What BOOK are you reading right now?

The whole trilogy is in my favorite books of all time list.

a friend is in Manhattan for a dance thing this week
she didn't realize she'd be going past Les Halles on one of her walks

among the tributes posted on the door / wall

Finished recently:
Agatha: The Real Life of Agatha Christie by Anne Martinetti;

Reread Just Kids by Patti Smith. Not quite as affective in audiobook as in paperback, Patti Smith is a decent narrator of her own memoir but something... is lost in the translation ... or the writing really wasn't as powerful as initially felt in the first read.

Currently nearing the end of The Jennifer Morgue (Laundry Files, #2) by Charles Stross. It's a supernatural hoot and a blast.

I'm not sure if I mentioned "Killers of the Flower Moon", I finished that a while ago but it's incredibly disturbing but absolutely important to read.

Right now I'm trying to finish "Come Retribution", its about the Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln. It was written by three of my colleagues from NSA...and it reads like an intelligence study, because thats how they process information and draft the finished product. I'm enjoying it, but it's chock full of info and it's taking time to digest.

I'm currently reading The Snowman by Jo Nesbo. If you like detectives, I recommend it with confidence!

The whole Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake (found it in one volume on a Poros hotel's bookswap shelf in Kefalonia).

Often namechecked with Lord Of The Rings. I'm midway through the final book and I'm losing interest. Not awful at all but I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone, sorry Harold Bloom.

I never finished Titus Alone. Got about half way through it too. Someone told me Peake went mad while he was writing it.

I liked the first two volumes though.

Jinx private.

Eight Pillars of Prosperity
Building Wealth and Being Happy
Pocket Mentor
Michel Foucault's Knowledge/Power
Verbal Judo

Currently back into Russian stuff and reading Oblomov by Goncharov.

Just finished OUTPOSTS by Simon Winchester. It's about the colonies of the British Empire. It was interesting for me because I have visited some of the places mentioned in the book like the BVI, Tangiers, Hong Kong, London, Gibraltar, Pitcairn (didn't land, but the citizens came on board our ship to tell us about their life.) Also, most of us know about Fletcher Christian of Mutiny on the Bounty. Most of the people living there is named Christian, and they are Seventh Day Adventists. My siblings are Seventh Day Adventists. It was a good-interesting read.

I haven't updated this thread for too long.


Spooky New York: Tales of Hauntings, Strange Happenings, and Other Local Lore by Schlosser, S.E.: Easy bedtime reading. Not really spooky.

Heart-Shaped Box by Hill, Joe. Recommend this one. Will try and read more of his work. He definitely has his own voice (completely seperate from his iconic horror father, Stephen King).

The Fold by Clines, Peter: Sequel to 14. Hard science fiction with a HP Lovecraftian twist. Rating it an Awesome possum.


Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Loory, Ben *

The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files, #3) by Stross, Charles: Highly recommend the entire Laundry Files series. Cheeky James Bondesque thrillers if all the baddies came from the mind of HP Lovecraft.

Whiskey, Words, and a Shovel I by Sin, r.h.: Don't bother unless you're a literal feminist millenial. Not terrible but too self help. I definitely wasn't the target audience.

New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2 by Oliver, Mary: DEFINITE RECOMMENDATION

Reread The Mote in God's Eye by Niven, Larry. Didn't hold up very well on the second read.

The Dead Mountaineer's Inn by Strugatsky, Arkady: Not my cup of scifi tea. Didn't satisfy my crime noir itch either.

14 by Cines, Peter: This definitely satisfies my cravings for HP Lovecraft (keep in mind its set in present day). HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.


GRAPHIC NOVEL:
Harrow County, Vol. 3: Snake Doctor by Bunn, Cullen: Definitely not scary. Will not go out of my way to read the first two volumes or any new ones that come out. Not bad. Just shrugworthy. Love the art style.

Lifeformed: Cleo Makes Contact by Lowery, Matt Mair . I really liked it. Most likely, further volumes read via the NYPL.

Spill Zone (Spill Zone, #1) by Westerfeld, Scott: Really mesmerizing and utterly mindsshattering read. DEFINITE RECOMMENDATION.

Because I am writing a western novel, I am reading Luke Short's Vengeance Valley, for help in terminology and lingo.

"Origins" by Dan Brown

I’ll give you a little sample...
Alas, the moon rises and the night turns to fright; there’s no twinkle, twinkle little star out tonight. The laughter of demons that roam through my mind and the smile of Satan fills me with fear. His tongue lashes my sweat, his breath lashes my ear. He loves to feed off my fear.


https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/storybook-tommy-richards/1129817171?ean=9781546264385

https://www.amazon.com/Storybook-Bedtime-Tales-Grave-Snatchers/dp/1546264388/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542761595&sr=8-1&keywords=tommy+richard+storybook

Enjoyed tremendously!

I’ve read that! It’s hillarious!

Finished:
The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency #1) by John Scalzi;
The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker;
Joyride Vol. 2 by Jackson Lanzing.

Down the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley;
Ring (Ring, #1) by Koji Suzuki.

No Access New York City: The City's Hidden Treasures, Haunts, and Forgotten Places by Jamie McDonald. Pretty tame/generic city guide with more than a few spelling and grammatical errors that didn't deserve to be name dropped in the NY Times.

Just finished Blood Safari by Deon Meyer. He's a South African author, he apparently writes in Afrikaans, which is then translated into English. Excellent, excellent writing.

I have not read this, but I would like to.

Mama’s Last Hug
FRANS DE WAAL -
My new book Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They tell Us about Ourselves will be published by Norton, New York, on March 12, 2019.
I write all my books in English, but this one will come out first in French in mid-November. Soon thereafter in English, Dutch, German, Japanese, Turkish, Russian, Polish, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, Greek, Italian, and so on.
The book starts with the story of Mama, the famous alpha female of the Arnhem colony of chimpanzees, which lives on a large forested island at Burgers Zoo in the Netherlands. Mama died at the age of 59. Her last hug with Professor Jan van Hooff was filmed and went viral on the Internet.

I gave Mama her name precisely because of her matriarchal position in the Arnhem colony. She not only took center stage in the colony’s social life, but also maintained its outside relations, such as with people at the zoo. She was a true diplomat and peacekeeper, who held the world’s largest zoo colony together for over forty years.
After a description of Mama’s life, my book delves into evidence for emotions in animals, starting with primate facial expressions. People sometimes disrespectfully describe these expressions as grimaces -- misled by the apes in Hollywood movies, who are trained to pull weird faces for our amusement -- but primates have an incredible variety of expressions that are just as meaningful to them as our own expressions are to us. These expressions are very similar to ours and engage the same facial muscles under similar emotional circumstances. Apes laugh when tickled, pout when disappointed, and produce a fierce frowning stare when angry. Charles Darwin concluded long ago that if apes use expressions similar to us under similar circumstances, the underlying emotions are probably similar, too.

One of the main take-aways from this book is that there are no uniquely human emotions. All of our emotions can be found one way or another in other species, especially those close to us. The whole idea that there is just a handful of basic emotions (fear, anger, disgust) that we share with other animals, and that all other emotions (jealousy, guilt, love, hope) are uniquely human doesn’t make sense. The book explains that the continuity between us and other species is all-encompassing. Emotions are like organs. There are no organs that we can do without and there are no organs that are unique to us. We share all of them with other vertebrate animals, from frogs and rats to elephants. No exceptions.
One chapter explains why we may speak of a sense of fairness in other species, and even of free will, while another chapters discuss mammalian empathy. There are also reflections on the Will to Power, as Nietzsche called it, and its role in politics, such as in the below lecture on the role of the alpha male.

Emotions engage both body and mind to prepare an animal for adaptive action, such as escape or attack. The body is sometimes forgotten when people discuss emotions, but the main power of the emotions comes from how they affect heart rate, body temperature, stomach, breathing, voice, and so on. This makes it easy to measure human and animal emotions: they are visible on the outside.
Feelings behind the emotions are harder to know, however. In humans, we often get our information from language (we show our emotions, but talk about our feelings), which is a notoriously unreliable way of knowing what others feel. You may tell me that you are “sad,” but how do I know that your sadness is like my sadness? I can’t feel what you feel. Because we value feelings so much, emotion research on humans has become very dependent on language.
With animals we don’t have the same problem, but we have the different problem that they don’t tell us anything about their feelings. We have good reasons to assume that they feel, however, because they remember where they encountered stimuli that are pleasurable or painful, and learn from these experiences. How could they learn anything if they felt nothing?
The manifest presence of emotions in most animals has moral implications. The last chapter discusses animal sentience. We are beginning to think differently about the inner lives of animals, which means that our treatment of them will have to change. We cannot keep acting as if animal well-being doesn’t matter.
Finally, I discuss human emotions at length. We love to emphasize our intellect, and sometimes assume that rationality is the dominant factor in our lives. This is an illusion, however. We are intensely emotional beings, much more bodily engaged with and reactive to our social environment than we think, making us just as emotional as the creatures around us.

CHAPTERS of Mama’s Last Hug
Preface
1 – Mama’s Last Hug
An Ape Matriarch’s Farewell
2 – Window to the Soul
When Primates Laugh and Smile
3 – Body to Body
Empathy and Sympathy
4 – Emotions That Make Us Human
Disgust, Shame, Guilt, and Other Discomforts
5 – Will to Power
Politics, Murder, Warfare
6 – Emotional Intelligence
On Fairness and Free Will
7 – Sentience
What Animals Feel
8 – Conclusion

About myself: I am a biologist and ethologist, who has all his life studied the behavior and cognition of monkeys and apes. I was born in the Netherlands, but live and work in Atlanta, in the USA. My positions are C. H. Candler Professor in Psychology, Director of the Living Links Center at Emory University, and Distinguished Professor at Utrecht University. I have been elected to the (US) National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. In 2007, I was selected by Time as one of The Worlds’ 100 Most Influential People Today. My books for the general public have been translated into over 20 languages. My academic writing can be found here.

Advanced Praise for Mama’s Last Hug
“I doubt that I've ever read a book as good as Mama's Last Hug: Animal and Human Emotions, because it presents in irrefutable scientific detail the very important fact that animals do have these emotions as well as the other mental features we once attributed only to people. Not only is the book exceedingly important, it's also fun to read, a real page-turner. I can't say enough good things about it except it's utterly splendid.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

“Before I realized Frans de Waal's connection to Mama's actual last hug, I sent the online video link to a large group of scientists saying, ‘I believe it is possible to view this interaction and be changed forever.’ Likewise, I believe that anyone reading this book will be changed forever. De Waal has spent so many decades watching intently and thinking deeply that he sees a planet that is deeper and more beautiful than almost anyone realizes. In these pages, you can acquire and share his beautiful, shockingly insightful view of life on Earth.”
—Carl Safina, author of Beyond Worlds: What Animals Think and Feel

“After you've read Mama's Last Hug it becomes obvious that animals have emotions. Learn how they resemble us in many ways.”
—Temple Grandin, author of Animals Make Us Human and Animals in Translation

“Frans de Waal is one of the most influential primatologists to ever walk the earth, changing the way we think of human nature by exploring its continuity with other species. He does this again in the wonderful Mama’s Last Hug, an examination of the continuum between emotion in humans and other animals. This subject is rife with groundless speculation, ideology, and badly misplaced folk intuition, and de Waal ably navigates it with deep insight, showing the ways in which our emotional lives are shared with other primates. This is an important book, wise and accessible.”
—Robert Sapolsky, author of Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Fascinating. Frans de Waal makes us think long and hard about the true nature of animal emotions.”
--Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape

“A captivating and big-hearted book, full of compassion and brimming with insights about the lives of animals, including human ones.”
—Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus

“De Waal is the ultimate zoological magician. His animals hold up mirrors and make you see yourself. Whether you find that terrifying or exhilarating is up to you. He is prescient, unnerving, politically explosive, and always downright entertaining. He can unmake and remake you, and you should let him.”
Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast

28 Comments115 Shares
537537
Like
Show more reactions
Comment
Share
Save
Most Relevant
Comments
Charles Turner

Write a comment...

Carol Clothier
Carol Clothier The description of the book ("See More") is like a book report and well worth the read. Those of us who are now criticized as loving our fur friends too much or are caught understanding their requests may feel a little more grateful for these studies and great books.
7
Manage
LikeShow more reactions · Reply · 1w
Patsy Nakell
Patsy Nakell this is one book I cant wait to read..
3
Manage
LikeShow more reactions · Reply · 1w
Jean-daniel Martino
Jean-daniel Martino "La dernière étreinte" title in french and comes out in 14 november.
1
Manage
LikeShow more reactions · Reply · 1w
Kate Tkatch
Kate Tkatch Looking forward to this.
Manage
LikeShow more reactions · Reply · 1w

Now reading NISEI about second generation Japanese Americans. It shows how much discrimination Japanese Americans suffered at the hand of white Americans in this country from the very beginning of the migration from Japan to the USA. It was interesting to learn that many migrants moved from Hiroshima to Hawaii, the same pattern that our family experienced. My father was born in Maui, Hawaii, and moved to California with his two brothers to California in the early 20th century. I think it was around 1912 when they were still teenagers. Even though Japanese Americans suffered much discrimination from the beginning of their arrival from Japan, I'm glad they had the wherewithal to come to the USA. Many settled in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Many also settled in South America, and there is still a large Japanese settlement in Brazil. A Brief History of the Japanese in São Paulo - Culture Trip
https://theculturetrip.com › South America › Brazil
May 17, 2017 - One of the most visible migrant groups in São Paulo is the Japanese, who began arriving in Brazil at the start of the 20th century. Today, São Paulo is home to the largest Japanese population outside of Japan. I learned about this on my visit to South American many decades ago. It was interesting to see that the Japanese who settled in Sao Paulo did the same thing as those who settled on the West Coast of the US. They started businesses like restaurants and laundries before their children started going to college. Even then, discrimination was strong, and many did their professional practice in the Japanese community. Fast forward to today: My older brother is an attorney who worked for the State of California. My younger brother is a physician, an ophthalmologist, who was one of the first to do eye surgery by laser in San Joaquin Valley, and also became a politician who served two terms in the California State legislature, and also as Mayor of his town a couple of times. So the book covers many of the same experiences as our family members. Both my brothers and I served in the US military, as did my cousin in the 442nd Infantry during WWII. This is not to imply that all Japanese Americans are successful or middle class. We have our share of the poor and destitute.