Read any good books lately?
Every month, our team Basecamp sends everyone at doopoll an auto question: Read any good books lately? It’s an opportunity for us to share what we’ve been interested in and inspired by over the previous few weeks.
I love reading. Here’s what I just shared in response:
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SO MANY!
Calypso by David Sedaris:
Sedaris’ essays are all so good. This book is about suicide, cancer, feeding medical waste to animals, Eastern European insults, difficult relationships with parents. And it is ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS.
I thought about taking the penis home and mailing it to one of my sisters for Christmas but knew that the moment I put it in my knapsack, I’d get hit by a car and killed. That’s just my luck. Medics would come and scrape me off the pavement, then, later, at the hospital, they’d rifle through my pack and record its contents: four garbage bags, some wet wipes, two flashlights, and a strap-on penis.
Bullsh*t Jobs by David Graeber:
I shared a bunch of extracts from this book in the Reading List channel but here’s a quick one
Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at.
Crudo by Olivia Lang:
While reading this quick little novella (150 pages) about a woman who is getting married in the summer of 2017 to a backdrop of social media, Trump, Brexit, I hated it! But then as I got towards the end, I realised that I was really enjoying it. Still unsure what happened in the end. Let me know if you read it, pls.
They were stressed and then all of a sudden, in the car park, they were ecstatic. NO EXIT it said in big white letters, but they didn’t care, they loved it, permanence was what they were here for, they didn’t want to get out.
Blitzed by Norman Ohler:
This week’s book. I just started reading it last night but already highlighted so much stuff. A book about drugs in the Third Reich. It was very popular in Germany and now the translation is popular too.
On 10 August 1897 Felix Hoffmann, a chemist with the Bayer company, synthesized acetylsalicylic acid from willow bark; it went on sale as Aspirin and conquered the globe. Eleven days later the same man invented another substance that was also to become world famous: diacetyl morphine, a derivative of morphine — the first designer drug. Trademarked as ‘Heroin’, it entered the market and began its own campaign.
Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky:
Alinksy’s organisational ideology has influenced several generations of community organiser including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama et al. It is given out as a standard issue to activists in the Republican Party and the Democrats also use it extensively. Whatever your worldview, if you would like to play part in changing the world (somehow), this is a great book to inspire and help you.
A major revolution to be won in the immediate future is the dissipation of man’s illusion that his own welfare can be separate from that of all others.