Left Coast Justin > Recent Status Updates

Recent significant lifestyle shift: I stopped being retired and am now working as a medical librarian. This means my ever-present joy in reading funky books about biology and medicine will take up a larger percentage of my reading than ever before.

Going from being a bum who worked zero hours per week to a full-time employee has taken a big bite out of my reading/GR browsing time. Sorry mis amigas y amigos, totally not due to anything you've done.

I scored big at Half Price Books in Dallas today:

I've started a shelf called "Free to a Good Home." These are books that I am happy to give away to the first person who claims it. Some are duplicates, some I didn't much like and others I liked a lot but don't intend to re-read.

I ordered a book from a dealer in Germany a couple of days ago to try and keep up with the language. This morning the dealer informed me "Due to the Trump administration's absurd customs policies, I am unfortunately unable to ship any goods to the United States at this time.

I'm sorry, I have to cancel your order."

Small problem compared to being bombed, but still.....sigh

I ordered a book from a dealer in Germany a couple of days ago to try and keep up with the language. This morning the dealer informed me "Due to the Trump administration's absurd customs policies, I am unfortunately unable to ship any goods to the United States at this time.

I'm sorry, I have to cancel your order."

There is much dismay about the recent behavior of the United States government (or more specifically, the Executive branch of same.)

The citizenry here is not simply allowing Trumpism to run unchallenged. This is required reading for anyone who considers themselves an informed adult.

It's very short and very fun. Just Google CIVIL CASE NO. SA-26-CV-415-FB since I'm not allowed to provide links here.

My Christmas present this year: Simon Stålenhag's "Tales from the Loop," "Things from the Flood" and "Sunset at Zero Point". Woo-hoo!

Halfway through and want to give a pat on the back to Mr. Hopkins for writing some of the best historical fiction I've ever read.

Somebody with too much time on their hands recently counted up the number of times European cities were mentioned in all the books in Google Books from 1920 - 2020. It's not too surprising that London, Paris and Rome occupied the top three spots. From there, counting down, we have Berlin, Florence, Vienna, Athens, Dublin, Amsterdam and Brussels.

I'm a little surprised about Brussels. Nothing Scandinavian?

Gosh DARN this guy is good!

My favorite book of the year so far? (1/3 of the way in).

Once, she taught an entire class with a smear of tapenade on her forehead. How did it get way up there?She had no idea, and her students didn't tell her. They'd let her keep of the charade of imparting knowledge with a sandwich condiment on her face. Humiliations never seem survivable until you go ahead and survive them.

I wonder what Amazon knows about me that I don't? All of a sudden they keep recommending books to me on the general topic of "Advice for the Dying".

A little sad this morning, having learned about the death of peerless nonfiction writer William Langewiesche a few months ago. He seems to have live the life he wanted, though.

Sorry for all the old reviews popping up -- doing some housekeeping on my bookshelves.

Might be of interest to Bay Area writers:

Tommy Orange will be hosting an Advanced Writing Masterclass at the Mechanics' Institute Library on Oct. 04. Details at

https://milibrary dot org/events/23515

After three pages, I went and checked out a stupid spy novel. I have the feeling I'm going to need it after finishing this one.

I suppose it's no surprise that this is utterly engrossing.

Too busy reading work stuff to read fun stuff 😒

Big ol' sigh....

https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/202...

I went to an interesting talk a couple of days ago given by Jon Cho-Polizzi, a half-Korean half-Italion wholly Californian professor at UMich who translated the Turkish-German novel Djinns, among others. The topic of AI inevitably came up, and he made some good points about AI language tending to regress to the mean while most novelists try to write in ways that aren't so standard and familiar.

I went to an interesting talk a couple of days ago given by Jon Cho-Polizzi, a half-Korean half-Italion wholly Californian professor at UMich who translated the Turkish-German novel Djinns, among others. The topic of AI inevitably came up, and he made some good points about AI language tending to regress to the mean while most novelists try to write in ways that aren't...

It's a long book and I don't read very fast in German. I'm going to be disciplined and finish this before starting anything else, so no more reviews from me for a while.

Fans of Tommy Orange, particularly in the SF Area, might be interested in this:

https://www.milibrary.org/events/mast...

The Mechanics Institute Library is hosting a writing workshop led by Mr. Orange on April 26th.

I'm slogging my way through two *long* books, but need to think about what I'm going to read next. I am not a fan of George Orwell's fiction, but picked up a copy of his nonfictional "Road to Wigan Pier" which I read back in college and would like to revisit. Also, cheered on by many GR friends of excellent taste, grabbed a copy of Wally Stegnar's "All the Little Live Things."

I've been doing re-reads -- currently Philipp Dettmer's Immune and Diana Marcum's The Tenth Island -- until I have time to get to the library again.

I will be checking in here for a while longer, but am migrating to Storygraph. Hope you all can join me there! "GR without Amazon" and hopefully without all the bugs.

I'm finding this deeply frustrating at this point....Sometime I feel Wang may be onto something, but for a nonfiction work this is staggeringly inarticulate.

Re: Cormac McCarthy

There's always a sense of vindication when learning an author you can't stand was in fact a total scumbag in real life.