Books first mentioned on podcasts in week 2023-W46

“And Eli Finkel, he has this one diagram in his like magnum opus on how our expectations about marriage have changed over time and he calls it 'Mount Maslow.' And there's quite literally a picture of a mountain!”

“Yeah, and then the other writer that I'm slightly more fanboyish about than Didion is John Fante. I just read 'Brotherhood of the Grapes.' It's about Roseville?”

“No, I'm going to read 'Ask the Dust.' I have that in the story; it's one of the great novels of all time. Uh, crazy story which we should talk about; he has a bunch, maybe '1933 was a Bad Year,' 'The Road to Los Angeles.'”

“Uh, crazy story which we should talk about; he has a bunch, maybe '1933 was a Bad Year,' 'The Road to Los Angeles.' He has a couple of books about his journey; he's seen as an LA writer, but he's from Colorado, and so it's just a weird snapshot to have the Italian-American experience from Colorado to LA, then Northern”

“Uh, crazy story which we should talk about; he has a bunch, maybe '1933 was a Bad Year,' 'The Road to Los Angeles.' He has a couple of books about his journey; he's seen as an LA writer, but he's from Colorado, and so it's just a weird snapshot to have the Italian-American experience from Colorado to LA, then Northern”

“Um, his short stories are good; um, he wrote this book—'Full of Life,' um which was his most popular book; it wasn't a popular book, but it gets turned into a big movie that basically pays for everything. He once—so basically what happens is once 'Ask the Dust' is destroyed, he is sort of heartbroken and then just becomes a”

“And then after—this is way nerdier than people listen to—but after, after Bukowski rediscovers 'Ask the Dust' as Fante is dying of diabetes, they’re like chopping off his limbs as blind; he dictates to his wife the sequel of 'Dreams from Bunker Hill.' How's that, 'cause that's done; it's not done writing out; he told his wife the novel while”

“And I mean, it reminds me of, in kind of a tangential way, but you know the passage in Didion's The White Album where she’s with, uh, Jim Morrison? Yeah, you know, and you know how she writes about it. It’s, she goes to the recording session, they’re waiting for Jim Morrison, he shows up, he doesn’t talk to anybody,”

“Right, the best way I understood Trump was Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. And I feel like your book actually, which comes, which is basically the generation right after that book, like you’re talking about, no longer does the fascist movement look like Mussolini or Hitler. It’s figured out how to dress better; it’s figured out how to co-opt”

“Think about two years later, on the night that Martin Luther King was shot, Bobby Kennedy—who was a Philistine for most of his life—began to read the Greeks and read 'The Greek Way.' I have the book in the bookstore, by Edith what? Edith Wharton.”

“There’s a great book, 'Immunity' by Eula Biss, and it was the first time I began to understand immunity is not about you; it’s about participation. She articulated that while she was writing it, especially during her pregnancy in the 2010s, and it was the first time I understood immunity is about how participation and how we come together to”

“There’s a book titled 'The Wasteland' about Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, which came out recently, analyzing the deterioration of Ezra Pound's mind as he fell into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Anti-Semitism may be the oldest virus; it infects different Romans and emperors at various times, different leaders at different times.”

“I teach 'Shooting an Elephant' today by George Orwell. I love 'Homage to Catalonia,' but there are parts of it where he talks about what it was like as a colonial administrator, knowing colonialism was wrong. It’s a lot like Thompson—he was caught up in enforcing it, and it shows how it destroys him as a way to argue against”

“I love 'Homage to Catalonia,' but there are parts of it where he talks about what it was like as a colonial administrator, knowing colonialism was wrong. It’s a lot like Thompson—he was caught up in enforcing it, and it shows how it destroys him as a way to argue against it. Thompson does a very good job at illustrating”

“His son wrote a great book called 'Stories I Tell Myself,' which tries to encapsulate Thompson's struggle. I attempted to conclude with Nixon leaving, but the years after were really tough because they reflect our current understanding of alcoholism, coupled with how Thompson would take Dexedrine. There was a price to be paid later, and his son writes about getting”

“It's not being, what was the book called, 'The Big Sort,' a while ago?”

“The banality of evil, remember Hannah Arendt?”

“I've just been rereading Atlas Shrugged, which I do oddly enough about every 15 years, and I figured out one of the core problems with her doctrine; it might be the core problem.”

“Thanks to him as well as to Sain Kajura, whose book is called '2 and 20: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win.'”

“We have the religion of gender. We have the religion of race.And you know, all these things have just stepped into this void, and they're all dogmatic things where they have their founding texts.”

“You mentioned George Orwell; The Telegraph recently spoke about his bi—his wife's biography or autobiography.Oh, there's a new biography of Sonia Orwell?”

“I mean, I read Meghan Markle's book, 'The Bench', and that's worse.”