Maggot Moon

7/10

Love, Dishonor, Lie, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff

7/10

Black hole

8/10

The Third book has been on my to-read shelf for a while. It is the second choice for the retirement community book club that I'm leading. The book is The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

The book was well written but it offered nothing fresh. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 so I expected it to be really good but it actually just felt really slopped together. More old-man-musings. Can we not appreciate anything else as literature? Come on people.
3/5

The second book I read is for the new bookclub I am leading. I'm getting paid $100 per session to lead it! Can you believe that? The book was Thomas Jefferson, Rachel, and Me. Quite a title, right?

The book was yet another musings-of-an-old-man who played the game I love to play- "Imagine someone from the past is transported into the present." That "someone" just happens to be Thomas Jefferson. While the book wasn't very good - it was well written but the plot was just tedious - I did learn a few things about Mr. Jefferson that I didn't previously know.
2/5

It's a new year and I promise to get back on the bandwagon. This year I have already read three books!

Trance:Formation of America by Cathy O'Brien and Mark Philips was incredibly entertaining. Riff with typos, about 80% rape, with questionable content, Cathy O'Brien recounts her alleged time spent as a mind-controlled slave in the MKUltra project. I learned a lot about mind control though and feel much more informed after reading this book - even if it is hogwash.

Genius by Agamben

While I haven't finished a book in a month and a half, I've been reading - here and there, throwing books across the room, forgetting about them as they slowly slink deeper into the shadows beneath my bed. The poet Dan Beachy-Quick recommended I read this essay after "Self-Reliance." What I have gleaned so far is that Genius is a god, a ghost, a possessor who simply happens to appear. One cannot claim his name, only his influence.

Quotes
Passion is the
rope kept taut between ourselves and Genius, the rope on which life, the tightrope
walker, balances.

With time Genius divides in two (si sdoppia) and begins to assume an ethical hue.
The sources, perhaps due to the infl uence of the Greek theme of the two demons
inside every man, speak of a good genius (genio) and a bad genius, of a white
(albus) Genius and of a black (ater) one.