2025 Book Club, second quarter!

@yakkoTDI I don’t want to be all you can get them from the library because I understand that reading them will be the reward for figuring out which box they’re in. But you could, like, get the audiobooks from the library. That’s totally different.

@mossygreen I don’t do well with most audio books unless I am using them to sleep to. I tend to get easily distracted by other things.

@yakkoTDI There is an interesting logic puzzle here. The first box of books I packed were the ones to be donated and after that the ones I couldn’t quite decide about. The donation boxes went out (eventually) and the indecisive boxes were downstairs for a while then went into the, er, storage room, followed by the want-2-keepers, which are mostly in boxes with no lids, not for the smart reason of being able to look at the spines but because I used the lidded or foldable-top boxes first. But the books are otherwise grouped by shelf so The Hobbit, for example, is in the box with the other paperbacks from the 2nd-floor hallway bookshelf, now in a topless Aldi snack-pack box in the 3rd-floor hallway.

@aetris Oh, I loved Please Kill Me. The first chapter was like a secret postscript to Edie, an American Biography, and the rest was good too. Kind of made me hate Iggy Pop for awhile, though. But it passed. Probably time to reread. But maybe I should read Our Band Could Be Your Life and Under the Big Black Sun first.

@aetris I loved Elizabeth Gouge years ago; I haven’t read her since high school or college, maybe? I should go back and reread her stuff.

@mossygreen OK, Edie, an American Biography and Under the Big Black Sun are ALSO available at the Internet Archive, but there are two books called Our Band Could Be Your Life there and only the one about T Boon and the Minutemen is free, the other one, by Michael Azzerad, is only available to readers with print disabilities which I can’t honestly claim. You recommend reading those titles BEFORE Please Kill ME, eh?

@Kyeh I only ever read The Little White Horse, but people say a couple of the Cathedral Stories are really good.

@aetris Nah, you should read Please Kill Me first. Edie is all about the '60’s, Edie’s weird poor-little-rich-girl life, Andy Warhol and the Factory scene. Definitely worth reading if you have any interest in that milieu, but the overlap might exist mostly in my mind. Our Band Could Be Your Life comes a bit later chronologically.

@aetris @mossygreen

I remember reading Edie way back when. Wasn’t the hardback full of pix?

@f00l Edie, an American Biography is full of pics, including Edie’s illustrious ancestors, her illustrious associates, their illustrious nipples (including Andy Warhol’s), illustrious restaurants, paraphernalia, fashions…

There’s also Edie, an American Girl but that’s not available at the Archive.

@aetris @f00l Both paperback and hardcover are full of pictures, but if you want full frontal Allen Ginsberg you have to get the hardcover.

@aetris @mossygreen

Well … Since it’s Ginsberg … Obviously worth an all out effort to acquire!

Funny that I once on this book in hardback when it came out and I liked it and thought it over-promoted a bit, and otherwise thought nothing of it as being special, and I have no idea what happened to it

My memory of reading it is that I felt pretty sorry for Edie

who kind of got in way over her head in terms of questionable lifestyles and was too poorly educated or too little reflective to have any idea what she was doing

It was just another 60’s story of somebody who went too far and screwed up and died

I remember that I immediately felt I had to do a different sort of book so I read a biography of Lady Diana Cooper, who was very good at being privileged, entertaining, and useful for something like 9 decades

I think the two bios dropped into public view about the same time.

@aetris @mossygreen

Perhaps i should clarify?

The Diana Cooper I refer to us not the tarot and mysticism guru.

I refer to Lady Diana Cooper, originally Lady Diana Manners, putative daughter if the the Duke and Duchess of Rutland. (He father was not actually the Duke itis believed).

She was considered insanely beautiful, to the degree that she played a statue if a beautiful goddess on stage before she married.

She then married Duff Cooper who became a essential portion of Churchill’s war cabinet and after the war became a huge success as ambassador to France

Lady Diana was a very entertaining guest hostess and correspondent

Books of her letters between her and her husband between her and her son between her and Evelyn Waugh, and others have been published and are supposed to be very good reads

She also composed of biography in three parts which is also said to be a good read.

Nancy Mitford heavily caricatured her in one of her minor novels

The bio I referred to is by Philip Ziegler.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0394500261/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.BuEZ2K0Eygg8XBiKApFSY0GGGNHsRfwnh8Oan0EkBChN3BmW4VPk0dwXl_yGmHycQoLUeK6mKGv_FS5vFtjZ7sskgv_5OK6pzjwejVHB1TvYBivUhLE2AlEOV0NH1Aakj5qYFvrUdX26Vt-mwpW8HcKDUuavepAWSI_FDUjiPdJSneB2IooUdvTMb8yHPKGlwpv4xW8doG_9sSHxYu6SRg.TFsaGevU4wshv3X0Qy6ROXymsbzieNS15tH6VA-Z2xc&qid=1748339001&sr=8-6

Supposedly Lady Diana was excellent company all of her life

@aetris

How does one get

The Man Who Gave The Beatles Away by Allan Williams

Off the internet archive?

I donate to the archive but mostly use it for news articles.

I poked around looking for this book and found it in the text library, but as far as I could tell, not available for download? Perhaps I’m just too novice at using the archive.

@aetris

Well I figured out how to borrow the book from the internet archive

I suppose that means reading it in their dreadful browser set up which is awful

Maybe it’s better if you’re not trying to use a phone but my goodness it’s bad on a phone and I don’t really read books except on my phone or in hard copy

What am I missing if anything

What I would like is a text copy of a book in a standard format so that I could load it into an e-reader with good text to speech functions and just play the book

I do this fairly frequently when there’s some book with no audio version and that’s how I want to experience it I don’t mind the synthesized voice so much

Anyway is there a way to do that with this book I’m such a newbie at getting books off internet archive that I’m probably just fumbling around like an idiot

@aetris @mossygreen

You both seem to be far more knowledgeable about punk than I. Although I was in the fringe because of artistic affinity and location:

I saw Deborah Harry and the Ramones at CBGB, because I loved the music and because I lived 2 blocks away (during the final era when a poor person could have a grand time living in Manhattan.)

I loved the music but didn’t chase the culture of it because I was busy doing other things I suppose

Although due to in part to my fanatic roommate I must have seen the talking heads live something like 50 times during those years

But I don’t know the stories behind the lives and musical trends so much, so these books are just the thing!

@f00l As I am currently on a roadtrip in New England I will leave it to @mossygreen to talk Punk as I was planning to educate myself based on her recommendations anyhoo. Yes, being cheap I am using the Archive’s dreadful pdf interface to read the books but I THINK they have a way of reading a text version? If worst comes to worst there is always the public library! You can get a lot of things interlibrary loan…

@aetris @mossygreen

I mentioned the Beatles book as a “this is interesting” to a friend. Who said that sounded great they would buy a copy from book finder or some place like that and let me read it

So I hope that happens.
: )

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So when you use the archive for non downloadable books you read a pdf using a browser window?

Do you read using a desktop/laptop, tablet, or phone?

I was trying using a phone. Ouch

Plus no popping the file into a good e-reader app for the “read aloud” option.

Still it’s nice that the book is available online for the masses in some form somewhere.

@f00l I’m using a laptop. It probably isn’t pdfs, the site has a “viewer” and the books display as a kind of scan. I would imagine reading them on a phone is hard! I recommend reading them on a monitor, it’s a fantastic service.

@f00l I guess if you’re really into The Beatles the Williams book would be worth owning but I would take his account with several grains of salt, apparently there are other versions of the events. I recommend borrowing a laptop and reading it online!

@speediedelivery

I’m holding off on doing likewise for a while. Just to see if he feels like publishing something someday.

@ChompyGator I keep forgetting I bought the audiobook set. Next long drive.

@ChompyGator @sammydog01

Yeah I’ve got Murderbot on my list. Loaded on the phone and waiting for the impulse.

@ChompyGator @sammydog01

Re Murderbot series.

For audiobook lovers there are two recorded versions for many of the books.

One version is a normal audiobook.

The other is a “full cast dramatization”

A number of popular books especially in the SF genre seem to get this treatment where there are two audio versions: one dramatized, one read straight.

I’m probably going with the normal audiobook version when I do my listening but I might try a sample of the dramatized version sometimes those are very good sometimes they’re kind of awful

@ChompyGator @sammydog01

Re murderbot

Listened to the first one.

Short. Like 4 hours Which is nice for the 1st book of a series.

Quite liked it. About starting on #2.

@f00l

Pretend to be COMPETENT

not pretend to be confident.

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Thanks siri!

Tried to edit original but missed the 5 min window.

@f00l

Pergsia I should add that Biden was very likely seriously and continuously lied to by family and by 4-6 closest advisors.

Before the debate went so badly he was losing in the polls but was kind of theoretically within recovery distance

After his terrible performance in the June debate his poll numbers just went down and down and down

Many people who cared about him and who cared about his career tried to tell him or his staff what he needed to do

And what do you needed to do was get out and do a bunch of town halls that were completely unscripted so that people could see that he could think on his feet and evaluate things and come back with a comprehensible answer

These were never scheduled it’s likely that Biden wasn’t capable of doing one by that time

But in personal conversations and personal correspondence with all sorts of people he kept saying he was ahead in the polls that the polls I’ve seen show me leading and I’m the only one who can win against Trump

As far as anyone knows there were no such polls.

Various serious people in Congress asked for what polls Biden was being shown and demanded that he be shown the public polls that they and everybody else were seeing

These people never got a response from biden’s staff about what polls he was seeing or what he was being told about the polls

And they never got confirmation that Biden was being shown the very depressing polls that everybody else was seeing

It’s sort of like maybe in the last few months when Biden could have still claimed to be mentally capable of the job in some sense or other he decided he wanted to run or shortly after he lost the ability to perform at all he decided he wanted to run

And this was an ego choice based in part upon his personality and probably in part upon his inability to comprehend what was going on in the world and what was going on with his image and also to comprehend his seriously declining capacity

Once he is communicated that choice it seems that his staff and his family essentially created a bubble around him where he could never be confronted with his own complete lack of ability to perform and he could lie to himself about it and people around him lied to him about it

Or so it appears obviously none of us will ever have access to the personal conversations he had with his family or with the four five staff members who were closest to him

It it appears that he had this delusion that he was still competent and that he could still win and instead of anyone talking reality to him they simply fed the delusion

And they went to amazing lengths to keep everyone else away from him including other staff including the cabinet including Congressional leaders

When someone who had the power to demand a meeting and get a meeting did so then his staff would put it off as long as possible and then set up a meeting at his best time of day usually by zoom instead of in person or by telephone

And even though the other person had been promised a serious conversation the staff would simply cut everything short after a very few minutes

In several of these conversations the other side couldn’t prove that Biden was reading his responses from a teleprompter but they had that impression

Then if anybody said they were going to call for him to step back and to be replaced then the Biden loyalist went insanely on the attack including releasing all sorts of negative stuff to the press without attribution

And because the Biden people were keeping Biden so protected all the people thought he was probably incompetent they hadn’t seen enough of him to be sure so they were a bit less forceful about their fears of his State of mind than they would have been if they’d been allowed to get closer

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The history of presidential deception about health issues that are serious is a long one we only probably know a little of it

JFK outright lied to the press about Addison’s disease and some of the other problems he had

Eisenhower and his staff tried insanely hard to keep news of his heart attacks from the public

Reagan’s dementia was probably visible in his last couple of years in office although he wasn’t as out of it as Biden appears to have been I guess
And Reagan’s family and staff protected him to the point that there was no public awareness of it or very little

FDR was known to have had polio and to need braces to stand and he arranged to not be photographed while attempting to walk and usually to not be photographed in his wheelchair or so that the wheelchair would not be visible

But he and his family withheld from the public the knowledge of his very severe circulatory problems and he then died of a sudden brain bleed

But I assume that serious health issues may have afflicted all the presidents who were much over 70 years old in one way or another and they all judged it either personally or politically expedient to keep the lid on that

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Unfortunately for Biden his deterioration was very fast and in the end it was very visible and the fact that his staff and he colluded in covering it up or covering up political and public awareness of it and denied it for so long means that his legacy is going to be that cover-up in those lies

Biden has had a long distinguished career as a legislature and then as a vice president and president

And he will be remembered for this deception against the American people

@f00l Looks like I own the audiobook, maybe after the murder bot ones.

@sammydog01

PHM (as they call it in Reddit) really gets great and incredible as the story goes along.

Don’t quit early. : )

People love this effing book.

I think maybe soon to be a film maybe with Ryan gosling I’m not sure