Here are some interesting articles that I have stumbled across or was suggested by other sites that recommend long or interesting reads and I just want to share as well. Also, hopefully they will take your mind off Coronavirus. Enjoy!

I came across this particular read on Longreads.com (not sponsored, highly recommend supporting). This story was such a beautiful and visceral read for me. My grandmother had died with dementia, and if I am honest, I hid away from her. I wanted to hold onto my last memory of her before she fell into the mists that fogged her mind.

Excerpt:

At a press conference shortly after his wife’s death, Ron Adkins read from Janet’s suicide note: “I have decided for the following reasons to take my own life. This is a decision taken in a normal state of mind and is fully considered. I have Alzheimer’s disease and do not want to let it progress any further. I do not want to put my family or myself through the agony of this terrible disease.”

This read was one of those reads that just sucked me in. Honestly, I didn’t think I would have been so engrossed with the underbelly of the American sitting room from the perspective of “the cable guy”, and yet I was. Here I am imploring anyone who reads these posts to Read.This.Story.

Excerpt:

The one that comes to mind now is the anti-gay lobbyist whose office was lined with framed appreciation from Focus on the Family, and pictures with Pat Buchanan and Jerry Falwell, but whose son’s room was painted pink and littered with Barbies. The hypocrite’s son said he was still a boy. He just thought his sundress was really cute. I agreed, told him I love daisies, and he beamed. His father thanked me, and I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. How the fuck do you actively work to ensure the world’s a more dangerous place for your beautiful little kid? But I didn’t ask him that. I just stood and glared at him until he looked away. I needed the job. I assumed his kid would grow up to hate him. 

This read was a welcome change from most of the coronavirus info-overload that I have been gorging on since January; obviously, the information wasn’t at the peak it has been over the last number of weeks. Anyway I digress, this article on sounds in movies was a welcome distraction, and I hope that it will be one for you. In an aside the Guardian does some great long reads and if you don’t have the time and like audio I absolutely recommend their audio reads you can find them here.

Excerpt:

It is a central principle of sound editing that people hear what they are conditioned to hear, not what they are actually hearing. The sound of rain in movies? Frying bacon. Car engines revving in a chase scene? It’s partly engines, but what gives it that visceral, gut-level grist is lion roars mixed in.

An interesting read on anger. Anger for me is something I have always from to go against for the reasons brought up in this next read. I always find in anger I lash out in ways that, to me, feel like it wasn’t me. I always question how I got to that point and why I had allowed myself to get there, the point of lashing out verbally or physically.

Seneca thought that anger is a temporary madness, and that even when justified, we should never act on the basis of it because, though ‘other vices affect our judgment, anger affects our sanity: others come in mild attacks and grow unnoticed, but men’s minds plunge abruptly into anger. … Its intensity is in no way regulated by its origin: for it rises to the greatest heights from the most trivial beginnings.

Book that I am currently read is NAMA Land by Frank Connolly.

NAMA land is about how Ireland after the fallout of the 2008 banking crises and the set up of the National Asset Management Agency. Nama “bought” €74 billion of loans from the banks for €31.8 billion and was given the job of getting back for the benighted taxpayer at least as much as it had paid for them. In the process, of course, it was quietly accepted that more than €30 billion of public money was being vaporised. 

Categories: Rob reads

Tags: #blogger, #habits, #reading, #writer, currentreads