305 replies to this topic

[Meursault]

Just finished this fascinating non-fiction work by Ali Soufan entitled The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War against al-Qaeda. The book recounts a master FBI interrogator from his first few years at the Bureau and his work in the counterterrorism unit to when he left the agency in 2009. With an in-depth look into the work about the USS Cole, the East Africa Embassy bombings, 9/11 and other smaller attacks, the book allows a new perspective on the work the government is doing about terrorism. It also reveals the heavy tension that followed after 9/11 between the CIA and the FBI and the White House. For example, the CIA stonewalling the FBI on access to suspects and the White House forcing the use of EITs during interrogations, despite the FBI getting results without them.

All in all a great and informative read.

[Hugo Holbling]

muraii, on 06 March 2012 - 07:14 PM, said:

I'm looking for a book that touches me in the way The Road did, that evokes desperation and melancholy. Perhaps a bit less optimistic. Anyone have recommendations?

I suggest you try McCarthy's Border Trilogy, which I hold to be superior to The Road and certainly more melancholy, particularly the second book The Crossing. Here are a few lines from All The Pretty Horses:

"He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits."

[davidm]

muraii, on 06 March 2012 - 07:14 PM, said:

I'm looking for a book that touches me in the way The Road did, that evokes desperation and melancholy. Perhaps a bit less optimistic. Anyone have recommendations?

I would recommend almost anything by McCarthy, certainly the trilogy that Hugo mentioned but also Suttree and Blood Meridian especially. McCarthy is currently copy editing a science text, on the condition that he be allowed to ruthlessly purge from the text all semi-colons and exclamation marks, "which have no place in literature." It's curious too how he completely eschews quotation marks, and somehow the dialogue does seem all the more powerful for it, like reading a religious text.

[DaveT]

I am reading and making minor editorial changes to something is working on, which can be read in the Jesus Plan thread in the Private forum, here:

http://www.galilean-...__50#entry51997

[The Heretic]

Not to mention the assigned readings for my classes, I'm reading the following books:

Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze & Guattari
Pygmalion by Shaw
The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism by Nishitani
Nietzsche by Safranski

For spring break I'll be reading the sequel to Les Liaisons Dangereuses, A Factory of Cunning by Stockley, and Being & Time.

[John Castillo]

I just finished reading The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker. Normally, this wouldn't interest me much, but after reading Baker's The Mezzanine, I absolutely had to read more by him. The Mezzanine, by the way, is a very enthralling book, covering the course of about 15 minutes of a man walking back from a pharmacy to work. The catch is that every single thing in the book is expounded upon in such detail it's like zooming in on a fractal, with more and more branches, more and more footnotes-- and even footnotes to footnotes! Fascinating.

Anyway, The Anthologist is initially not terribly interesting. You'll read a bit, put it down, and think, "Ah, okay. I'll wash the dishes now." It's about a sometime-poet who is trying to write an introduction to an anthology of poetry, but is having some difficulty. His girlfriend left him, you see, and his mind's not on it. You get to read what he writes as he muses about what to write. Eventually, you think about the dishes and realize you cannot do the dishes now. It's impossible. The love of poetry of this man shines through his banal existence so brightly that you begin to love it also. The tiny one-line quotes of poems in the book suddenly become the things you want to sound aloud, to desperately skip ahead for-- just so you can say them along with him. And I do admit that immediately upon finishing the book I went to the bookstore and bought an anthology so I could find more poems to read aloud. Highly recommended.

Edited by John Castillo, 03 April 2012 - 02:53 AM.