Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land
by Jacob Mikanowski

This was really good. I read quite a bit of history, but like many Americans, most is focused on US or England/Western Europe. Haven’t read too much on Eastern Europe, despite it being my ancestral homeland. I’ve been missing out! The book was a truly fascinating read. It covers the story of the region—basically everything east of Germany and west of Russia—from Medieval times to the present day. Throughout its history, it’s been a crazy patchwork quilt of ethnicities, cultures, and religions. Borders have been in continuous flux, with the rise and fall of various empires and nation-states. The book seemingly manages to cover just about everything at a basic level, but avoids an excessive amount of mind-numbing minutiae. So it’s a relatively fast and easy read (by history book standards), at less than 400 pages. Highly recommended for anyone interested in history.

I finished Martha Wells' new Murderbot book, System Collapse.  Fan-freaking-tastic.  I think I read somewhere these books are an examination of how people on the Autism Spectrum view the world, but if I didn't - I strongly suspect they're an examination of how people on the Autism Spectrum view the world.  I now know that at least one, maybe two or three of my high school friends were on The Spectrum, and reading these reminds me strongly of them, particularly with the excellent narration by Kevin R. Free.

I'm seeing there's an Apple TV+ series coming starring Alexander Skarsgard in the lead, and I'll definitely be restarting my subscription for it.

I also started and finished the Audible Original, Snoop Dogg: From The Streets To The Suites, a "words and music" title recorded by Tha Doggfather himself.  He talks about important events in his life and career, punctuated by musical interludes - mostly off-the-cuff performances of his hits, but sometimes the songs and artists that influenced him.

I'm not as pearl-clutchy about pot use as I once was, so the main burr in my enjoyment of Snoop is the phase he went through as an actual pimp.  I thoroughly enjoyed this short listen - he has a great storytelling voice, very personable (I laughed out loud several times), and it was interesting listening to his behind-the-scenes stories from Death Row, the infamous Source Awards debacle, recording The Chronic, and meeting Dre and various other luminaries.  And the musical snippets - you know, it's easy to just think of him as a walking cloud of weed smoke spouting "izzles" with various consonants put in front, but he is a HECK of a great rapper.  Such a unique flow and delivery.

And boy, is he passionate about the youth football league he founded, for all the right reasons.  Genuinely concerned about guiding the kids who play, not just in football, but in navigating life.

I finished Old Soldiers Never Die by Frank Richards. It's a non-fiction memoir of the author's time on the Western Front during WWI. (I think this one was an algorithmic recommendation from when I finished The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. Or did one of you suggest it?) It was very good. The author was fighting on the front lines for the entire damn war, from 1914 to 1918. He saw some stuff.

Moving on to something lighter on the ol' Kindle, Tom Felton's memoir, Beyond the Wand. I'm almost positive that I added this one to the list based on a recommendation from here.

I'm also listening to the audiobook of Cody Rigsby's memoir, XOXO, Cody. He's my favorite Peloton instructor and has led an interesting life full of colorful stories. I suspect most young people who picked up and moved to NYC and had to scrape their way through life for a while have some colorful stories, but Cody has a gift for storytelling. I'm maybe halfway through. I'm just getting into the part of the book where he talks about how his professional dancing career somehow transformed into this Peloton celebrity life he's currently living. He's very opinionated, very hilarious, and he reads the audiobook himself. Super fun listening.

Avast!  Repent, ye scurvy dogs!

 

This thread's called "Whatcha reading?", so...are you reading this? I imagine it would be entertaining at first, but wouldn't take too long to get exhausting.

No, not reading it, but didn’t know where else to put it.

I agree, I think the gag would get pretty thin, pretty quick.  I’m completely undecided whether I think the whole thing is a genius idea or horrifying, but if it’s the first, I can really only see it as a source to pull verses from for comedic effect.

Back to our regularly scheduled book reports:

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955
By Harald Jähner (Translated from German to English by Shaun Whiteside)

This book is excellent. It describes the experiences of living in post-WWII Germany (mostly focused on the West), in a wide variety of aspects. If you haven’t read much in depth about the period (which I hadn’t)—so many things you wouldn’t have thought about. For example: a whole chapter about all the rubble that had to be cleared, and how that was handled. The book mainly covered how people lived day to day—in the immediate post-war times, dealing with abject poverty, hunger, homelessness, and complete lack of infrastructure. Gender roles adapted, with women being the ones left behind and taking control of their situation. There were millions of “displaced people,” wandering with nothing but the clothes on their backs. People were forced to rely on a black market economy to survive. It explored the various interpersonal relationships—with returning spouses, with former Nazis, with their Allied conquerors. The book ultimately took us through the recovery—economic, political, cultural. But it also addressed the idea of repression—how Germans dealt emotionally with what their own country and people had done. There were a few portions that were not so interesting to me, such as a significant section on the abstract art movement that emerged. But overall, fascinating and highly engaging. It did an admirable job of putting you inside the heads of the people living through the era.

I also finished the audiobook of Into Thin Air about the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. The author is one of the climbers who survived, so it's a first-hand account augmented by a lot of content he gathered through interviews. The book has really high ratings, and the tale itself is wild, but for some reason I found the storytelling in this book to be a little dry. Maybe it was the guy reading the audiobook, I don't know.

I read this book on paper several months ago. It held my attention pretty well. I can understand why you would call the storytelling to be a little dry though. The book really opened my eyes up to the industry that surrounds climbing Mt. Everest - something in which your life is at risk under the best of circumstances. Thankfully, climbing Mt. Everest is not anything that I have ever wanted to do. If it had been something I wanted to do, I think the book would have squashed that desire down.

For my next audiobook, Touching the Void, another mountain climbing disaster book.

This one is great!  As is the movie adaptation.