unsure if Ezra *ever* really understands that Orson is using him.
Frumkin has a lot of fun with the book, having his two antiheroes run all kinds of scams and cons. They work their way up from very low level scam until at the end of the book they are running a billion dollar company that is a total fraud, but has all kinds of vapid celebrities and rich people believing in them. Pretty much every recent high profile scam is satirized in the book. Along the way they themselves get scammed by a rich guy who is a thinly veiled Elon Musk, despite warnings from one of their own employees that the Musk stand-in is a total fraud.
It all gets crazier and crazier until it all crashes down at the very end.
This is a very plot-driven book. A bit too much, I think. The plot is zany and wild and tons of fun. But, the whole book hinges on the reader believing that Ezra really is THAT much in love with Orson to keep going along with everything. It needs to be obsession-level love. I'm not entirely sure the writer pulls this part off. The beginning third of the book is where this works the best, when everything is still really low level. The middle third, however, doesn't really feature enough introspection from the protagonist. It is too plot plot plot. I wanted to hear more self-examination from the protagonist there.
The final third of the book has a lot of the writer telling you that Ezra is too in love with Orson to put a stop to anything. This would be fine if the middle section had reinforced it. But if you've got another character telling Ezra he'll help him get out, and Ezra turning that down, while knowing the whole scheme is crumbling around them.... I really really need to believe that protecting Orson is his primary goal. And I'm not entirely sure I believed that.
Still, if you can just go along with the idea that Ezra is obsessed with Orson, then the whole book is really fun. I mean, if you enjoy watching a guy throw his entire life away for the love of a guy who is horrible to him. The author really does have a lot of fun skewering capitalism, which I found enjoyable.
I'd rate it 3.5/5
Edited to add: Great timing by the library to finally release to me right before Pride month a novel about two gay boys who rob the rich
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Post by Dellarigg on Jun 3, 2023 10:42:45 GMT -5
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest HemingwayAlmost 100 years old, this one. I struggled with it, I remember, the first time I tried it, back in my first flush of papa enthusiasm, finding it too crammed with characters and dialogue. Then one day on a train the first few pages really clicked, and I finished it in a weekend. It's still pretty great, of course, though I wouldn't put it as highly as a lot of the other work. As pointed up in the novel itself, it's a recasting of the Circe myth from The Odyssey, transplanted to post-WWI Paris and Spain and based loosely on real events that fell into Hemingway's lap: a bunch of boozy men degenerating into swine over the unwinnable English aristo Brett Ashley. Our narrator, Jake Barnes, has been wounded in such a way as he can no longer perform sexually, and is all unrequited passions (and maybe vicarious satisfaction over the antics of the promiscuous Brett). The gang travel from Paris to Pamplona, to see the running of the bulls and the bullfights, where matters come to a head. It still all feels new and fresh, this virgin territory of style and content. The landscape descriptions, and the bull stuff, is as good as writing gets. The line about bankruptcy happening 'gradually then suddenly' is also from here. One of the men is Jewish, however, and that's not handled with delicacy, though he is capable of beating up the others. A key 20th century book, though give me A Farewell To Arms and The Old Man And The Sea. Fun fact: Godfather producer Robert Evans had a part as a matador in a film version. Here's Hemingway (white trousers, nearest the bull) at the time of writing, getting in amongst it in an amateur fight. The bull's horns are padded, but still.
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Post by Desert Dweller on Jun 4, 2023 23:46:02 GMT -5
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest HemingwayAlmost 100 years old, this one. I struggled with it, I remember, the first time I tried it, back in my first flush of papa enthusiasm, finding it too crammed with characters and dialogue. Then one day on a train the first few pages really clicked, and I finished it in a weekend. It's still pretty great, of course, though I wouldn't put it as highly as a lot of the other work. As pointed up in the novel itself, it's a recasting of the Circe myth from The Odyssey, transplanted to post-WWI Paris and Spain and based loosely on real events that fell into Hemingway's lap: a bunch of boozy men degenerating into swine over the unwinnable English aristo Brett Ashley. Our narrator, Jake Barnes, has been wounded in such a way as he can no longer perform sexually, and is all unrequited passions (and maybe vicarious satisfaction over the antics of the promiscuous Brett). The gang travel from Paris to Pamplona, to see the running of the bulls and the bullfights, where matters come to a head. It still all feels new and fresh, this virgin territory of style and content. The landscape descriptions, and the bull stuff, is as good as writing gets. The line about bankruptcy happening 'gradually then suddenly' is also from here. One of the men is Jewish, however, and that's not handled with delicacy, though he is capable of beating up the others. A key 20th century book, though give me A Farewell To Arms and The Old Man And The Sea.
I had held off on reading this for a long time, kind of assuming that it wouldn't have anything for me. But then I read the review on Goodreads by our old friend Dr. Dastardly and this convinced me to give it a try. His review was as follows:
"THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A MAN IN SPAIN HE GETS FRIENDZONED." He then rated it 5 stars, and tagged it on his shelf entitled "dick lit".
Okay, the combo of that review with that rating caused me to read the book.
Yep. That's a 5 star book. Amazingly, it really doesn't have anything for me in terms of the plot. But yeah, that's a 5 star book.
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Jun 6, 2023 18:26:54 GMT -5
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest HemingwayAlmost 100 years old, this one. I struggled with it, I remember, the first time I tried it, back in my first flush of papa enthusiasm, finding it too crammed with characters and dialogue. Then one day on a train the first few pages really clicked, and I finished it in a weekend. It's still pretty great, of course, though I wouldn't put it as highly as a lot of the other work. As pointed up in the novel itself, it's a recasting of the Circe myth from The Odyssey, transplanted to post-WWI Paris and Spain and based loosely on real events that fell into Hemingway's lap: a bunch of boozy men degenerating into swine over the unwinnable English aristo Brett Ashley. Our narrator, Jake Barnes, has been wounded in such a way as he can no longer perform sexually, and is all unrequited passions (and maybe vicarious satisfaction over the antics of the promiscuous Brett). The gang travel from Paris to Pamplona, to see the running of the bulls and the bullfights, where matters come to a head. It still all feels new and fresh, this virgin territory of style and content. The landscape descriptions, and the bull stuff, is as good as writing gets. The line about bankruptcy happening 'gradually then suddenly' is also from here. One of the men is Jewish, however, and that's not handled with delicacy, though he is capable of beating up the others. A key 20th century book, though give me A Farewell To Arms and The Old Man And The Sea.
I had held off on reading this for a long time, kind of assuming that it wouldn't have anything for me. But then I read the review on Goodreads by our old friend Dr. Dastardly and this convinced me to give it a try. His review was as follows:
"THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A MAN IN SPAIN HE GETS FRIENDZONED." He then rated it 5 stars, and tagged it on his shelf entitled "dick lit".
Okay, the combo of that review with that rating caused me to read the book.
Yep. That's a 5 star book. Amazingly, it really doesn't have anything for me in terms of the plot. But yeah, that's a 5 star book.
I miss Dastardly’s reviews; they were so good.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jun 8, 2023 11:35:04 GMT -5
Success, Martin Amis
His third novel, dating from the impossibly antique year 1978, and the first to feature the 'inadequate men in competition' theme that would crop up again and again, almost till the end.
Terry and Greg are foster-brothers: Terry rescued from a grim working class life, Greg a scion of privilege, though from a line of somewhat faulty dispositions. There's also a damaged sister, Ursula. We follow Terry and Greg's lives over a year, both taking turns narrating a monthly instalment*. In January, Terry is forlorn and grimy, utterly unable to get laid, while Greg swishes through his life on the way from one orgy to the next. Over the year, things begin to change.
This was always one of my favourites as a young pup, even if it didn't have the heft of the books yet to come. Rereading it now, there's still lots to admire: Amis's control over his dazzling prose is a sight to behold, and there are stretches of comic brilliance. But, as with my reread of The Information a few months ago, my appetite for callousness and cruelty isn't what it was, and there's slightly too much of it here. It's also very much a 70s book, with a cancellable line on just about every page. Worth reading, of course, but not the one I would start with.
*Both narrators have really distinct voices, while at the same time sounding a lot like Martin Amis.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jun 11, 2023 9:13:01 GMT -5
The Lost Estate, Alain-Fournier
That rare thing: a recommendation by a student that I followed up. It took years, mind you, but I got there.
This was published in France in 1912, its young author swallowed up by WWI not long after. It's a brief and floaty thing. Our narrator is an awkward, interior schoolboy, but then a much grander figure, Meaulnes, a charismatic golden boy, joins his class. It isn't long before Meaulnes gets lost one day, and comes back three days later with a tale of happening upon a country house where a party is about to flower, and where he meets a beautiful young woman. Attempts to find this house and woman once again is the basis for the rest of the book.
As I say, it's very floaty, operating on almost a dream logic wavelength, veering between the hazy and hallucinatory and the bitter and realistic. One I'll probably have to read again to nail down.
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