What Are You Reading Right Now?

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Comment by Marycharles Meserve on May 18, 2013 at 7:50pm

Oh goody. My computer actually let me sign in! I am reading "The Strange Story of Edgar Sawtelle"' Lovely descriptions of where I grew up but I'm not sure what to make of it yet...

Comment by wiffledust on May 18, 2013 at 7:34pm

nice to see you, julie! thanks for sharing!

Comment by Julie Campbell on May 18, 2013 at 7:33pm

A Stained White Radiance, James Lee Burke.  I've read these Dave Robicheaux books all out of order and am trying to go back and catch the ones I missed.  Love them all.

Comment by wiffledust on May 18, 2013 at 7:16pm

so glad you guys stopped by today. please share our reading group and help to get folks active! thanks!

Comment by Pamela Drake on May 18, 2013 at 6:28pm

Bookbub sounds good, Cindi! I'm working on another Susan Isaacs cop novel, LILY WHITE. It's fun.

Comment by wiffledust on May 18, 2013 at 1:52pm

not beach reading, but the kind of stuff folks here would like i hope! :-) 

thanks for the suggestion of bookbub, cindi! we all need to read and discuss. the more we read, the more interesting we are to others and to ourselves! 

Comment by cindi a morgan on May 18, 2013 at 1:49pm

Looks fascinating, Lisa, even if it isn't exactly beach reading! ;-)

In other news, wanted to recommend to my other fellow voracious readers something called bookbub.com. You sign up with your e-mail address and check off the kinds of books you enjoy (horror, biography, memoir, etc.), and you get a daily e-mail with a link to a free or deeply discounted Kindle book. Sure, some may be ho-hum, but others are well-reviewed with hundreds of ratings-- got one recently with high praise from Maya Angelou! Most links are only good for a couple of days. My sister-in-law recommended it, and after a few weeks I've probably accumulated 3-6 months of reading! What could it hurt?

Comment by wiffledust on May 16, 2013 at 11:31pm

a book i want to recommend for us.."The Unwinding" by George Packer. Here are some of the Amazon reviews: 

Praise for The Unwinding:

“Exemplary journalism . . . A foundational document in the literature of the end of America.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

“A broad and compelling perspective on a nation in crisis . . . an illuminating, in-depth, sometimes frightening view of the complexities of decline and the enduring hope of recovery.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“Trenchant . . . [the] brief biographies of seminal figures that shaped the current state of affairs offer the book’s fiercest prose, such as in Packer’s brutal takedown of Robert Rubin, secretary of the Treasury during some key 1990s financial deregulation that amplified the severity of the Great Recession of 2008. Packer has a keen eye for the big story in the small moment, writing about our fraying social fabric with talent that matches his dismay.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The Unwinding . . . echoes the symphonic rage of the celebrated television series The Wire . . . a tremendous work of reporting that pushes past abstractions and recycled debates . . . Whatever one’s views on American decline generally, it is difficult to put the book down without . . . a conviction that we can do better. And yet if it is a story of despair, it is also a story of resilience. Packer’s subjects make good and bad decisions, enjoy lucky breaks and misfortune, eke it out, give in, and try harder. The lives they lead are worth describing in detail, not only because they are instructive but also because they are beautiful.”
—The Washington Monthly

“[A] sprawling, trenchant narrative . . . Packer is a thorough, insightful journalist, and his in-depth profiles provide a window into American life as a whole . . . The Unwinding is a harrowing and bracing panoramic look at American society—things are bad everywhere, for everyone, but there’s still a sense of optimism. Through hard work and dedication we can pull ourselves out of the financial, political, and social mess we’ve created and become stronger as individuals and ultimately as a society.”
—The Brooklyn Rail

“George Packer has crafted a unique, irresistible contraption of a book. Not since John Dos Passos’s celebrated U.S.A. trilogy, which The Unwindingrecollects and rivals, has a writer so cunningly plumbed the seething undercurrents of American life. The result is a sad but delicious jazz-tempo requiem for the post–World War II American social contract. You will often laugh through your tears at these tales of lives of ever-less-quiet desperation in a land going ever-more-noisily berserk.”
—David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Freedom from Fear and Over Here

Comment by wiffledust on May 1, 2013 at 2:03pm

i don't want to get all religious here, because wiffledust is not about religious stuff, but there is a reason why Jesus talked about the prisoners. just sayin'

Comment by cindi a morgan on May 1, 2013 at 1:53pm

I like the idea of starting with the small stuff-- just how we treat people on a day-to-day basis. But sometimes I want to grab this country by the ears and shake it, because there are so many things we are doing wrong, and yet I hear us being so arrogant with other countries about their flaws when our own back yards are such a mess. "The mote in your own eye". . . When I read about the frequency of stop and frisk, the wide discretion of DAs in charging (whites use drugs at least as much as people of color, but are charged far less frequently or severely), the way that a felony on a person's record results in ineligibility for public housing, employment, and voting, the fact that prisoners are forced to work for miniscule wages but are charged for prison costs, probationary expenses, and court fees, so they can end up liable for debts they can't pay-- all of this conspires to create a permanent undercaste in American society. And that doesn't even begin to address the issue of private companies operating prisons and lobbying for "law and order" penalties to keep them fully occupied, and profitable-- or that longer prison terms if anything increase the likelihood of repeat offenses-- or that the bulk of nonviolent offenders are in prison for drug or alcohol-related problems, and that treatment costs only a fraction what prison costs. I've been involved in Treatment Instead of Prison work, so some I've what I've learned has gone beyond this book. Still, Michelle Alexander's research is well-presented and gripping, and I wish everyone would read this book.

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