Counterfeit Kingdom by Holly Pivec and Douglas Geivett. It's a tale of the New Apostolic Reformation, from an evangelical Christian perspective. The NAR is a underreported cultic group. Scholars who study the movement get frustrated because it sounds fringe, but it's not fringe. There are at least 3.5 million people in the movement. They were involved in January 6. It's a horrifying, but necessary read.
Being and Having: An Existential Journal, which I read for a class in college 42 years ago by French philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Interestingly, the parts I underlined back then make little sense to me know, and much of what I didn’t underline has me thinking, “hey, this is interesting.” Not sure what to make of that.
Slow Productivity - Cal Newport Newport's latest foray into better ways to do knowledge work, this doesn't cover much new ground for me because he's covered much of this on his blog and podcast leading up to the book being published. The premise is pretty simple, Cal suggest three basic principles for doing that are an updated take on his original ideas of Do Less, Do Better, and Know Why. Here he expands those into: Do Fewer Things Work at a Natural Pace Obsess Over Quality He covers everything from John McPhee laying on a table and looking at trees as he starts trying to figure out the structure of his next long form New Yorker article in the 70s to McPhee's detailed system of note taking and organization that led to the actual writing of the award winning articles. One fascinating story in the book is about Jewel, who turned down a $1 million bonus while she was still homeless, taking the time to raise the quality of her art to the point that she could become a generational star without the pressures of a record label making demands because of their investment in her. This is a really good one for anyone you know who can't figure out what to focus on, how to cull as much of the unnecessary from your schedule as possible, and how to deliver work of such quality that you earn more career capital to be traded for freedom and flexibility.
Augustus by John Williams. This novel won the National Book Award. It's an epistolary novel about the Roman emperor Augustus. I read I, Claudius by Graves in junior high. Williams has been read on here before. Should be an interesting read.
Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike – David Beresford " “He may seem the fool who has given his all, by the wise men of the world; but it was the apparent fools who changed the course of Irish history.” — Patrick Pearse
My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future which is more of a memoir than I expected, but still pretty interesting. Some of the people she mentions I've heard of (Charley Pride, for example) but many I haven't. The most prominent contribution to country music is as songwriters (author Alice Randall herself is an awarding winning writer of country songs, as well as an English professor at Vanderbilt): for example, a song I remember hearing on the radio as a kid, Johnny PayCheck's "She's All I Got" was written by Jimmy "Swamp Dogg" Williams and Gary "US Bonds."