When we were living in Spain, I would go to the library to work. They had an old card catalog tucked off to the side, and by chance I opened it to a random location. The first card I saw was Toole's Confederacy of Dunces.
There was also a little book kiosk in one of the parks near us, only opened up a few hours a week. But among other books, stacked against the window was La conjura de los necios. Same book, in Spanish.
Not a lot of people ask, but I think it's still possible. When I first tried it, it took awhile but I finally succeeded.
I use the library for my research. I got a faculty member to sponsor me, so I also have Internet access (sort of... you now need a VPN to access the e-collections off campus). But I have to renew for that every year.
Jim Ross...BUSINESS IS ABOUT TO PICKUP!
An interesting note on that, something some of you already know. The reason the Cajuns were such great assets wasn't just because they were fluent in French.
It's also because, even though they were three-and-a-half centuries removed from the Anjou and Poitou regions of France, with very minimal training (e.g., if I remember correctly, the Cajuns say barre la porte, literally 'bar the door,' but the French in that area say barre à clé 'bar it with a key', the result of newer technologies), they could drop them in the middle of those two départements and the locals couldn't tell they were American.
For those of you who dabble in languages, that is really weird. The languages should have begun diverging, but they didn't.
Just finished "Hillbilly Elegy" by Congressman J.D. Vance. A pretty gripping story of a kid born into a poor, country family who worked his way out of it into Ohio State University and then Yale Law School. A real American Dream story.
For a book with a similar story line, check out Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin'. Man, can he write; there are just stunning passages throughout (including a heart-breaking story he filed from New Orleans, an interview with the mother of a child who had died from a stray bullet in a gunfight).
There's a reason he won a Pulitzer. Great read.
Brian Shannon's Maximizing Trading Gains with Anchored Vwap - a real barn burner I tell ya
One Second After is in this same vein. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...nav_sb_ss_1_16
Alas, Babylon is probably the standard bearer for this genre IMO
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