Bout of Books 38 Wrap-Up

 I had a lot of other things going on this week, so didn't even really do the photo challenges the way I normally do. I did make progress on things I was reading. 

I finished The Pallbearers Club which I liked a lot. I saw on Goodreads that it was very polarizing, and I was definitely on the side of the enjoyers. As a Gen-Xer who was into punk when I was in junior high and highschool, I'm the target audience for it. 

I am almost finished with Winant's The Next Shift, which is excellent, and I made progress in the audiobook of Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of The Dead which got off to a slow start, but has become more appealing in the most recent chapters. I wonder if I would have liked this book better to read than to listen to. 

I didn't get much further in A Death on W Street. I think I already learned most of what interested me about this book by hearing the author interviewed by David Isikoff for one of his podcasts. 

I started reading one new book, in honor of Trump's Fulton County indictment and booking: Mark Leibovich's Thank you for your Servitude. I read a significant portion of it while preparing for my first colonoscopy, and I've gotta say that it was the perfect pairing.  

If anyone ever creates a listicle of recommended books for a variety of medical procedures and their respective recoveries, books about Trump and his sycophantic supporters are appropriate for any procedure involving hours on the toilet. 

In honor of the Next Shift, which I hope to finish over the next hour, here's the Replacements 'Take Me Down to the Hospital." Bob Stinson, who would be kicked out of the band later that year because of his out of control drug addiction, sounds amazing on this live recording from Maxwell's from Feb 1986. I remember that I missed a chance to see the 'Mats at the Pier in Raleigh the following year. It's one of the great regrets of my life since they were one of my favorite bands, and I didn't finally see them live until they were doing one of those reunion tours and played Shaky Knees in Atlanta. I did meet Bob Stinson in Minneapolis in the early 1990s, a few years before he died of a heroin overdose. What a sad fuckin' story. I remember that period in the late 80s-early 90s when so many people in the alt-rock scene were doing heroin - it was terrible, nothing romantic about it.