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    Default Reading that challenges

    Some suggestions for reading in the new year, please be aware should you accept the challenge of reading a few of the books listed below you will be changed. Proceed with caution. Great Holiday gifts too.

    “One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” Cassandra Clare

    Alpha order. Various topics.

    'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle' by Daniel L. Everett
    'Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis' by J. D. Vance
    'House of cards : psychology and psychotherapy built on myth' by Robyn M. Dawes
    'Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain' David Eagleman
    'Merchants of Doubt' by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. M. Conway
    'On Human Nature' by Edward O. Wilson
    'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century' by Timothy Snyder
    'One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway - and Its Aftermath' by Seierstad, Åsne and Sarah Death
    'Paul Farmer: Servant to the Poor' by Jennie Weiss Block
    'Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind' by Colin Renfrew
    'The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark' Carl Sagan
    'The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century' by Peter Watson
    'The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy' Albert O. Hirschman
    'The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science' by Will Storr
    'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
    'World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech' by Franklin Foer
    'Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance' By Robert Pirsig

    Check Goodreads for reviews, many of the books are challenging and they will change you and change the way you see.


    "The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading." David Bailey
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    No suggestions or complaints?

    Now to fiction:

    "It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect." Dorothy Allison

    Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Wolfe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Baldwin, Robert Pirsig, Arthur Koestler, Susan Sontag, Wallace Stegner, Ralph Ellison, André Malraux, Theodore Dreiser, Graham Greene, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.

    Modern writers worth reading, Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, William Vollman, Richard Powers, Don Delillo, Richard Ford, Paul Auster, and the books below are all excellent.

    'The Brothers Karamazov' Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky - New translation

    An American Tragedy By Theodore Dreiser
    Angle Of Repose By Wallace Stegner
    Darkness At Noon By Arthur Koestler
    Go Tell It On The Mountain By James Baldwin
    Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley
    Invisible Man By Ralph Ellison
    Man's Fate, André Malraux
    Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
    Sophie's Choice By William Styron
    The Echo Maker, Richard Powers
    The Fall, The Plague, Albert Camus
    The Heart Of The Matter By Graham Greene
    The Sound And The Fury By William Faulkner
    To The Lighthouse By Virginia Woolf


    Note: If you have read any of the above, comments welcome, or add some favorites.


    "Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning." Dorothy Allison
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    Quote Originally Posted by midcan5 View Post
    Some suggestions for reading in the new year, please be aware should you accept the challenge of reading a few of the books listed below you will be changed. Proceed with caution. Great Holiday gifts too.

    “One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” Cassandra Clare

    Alpha order. Various topics.

    'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle' by Daniel L. Everett
    'Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis' by J. D. Vance
    'House of cards : psychology and psychotherapy built on myth' by Robyn M. Dawes
    'Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain' David Eagleman
    'Merchants of Doubt' by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. M. Conway
    'On Human Nature' by Edward O. Wilson
    'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century' by Timothy Snyder
    'One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway - and Its Aftermath' by Seierstad, Åsne and Sarah Death
    'Paul Farmer: Servant to the Poor' by Jennie Weiss Block
    'Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind' by Colin Renfrew
    'The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark' Carl Sagan
    'The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century' by Peter Watson
    'The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy' Albert O. Hirschman
    'The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science' by Will Storr
    'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
    'World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech' by Franklin Foer
    'Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance' By Robert Pirsig

    Check Goodreads for reviews, many of the books are challenging and they will change you and change the way you see.


    "The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading." David Bailey
    I strongly recommend reading Hillbilly Elegy. I'm very, very familiar with the area and the culture of the people the author is writing about and the book, though I don't think the author intended it as such, is strong evidence that a wall should be built on the North Shore of the Ohio River to keep these immigrants out of our State. One only has to visit Middletown for a few hours to see what these Hillbilly's have done to our communities in Southwest Ohio. We need a wall!!!
    You're Never Alone With A Schizophrenic!

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    Quote Originally Posted by midcan5 View Post
    Some suggestions for reading in the new year, please be aware should you accept the challenge of reading a few of the books listed below you will be changed. Proceed with caution. Great Holiday gifts too.

    “One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” Cassandra Clare

    Alpha order. Various topics.

    'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle' by Daniel L. Everett
    'Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis' by J. D. Vance
    'House of cards : psychology and psychotherapy built on myth' by Robyn M. Dawes
    'Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain' David Eagleman
    'Merchants of Doubt' by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. M. Conway
    'On Human Nature' by Edward O. Wilson
    'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century' by Timothy Snyder
    'One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway - and Its Aftermath' by Seierstad, Åsne and Sarah Death
    'Paul Farmer: Servant to the Poor' by Jennie Weiss Block
    'Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind' by Colin Renfrew
    'The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark' Carl Sagan
    'The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century' by Peter Watson
    'The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy' Albert O. Hirschman
    'The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science' by Will Storr
    'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
    'World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech' by Franklin Foer
    'Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance' By Robert Pirsig

    Check Goodreads for reviews, many of the books are challenging and they will change you and change the way you see.


    "The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading." David Bailey
    Oh...and I've already read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and it would be hard to believe that any book on that list would be better. It's probably the best book on your list. Great read!
    You're Never Alone With A Schizophrenic!

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    One writer I missed in the list above is Robyn M. Dawes' 'House of cards : psychology and psychotherapy built on myth'. Fascinating read on a topic that enters the lives of so many families.

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...ouse_of_cards_

    Also check out 'Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making' Reid Hasti / Robyn M. Dawes. If that topic is of interest.

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...ncertain_World

    And humor is a must if we are to remain human. I liked George Saunders early stuff but later work seems strained. Saw this today, Sam Lipsyte, 'Hark' may check it out. Kurt Vonnegut is still funny and readable too. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...om_search=true

    I love books on life and work different from ours, may check this out, Doug Bock Clark, 'The Last Whalers'.

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...e-last-whalers

    This site was inspiration for repost: https://lithub.com/13-books-you-shou...-this-january/

    Advice - Read: https://lithub.com/whats-needed-is-m...ruki-murakami/

    PS see advice thread in app.
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    I am currently reading three books which is often my wont. I do the same with movies on Amazon Prime. Wanna see a fascinating movie, watch 'Don't worry he won't get far on foot'. Joaquin Phoenix is amazing in his role as John Callahan. But back to books, I read Szasz long ago, as well as Arendt and both create a hard question mark on human behavior and acts of evil. Check out this OP and see books below, you won't be able to put down 'One Of Us'.

    "It taught me, at an early age, the lesson that it can be dangerous to be wrong, but, to be right, when society regards the majority’s falsehood as truth, could be fatal. This principle is especially true with respect to false truths that form an important part of an entire society’s belief system. In the past, such basic false truths were religious in nature. In the modern world, they are medical and political in nature." Thomas Szasz

    https://aeon.co/essays/the-psychiatr...mental-illness


    "You know the left think that I am conservative, and the conservatives sometimes think I am left or I am a maverick or god knows what. And I must say I couldn’t care less." Hannah Arendt


    'One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway'
    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22237163-one-of-us

    'Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil'
    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...n_in_Jerusalem
    Last edited by midcan5; 02-24-2019 at 08:49 AM.
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    The Holy Bible
    Anonymity is priceless!

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    I want to add three books to my list of must reads for the thinker and the explorer. Vonnegut will blow your mind.

    'Fates Worse Than Death' by Kurt Vonnegut
    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...rse_Than_Death

    'The Last Novel' by David Markson
    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...The_Last_Novel

    'That's Not What They Meant!' by Michael Austin
    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...hat-they-meant



    "The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading." David Bailey
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    If you want a real challenge I have an author - I should have listed above not sure how I had missed him - for you all. William T. Vollmann. I have been re-reading 'Rising up, Rising Down'. The abridged edition. Vollmann will challenge you in a way you have never been challenged before. I've read several of his other books, but I'll leave it there for now.


    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...nd_Rising_Down

    "Just for the hell of it, try to love someone as unlike you as possible." William T. Vollmann


    Some readers mention Ayn Rand so I thought I'd add this review.

    "Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible." Whittaker Chambers

    http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/re.../2705853/posts
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    ""To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing," the Canadian poet Anne Carson once said. With Trump, America finds itself at the end of its myth.

    To talk about the frontier is also to talk about capitalism, about its power and possibility and its promise of boundlessness. Donald Trump figured out that to talk about the border -and to promise a wall- was a way to acknowledge capitalism's limits, its pain, without having to challenge capitalism's terms. Trump ran promising to end the wars and to reverse the extreme anti-regulatory and free-market program of his party. Once in office, though, he accelerated deregulation, increased military spending, and expanded the wars. But he kept talking about his wall.

    That wall might or might not be built. But even if it remains only in its phantasmagorical, budgetary stage, a perpetual negotiating chip between Congress and the White House, the promise of a two-thousand-mile-long, thirty-foot-high ribbon of concrete and steel running along the United States' southern border serves its purpose. It's America's new myth, a monument to the final closing of the frontier. It is a symbol of a nation that used to believe that it had escaped history, or at least strode atop history, bur now finds itself trapped by history, and of a people who used to think they were captains of the future, but now are prisoners of the past." Introduction p8-9

    'The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America' by Greg Grandin

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...nd-of-the-myth

    "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." Dwight D. Eisenhower
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    If you want a mental and philosophic challenge pick up 'Hitler's Willing Executioners'. It gives you a sense of how anti-Semitism grows as it has during Trump's presidency. Challenge yourself.

    'Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust'

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...g_Executioners
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    How did the rich get so rich and the majority of people barely getting by. While this book is about now it details how we got to now, Read it read read it. Learn.


    "What began as advertising is now a threat to freedom and democracy argues the author and scholar. Time to wake up - and fight for a different digital future"

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...igital-privacy


    'High tech is watching you'

    https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/sto...ing-democracy/


    'You Are Now Remotely Controlled'

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/o...apitalism.html


    Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...nce-capitalism



    "So he lent her books. After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I've drunk." William T. Vollmann
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    Books are what you see in the background of MSNBC skype interviews.
    That's why they don't put many pachys on the air.
    The background would be well-worn VHS porno tapes on the shelves.
    Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Samuel Johnson, 1775
    Religion....is the opiate of the people. Karl Marx, 1848
    Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose. Kris Kristofferson, 1969

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    "We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom." IW

    I am finally back to this history after reading 'Hoax' Which covers Fox v Trump. I recommend both. Wilkerson's book is deep, it reminds me of James Baldwin's work. Race is a myth but caste is a reality. Read it.

    "Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things."

    'Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents' Isabel Wilkerson

    https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51152447-caste


    "Slavery was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant caste and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences."


    "If people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?" Taylor Branch


    Read Hoax too, it is an easy read and fascinating. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53345186-hoax
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    Readings for those who like to think.


    https://www.edge.org/summer-reading-from-the-archive


    'To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.'


    Added this too:


    'Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy'

    "“Having enabled Trumpism and thoroughly condoned—or joined in on—white-nationalist campaign rhetoric, the GOP finds itself uniquely unable to fend off the incursion; it is akin to someone who starves a hound, lets it loose to savage the neighbors, then finds himself surprised when the red-jawed hound turns at last on its owner.”

    Talia Lavin, 'Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy'

    https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/sh...lture-warlords

    https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Warlo.../dp/B084FXPHM3
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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