IMWAYR 1/30/17; I haven’t read what I’m supposed to.

“Mankind barely noticed when the concept of massively organized information quietly emerged to become a means of social control, a weapon of war, and a roadmap for group destruction” (Black 20)

My friend suggested that instead of blogging about books today, I should blog about the TV show I’m watching on Netflix right now, since I am technically reading the subtitles. I was going to sadly  dismiss this as impractical, but then I remembered that this is my blog, and I can do what I want! So that’s what I’m going to do.

I am currently watching the Netflix original TV show “Morning Call“. I initially watched it because I didn’t know that Netflix made Japanese Drama, and given Netflix’s track record with their original shows, my interest was immediately piqued. So far it has been more or less what I expected; a dumb (in a good way) fun show. That said, the existence of the male protagonist is very annoying; he is a jerk, plain and simple. But however obnoxious he may be, the female protagonist is quick to forget, even though one of her defining personality traits is that she is one of the few people who can resist the male protagonist’s “charm”. Buuuuut that is pretty much par for the course for a japanese comic book adaptation, so whatever, the show is still fun.

Moving on to the point of this blog, I’m currently reading two books, neither of which are actually for this class. They are Tom Clancy‘s The Hunt For Red October (page 325) , and Edwin Black‘s IBM And the Holocaust: The Strategicc Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (page 187). I’ve been reading Red October for well over a month now, but I keep on getting distracted by other books, so the going has been pretty slow, but I’ve been enjoying it. I’ve picked up IBM And the Holocaust more recently after it was mentioned to me by a friend of mine. It’s appeal is certainly less broad than that of Red October; if the idea of complicated international legal and financial falsehoods being maintained by horrible people doesn’t sound interesting to you, you probably won’t enjoy the book.

The book that I am supposed to be reading is The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, but I haven’t started that yet, so I don’t have very much to say about it. From what I have heard, it is an extremely contentious book, with reactions about evenly split between loving it, and finding it profoundly moving, and hating it. So we’ll see how that goes.

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