What are you reading?

[Happy Face 29]

Bush at War - Bob Woodward

 

First of his 4 books on Afghanistan/Iraq. It goes through the 100 days immediately following 9/11. The problem is that once bombing started in Afghanistan, the same discussions were being had most days, and Woodward omits none of it. He repeats the views of each principal at each daily gathering of the NSC when perhaps a weekly view of the changing situation would be less laborious. Despite that, it is often fascinating and probably a fairer view than the more left leaning books I normally go for. Woodward never gives opinion, he just reports the way it went which has given me sympathy for Bush and a bit more respect....though it is still clear he made one almighty clusterfuck out of things.

 

 

Read the next couple. Plan of Attack is the second book in the series which looks at the time between invading Afghanistan and going into Iraq. It's more of the same justifications for war from the people who made the decisions with no author contextualisation. This is forgivable though given how quickly they were released. It's clearly intended as a glimpse of that time, untainted by hindsight and reflecting the lack of clarity around the case for war. The WMD jury was still out when it was published and Woodward is scrupulously fair.

 

The jury was well in when the third part came out though. State of Denial is far more scathing of the the CIA and the bush administration. It's the first one of the series where Bush refused to be interviewed and he's condemned repeatedly. Rumsfeld still agreed to be interviewed for this one though, and he perhaps comes out of it worse of all. It's been the best one so far and i look forward to reading part 4 which came out last year.

 

Got through Bad Science by Ben Goldacre in a day. Very funny righteously indignant attack on big pharma, hippy healers and the media. He's marvelously upbeat about the positives all three can provide while being contemptuous of the charlatans associated with each. He makes complex statistical analysis fun (but then I can't think of any statistical analysis that isn't ) and his anger was expressed well enough to boil my blood as i read.

 

Currently halfway through Globalization and its Discontents by Joseph Stiglitz which tears apart the actions of the IMF in just about every country where it has intervened backing up the widely held belief they do more harm than good every time with cold hard facts. It's great to read how much they ignore the advice of the best economic minds out there. But rather disheartening when you consider the author spent years as Clinton's chief economic advisor and was later appointed senior vice president of the world bank. If he's this disgusted with the IMF and couldn't do anything about it from such positions of power, what hope is there? It's pretty dry too.

[Happy Face 29]

John Pilgers summer reading list....

 

The radical works which can make sense of these extraordinary times

 

These are extraordinary times. Flag-wrapped coffins of 18-year-old soldiers killed in a failed, illegal and vengeful invasion are paraded along a Wiltshire high street. Victory in Afghanistan is at hand, says the satirical Gordon Brown. On the BBC's Newsnight, the heroic Afghan MP Malalai Joya, tries, in her limited English, to tell the British public that her people are being blown to bits in their name: 140 villagers, mostly children, in her own Farah Province. No parade for them. No names and faces for them. The suppression of the suffering of Britain's and America's colonial victims is an article of media faith, a tradition so ingrained that it requires no instructions.

 

The difference today is that a majority of the British people are not fooled. The cheerleading newsreaders can say "Britain's resolve is being put to the test" as if the Luftwaffe is back on the horizon, but their own polls (BBC/ITN) show that popular disgust with the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq is strongest in the very communities where adolescents are recruited to fight them. The problem with the British public, says a retired army major on Channel 4 News, is that they need "to be trained and educated". Indeed they do, wrote Bertolt Brecht in The Solution, explaining that the people . . .

 

Had forfeited the confidence of the government

And could win it back only

By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

 

In their modern classic Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky describe how war propaganda in free societies is "filtered" by media organisations, not as conscious "crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors' and working journalists' internalisation of [elite] priorities and definitions of newsworthiness". In the wake of the US invasion of Vietnam, in which at least three million people were killed and their once-bountiful land ruined and poisoned, planners of future bloodfests invented the "Vietnam syndrome", which they identified perversely as a "crisis of democracy". The "crisis" was that the "general population threatened to participate in the political system, challenging established privilege and power". Afghanistan and Iraq now have their syndromes.

 

With this in mind, I respectfully urge readers to put aside the holiday reading lists in the newspaper review pages, with their clubbable hauteur, and read, or read again, books as fine as Manufacturing Consent, which help make sense of extraordinary times. As Herman and Chomsky decode principally the American media, an ideal companion is Newspeak in the 21st Century, by David Edwards and David Cromwell (published next month by Pluto). The founders and editors of the outstanding website www.medialens.org present a fluent dissection of Britain's liberal media, employing the kind of rigour that shames those who proclaim their impartiality and independence from vested power. Read also A Century of Spin by David Miller and William Dinan, who describe the rise of an "invisible government" invented by Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays. "Propaganda," said Bernays, "got to be a bad word because of the Germans, so what I did was to try and find some other words." The other words were "public relations", which now consumes much of journalism.

 

The latest achievement of PR is the "Obama phenomenon". In Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (published in the US by Paradigm), Paul Street peels away the mask in perhaps the only book that tells the truth about the 44th president of the United States.

Not enough laughs? Pack Joseph Heller's Catch-22, still unmatched in its demolition of the idiocies and lies of the killers who promote wars. Try this:

 

"Anyone," says Dr "Doc" Daneeka, "who wants to get out of combat isn't really crazy, so I can't ground him."

Yossarian: "OK, let me get this straight.

In order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy. And I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I'm not crazy anymore, and I have to keep flying."

Dr "Doc" Daneeka: "You got it . . ."

 

Kurt Vonnegut's equally black and brave and hilarious Slaughterhouse Five is my other favourite war book.

 

"How's the patient? [the colonel] asked.

“Dead to the world."

“But not actually dead."

“No."

“How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."

 

Faber recently published Harold Pinter's Various Voices: 60 Years of Prose, Poetry, Politics (1948-2008). It is a gem from Pinter on everything from Shakespeare, night cricket and Arthur Miller's socks to murderous great power:

 

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless . . . while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

 

If you have not already read it, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers is a rare treat: a view of humanity so precisely, beautifully, honourably, yet almost incidentally expressed. In the "bantering inconsequence" (F Scott Fitzgerald) of effete modern fiction, no one touches McCullers or, for that matter, Pete Dexter, whose Paris Trout is the great unsung book of the American South, or Richard Ford, whose Rock Springs is a masterly collection, among his others, on the mysteries between men and women. And don't forget Albert Camus's The Outsider, about a man who will not pretend: a parable for today. Happy holidays.

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/20...ry-times-pilger

[Guest alex]

Surprised he never mentioned 'The Naked and the Dead' when he talks about war books. He waxes lyrical about it in the introduction and I wouldn't argue with his view. That said, I couldn't fault his picking 'Catch 22' or 'Slaughterhouse 5'. 'The Outsider' is class as well. I haven't read the rest and I refuse to do a Parky

[SloopJohn 0]

The Plague & The Fall are definitely worth your time if you enjoyed The Outsider

[Brock Manson 0]

Thomas Harris - The Silence of the Lambs

[Guest alex]

The Plague & The Fall are definitely worth your time if you enjoyed The Outsider

I've read the latter but cheers and I'll try and get round to reading the former at some point. I've got so many books on the 'to read' list it's ridiculous. I should stop buying them for a bit I suppose.

[SloopJohn 0]

Yeah I have the problem as well. Charity book stores are so inviting

[Gemmill 44872]

Advanced Pot Limit Omaha: smallball and shorthanded play by Jeff Hwang. A real page-turner.

[Tooj 17]

Just bought this.

 

 

Sure Alex recommended it to me ages ago and saw it advertised as on offer on Play.com.

[sammynb 3355]

Inverting the pyramid

[Guest alex]

Just bought this.

 

 

Sure Alex recommended it to me ages ago and saw it advertised as on offer on Play.com.

I did, I would say the Loaded review is a tad ott mind

Btw, 'Requiem for a Dream'. It's some dope, fly shit.

Edited August 28, 2009 by alex

[Nyff 0]

Dawn of the Dumb - Charlie Brooker. Just a collection of his Guardian articles it seems, but funny nonetheless.

[ChezGiven 0]

George Soros - The New Paradigm for Financial Markets

 

Review

 

"Lots of commentators claim to have anticipated the credit crunch; Soros actually did, years ago. And he says we're `still walking towards the storm rather than away from it.'"

[Guest alex]

Just finished a Raymond Carver short story book which was fucking mint to be honest and I've eventually plucked up the courage* to start reading 'Homicide...' the David Simon non-fiction book which helped form the basis of 'The Wire'. Very good so far.

*It's about 600 pages long.

[Monkeys Fist 42428]

Dissolution - C.J.Sansom

 

great read

[Happy Face 29]

Put Band of Brothers in my bag to start this morning, but listened to the Adam and Joe Podcast on the way in instead.

 

Put In Cold Blood in my bag to start yesterday, but listened to the Frank Skinner Podcast on the way in instead.

 

I'll start something soon.

[Guest alex]

Put Band of Brothers in my bag to start this morning, but listened to the Adam and Joe Podcast on the way in instead.

 

Put In Cold Blood in my bag to start yesterday, but listened to the Frank Skinner Podcast on the way in instead.

 

I'll start something soon.

'In Cold Blood' is excellent.

[Happy Face 29]

Finished Band of Brothers. Fantastic book, but not as good as the TV show. The book seems to concentrate on Winters more. The odd mention of each of the other characters in one or two chapters meant you never get to know them as well as you'd like. I found each of the characters in the TV show was more memorable.

 

I seem to have misplaced In Cold Blood, so I started Hammer of the Gods this morning. Wasn't too excited about it beforehand, but I'm well into it just after the prologue. Haven't listened to much Zep since uni. I carried all their albums in my backpack wherever I went for what, in retrospect, seems like the entire 3 years solid. I did love playing them over and over on my backbreaking discman. Think this will get them back into heavy rotation for a month or so.

[Happy Face 29]

Richard Herring's Blog. He's in New York at the minute...

 

Still it meant we could go and see the World Trade Centre before we got a ferry to the Statue of Liberty. I had loved coming here in 1999 and was really looking forward to visting the Windows on the World restaurant again.

 

But you'll never guess what has happened. They've chosen to demolish the whole thing for some reason, which seems like a shame. The whole place was just a building site. I was astonished. And yet everyone I stopped to ask what had happened to the World Trade Centre looked at me as if I was mad or sick in the head. One bloke tried to punch me.

 

http://www.richardherring.com/warmingup/wa...gup.php?id=2523

 

[Park Life 71]

Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain

 

taken 2 months to wade through 500 pages when normally I can read 400 odd a week...

 

slow going

 

Another one of those books I could never finish.

[Andrew 4748]

I'm supposed to be reading bram stokers dracula but I just cant seem to find the time to sit and read at the moment

 

i'll get round to it

[Monkeys Fist 42428]

Anyone read Ghost Road- Pat Barker?

Just picked it up from Ozzy's Hospice Shop with one or two others.

[Guest alex]

Nearly finished 'Hot Water Music' by Charles Bukowski. It's an entertaining read but loads of the stuff in it turns up in one form or another in his novels.

[Meenzer 15525]

Got through a bunch of library stuff on holiday last week, mostly fairly lightweight - Pies and Prejudice (canny), Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now (likewise but slightly less so), Millions Of Women Are Waiting To Meet You (self-indulgent but diverting), The Tesseract (surprisingly satisfactory), Becoming A Man ( and fascinating), Burden of Ashes ( and impenetrable, which some would say is a contradiction in terms), How To Have A No. 1 Hit Single (grossly self-indulgent, but bonus points for Eurovision-related content), and - unfortunately - The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas (I know it's a children's book, but what a load of insulting, ill-informed, patronising, implausible old twaddle).

 

I suppose I ought to shoot for something a bit higher-end next time, but hey, it's poolside reading.

[Guest alex]

I liked 'The Tesseract' although it wasn't as good as 'The Beach' imo. I've read Garland's third book though 'The Coma' which was alright but it was an absolute piss-take publishing it as a novel. It's illustrated and barely has a paragraph per page on the non-illustrated pages and took about an hour to read. Seems like he's run out of ideas, which is a shame because it looked like he was going to be a star.

You read 'Generation A' yet by the way Meenz?

Edited October 1, 2009 by alex