I just finished Bullpen Gospels by Dirk Hayhurst. Pretty good read. It is basically a Ball Four of the minor leagues. Follows him in the Padres system.

Posted by kneeneighbor on 10/14/2019 12:30:00 AM (view original):
I just finished Bullpen Gospels by Dirk Hayhurst. Pretty good read. It is basically a Ball Four of the minor leagues. Follows him in the Padres system.

I liked it a lot.

I just finished the Gospel According to Mark. I liked it a whole lot!

Posted by boogerlips on 10/22/2019 9:31:00 AM (view original):
I just finished the Gospel According to Mark. I liked it a whole lot!

That's the one with the zombies walking around at the end, right?

"...the only things I remember as well as books, found in certain bookshops, in such and such condition, are women, about whom I mean to say little or nothing just at the present time."

"...was a much admired London bookseller, who when asked how he arranged his books, replied that if he bought a short fat book, he tried to find a short fat hole."

Posted by thunder1008 on 6/7/2019 6:29:00 PM (view original):

Posted by dino27 on 6/7/2019 12:26:00 PM (view original):
barnes and noble is about to be sold to a hedge fund for 476 million.
there is no business in book business...no business no more.

Nothing about it is appealing.

Why is a book not appealing?It is very appealing to me.

no......i meant booksellers are not doing well because people dont buy books anymore....sad but true.
im ...one of the people keeping B & N afloat.
i like a book...with a good cover...sometimes i judge a book by its cover.

Well said.Maybe they're overpriced.I mostly buy at half price bookstore

Posted by dino27 on 11/4/2019 9:30:00 PM (view original):
no......i meant booksellers are not doing well because people dont buy books anymore....sad but true.
im ...one of the people keeping B & N afloat.
i like a book...with a good cover...sometimes i judge a book by its cover.

Not sure this is true.

While I am sure that the sales of paper books have declined due to the low cost and general accessibility of e-readers, I am guessing that Amazon still sells plenty of traditional books. B&N's problem, like Borders before them, is that they don't have a compelling value proposition. The stores are generic, poorly organized, and just about everything you can find in there you get for less money online. And with Amazon Prime, you can have your stuff in a day or two - sometimes same day.

And if you like the appeal of going into a bookstore and browsing or sitting and reading...well compare your local B&N to any indy bookstore and I bet they lose that comparison too. Anyone ever been to Powell's in Portland? Always packed. B&N never adapted their strategy and got outflanked on both sides.

Currently reading "It Shouldn't Be This Hard to Serve Your Country" by David Shulkin, former head of the VA. (In hardcover btw, purchased from Amazon, where I pre-ordered the book and they later discounted the price to me...)

I've met Dr. Shulkin a couple of times, though I certainly don't know him well. It's a decent book, not great, but informative and generally well written. At this point, there has been enough written about the failures and general incompetence of the Trump administration that almost nothing can surprise me any more. But...Shulkin's narrative of the meeting in which Trump "interviewed" him for the job is practically an SNL skit writing itself (a fact that Shulkin himself noticed at the time.) It would be hard to imagine more of a buffoon holding the nation's highest office. While not the primary focus of the book, just about every scene in which he describes an interaction with Trump reinforces this perspective.

The real merits of the book though are the details into which Shulkin takes the reader in describing the VA health system. For non-US readers, the Veterans Administration is the federal agency that pays for and delivers health care, and some other services, for veterans of the US armed forces. It is an extensive network of hospitals and other care providers located (largely in major cities) across the US, and it has come under fire in recent years - sometimes for valid reasons and sometimes not - for its overall performance. Shulkin pulls few punches in talking about the shortcomings and failures of the system, and gives his perspective on what can be done to improve it. But he also shines a bright light on many of the success stories. The VA is far far far from the nightmare that many - especially on the political right - make it out to be. And in fact the VA pioneered (and remains ahead of most of American health care) in several areas: telemedicine, integrating behavioral health, team-based care, addressing social determinants in addition to clinical issues, etc.

Worth reading if you want to be just a little better informed on the issues facing the health of American vets.

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (2019) by Ronan Farrow. Odd book, in that I was impressed with the reporting and the constant twists and turns in the story (involving some legitimately crazy spy stuff) but turned off by Farrow’s writing, in which he comes across as an Encyclopedia Brown in the age of selfies. Funny passage near the end of the book, when The New Yorker is set to publish Farrow’s first big Harvey Weinstein article online, and Farrow moves to take a photograph of everyone in the room -- until editor David Remnick (who’s one of the heroes of the book) tells him no photographs, kid, that’s not our style here. Farrow sheepishly writes that he wanted the photo in the spirit of "unsmiling documentation, not triumphalism," but I think Remnick had him figured out.

The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life (2019) edited by Andrew Blauner. Anthology with 33 contributors (mostly with essays, but also a couple poems and comic strips) on Charles Schulz’s life and work. Quite a range in quality, from excellent (Gerald Early, Kevin Powell, Chris Ware) to bad (Jonathan Franzen, predictably insufferable). Worth it if you’re a fan of Peanuts.

By the way, over the past few years I read (or re-read, in the main) the entire strip in volumes that contain two years’ worth of strips each. The books begin in 1950 and end in 2000 – that’s right, Schultz drew Peanuts for exactly half a century, with the last strip published the day after he died. Peanuts was genuinely brilliant for maybe 15 years, from about 1959 to 1974. There are still good individual comics in the ‘80s and beyond, but unfortunately a lot of sentimental fluff too, as Schultz moved away from the earlier irony and cruelty and brought the strip more in line with the cutesy “Happiness is a Warm Puppy” merchandising. Anyway, great to read these right before bedtime, especially if you've had a rough day...

I work third shift driving so as much as I love a good physical book (I have a robust library and I love the smell of old books!) Audible has become a necessity for me! I've gone back to restart Terry Goodkind's Legend of the Seeker with and excellent narrator.

Posted by contrarian23 on 11/5/2019 8:48:00 AM (view original):
Currently reading "It Shouldn't Be This Hard to Serve Your Country" by David Shulkin, former head of the VA. (In hardcover btw, purchased from Amazon, where I pre-ordered the book and they later discounted the price to me...)

I've met Dr. Shulkin a couple of times, though I certainly don't know him well. It's a decent book, not great, but informative and generally well written. At this point, there has been enough written about the failures and general incompetence of the Trump administration that almost nothing can surprise me any more. But...Shulkin's narrative of the meeting in which Trump "interviewed" him for the job is practically an SNL skit writing itself (a fact that Shulkin himself noticed at the time.) It would be hard to imagine more of a buffoon holding the nation's highest office. While not the primary focus of the book, just about every scene in which he describes an interaction with Trump reinforces this perspective.

The real merits of the book though are the details into which Shulkin takes the reader in describing the VA health system. For non-US readers, the Veterans Administration is the federal agency that pays for and delivers health care, and some other services, for veterans of the US armed forces. It is an extensive network of hospitals and other care providers located (largely in major cities) across the US, and it has come under fire in recent years - sometimes for valid reasons and sometimes not - for its overall performance. Shulkin pulls few punches in talking about the shortcomings and failures of the system, and gives his perspective on what can be done to improve it. But he also shines a bright light on many of the success stories. The VA is far far far from the nightmare that many - especially on the political right - make it out to be. And in fact the VA pioneered (and remains ahead of most of American health care) in several areas: telemedicine, integrating behavioral health, team-based care, addressing social determinants in addition to clinical issues, etc.

Worth reading if you want to be just a little better informed on the issues facing the health of American vets.

Thanks. It is on my list. I was a union organizer and contract negotiator for the Residents and Interns union many years ago and was often at VA hospitals. The only hellish element of them were the often permanent damage to so many veterans from the wars they had been in. The doctors were dedicated and capable and intelligent, I agree contrarian23. As usual, the ideology that stupidly claim the private sector always works better has to smear the public sector and its efforts. Of course, nearly 100 of the global Fortune 500 companies are Chinese State-Owned Enterprises, so the old neoliberal adage that "the state can't pick winners" has pretty much run out of steam, as has their whole game at this point. No one wants to buy what they are selling anymore, not the nationalist right like Trump and Tucker Carlson, like Hungary's Orban and Italy's Salvini, though these only have beating up on immigrants to substitute for it, and not the socialist left like Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes and Elizabeth Warren and their voters in the US, and most of Latin America as well. So, the jig is up on it. Hopefully whatever comes next will in any case mean fewer or no wounded veterans of war to need the VA. Wouldn't that be nice? In the meantime, good thing it is there.

My current reading is unusual for me. One of the many Youtubers that review movies that I like (my favorites include FilmJoy, Lindsay Ellis and Patrick H. Willems) is a Scottish guy who goes by "The Critical Drinker". His politics are often pretty bad by my standards, but his criticism of many movies is right on more often than not all the same. Anyway, he writes novels under the name Will Jordan and I decided to read his first of a series called "Redemption" about a CIA team doing something or other. I will let you all know if it is any good. Not my usual favorite genre of novels, but what the hell, I'll give it a try since the guy knows a lot about story telling.

Posted by boogerlips on 10/22/2019 9:31:00 AM (view original):
I just finished the Gospel According to Mark. I liked it a whole lot!

boogerlips, me too.

Have you seen my take on Mark 2:27-28?

Here it is:
https://stevencolatrella.wixsite.com/justice-and-shame/post/the-sabbath-was-made-for-human-beings-means-all-of-this-is-yours

I would be interested to know what you think of it.