27 September 2020

annus horribilis, cont'd.

at this point, i just want it all to end — "i would kill for a good coma right now," to quote moira rose — short of that, all i can do is mental chants and a shitload of reading to drown out the awfulness of what is happening to our country — i've given more money to politics than i ever have and could easily be talked into giving away the rest of it if it would get us out of this nightmare —

regardless of how the election comes off, what will remain is the stark realization that so many people i thought i knew, including the majority of my biological family, are, at bottom, bigoted racist fools, and  hypocrites besides, to whom i have given the benefit of the doubt all these years but who weren't and aren't worth the effort — i understand too well how the nazis were able to destroy germany and fear that we're watching another episode of that here, probably without gas chambers and what not, but certainly with a goal of continued white, christian, male supremacy in service to mammon and his incorporated minions

 i also understand how some old people just get tired of it all 

in the meantime, i read, most lately these, with parenthetical publication dates and a 3-star rating system:

William N. Morgan, Pre-Columbian Architecture in Eastern North America (1999)

***Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent (2020)

***Edward Ball, Life of a Klansman (2020)

***Eric Cervini, The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America (2020)

*William E. Wallace, Michelangelo, God’s Architect (2019)

Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (2020)

Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin (2011)

*Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Last Divine Office: Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries (2009)

T. M. Devine. The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed, 1600-1900 (2019)

Ernle Bradford, The Great Betrayal: The Great Siege of Constantinople (2014)

*Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (2007)

Alistair Moffat, Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms (1999)

*Alistair Moffat, Remembering Charles Rennie McIntosh (1998)

Alistair Moffat, Before Scotland: The Story of Scotland Before History (2005)

*Alistair Moffat, To the Island of Tides: A Journey to Lindisfarne (2019)

Alistair Moffat, The Faded Map: Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (2010)

James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1666 (2015)

**Matthew Kneale, Rome: A History in Seven Sackings (2019)

***David Coles, Chromatopia: An Illustrated History of Color (2019)

Alistair Moffat, The Highland Clans (2010)

*Simon Thurley, Whitehall Palace: An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments, 1240-1690 (1999)

David Zucchino, Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy (2020)

*Peter Ackroyd, Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day (2019)

Peter Ackroyd, Tudors: The History of England from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I (2014)

Peter Ackroyd, Dominion: The History of England from the Battle of Waterloo to Victoria's Diamond Jubilee (2019)

Peter Ackroyd, Revolution: The History of England from the Battle of the Boyne to the Battle of Waterloo (2017)

Peter Ackroyd, Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (2015)

Peter Ackroyd, Civil War: The History of England, Volume III (2015)

***Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2020)