What BOOK are you reading right now?

Found one of the Domestic Diva mysteries in the neighbourhood Little Free Library. The mystery itself is good, but I'm guessing the target market isn't really me. Good enough for garden/beach reading. Don't expect much.

http://www.kristadavis.com/domestic-diva-mysteries/books.html

The Seekers, Boorsten (Again)

Currently reading:
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. The 2016 Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography

Read two graphic novels:
Sumo by Thien Pham. Which I lost somewhere between finishing it on the train and walking home.

AND
Hawaiian Dick. Volume 3, Screaming black thunder / [B. Clay Moore, story ; Scott Chantler, pencils and inks ; Steven Griffin, cover colors, lettering, story fonts & book design stuff].

Which I didn't know it was Volume 3 until I copied and pasted the details from NYPL.

I'm travelling, and had stocked my suitcase with Naipaul's The Loss of Eldorado. I didn't like the style one bit. He manages to make a rather deadpan narrative out of a fantastic story... It's also littered with condescending remarks about the Spaniards. It's the first book by Naipaul I try to read, and probably the last.

So I dropped it and went searching for something else in town. I found a sort of modern Candide, a philosophical travelogue called The Curious Enlightment of Professor Caritat, by a certain Steven Lukes. Pretty good so far. It's a bit brainy but it's well written and I like philosophy so I go along with his musing. Much is made of debates between various protagonists many of who stand for actual philosophers through fairly transparent word-plays -- Caritat for instance stands for Condorcet, whose full name (we're told) was Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet.

Some of these dialogues make me think of A2K.

It starts in a country called Militaria run by the army. Professor Caritat, a slightly aloof scholar specialist of Enlightenment writers, is arrested because he has not given up his faith in the goodness of human beings, in spite of all the horrors around him. He is soon rescued from prison by a guerilla group called "the Hand" and given a mission: to travel the world in search of the best possible political system, and to inform the Hand of what it is so that they know there's hope. The Hand fights against the military, but they don't know what they should fight for. Caritat's job is to survey the world and tell them if a better system is possible.

The mission first leads him to a country called Utilitaria, where a powerful welfare system maximizes happiness for the greatest number of people. Everything is well-designed and functional. Everyone goes around with a smile on their face and a pocket calculator with which they constantly calculate the future utility of their actions. Utilitarians have no word for "regret" or "gratitude" because these are emotions turned towards the past, useless for them. Caritat realizes that people have no rights in this system: if it maximizes utility for society to condemn an innocent, or to kill an infirm, then the innocent must be condemned and the infirm killed. Another problem is: who should compute utility: experts or the people?

The other countries will be Libertaria, where the entire state is built on the privatization and trade of various programmes on the stock market, and Communitaria, a society based on equality and multiculturalism... I'm not there yet.

I'm busy in the kitchen, so for now I'll just say I've been rereading my Gianrico Carafiglio books, all set in the Bari area, some with Rome as one of the places where situations happen.

I like some of the books better than others; will report but not this evening. Oh, and I read them in the english translation as my italian is beginning to fade pretty fast, not being that great in the first place.

Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, a popcorn memoir by Bruce Campbell

Adds, I've never read a Naipaul book. Possibly I've read an article by him, not sure. If I remember, he had some kind of spat going on with, I think, a Brit, whose name I almost do remember - I just wasn't that interested, at least at the time.

I just skimmed an article in The New Republic by Isaac Chotiner, Dec. 6, 2012. Um, I'm still not very interested re all of it.

Ack, I missed adding the Chotiner title:

V.S. Naipaul on the Arab Spring, Authors He Loathes, and the Books He Will Never Write
By Isaac Chotiner
December 6, 2012

She remembered! The guy he spatted with was Paul Theroux, who wrote Riding the Iron Rooster: The Great Railway Bazaar, among other books.
I was wrong, he's an american travel and fiction writer.

I guess I should try another book by Naipaul before dropping him altogethet, but life is short.

Hmm, if William Finnegan is who I think he is, I'd like the book (good writer). I'm sure I've read him at length in the New Yorker. Surfing is not my thing (laughs) but I've lived around it for decades.

A year or two or three ago, I put down an Orhan Pamuk book that I even liked so I could get to a stack of some police or legal procedural books that I had bought. Shallow idiot, I say to myself! Pamuk is, to me, a mix of serious writer and a good read. The book was Snow.

I started it again last night, kicking myself for ever putting it down.

Surfing was never my thing as well. Read the book because of the accolades it got as well as it was on sale at Audible. Well written with mostly good parts but not necessarily connected with me as a whole.

I'm still into Orhan Pamuk's Snow. I did have to skip over one set of seven? pages of someone ranting, but that's me, and I could surmise. I'm learning a lot, as is usual for me with Pamuk.

Reading "The Principled Politian" about the 29th gov of Colorado. It was a time when most white Americans didn't want Asians in this country, but Ralph Carr was a Constitunalist who believed all Americans were equal. Before and after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the west coast states were anti-Japanese even when 2/3rds were American born. Gov Carr invited the Japanese Americans to come to his state, and many moved to Colorado.
Will continue tomorrow.

Quantum Reality. I get into all sorts of deep stuff that I can learn from. I'm always looking for Book recommendations though I tend to go through 2 or 3 a week.

Sounds interesting I may just have to pick up a copy. My Grandmother moved here from Japan not too long after Pearl Harbor.

I think of Snow as Pamuk's best book by far. Well worth the occasional frustration with how oddly the story unfolds.

Currently reading the graphic memoir, Dare to Disappoint: Growing Up in Turkey by Ozge Samanci.

The World Walker, by Ian Sainsbury

I might like that one..