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A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich

It's a history book about the Byzantine Empire, an empire centered around the fortified city of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) for over 1,000 years. I saw it at a used book store and picked it up on a whim.

Ostensibly the Byzantine Empire was a Christian theocracy, but in reality there was a ton of stuff of cloak-and-dagger power games going on, backstabbing, torture, murder, sleazy stuff, you name it pretty much. That's why I like reading about this time period honestly lol.

This guy's life serves as a good general example of some of the kind of stuff that was going on: banged everything that moved, took his own niece as a mistress, murdered a kid to become emperor, mutilated/killed tons of enemies and, at the end, was tortured for several days and ultimately torn limb-from-limb by angry mob. And he was the emperor lol!

 
The Big Book of The Continental Op*.... i.e., all the stories that Dashiell Hammett published in Black Mask from 1923-29, plus the serialized versions of his first two novels: The Cleansing of Poisonville (which became Red Harvest) and The Dain Curse - a personal favorite of mine, since it deals with morphine withdrawal in quite a lot of detail.

Actually quite a few of the stories at least reference drugs and Hammett doesn't get caught up in the early 20s hysteria against dope (says an opium smoker is no worse off than a tobacco smoker)... not to mention other interesting aspects of the period, like the decline of the IWW's radical unionism in the mining sector.

*In all of those stories and the two first novels, the protagonist is a nameless "op[erative]" doing private investigations for the Pinkerton Continental Agency... In the following novels, we get named protgaonists instead - Sam Spade, Ned Beaumont, Nick and Nora Charles.
 
A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich

It's a history book about the Byzantine Empire, an empire centered around the fortified city of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) for over 1,000 years. I saw it at a used book store and picked it up on a whim.

Ostensibly the Byzantine Empire was a Christian theocracy, but in reality there was a ton of stuff of cloak-and-dagger power games going on, backstabbing, torture, murder, sleazy stuff, you name it pretty much. That's why I like reading about this time period honestly lol.

This guy's life serves as a good general example of some of the kind of stuff that was going on: banged everything that moved, took his own niece as a mistress, murdered a kid to become emperor, mutilated/killed tons of enemies and, at the end, was tortured for several days and ultimately torn limb-from-limb by angry mob. And he was the emperor lol!

Yes this East-roman empire is direct offshoot of Great Roman empire,when emperon Constantin the Great move capital from Rome to Constantinope.Its almost 1000 Empire with highs in many arts(look St.Sophia church) and great power in Europe at all
 
Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed
by David Farber
Ever read "In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio" by Phillipe Bourgois? I highly recommend it.

For research, the author lived in Spanish Harlem full-time from 1985 to 1990, hanging out with local crack dealers and eventually becoming pretty close with some of them. It was originally written as a dissertation, but it's a first-person account that mostly reads like a novel (with some excursions into theory).
 
The River Swimmer
The English Major

Jim Harrison

Really enjoying The English Major. I’m going to be a formidable old fart when that inevitably descends
 
Some Antonin Artaud works, i don't know if there's much translated but it's some heavy-mental-litterature shit. I'mma read some Emil Cioran after that....
 
In the past couple weeks, two of my favorite reads have been Battle Royale by Koushun Takami and Choke by Chuck Palahniuk.

Battle Royale is a very easy read for a novel that's over 600 pages. I got through it in a couple days. It's the novel that the Hunger Games (poorly) ripped off and it has been cited as a huge inspiration by the creator of Squid Game.

I loved Choke so much that I got through it in one sitting. There's something about Palahniuk's writing that makes me simultaneously find it fascinating and hilarious. It's a good book, but if you don't like dark humor then I'd suggest steering clear of it.

As for right now, I'm currently reading Dostoevsky. I'm on Crime and Punishment, and next up is The Brothers Karazamarov. After that, I'll probably move on to some Tolstoy.

"Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut is a good one. I never really got into his stuff that much but I remember that book being in my parent's book collection when I was a kid, reading it and enjoying the book's sense of humor (and Vonnegut's attempts at illustration lol)
I finally got around to reading Vonnegut last summer. I read Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse Five, and Cat's Cradle (the latter now being one of my favorite books of all time.) There's nothing quite like a book that simultaneously gets you to laugh your ass off and rethink the way that you live your life.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by patrick süskind
I read the first 100 or so pages of this years ago and never finished it. Everyone keeps recommending it to me, so I'll have to give it a full read soon.
 
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In the past couple weeks, two of my favorite reads have been Battle Royale by Koushun Takami and Choke by Chuck Palahniuk.

Battle Royale is a very easy read for a novel that's over 600 pages. I got through it in a couple days. It's the novel that the Hunger Games (poorly) ripped off and it has been cited as a huge inspiration by the creator of Squid Game.

I loved Choke so much that I got through it in one sitting. There's something about Palahniuk's writing that makes me simultaneously find it fascinating and hilarious. It's a good book, but if you don't like dark humor then I'd suggest steering clear of it.

As for right now, I'm currently reading Dostoevsky. I'm on Crime and Punishment, and next up is The Brothers Karazamarov. After that, I'll probably move on to some Tolstoy.


I finally got around to reading Vonnegut last summer. I read Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse Five, and Cat's Cradle (the latter now being one of my favorite books of all time.) There's nothing quite like a book that simultaneously gets you to laugh your ass off and rethink the way that you live your life.


I read the first 100 or so pages of this years ago and never finished it. Everyone keeps recommending it to me, so I'll have to give it a full read soon.
Tried to read "The Brothers of Karamazov",but could not finished it.Too.....heavy like style.must try"Crime and punishment"
 
Tried to read "The Brothers of Karamazov",but could not finished it.Too.....heavy like style.must try"Crime and punishment"
I can understand that. I first started it many years ago while on vacation. Even though I liked it, I just never picked it back up once I got back. It's still sitting on my shelf to this day.
 
In the Emergency Room, Jane goes to the counter with their insurance information and the police report and explains that her husband was involved in a fatal car accident the evening before and appeared disoriented at the scene.

“That’s not what happened,” George bellows. “The fucking SUV was like a big white cloud in front of me, I couldn’t see over it, couldn’t see around it, I couldn’t help but punch through it like a cheap piece of aluminum, like a fat fucking pillow.
 
I dropped brothers and have no interest in picking it back up. Crime and Punishment is really good imho
 
The fruit has been placed with care, just so: the woody stem down and the star of the calyx up. The skin mustn’t touch that of its neighbour. They must sit like this, lightly held by the wooden groove, a finger width from each other, over the winter or they will spoil. If they touch each other, they will brown and sag and moulder and rot. They must be preserved in rows, like this, separate, stems down, in airy isolation.
 
I'm reading a book titled 1997: The Future that Never Happened. It was written by Richard Power Sayeed and published in 2017, just in time for the 20th anniversary of Tony Blair's election.

Each chapter of the book deals with a major event that happened in the UK during the year 1997 (at least in part), but the basic focus throughout is on New Labour and how it was implicated in all the year's events. They range widely in nature, from the Stephen Lawrence inquiry to Britpop to Princess Diana's death to the Spice Girls.

I lived through these events as a sentient being, but I wasn't well-informed at the time and, more to the point, I'm from the USA, where international news is only visible in the glare of a bombing campaign. So given my low awareness of them, I've really been enjoying the author's explication of these events and how they played out.

As far as his argument, there is a main thesis that he hammers home repeatedly in each chapter, which is essentially this:
  • The year 1997 saw various egalitarian or progressive movements (anti-racism, feminism, anti-monarchism) incorporated into the mainstream of British culture by elite actors -- quintessentially Tony Blair and the top echelon of New Labour -- who served their own interests in doing.
  • This, in turn, opened up a broader audience for these movements' protest messages but, at the same time, it watered down the radical nature of their critiques to the point that they no longer insisted on transforming society.
It's hard to argue with that, IMHO, but at times he assigns too much power to nebulous entities like "the culture," which appears to act on its own initiative to defang movements of social protest. And although his need to reiterate the thesis gets overly didactic at times, it's a very well-written book overall. His insights are basically right, I think, and they do illuminate the era.
 
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The Violent Bear it Away Flannery O’Connor.. just started


True North
The Ancient Minstrel
The Road Home
The Woman Lit By Fireflies
Returning to Earth

All by Jim Harrison

enjoyable UP binge there
 
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