Did I hang ten on my vacation? I actually hung 14 — fourteen books, that is, as I tell Larry O’Connor today in our latest episode of Off the Beaten Path! Larry and I talk about the joy of reading, along with the joy of not working, as well as what’s coming up on his show tonight. We also discuss the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and why the revisionists have already been completely contradicted.
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Welcome back to our VIP video series “Off the Beaten Path,” featuring my friend Larry O’Connor! The Townhall columnist and Salem News Channel host starts off our week by discussing stories and ideas that may fly under our radar, in culture, politics, sports, and more. Plus, Larry previews tonight’s SNC show!
A few highlights:
- “When I was a kid, I used to just devour books and yeah, even as an adult I would devour books,” I tell Larry. “I rarely get an opportunity to read substantially. I mean occasionally I do, and there are ways that I can carve time out for that. But especially over the last ten or eleven months that I’ve been managing editor here, there just really simply hasn’t been a lot of time for that.”
- On Asimov’s books, Larry and I discuss their relevance, post-pandemic. “I found it to be the most chilling thing during the presidential election,” Larry says, “when someone asked [Biden], How would you do things differently than Trump with the pandemic? And he said, Easy, I would just step aside and let Anthony Fouci have the podium and he’ll make all the decisions. Like, what are you talking about? This doesn’t let the scientist make all the decisions. There’s a reason why we have elected representatives and people that are in charge.”
- “The science becomes a theocracy,” I note, and point out that Asimov predicts that in his Foundation series as well. “At one point it becomes a religious belief, and that really resonated for me after the pandemic.”
For those interested, here’s the book list. I had never read any of these before, just to be clear. I’d recommend all but the Grisham novel, which I found well written but didn’t really have any sort of satisfying conclusion. You might find a couple of these in regular book stores, but a few will have to be located in used book stores:
- Downfall by Richard Frank
- Chernobyl by Sergii Plokhy
- A Time for Mercy by John Grisham
- The King’s Speech by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi
- Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood by Danny Trejo (Audible)
- My Happy Days in Hollywood by Garry Marshall (Audible)
- Filthy Rich Politicians by Matt Lewis (Audible)
- I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
- Foundation by Isaac Asimov
- Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov
- Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- The Fourth Side of the Triangle by Ellery Queen
- The Egyptian Cross Mystery by Ellery Queen
