The Myth of Capitalism - Jonathan Tepper

 A book that take down the myth of the American capitalist system as a system of competition and constant renewal.  He outlines how the actual American economy has become both monopolistic and monopsonistic with a small number of companies controlling huge areas of the economy, setting prices, wages and even what suppliers will be paid.  Innovation and new company creation are steadily slowing.  Smaller firms are more and more swallowed up by a few big ones.  The end result is lower wages for everyone, the disappearance of family farms and businesses and higher prices for everyone too.  This is actually the driving force behind growing income inequality:  wages shrink, prices go up, large corporations and big share holders grab more and more of the wealth. 

Since slavery the basic American economic model has been highly exploitative.  Then came colonialism/imperialism on the world stage.  Now they are back consuming their own people to get rich.  

Nothing is done because money runs politics.  Congress works for the wealthy shareholders and corporations by granting monopolies, increasing regulation that makes it harder for small companies to get started and changing laws that benefit large companies and the wealthy.  He underlines the importance of how government advisors and top administrators move back and forth between the private and public sector.  

This problem is particularly important in the U.S.  Canada and Europe are far more stringent in applying anti-trust and anti-monopoly rules.  The U. S. has given up on this.  

This book explains why Google and other large tech companies have been having legal problems and being fined large sums of money in Europe whereas nothing is happening in the U.S.  

Worth rereading for the details,

Circe - Madeline Miller

 An excellent story based on Greek mythology.  Most of the characters come from Greek mythology or Homer.  She brings real human insight to both the ancient stories and the characters she works with.  It is a novel about vanity, about finding one's own identity, about mortality and death.  It also has things to say about some modern issues - our worship of fame, power and celebrity culture; the self-centred, self-indulgent life, our desire for everything to come easily.  

This is the first book where I actually feel Greek mythology has come alive.  She uses the characters from mythology but she bends them around the meaningful story and themes she wants to write about.  

Il Treno dei bambini - Viola Ardone

 Libro eccellente che racconta la storia vera di un gruppo di bambini da Napoli mandato a Bologna durante l'inverno dopo la guerra per togliergli della povertà e della fame.  E la storia di chi vive senza un senso chiaro d'identità tra due mondi.  Il personnaggio principale scopre un mondo diverso quando vive colla famiglia a Bologna e non può piu tornare alla vita stretta e dura della sua madre a Napoli.  Lei anche lo respinge nel senso che non può accettare quel nuovo mondo che il suo bambino ha scoperto.  In quel senso è anche un libro su come la gente  può tenersi prigioniero nel sua propria vita e idee.  

Una storia emotiva ma non eccessivamente - va bene con il tema dei bambini.  

The Scarlet Gospels - Clive Barker

 A disappointing read.  His best work seems to have been the Abarat Trilogy.  Characters are stereotypical and lack convincing depth.  The action is repetitive in its graphic description of endless gory violence.  The storyline has potential, some creativity but the stylistic weaknesses undermine it too much.  

Steps - Jerzy Kosinski

 A collection of short texts with little or no connections.  Like fragments.  You can see the themes I saw in the film version of his book, Painted Birds - sadistic violence, violent sex, anger and resentment,  revenge.  He writes well but the whole things seems like voyeurism or thrill seeking by the comfortable and well-off.  Jean Genet, on the other hand, is the real thing (though his popularity is this same kind of voyeurism on the part of his readers).

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe

 A reread from long ago.  A portrait of a lost era that quickly disappeared into the maw of commercialization of everything.  Kesey was a strange character - a bit of a prophet with a vision of a society with a freer, more open mind.  It is interesting that his later message was to move beyond acid and the other drugs, to find that open mind state without the drugs.  Of course, this message fell flat.  For most the attraction was the thrill.  

Also, always the same old things:  leader worship, in crowd and out crowd, conformity pressure.  The alternative vision that mirrors the same old same old....

Sadly, ultimately, the whole thing ended rather seedily - hiding from the law, seamy Mexico, in-fighting, even a bit of megalomania and paranoia.  A failed prophecy and a failed prophet.  

Wind/Pinball - Haruki Murakami

 Two of Murakami's first works, both novellas.  Interesting from a development perspective.  One of them (I forget which) is basically an autobiographical piece about his life right around when he decided to write novels, and also an explanation of the completely random way in which he decided to become a writer, and his first steps in finding his own particular style (turns out he first started to try writing in English and liked the simplified, pared down result, which he then translated into a writing technique in Japanese)

The WEIRDEST People in the World - Joseph Henrich

 A potentially fascinating book exploring the psychological and conceptual differences between the Western European psyche and culture and that of the rest of the world, and how this helps explain the rise and dominance of the West.  He looks at all kinds of things - individualism vs. social and familial integration,  social cohesion vs. individual perception and judgement, the locus of causality and guilt, and many others.

One interesting point that he makes is how the Catholic Church revolutionized social relations in the West by forbidding cousin marriage, thereby forcing people to reach out beyond their immediate familial circles to develop a wider web of relations.

Unfortunately, the book delves into the background, research and experiments a bit too deeply and it begins to drag.  I would like to read a version with the main themes and conclusions and a simple summary of the background related to each.  Because of this quality, I couldn't finish the book.

Try again, reading only the beginning and end of each section for the main points and themes.

Even the Dead - Benjamin Black

 As per usual

The Night Manager - John LeCarre

 Another great book.  This time the focus is the international trade in illegal weapons and its links to the narco-mafia of Central and South America and also to the big banks of Europe and the U. S.

Holy Orders - Benjamin Black

 Same "forces of evil".  Same good guys...

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami

 Fairly straight-forward plot - an early life trauma, its effects and the final quest to untie the knots.  Perhaps a look at how great a distance there can be between our memory or image of reality and the actual reality itself.

Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami

 An earlier book by Murakami.  Like all his books, the plot is continually unraveling out in left field somewhere.   A mix of daily grit and occult with some parallels to Greek mythology thrown in - Hades, trips to the land of death.  The characters are unusual well- developed.  Especially the old man, Nakata, grows on you - in his mental simplicity, he has almost a Zen character.   The nominal theme would seem to be about the search for identity and the sense of self, but there are other threads - nature of time and death, the act of reading, the shallowness of most social constructs we live by.  

Worth a reread.

A Death in Summer - Benjamin Black

 Much the same

The Lemur - Benjamin Black

Like all of Black's books, not bad.  Evokes an older Dublin.  Some Irish social criticism, but always the same - corrupt church in league with corrupt politicians and criminal gangs.  It is like the same book over and over with subtle plot changes.  Rankin's work is far more varied, and his characters are much more complex. 

However, they do pass the time. 

Elegy for April - Benjamin Black

 As usual.