I read two books!

I read Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead a while ago because Dave suggested it.  It was great so I read the sequel, Crook Manifesto, while on vacation.  It was great too, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, other times chillingly evil.  Both books read like screenplays and Dave said Netflix should turn them into a series.  He's right.  We're currently figuring out who to cast but we agree on Eddie Murphy for the lead.

via GIPHY

I polished Crook Manifesto off in two days and followed it up with Underground Railroad, another SoD (and maybe OBXD) recommendation (from 2016, I need to keep up).  It was not at all laugh-out-loud funny but it was often chillingly evil.  I am not eager to write about literature given the much greater qualifications of the Daves on staff here.  However, I am comfortable opining that Underground Railroad is an incredible piece of writing.  Each chapter is either a new setting with a new vibe or an eight page backstory of a secondary character.  The main character rides the underground railroad (which in this novel is literally a railroad under the ground) to different destinations.  As the first stationmaster tells her, "The problem is that one destination may be more to our liking than another .... You won't know what waits above until you pull in."  Sometimes it reads like Brave New World, other times it's like Blood Meridian, there's a chapter like The Lottery through the eyes of Anne Frank, a smattering of Sula and maybe Beloved at the beginning, then it feels like Animal Farm for a few minutes and then it hits your stomach with a crowbar at the end.  But throughout it's a horror movie, just nonstop dystopian misery.  It's a must-read.

Allllllllllllllll Aboard...THE DONKEY RAILROAD

Sometimes my work-related google alerts serve up gems, such as this:

Bygone Muncie: History of local mass transit, from the 'Donkey Railroad' to MITS buses

To alleviate the growing distances for workers, the city chartered the Muncie City Railway Company in 1887 to build a trolley system. Two years later, MCRC built a few lines connecting nearby suburbs to downtown Muncie. This first system was pejoratively called a Donkey Railroad, so named because the trolleys were powered by inefficient and very loud "donkey" steam engines. Munsonians were quick to reject it. The Muncie Daily News even joked in 1890 that when the steam streetcar made its way up the tracks, “people fled in all directions. Many of our oldest citizens thought the courthouse was coming up the street on wheels.”

zman has already called shotgun...er, conductor...on The Jackass Express

Not the actual donkey railroad in question