What'cha Reading?

[Lark]

I'm reading and enjoying Swastika Night, I think its one of my favourite books, I'm also reading Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, which is interesting but I feel a bit like I should just skip the author and go to all the books and other authors me mentions repeatedly, and Discontent and Its Civilizations by Mohsin Hamid, I think this guy is a master of the short essay format, its possible to read a chapter a day at least from this book, which I like since I'm reading the other books at the same time.

[Jaguar]

An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back

[deathwarmedup]

The Haunting of Hill House

[Lark]

An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back

Is that any good? I havent even seen the Mike Moore documentary Sicko yet, I'm keen to study how health care works in the US since it is basically what the UK Conservatives have been building up to introducing in the UK, the system has been under funded and politically sabotaged like no ones business for so, so long.

I'm also suspicious that the political elites here in NI would like to privatise it, the unionists because they are hostile to all public spending what so ever, the republicans because they imagine it would some how take them closer to harmonisation with the ROI in one sphere of governance, the cost of the medication upon which I'm dependent is such that I'd suffer dire consequences if I had to self fund, I'm conflicted about that because on the one hand I definitely want to avoid a situation in which basically privatised services would just hamstring me but on the other I know that I'm a responsible NHS service user, there are a lot who are not, the system is abused by elites exploiting it for money and status at one end and medication scammers and the black market in prescription meds at the other.

[senza tema]

I've been working through Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo for the sake of practicing my Italian but since it's been going very slowly, I zipped through the English translation (If This Is a Man/Survival in Auschwitz) because I couldn't wait to find out how things went.

Then I decided to binge read Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem on the sixteen-hour plane ride from India to the US. Fuck me, it's depressing. I don't understand though why so many people were down on Arendt for this book. The idea of an ordinary individual following through with a horrific genocidal program because of personal ambition, elevation of obedience as the highest virtue, and a shattering incapacity for original speech and thought seems to me to be both more horrifying and more compelling than the notion that he must have been a racist, psychopathic monster.

Then again, it's not my struggle and not my pain so perhaps I am not in the position to make judgments on the issue.

[Lark]

I've been working through Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo for the sake of practicing my Italian but since it's been going very slowly, I zipped through the English translation (If This Is a Man/Survival in Auschwitz) because I couldn't wait to find out how things went.

Then I decided to binge read Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem on the sixteen-hour plane ride from India to the US. Fuck me, it's depressing. I don't understand though why so many people were down on Arendt for this book. The idea of an ordinary individual following through with a horrific genocidal program because of personal ambition, elevation of obedience as the highest virtue, and a shattering incapacity for original speech and thought seems to me to be both more horrifying and more compelling than the notion that he must have been a racist, psychopathic monster.

Then again, it's not my struggle and not my pain so perhaps I am not in the position to make judgments on the issue.

I like that book, others which are similar to it too, because any time I was a victim of a serious crime or incident it was because of this precise thing, the banality of evil, thugs, psychos, the obviously evil or wicked, of course no one falls afoul of them, you see the coming a mile off and its why when the average person reads about them they've made it their purpose to prey upon the extra unwary and unsuspecting, but the real evil is done by people no one would suspect and they are usually the guys who get away with it for as long as they want pretty much.

In relation to Eichmann, I think people wanted the Nazis to be all super villainous, the fact that he didnt fit the stereotype made it pretty clear that "it could happen here", "it could be my neighbour", if you want to read about this occuring again and again you should read about what happened in Bosnia and the Balkans, there's some incredible stories there, men and women just up and organising militias murdering their neighbours who they had been a short time before borrowing lawn mowers from or stuff like that, there was someone who killed people using a saw from their garage, it made me think about the accounts of "Hitler's willing executioners" people who had murdered jewish neighbours long before invading Nazis could get to them or order them to do so, those stories too, man, choosing the side of the aggressor for purposes of survival? It doesnt cover it all or explain it all at all.

I've read a lot about this topic, at different junctions in my life I've felt this "fight evil, fight oppression" thing within, its made me do more than my fair share of "gazing into the abyss" and I know the whole of the quote, it does look back into you when you do that. I do think its possible to hunt monsters without becoming one though.

[deathwarmedup]

Entering the Circle: Ancient Secrets of Siberian Wisdom Discovered by a Russian Psychiatrist by Olga Kharitidi Yahontova

[Lord Lavender]

Im reading a few ATM im reading both the LoTR series (Just finishing off The Fellowship and the first Dune novel)

[VILLANELLE]

The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche.

[Tellenbach]

Chemistry by Weineke Wang. A very mediocre novel about an inter-racial relationship between a great guy and a messed up girl. I don't recommend it because there is one anti-cat comment in it.