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The OT Book Club & Literary Society, week of 5-27

Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:07 pm
Posted by Kafka
I am the moral conscience of TD
Member since Jul 2007
146533 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:07 pm
Feel free to discuss old books, new books, good books, bad books...




Short story of the week:
"Babylon Revisited" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Read it online, discuss it here, smoke if you got 'em

================

Being a lifelong bookworm may keep you sharp in old age
quote:

New research suggests that reading and writing can slow down cognitive decline

Smithsonian Magazine

To keep their bodies running at peak performance, people often hit the gym, pounding away at the treadmill to strengthen muscles and build endurance. This dedication has enormous benefits—being in shape now means warding off a host of diseases when you get older. But does the brain work in the same way? That is, can doing mental exercises help your mind stay just as sharp in old age?

Experts say it’s possible. As a corollary to working out, people have begun joining brain gyms to flex their mental muscles. For a monthly fee of around $15, websites like Lumosity.com and MyBrainTrainer.com promise to enhance memory, attention and other mental processes through a series of games and brain teasers. Such ready-made mind exercises are an alluring route for people who worry about their ticking clock. But there’s no need to slap down the money right away—new research suggests the secret to preserving mental agility may lie in simply cracking open a book.

The findings, published online today in Neurology, suggest that reading books, writing and engaging in other similar brain-stimulating activities slows down cognitive decline in old age, independent of common age-related neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, people who participated in mentally stimulating activities over their lifetimes, both in young, middle and old age, had a slower rate of decline in memory and other mental capacities than those who did not.

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The Quiet Greatness of Eudora Welty
quote:

Like Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and a few others, Eudora Welty endures in national memory as the perpetual senior citizen, someone tenured for decades as a silver-haired elder of American letters. Her abiding maturity made her seem, perhaps long before her time, perfectly suited to the role of our favorite maiden aunt.

But when I visited Welty at her Jackson, Mississippi, home on a bright, hot July day in 1994, I got a glimpse of the girl she used to be. She was eighty-five by then, stooped by arthritis, and feeling the full weight of her years. As she slowly made her way into her living room, navigating the floor as if walking a tightrope, I could see that her clear, blue eyes retained the vigorous curiosity that had defined her career. She still wanted to know what would happen next.
quote:

Tellingly, One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty’s celebrated 1984 memoir, begins with a passage about timepieces:

In our house on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was born, the oldest of three children, in 1909, we grew up to the striking of clocks. There was a mission-style oak grandfather clock standing in the hall, which sent its gong-like strokes through the living room, dining room, kitchen and pantry, and up the sounding board of the stairwell. Through the night, it could find its way into our ears; sometimes, even on the sleeping porch, midnight could wake us up. My parents had a smaller striking clock that answered it... This was good at least for a future fiction writer, being able to learn so penetratingly, and almost first of all, about chronology. It was one of a good many things I learned almost without knowing it; it would be there when I needed it.

===============

William Faulkner's Hollywood Odyssey
quote:

The biggest name in Southern lit didn’t spend his whole life in Mississippi

In 1932, a rising writer from Mississippi found himself amid the bright lights and dry heat of Tinseltown, at the start of what would become a lengthy dalliance with the screenwriting biz. In the wilds of L.A., Faulkner met movie stars, found a bourbon haunt, chased true love, and tried to stay sane in a place that often seemed very far from home.

===============

THE END

Professor Jones had been working on time theory for many years.

"And I have found the key equation," he told his daughter one day. "Time is a field. This machine I have made can manipulate, even reverse that field."

Pushing a button as he spoke, he said, "This should make time run backward run time make should this," said he, spoke he as button a pushing.

"Field that, reverse even, manipulate can made have I machine this. Field a is time." Day one daughter his told he, "Equation key the found have I and."

Years many for theory time on working been had Jones Professor.

END THE

-- Fredric Brown

===============

Previous meetings of the society:

10-16

11-11

11-25

12-9

12-16

1-7

1-20

2-10

2-26 -- Special Mardi Gras edition


"There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag; and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty; and vice versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you." -- Doris Lessing


London bookstore after an air raid, 1940:







===================

Posted by LSUballs
RayVegas LA
Member since Feb 2008
38272 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:10 pm to
After a long hiatus due to a car wreck that nearly cost him his life, Greg Iles has got a new book out called Natchez Burning. I haven't read it yet, but I've been told that it is top notch. Thus ends my current contribution to this thread as all I have been reading lately are Jack Reacher books. But they are entertaining.
Posted by Bama and Beer
Baldwin Co, AL
Member since Oct 2010
81611 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:11 pm to
I read the first 20 or so page of The Three or something similar yesterday and it seemed interesting

It was about 4 plane crashes all around the same time and 3 children survived
Posted by LobbyingLeprechaun
D.C.
Member since May 2014
192 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:17 pm to
I finally read Nabokov's Lolita after watching Kubrick's film adaptation and hearing so many good things about the book.

My reaction: From a story standpoint it is amazing, breathtaking, scary, funny, and adventurous. From a writing standpoint it is easily in the top 3 (for me) of best written books of all time.
Posted by WG_Dawg
Member since Jun 2004
87686 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:18 pm to
I've been reading the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo for GD months and I'm so ready to be done already. I've got like 30 pages left, gonna knock it out tonight.

Does anyone know of any major differences between the unabridged and abridged?
Posted by TigerPanzer
Orlando
Member since Sep 2006
9476 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:22 pm to
Gravity's Rainbow. Not a big Pynchon fan, but GR deserves the accolades for its funhouse mirror perspective on sex, science and society among many things. I plowed through 250 pages over the weekend, and will regret reaching the last page.

Posted by The Third Leg
Idiot Out Wandering Around
Member since May 2014
10158 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:22 pm to
The Bachelors' Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Béarn

Over the past four decades, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died in 2002, he was considered to be the most influential sociologist in the world and a thinker on a par with Foucault and Lévi-Strauss—a public intellectual as important to his generation as Sartre was to his.

Bourdieu’s final book, The Bachelors’ Ball, sees him return to Béarn, the region where he grew up, to examine the gender dynamics of rural France. This personal connection adds poignancy to Bourdieu’s ethnographic account of the way the influence of urban values has precipitated a crisis for male peasants. Tied to the land through inheritance, these bachelors find themselves with little to offer the women of Béarn who, like the young Bourdieu himself, abandon the country for the city in droves.
Posted by The Third Leg
Idiot Out Wandering Around
Member since May 2014
10158 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:26 pm to
I'll check it out. Looks solid.
Posted by WG_Dawg
Member since Jun 2004
87686 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:27 pm to
quote:

My reaction: From a story standpoint it is amazing, breathtaking, scary, funny, and adventurous. From a writing standpoint it is easily in the top 3 (for me) of best written books of all time.


Noted. I've had that on my to-read list for a while but never gotten to it. Maybe I will soon.
Posted by CAD703X
Liberty Island
Member since Jul 2008
82072 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:32 pm to
*any* book?

i'm still reading that pendergast trash.

why do i read stuff that is bad?
Posted by TigerPanzer
Orlando
Member since Sep 2006
9476 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:33 pm to
Another strong recc: Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky. Two novellas about the German occupation of France, written by an immigrant Russian Jewess who achieved great success as a writer in France. As a tragic backdrop to these books, Némirovsky was arrested in June, 1942 and little more than a month later, murdered at Auschwitz.
Posted by Macintosh
Leveraging Salaries University
Member since Sep 2011
53217 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:34 pm to
My favorite book of all time is either stormbreaker or the hatchet
Posted by NIH
Member since Aug 2008
114751 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:38 pm to
The Jack Reacher books are pretty good for mindless entertainment. Is it just me or does he overly use OK and a-hole? Feel like I see those two on every page.

Have any of you read Gavelston? It's the book by Nic Pizzalato, the True Detective guy, I've been wanting to pick it up.
This post was edited on 5/27/14 at 2:39 pm
Posted by The Third Leg
Idiot Out Wandering Around
Member since May 2014
10158 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:40 pm to
I recently read muckraking Matt Taibbi's new book, The Divide.

Taibbi toned down a lot of his typically scathing prose and illustrated some fascinating components of domestic criminal justice, juxtaposing white collar crime with low level petty crime, as our system has evolved since Nixon's declaration of the war on drugs.

Quick read that should piss off any American, which is always Taibbi's goal as a muckraker.
Posted by The Third Leg
Idiot Out Wandering Around
Member since May 2014
10158 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:46 pm to
Flash Boys, Michael Lewis

I ripped through this pretty quickly, Lewis focuses in high frequency trading and the rigged markets. He is a great translator for the layman to understand the mind numbing bore of financial vernacular.

Featuring a former exec from RBC, the book is yet another cautionary tale of the power of money.
Posted by wiltznucs
Apollo Beach, FL
Member since Sep 2005
9012 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 2:55 pm to
Just finished Folsom's FDR New Deal or Raw Deal which was a decent read. The author is probably overly biased and certainly guilty of cherry picking his supporting data. Anyhow, its interesting if for no other reason than it paints a different light on FDR as compared to most history texts..
This post was edited on 5/27/14 at 3:02 pm
Posted by ProjectP2294
South St. Louis city
Member since May 2007
72025 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 3:00 pm to
quote:

Flash Boys, Michael Lewis


I'll have to pick that up. I'm reading Tyler Cowen 'An Economist Gets Lunch' right now. Nothing hardhitting, but it combines behavioral economics and food, both things I enjoy reading about.
Posted by wiltznucs
Apollo Beach, FL
Member since Sep 2005
9012 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 3:01 pm to
quote:

I'm reading Tyler Cowen 'An Economist Gets Lunch' right now. Nothing hardhitting, but it combines behavioral economics and food, both things I enjoy reading about.


Sounds interesting, may have to put that on my list..
Posted by The Third Leg
Idiot Out Wandering Around
Member since May 2014
10158 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 3:03 pm to
That does sound interesting. I'm always up for a new angle.

Human behavior is a rabbit hole subject for me.
Posted by mikrit54
Robeline
Member since Oct 2013
8664 posts
Posted on 5/27/14 at 3:08 pm to
Just finished Last Car to Elysian Fields by James Lee Burke. Excellent.
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