I love to read, and I love to know what everyone else is reading and what they're thinking about it all. Nothing is quite as pleasing as running my eyes down a long list of books, a list of books read by a close friend, and noting what I've also read, what I would never read and perhaps a few I'd wondered about. Such a list has the makings of a long and varied conversation that, among my wild and amazing friends, could go on through the afternoon, through a few bottles of wine, and right into the evening. And, with the January Maine nights coming on shortly after lunch, being bone cracking cold and hauntingly dark, I think just such a list should be presented here.
This has proved to be the year of the Woman, and won't my good friend and roommate, a tireless champion for what he feels is the unsung woman in all of life's varied pursuits, be glad to hear it. Without intention or awareness I sat down to my list of 38 books read this year and discovered my top 4 were of female authorship, and my top 10 harbored 8 more brilliant ladies. Rather remarkable considering how skewed (according to my roommate) I tend to be towards male authors (and male everything). But, I will not de-emphasize the feminine this year, as it was a pervasive undercurrent to my reading.
The Top Five
1. The Passion, Jeanette Winterson - This was my find of the year, and a remarkable one it seems to be. I happened upon this book in a short article on NPR Books. I requested the hard to find title from Bangor Public Library on a bored whim. I had liked the way the author of the article (Stephanie Staal, http://www.npr.org/2011/08/05/133476730/three-gutsy-heroines-to-celebrate-womens-history) had made the book sound so unusual, sexy, and intelligent. I forgot about it entirely, and when the book showed up at the Maine State Library I turned it over in my hands having no idea why I'd requested it. Which made it all the more delightful when I read it and just loved the hell out of it. It is indeed unusual, sexy, and very well written, but to that I would add romantic, violent, heart breaking, funny, and beautiful. I don't know what I loved more, the setting of a lunatic Venice, the bizarre & sexy leading lady, the unabashed melancholy of the prose, or the haunting way it lingers with me even now, but it is a precious and rare kind of a novel that everyone should take the time to read.
2. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf - I read this novel for about the 5th time this past year. That's cheating! you may be yelling, but it's my list and I can put whatever I want on it. This book, always a massively enjoyable read for me, was particularly potent this year. I found myself startled anew by the way Virginia Woolf writes about the inside workings of my heart as if she'd studied the minutia of my secret thoughts for many lifetimes. It is incredible; she seems to mirror back our own lives, and does so with a precision that makes you feel dam near afraid, and to top it off, she does this in settings that are so far removed from our own day to day life, yet looses nothing in the transference, it remains pitch perfect. Her books are the writings of a master of both language and the nuances of suffering, and her works are genius.
3. A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor - An author I had wanted to read for some time, so I was pleased when this collection of short stories was chosen for my book group's summer read. Short stories are far and away my favorite thing to read, and this collection was everything I had hoped - brilliant, dark, funny, grotesque, haunting. She gives voice to the displaced, painting local color and human suffering and joy in one stark snapshot of life, shocking and sometimes grotesque, and of course haunting. Southern Gothic at it's best, written by an amazingly honest and observant woman. She stands shoulder to shoulder with some of my favorites - Donna Tartt, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and William Faulkner.
4. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton - I do love Classic Literature and I was eager to read this well loved and much praised story of life in the upper crust society of New York circa 1870. And though I knew I would like it, I ended up absolutely adoring it. The final scene of this book is what I would call a delicate mind blower, and it gives perfect expression of an absolutely indefinable experience. The book is quick, engaging, amazingly complex and well written, and it leaves you feeling like you know something very slippery and beautiful and important in a way you will never loose. A must read for the classical lover of love.
5. A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest J. Gaines - This book should have been a grind to get through, given the dark and ugly content and the impossibly unlikeable characters, but despite (or perhaps due in part because) these gruesome details and ornery folks I found it to be a perfect story, woven like good poetry, turning the cumbersome and filthy frenetic into a single note that goes off in your gut like a revelation. Gaines shows a deep understanding of the human psyche and a comprehensive sense of place, both literal and metaphorical. It is a really involved and complicated grouping of emotions, ideas, and facts turned into this simple, heart breakingly elegant story. Exceptionally honest and compassionate.
And for those who love lists like I do, here are the rest of them, ordered from favorites down to the despised :
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
Gunnar's Daughter, Sigrid Undset
The House of the Spirit, Isabel Allende
The Complete Stories of Truman Capote
Full Dark No Stars, Stephen King
Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
The Magus, John Fowles
The Complete Works of Flannery O'Conner
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clark
Diary, Chuck Palahniuk
The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami
Oranges are not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
11/22/63, Stephen King
The Once and Future King, T. H. White
Palace Walk, Naguib Mahfouz
The Hunters, Claire Messud
Eat, Pray, Love, Melissa Gilbert
The Memoirs of Catherine the Great
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Nine Lives, William Dalrymple
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
Barabas, Par Lagerkvist
The Dwarf, Par Lagerkvist
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, Joan Didion
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, David Sedaris
Haunted, Chuck Palahniuk
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Julian's House, Judith Hawkes
Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
William Faulkner, Carolyn Porter
Showing posts with label Book Reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book Reviews. Show all posts
Book Recommendations to Change the World
Wake up and be the Revolution
In a society where wealthy and powerful forces are trying to keep us asleep, confused, passive, and weak it is very difficult to convey with enough passion, force, and emphasis what serious trouble our world is in and how little time we have to create the broad sweeping changes that will need to happen to avert further horror. In the United States we are all subject to the farce of government, the joke of freedom, the puppet show of a citizen empowered nation, and the lie of democracy.
Despite the growing dissent among an increasingly impoverished and abused populace, people are unwilling to take action, to realize that they are a part of the machine that is spreading death, destruction, environmental negligence, resource depletion, and abuse of people and animals all in the name of profit and greed. While we stand by worrying about cheaply made and vapid consumerism, television programs, and orchestrated/ meaningless political bickering, horrific and sweeping crimes are being perpetrated by corrupt corporations and governments, often using the general populace as a tool.
Tired of it? Well so am I. Here are some books to help you learn what is really going on and what you can do to help.
Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges
"If voting changed anything they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman
In this fierce and fact laden book journalist Chris Hedges denounces the "liberal class" for doing nothing in the face of continuous war, the creation of a permanent underclass, and rampant corruption. He shows that the elected politicians have consciously sold out the working class for corporate money.
" Corporations have thirty-five thousand lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation.... The financial sector, for example, spent more then $5 billion on political campaigns, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown, and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury....Obama lies as cravenly if not as crudely as George W. Bush. He promised that the transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open up credit and lending to the average consumer following the financial crisis. It did not. He told us he would withdraw troops from Iraq, close Guantanamo Bay detention camp, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus, pass a health-care bill with a robust public option, and create new jobs. He has not."
He interviews dozens of people inside of the government, press, military, and corporate machines. The media, Hollywood, the news, our senate, congress, and president are all controlled by a tiny sliver of people all seeking profit above integrity, humanity, truth and justice. This book will make you question everything, and should be required reading for everyone.
Healing Cancer from the Inside Out by Mike Anderson
"During the past fifty years scientists experimenting with thousands of animals have found 700 ways of causing cancer. But they have not discovered one way of curing the disease." -J. F. Brailsford, M.D.
The first part of the book examines the failure of conventional cancer treatments and provides a shocking portrait of just how unsuccessful these treatments are. Looking closely at our broken health care system and how drug companies hide the truth of how misguided we are in our "battle" against cancer the book shows money motivated corruption and a continuous turning away from the data of success rates of inexpensive diet and lifestyle based treatments. Our current methods to treat the majority of cancers (there are exceptions, such as prostate and some childhood cancers) are ineffective at best (fatal at worst) and extremely profitable. The same can be said for heart disease and diabetes. Yet these treatments are touted as the only option, and doctors and patients finding success out side of these industries are mocked and silenced.
The second part of the book provides an explanation of how cancer can be reversed naturally through diet and lifestyle changes, giving many real life stories of successful outcomes. The diet laid out is a vegan and mainly raw food diet. I found this book a bit fanatical in sections, and some of the data seemed a bit "loose", but despite some of Anderson's broad sweeping statements, ie "All Cancer can be cured through diet alone." I believe the majority of the information is accurate, unreported in the mass media and very important. Just the corporate control that large meat and dairy industries have in our government alone is eye opening and frightening. When you tie that greed to the multi trillion dollar "fight against cancer" the health care industry has been touting for 70 years, with such poor results, the picture is very disturbing indeed.
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
"Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience." - Howard Zinn
This history text is a time line of our countries founding through the eyes of the common people, rather than the elite. It is a fairly well known and revered book, by a man who is today, after his death, respected and celebrated for his honesty and bravery. During his life, due to his outspokenness and content of his work, he was tracked by the FBI and labeled a security threat, despite never having committed a crime. Many historians dismissed him for breaking from the status quo.
Make sure you get the complete, unabridged copy of this book. My first taste of The People's History, was an abridged audio version, read by Matt Damon. I assumed the work was paltry, weak, and redundant, till I read the complete text sans Matt Damon twittering away like an imbecile in my ear, and realized it was informative, meticulously researched and extremely interesting. Coming from the public school system of 1980s-90s it was almost comical (in a darkly ironic and tragic manner)l how the celebrated events I was taught about in the classroom were revealed as having a flip side saturated in deceit, injustice, murder, and maltreatment of the masses. Our heroes are manufactured, polished, and sometimes completely rebuilt to suit our clean and glossy self image as a country, when in reality, many of these figures were criminals.
The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson
"We do not think of these overseas deployments as a form of empire; in fact, most Americans do not give them any thought at all until something truly shocking, such as the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, brings them to our attention. But the people living next door to these bases and dealing with the swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape their women certainly think of them as imperial enclaves, just as the people of ancient Iberia or nineteenth-century India knew that they were victims of foreign colonization." -Chalmers Johnson, referring to our 725 military bases on foreign soil.
Most Americans do not recognize—or do not want to recognize—that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, they are often ignorant of the fact that their government garrisons the globe. They do not realize that a vast network of American military bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire. Jonson lays down the facts, giving actual numbers for how many bases we maintain, how much they cost, the cost of our wars, and the real death tolls from these wars. The numbers are staggering. While politicians argue about welfare costs we are dumping over half our federal budget into a military system, whose spending is mostly unreported and unaccounted for. This is the second of a three part series by old Chalmers, the first being Blowback and the last Nemesis, all are worth checking out.
*************************************************************************************
We have an obligation as thinking and feeling human beings to seek the truth. I consider it my life's work to read and learn everything I can, to gather information and make my own decisions about the world around me. When we as a people are faced with injustice, corruption, and evil we must act. I hope you find these books as powerful and informative as I did. I hope you will feel compelled to learn more and to disengage from our culture of hedonism, spectacle, preoccupation with self, and greed. We can transform our world, but we need to be engaged and active, moving forward with integrity and honesty.
In a society where wealthy and powerful forces are trying to keep us asleep, confused, passive, and weak it is very difficult to convey with enough passion, force, and emphasis what serious trouble our world is in and how little time we have to create the broad sweeping changes that will need to happen to avert further horror. In the United States we are all subject to the farce of government, the joke of freedom, the puppet show of a citizen empowered nation, and the lie of democracy.
Despite the growing dissent among an increasingly impoverished and abused populace, people are unwilling to take action, to realize that they are a part of the machine that is spreading death, destruction, environmental negligence, resource depletion, and abuse of people and animals all in the name of profit and greed. While we stand by worrying about cheaply made and vapid consumerism, television programs, and orchestrated/ meaningless political bickering, horrific and sweeping crimes are being perpetrated by corrupt corporations and governments, often using the general populace as a tool.
Tired of it? Well so am I. Here are some books to help you learn what is really going on and what you can do to help.
Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges
"If voting changed anything they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman
In this fierce and fact laden book journalist Chris Hedges denounces the "liberal class" for doing nothing in the face of continuous war, the creation of a permanent underclass, and rampant corruption. He shows that the elected politicians have consciously sold out the working class for corporate money.
" Corporations have thirty-five thousand lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation.... The financial sector, for example, spent more then $5 billion on political campaigns, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown, and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury....Obama lies as cravenly if not as crudely as George W. Bush. He promised that the transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open up credit and lending to the average consumer following the financial crisis. It did not. He told us he would withdraw troops from Iraq, close Guantanamo Bay detention camp, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus, pass a health-care bill with a robust public option, and create new jobs. He has not."
He interviews dozens of people inside of the government, press, military, and corporate machines. The media, Hollywood, the news, our senate, congress, and president are all controlled by a tiny sliver of people all seeking profit above integrity, humanity, truth and justice. This book will make you question everything, and should be required reading for everyone.
Healing Cancer from the Inside Out by Mike Anderson
"During the past fifty years scientists experimenting with thousands of animals have found 700 ways of causing cancer. But they have not discovered one way of curing the disease." -J. F. Brailsford, M.D.
The first part of the book examines the failure of conventional cancer treatments and provides a shocking portrait of just how unsuccessful these treatments are. Looking closely at our broken health care system and how drug companies hide the truth of how misguided we are in our "battle" against cancer the book shows money motivated corruption and a continuous turning away from the data of success rates of inexpensive diet and lifestyle based treatments. Our current methods to treat the majority of cancers (there are exceptions, such as prostate and some childhood cancers) are ineffective at best (fatal at worst) and extremely profitable. The same can be said for heart disease and diabetes. Yet these treatments are touted as the only option, and doctors and patients finding success out side of these industries are mocked and silenced.
The second part of the book provides an explanation of how cancer can be reversed naturally through diet and lifestyle changes, giving many real life stories of successful outcomes. The diet laid out is a vegan and mainly raw food diet. I found this book a bit fanatical in sections, and some of the data seemed a bit "loose", but despite some of Anderson's broad sweeping statements, ie "All Cancer can be cured through diet alone." I believe the majority of the information is accurate, unreported in the mass media and very important. Just the corporate control that large meat and dairy industries have in our government alone is eye opening and frightening. When you tie that greed to the multi trillion dollar "fight against cancer" the health care industry has been touting for 70 years, with such poor results, the picture is very disturbing indeed.
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
"Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience." - Howard Zinn
This history text is a time line of our countries founding through the eyes of the common people, rather than the elite. It is a fairly well known and revered book, by a man who is today, after his death, respected and celebrated for his honesty and bravery. During his life, due to his outspokenness and content of his work, he was tracked by the FBI and labeled a security threat, despite never having committed a crime. Many historians dismissed him for breaking from the status quo.
Make sure you get the complete, unabridged copy of this book. My first taste of The People's History, was an abridged audio version, read by Matt Damon. I assumed the work was paltry, weak, and redundant, till I read the complete text sans Matt Damon twittering away like an imbecile in my ear, and realized it was informative, meticulously researched and extremely interesting. Coming from the public school system of 1980s-90s it was almost comical (in a darkly ironic and tragic manner)l how the celebrated events I was taught about in the classroom were revealed as having a flip side saturated in deceit, injustice, murder, and maltreatment of the masses. Our heroes are manufactured, polished, and sometimes completely rebuilt to suit our clean and glossy self image as a country, when in reality, many of these figures were criminals.
The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson
"We do not think of these overseas deployments as a form of empire; in fact, most Americans do not give them any thought at all until something truly shocking, such as the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, brings them to our attention. But the people living next door to these bases and dealing with the swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape their women certainly think of them as imperial enclaves, just as the people of ancient Iberia or nineteenth-century India knew that they were victims of foreign colonization." -Chalmers Johnson, referring to our 725 military bases on foreign soil.
Most Americans do not recognize—or do not want to recognize—that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, they are often ignorant of the fact that their government garrisons the globe. They do not realize that a vast network of American military bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire. Jonson lays down the facts, giving actual numbers for how many bases we maintain, how much they cost, the cost of our wars, and the real death tolls from these wars. The numbers are staggering. While politicians argue about welfare costs we are dumping over half our federal budget into a military system, whose spending is mostly unreported and unaccounted for. This is the second of a three part series by old Chalmers, the first being Blowback and the last Nemesis, all are worth checking out.
*************************************************************************************
We have an obligation as thinking and feeling human beings to seek the truth. I consider it my life's work to read and learn everything I can, to gather information and make my own decisions about the world around me. When we as a people are faced with injustice, corruption, and evil we must act. I hope you find these books as powerful and informative as I did. I hope you will feel compelled to learn more and to disengage from our culture of hedonism, spectacle, preoccupation with self, and greed. We can transform our world, but we need to be engaged and active, moving forward with integrity and honesty.
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