Nice people thread 2 - now even nicer

lemonjelly

wageslave wrote: »

I read the Pierrepoint book and was sort of impressed how banal it was.

Got up, hung somebody........

I can't imagine a victorian executioner is any different

Your reading list is very "young" Lemon.

What age are you?

Eyewitness Auschwitz, which I read very recently is very similar ws. Part of me was shcked at the matter of fact manner in which the deaths of 40,000 was treated. Turn the page, the war machinery cranks up and 400,000 are slaughtered.

How is my reading list young?:D

I'm 35 btw.

misskool

vivatifosi wrote: »

Well you know what needs to be said and given my job it has to be me that says it.

That's what libraries are for misskool.

I have checked the online catalogue and they don't have it. And I have no idea how to request them to buy it

wageslave

lemonjelly wrote: »

Eyewitness Auschwitz, which I read very recently is very similar ws. Part of me was shcked at the matter of fact manner in which the deaths of 40,000 was treated. Turn the page, the war machinery cranks up and 400,000 are slaughtered.

How is my reading list young?:D

I'm 35 btw.

Please dont take this the wrong way but it is like you just discovered injustice.

And you are trying desperately to work it out.

You certainly wont find answers reading "Why I did dreadful things for a wage" by average working class bloke

vivatifosi

wageslave wrote: »

Please dont take this the wrong way but it is like you just discovered injustice.

And you are trying desperately to work it out.

You certainly wont find answers reading "Why I did dreadful things for a wage" by average working class bloke

To be fair to lj, his reading list is not untypical of that of a white male aged 30-50. Men tend to read far more non-fiction than women and true crime is one of the most popular categories, along with sport, politics/economics/money and things that move (trains, aeroplanes etc).

silvercar

My holiday reading this Summer:

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Superfreakonomics

LydiaJ

silvercar wrote: »

Superfreakonomics

I had that for Christmas last year, along with its predecessor. If you liked those, I'd recommend Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.

wageslave

silvercar wrote: »

My holiday reading this Summer:

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Superfreakonomics

She wrote that time travel weepy didn't she. Her Fearful Symmetry is about the dreadful duo. You have to plough half way through the book before the terrible twins abandon matching ankle socks.

Plus Niffengegger is a ginger.

I am not really into modern novels

vivatifosi

LydiaJ wrote: »

I had that for Christmas last year, along with its predecessor. If you liked those, I'd recommend Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.

That's on my to read list too. I read "The Tipping Point" a few years back and Blink has been on my radar for a while.

vivatifosi

silvercar wrote: »

My holiday reading this Summer:

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Superfreakonomics

Do you belong to a reading group silvercar? They are all very book club type books. If it isn't something you've considered you might enjoy it.

GDB2222

"Shooting an Elephant
by George Orwell
New Writing, Autumn 1936



[SIZE=+2]I[/SIZE]N Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically—and secretly, of course—I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos—all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in sæcula sæculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty."