Breast Expansion Archive Forum

Miscellaneous => Off-Topic & Testing => Topic started by: rtpoe on February 13, 2003, 09:22:13 PM

Title: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on February 13, 2003, 09:22:13 PM
Just wondering...

We're such an erudite and diverse bunch, I thought it might be interesting to see what we've all been reading lately.

For me, my most recent good book worth recommending is "The Savage Wars of Peace" by Max Boot (yes, that's his real name - he's a Senior Fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations). The book is mostly a history of all the little conflicts the U.S. has been involved in - from the actions against North African pirates in the early 1800's to the actions in Nicaragua in the 1920's.

He makes a very strong case that we have to be able to fight "small wars" like these just as much as we should be ready for the Big Wars. And we have to make sure we don't fight a Big War when a small one will do (as was the case in Vietnam).

So what have you read lately?

rtpoe  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: nick_caesar on February 13, 2003, 09:31:16 PM
Heh, mine is not quite so erudite.. I've just finished re-reading the Lord of the Rings saga myself. I'd forgotten most of it at this point, and wanted to go back and see how closely the movies had followed it after all. I've read the first book several times, the second and third not so frequently. They were much better than I remembered.

Yours sounds like a good read, rtpoe .. I may look for that one.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Catch on February 13, 2003, 09:37:03 PM
Time Enough for Love - Robert Heinlein
Re-read for the third time.

Anything by REX STOUT. Too many to list, but try the Nero Wolfe mysteries. There's only about 72 novels and shorter stories.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on February 13, 2003, 10:27:08 PM
Two collections of essays by Jonathan Ames... my thoughts on it here: http://forum.bearchive.com//showflat.php?Cat=&Board=UBB5&Number=66374&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: nick_caesar on February 13, 2003, 10:28:16 PM
Heh, I'm just getting started on Time Enough For Love, Catch.. funny coincidence there. Parts of it I like, parts of it seem a bit repetitious; haven't made it all the way through yet so I can't say where it would rank on my list of favorite Heinlein's just yet. Nonetheless, an entertaining read, as only the Grand Master can offer.

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zasha on February 13, 2003, 11:05:16 PM
Harlequin Romances, hands down the finest reading EVER!!!


(Now pulling tongue from cheek...) I'm currently in the middle of JFK, UFO's and Elvis:  And other Conspiracy Theories by Richard Belzer (yes, THAT Richard Belzer).  An excellent read.

(I suspect you'd really like it, Catch...)

I greatly enjoy the semi-humorous crime-drama series with the Native American elements by Tony Hillerman (no, NOT that Tony Hillerman).  A surprisingly good book that I read recently is Have A Nice Day!, a semi-autobiography of professional wrestler Mick Foley (aka Mankind, Dude Love, Cactus Jack, etc.).

My husband enjoys the occasional Nero Wolfe, Tom Clancy, or Dale Brown, but his favorite series is the Spenser  series.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MunchWolf on February 14, 2003, 12:41:59 AM
Let's see .. the last book I read ... don't recall the title ... but it was about a guy named Mr. Fern (maybe) ... and he painted his house purple ... I think it was called Mr. Fern's Purple House .. but don't quote me on that ...

-Munch "Hey ... when there is a 5-year old in residence ... you tend to be curious about what they read" Wolf
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Grayface on February 14, 2003, 06:09:21 AM
Area 51: The Truth, by Robert Doherty. It's pure candy, real fun and easy to read series. The book I read before was Souls In The Great Machine, by Sean McMullen.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Scarab on February 14, 2003, 12:13:22 PM
I love oriental fantasy... I'm now reding though Legend of the Five Rings Clan War book series...

The Scorpion, The Phoenix by Stephen D Sullivan
The Dragon, The Crane by Ree Soesbee
The Crab by Stan Brown
The Unicorn by A.I. Lassieur

Good series if your into that sorta thing, but my fav book is the Fight Club book I re-read it once every three or four months... had to buy a new book after the tenth time



-Scarab



 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Rafe on February 14, 2003, 01:19:19 PM
You can add my name to the "just starting Time Enough For Love" for the first time list, too.  co-reading that with "Stranger in a Strange Land" (gave the SBH "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" for XMS last year).

Just finished "Pet Sematary" for the first time (one of the few remaining gaps in my steve king ouevre), and am currently blazing through the entire Dark Tower pantheon (midway through Waste Lands atm, did "Drawing of the Three" over the weekend).

Also, for a hysterical read, pick up William Goldman's "The Princess Bride" - the movie was good, but the book is GREAT. (and i love the movie - the book is just that much better, it's amazing).

I've also resumed my own writing (short horror/sci-fi/cyberpunk) - so I'm re-reading a lot of my own efforts.

I am anxious to get my hands on William Gibson's latest, "Pattern Recognition."

And, somehow, I still have time to work, **82**, and surf porn.  However, my gym time has suffered the last week and a half.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: gOOber on February 14, 2003, 02:07:52 PM
   Really great plot.  

     
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: St Stephan on February 14, 2003, 05:31:32 PM
Just finished Water Music by T. Coraghessan Boyle.  Fascinating historical novel based on Mungo Park's Niger explorations.  I had to look up a word every two pages or so, and even then most of those words weren't even in my desk dictionary.

0 ( ( o ! < J
No, not Dick and Jane's ABC, Webster's New World.    
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: JizzTits on February 14, 2003, 05:36:31 PM
i think i've only read 3 books in my life (as in reading a book COMPLETELY)

and they were short books:



Catcher in the Rye (very cynical if you're into that kinda stuff)

Tuesdays with Morrie (very positive and the complete opposite fo Catcher in the Rye, if you're into this kinda stuff...)

and
Animal Farm (good stuff.)



so if you're like me and hate reading, these books are for you. they are short and easy to read, so if you like it then great, and if you don't like it it's ok you didn't  have to waste much time with them.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Dick_Woods on February 14, 2003, 07:35:10 PM
Goober...that is freakin hysterical. We just want everyone to know that that version is an UNAUTHORIZED biography, and we were never in a hot tub with the Barbie Twins. Moreover it was never proven that was us on that video....

Anyway....we have both read Roses are Red...Followed by Violets are Blue by James Patterson. We love all the Alex Cross Novels. Also check out Cradle and All...great book.

Lately we have put novels aside...and are reading books about spirituality. There is just never enough time to read what we'd like.

Peace, Love and Light- D&J  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: midsize on February 14, 2003, 08:20:08 PM
The Hamlet -- by William Faulkner
The Unvanquished -- by William Faulkner
Requiem for a Nun -- by William Faulkner
Under the Volcano -- by Malcolm Lowry
Bend Sinister -- by Vladimir Nabokov
The Unified Neutral Theory of Biogeography and Biodiversity -- by Steven Hubbell.


In my youth I read lots of spy novels and now the only ones I can stand are John LeCarre (and not even the new ones).

-mid
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Catch on February 15, 2003, 12:18:30 AM
Since you've read Catcher in the Rye read Huck Finn by Mark Twain. A comparative report on the two earned an A in high school Literature. Don't ask when that was.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: JizzTits on February 15, 2003, 01:47:13 AM
Huck Finn was one of the many books i was supposed to read in high school...

but Catcher was one of the few i read completely...



anyway, post up your essay, i wanna read it.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Catch on February 15, 2003, 03:56:43 AM
Now you did it. You made me admit how long ago that's been. Let's see... where is that file from 1968? Guess your out of luck JT.  Don't have anything further back than 1990.

One thing I do recall. The reason I pulled out all the stops on that paper was the teacher. She was 26 with long black hair and the biggest rack I had seen.  At that time she could hold her own against LDM.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: IMC on February 15, 2003, 09:39:24 AM
Right now, I'm re-reading Cervantes' 'Don Quixote" for the first time in three or four years; it gets richer, sadder, and more heroic every time.  I've also been desultorily sampling Tom Stoppard's collected plays; heady, hilarious and, much like Cervantes, not too much to digest in random 30-to 40-minute sessions.  "Artist Descending a Staircase" and "Arcadia" are especially good.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Afrogumby on February 15, 2003, 10:40:12 AM
I too am re-reading The Lord of the Rings, but I would have to say my favorite book is "No one Here Gets Out Alive", the Jim Morrison biography.
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on February 15, 2003, 01:24:05 PM
IMC, the Don Quixote you're reading... would it happen to be the Samuel Putnam translation? Coincidentally, that is the one favored by the author I recommended above, Jonathan Ames. IMHO, DQ (Don Quixote, not Dairy Queen) is one of the masterworks of the written word and as good as anything by 'Ol Bill for adaptation to live theater.

I can't believe that I'm the only one here who's read/reading Jonathan Ames (unless no one else wants to admit it)! Given his recent PR (he actually appeared on Letterman not too long ago... how often does a writer show up on late night talk shows), his happily shared tales of sexual and moral perversions, I'd have thought that he'd be the patron saint of some BEAers...  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zasha on February 16, 2003, 12:58:09 AM
Now sober (only one Corona) and reviewing this thread, I see that I've once again emabarrassed myself - but you guys are so nice you didn't point it out:

The Richard Belzer book that I mentioned is properly titled UFOs, JFK, and Elvis: Conspiracies You Don't Have to Be Crazy to Believe.

Freshly on my "To Read" list (courtesy of Rafe) are two by Neal Stephenson:  Cryptonomicon and In the Beginning...Was The Command Line.

I'd really like to find and read/see (I guess it's a movie, too) the story of Bill versus The Steves...I think it's called something like "The True Story of Silicon Valley" or something like that...Anyone?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: IMC on February 16, 2003, 08:20:00 AM
As a matter of fact, Palomine, it is the Putnam translation...and having read a couple others as well as struggled with the original (archaized, precious, vulgarly colloquial) I think I can safely vouch for it.  I'm curious, though why Jonathan Ames so highly recommends it.  Can you elaborate?

BTW, I understand that Terry Gilliam was working on a sreen adaptation which he had to stop when his leading man died.  I hope he eventually gets to release something; I'd love to see his interpretation.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on February 16, 2003, 09:20:00 PM
I forget the name of it, but the documentary about the aborted making of Terry Gilliam's Don Quixote movie is supposed to be great... akin to Heart of Darkness (the wonderful doc on the making of Apocolypse Now). It's playing here, probably elsewhere too. I don't think there's much chance the movie itself will be finished, but you never know...

Ames didn't say specifically why that particular translation, just that it was his favorite, and the impression I had was that he'd been thru a few.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on February 17, 2003, 10:02:50 PM
The documentary is called  Lost in La Mancha.

I just finished reading "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East". If you want a better understanding of why the Middle East is screwed up, and how it got that way, this is the book for you. If I wanted to start some arguments here, I'd say that (in the book, at least) Israel doesn't come off too well - but that's for another time and place.

rtpoe  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: prinz on February 18, 2003, 06:30:01 AM
Know what you mean..I lost a Cousin on the Israel attack on USS Liberty..Nasty little business swept under the carpet by US and Israel.. They apologized...Personally Id of sent the Alpa strike that USS America had ready and bombed the shit out of there gunboat docks at Hiffa..No apology nessary guys...now were even! PE    
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Catch on February 18, 2003, 07:23:16 AM
Although I'm a strong supporter of Israel it would be interesting to hear the details that stood out to you rtpoe. They have done a lot of hair brained things since 1947.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Blax12 on February 18, 2003, 07:56:24 AM
 
Last one I finished is called "Fascisti: gli italiani di Mussolini, il regime degli italiani" (Fascists: Mussolini's italians, italians' regime). An historical essay by Giordano Bruno Guerri, a historician/journalist I like a lot (half liberal - half anarchyst, like me). It studies the consent fascism had in Italy through the 20's and the 30's before like a religion of the political party then like a religion where Mussolini himself was considered like a god.

Now I'm going to begin "From the Big Bang to the Black Holes" by Stephen Hawking.
I don't know anything about astrofisics but I'd like to know something: a friend of mine's father - very passionate to this stuff - told me this book is a good beginning.

I read somewhere that Einstein said that time is the movement of electrons in the materia. I know somebody postulated antimateria. I was wondering if antimateria is also anti-time. And if anti-time is no time or reverse time. And - if big bang's theory is correct and universe is continously expanding - if out of the universe we have the anti-materia and the anti-time.

Blax"I don't know anything about physics...help me, I don't know what I'm talking about "12  
 
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Catch on February 18, 2003, 04:13:04 PM
The only part of Einstein that I have a firm grasp on is the relationship between gravity and time. As gravity increases time slows and as gravity decreases time speeds up.

As for anti-matter the difference is in the charge of the subatomic particles. The electron is positive and the proton is negative in anti-matter.

As for anti- time and temporal mechanics I almost flunked out of Star Fleet Academy because of a barely passing grade.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on February 18, 2003, 09:50:16 PM
The anti particle would also heve the opposite spin. At least I think so. It's been a  looong  time since I studied subatomic physics. I've always prefered astrophysics.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Blax12 on February 19, 2003, 07:48:23 AM
 
If anti particles have opposite spin, time in anti-matter runs oppositely.

Could it mean if we get into anti-matter we become younger?????


Ok, sorry. I passed from physics to sci-fi.

Blax12

 
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on February 19, 2003, 06:24:41 PM
Enough "Dancing Wu-Li Masters." Back to books:

After having thoroughly enjoyed two of Jonathan Ames' essay collections (detailed above) I moved on to a novel of his called "The Extra Man." Sadly, I didn't enjoy it as much as his essays and after a few chapters called it quits.

I then tried (for the second time) to get into P.G. Wodehouse's "Jeeves" books (looking for something funny) but again was put off by the tone and language and abandoned it too (though I do expect that an earnest 3rd attempt is in the offing old pip, perhaps when yours truly has reached the venerable old age of 40) ...ps: that was my feeble attempt at imitating Wodehouse on the fly. (as always, pls forgive spelling errs)

So, on my way to pick up "Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex" which is supposedly amazingly funny, I also (after hearing about war correspondents on NPR) picked up two books of WW2 dispatches by Ernie Pyle: "Brave Men" and another, larger collection of his reports. All three look promising (Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa" is supposed to be great). I'll let you know....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: docross on February 20, 2003, 08:19:22 AM
I recently read two old Sci-Fi books:

Starship Troopres by Robert Heinlein
Cronache Marziane (I believe the orginal englis name is Marthian Chrinicles but I'm not sure) by Ray Bradbury

they are really good books, I loved in particular Starship Troopers (that is a lot different from the movie)

ciao
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Juliekat on February 20, 2003, 08:30:19 AM
I'm currently in the middle of "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Sure, I'm reading it for my college english credits, but it's really an incredible story.

Also, I recommend anything by Joseph Campbell.

Juliekat  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zasha on February 23, 2003, 12:41:36 AM
Here's one of my faves that I stumbled upon in the library the other day:

Grass Beyond the Mountains, by Richmond Hobson.

It's a true telling of stories by a grandson of one of a group of Wyoming cowboys that scouted the high mountain swamplands of British Columbia, and established a cattle operation there.

When you get to thinking that you've got it tough, re-read the winter chapters.  Those guys were tough.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zasha on February 25, 2003, 02:02:27 AM
Another newly placed on my To Acquire/Read list:  Ben Stein's How To Ruin Your Life.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Goldeneye on February 25, 2003, 11:32:28 PM
Good recent reads:

The short story "Babylon Revisited" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I read last Friday.  Terrific.

Anything from Stuart Woods' Stone Barrington series - 'The Short Forever' is the most recent...okay, but deeply lacks the punch and balls-out fun of 'Swimming to Catalina,' 'L.A. Dead,' and 'Cold Paradise,' my favorites

Another by Stuart Woods, 'Under the Lake' - a tense somewhat supernatural mystery in a sleepy Southern town...pretty good.  I kept seeing Brian Keith as the sherriff.

'Rat Pack Confidential,' Shawn Levy - FAN-fucking-TASTIC book.  Kicks off with five breezy chapters, each dedicated to a different member of the Pack with a snappy bio leading up to the years in focus, then launches into a fascinating, quickly unspooling you-are-there recounting of the era of the Rat Pack, from formation to implosion.  Some of the best parts, btw, are from the sobering last section detailing their lives after the Pack disbanded.

'The Great Gatsby,' F. Scott Fitzgerald - My all-time favorite book...I try to read it once a year or so.

'On the Road,' Jack Kerouac - Good book, but I stopped in the middle for some reason.  I should finish.

Favorite guilty pleasure book: I'm not really one for romance novels, but...'Hidden Passions,' which tells the backstory of the characters from the soap "Passions" (THE WORST SHOW ON TV! and I have since given it up).  Show sucks hard, but the book is spellbinding.  I don't apologize, I said 'guilty pleasure.'

Currently reading:

'The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin' - REALLY fun book so far.
'The Art of Mingling' - 'cause I approve of any excuse to improve social skills

Upcoming reads:
'No More Mr. Nice Guy' by Dr. Robert Glover - Details "Nice Guy Syndrome" and sets out to cure it.  Haven't heard a bad review yet.
'All About All About Eve' and 'Close-Up on Sunset Blvd by Sam Staggs - in-depth books about my third and second-favorite movies, respectively
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on February 28, 2003, 03:39:52 AM
An update: well, I read bits and pieces of the two Ernie Pyle collections (dispatches from the front lines during WW2 in both theaters) and though they were interesting, I just didn't feel like dragging myself through more than 800 pages of it right now. Same goes for Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex... I made my way though the first few stories and enjoyed them (what's not to like... sex and neuroses?!) but with this lighter material too I didn't feel like going the distance... though I will buy a copy as a gift for a sexy, literate, Jewish friend.

When I was much younger (still in grade school) I used to read all night almost every night... I clearly recall finishing one, two and sometimes even three full science fiction novels during a long evening. Nowadays, I almost never read SF (though I do still like it, I just have less energy and patience than I used to) and of course, I can't read for 7 or 8 hours at a stretch either... my eyes won't stay focused that long, and of course the neck, elbow, etc... start to ache after a while. If I get through a hundred pages of fiction in a sitting now, that's not too bad (less if it's non-fiction, which is generally my preference these days). Of course, when I was young I would always finish a book I'd started, even if I didn't like it all that much. Nowadays, I have little compuction about putting a book down if it's not providing whatever I'm looking for at the moment... the number of hours remaining to me are finite, and I'm not going to spend any significant fraction of them pushing my way through something than I've lost interest in.

Since I seem to be out of gas with short stories lately, and my **83** habits are worse than usual, I'm going to reread Don Quixote again for the first time in more than 20 years (the Putnam translation). When that's done (or if I don't make it through) I have no definite plans, though my house is literally filled with books, many still unread.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: prinz on February 28, 2003, 08:56:20 AM
Gary Paulsen " Winterdance" The Fine Madness OF Running The Iditadod  Harvest books.. If you are a dog lover this is a must read.. Wonderful lite read, you will laugh your Ass off!For those of us who run sleddogs we have all done some of the things this poor bastard writes about in this book. cheers PE  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: IMC on March 01, 2003, 03:44:35 PM
Palomine, just a few unsolicited recommendations for future reference or in case you don't make it through
Don Quixote (I would caution that Part Two has an entirely different atmosphere and a rather careless and
hurried conclusion, almost as if Cervantes couldn't bear what he was subjecting his protagonist to).  If you
enjoy picaresque novels try Faulkner's "The Reivers", not his most monumental literary achievement but the
only work in his ouevre that has a felicitous and unambiguous ending.  Or Diderot's "Jacque the Fatalist and His
Master", the aimless peregrinations across ancien regtime France of a hopelessly conventional lesser aristocrat
and his wittily ribald manservant, their encounters with whores and gallows, their unresolvable dispute about
predestination.  Philosophic gauloiserie at its best.  Both of these are fun reads and if you happen to mention them
in the presence of literati, well, at least they won't think you're hopelessly shallow.

I understand how the hours put strict limitations on reading material sometimes.  If  I don't have the time or energy
to get into the rhythm of an extended, novel length narrative I generally pick up something like Borges' Collected
Fictions or the Norton Anthology and open at random.

Oh, for the record, my best read of the last year or so:  Robert Graves' "Goodbye To All That".  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on March 01, 2003, 08:20:19 PM
Recommendations noted and appreciated.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Catch on March 04, 2003, 12:43:33 AM
Just finished another Nero Wolfe mystery, The Doorbell Rang. Wolfe takes on the corrupt FBI of J. Edgar Hoover.
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: RandomX on March 04, 2003, 10:33:35 PM
I'm rereading all my Dave Barry and Orson Scott Card books, and I've begun to read the Sword of Shannara series. (all of them are incredible!)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: prinz on April 20, 2003, 10:21:15 AM
Thought I bring this thread up again as I just stumbled across a wonderful read..One of those that you just can't put down .. Daughter no1 is home for the holiday and brought with her a book her English class is reading.." The Soul Of The Night" An Astronimical Pilgrimage By  Chet Raymo.. This guy is a Poet /Astronomer . A wonderful read!!! What is the Universe? Where did it come from? How will it end??  How may pixies can dance on the head of a pin. We are living in the new golden age of Astronomy and this guy brings it alive for the common person.. I highly recommend!! cheers PE  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on July 22, 2003, 10:56:47 PM
*bump*

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach.

Ever wonder what happens to someone's body when they donate it to science? Some of the possibilities include being used for practice by plastic surgery students, calibrating crash test dummies, and decaying in a Tennessee field to produce data for forensic scientists.

There's a good deal of humor throughout - not at the expense of the departed, but a tongue-in-cheek look at the people who have dealt with cadavers in the past. Like the French doctor who wanted to see how long a head could stay alive after the body was removed by the guillotine...(about 10 seconds before **62** sets in). The passage where Roach visits a ballistics lab and was introduced to "ballistic gelatin" actually had me laughing out loud.

It's very interesting, and you will probably wind up thinking about your life after you're dead.

ALSO:

Before you spend $$$$ to see Seabiscuit at the movies, check your public llibrary to see if they have the book, which you can read for free....

rtpoe  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on July 22, 2003, 11:04:16 PM
One woman has put me on to Laurie R. King's Mary Russell adventures.  The concept: in 1915 a precocious young girl befriends Sherlock Holmes, and we follow a kind of second career of his through the eyes of a not-quite-so-bumbling heir to Watson's role of companion.  I've seen many perfectly good extensions of the Holmes mythology, but this is more than just a neat idea; it positively liberates our sense of Holmes.  The first book, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, was very cool.  I don't quite know how I feel about my current reading project, O Jerusalem, but I greatly look forward to Justice Hall and hope to be able to report on both in the not too far future.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Chronicler on July 22, 2003, 11:30:28 PM
Cherry, P. P. The Western Reserve and Early Ohio. Akron, Ohio: R. L. Fouse, 1921.

 
Quote:

 Acheron? A river in hell? A very appropriate name indeed!




-Local Magistrate to Simon Perkins in response to his request to name his new founded city "Akron".

Not much has changed since then... not yet anyway.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on July 22, 2003, 11:32:15 PM
The Pinball Effect by James Burke. An entertaining read about the interconnectedness of technological developments during the past several hundred years.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: HamsterGal on July 22, 2003, 11:36:41 PM
Oh, yes. Book thread. Must jump on it!

Things I Have Read and Enjoyed... in the past two days.

Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett
The Free Lunch, by Spider Robinson
and... um.... Fox in Socks. Dr. Suess. I have a toddler, though, so that excuses a lot.

Even if he was asleep. I was... practicing. Yeah.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: present_future on July 23, 2003, 12:44:52 AM
A few excellent books i've just read (or reread)

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis
Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon by Robert Rosen
strangely enough, Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman, was obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye, and he was carrying a copy of the novel on that fateful day, Dec. 8, 1980...  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on July 24, 2003, 12:03:24 AM
Currently reading  John Adams  by David McCullough.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: steveo on July 24, 2003, 05:25:46 AM
Off with Their Heads : Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media & Business by Dick Morris

His discussion of the New York Times is awesome!

 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Snobb on July 24, 2003, 06:08:03 PM
I'm in Sci-Fi mostly (some Fantasy, too...)

I just read  Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks - it's quite good.
Best book I read in the last months:  Diaspora by Greg Egan.
I read them translated german, though.

-Snobb-  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: PregNut on July 24, 2003, 09:04:07 PM
Most of you will probably think that I'm a redneck (BTW, I'm not) but the most recent book that I have read is The Guns of the South and I am currently reading How Few Remain both by Harry Turtledove, the king of alternate history. Now, I don't wish the south had won the civil war, but it's interesting to see how things may have turned out differently if key events had or had not taken place. The next books on my list are The Great War Series: American Front, Walk in Hell and Blood and Iron, three books about World War I with the CSA allied with the British and French and the USA allied with Germany. I wonder how that turns out.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Scarab on July 30, 2003, 02:58:38 PM
I just stumbled across the best author I've read in years...   David Gemmell , right now I'm reading through 'Sword in the Storm'.  It's damn good, I stayed up all night last night reading, I just couldn't pull myself away.... I guess this guy has like 20 books out there... I can't wait to read them.



-Scarab
"Yes, I'm half assed reading it right now."



 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on October 31, 2003, 11:39:14 PM
*bump*

"Color - A Natural History of the Palette" by Victoria Finlay.

A truly fascinating history of the major colors (black, white, red, orange, etc.).

Finlay travels the world to seek out the places where the pigments & dyes originated, in the hope that she can find them still being produced. The chapter that most impressed me was Blue. She went into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and trekked over mountains to get to the lapis lazuli mines (the vivid blue stone is used to make the pigment ultramarine), where she was the first woman to visit in six months. She also got to climb on the top of one of those Buhdda statues that were subsequently destroyed to see one of the oldest examples of ultramarine paint.

Oh, you can taunt your vegan friends by letting them know that one of the most widely used red pigments (Color Additive E120, which is used in Cherry Coke, for one) comes from crushed beetles.

Lots of wonderful anecdotes, and the photo section is - of course - in color.

rtpoe  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on October 31, 2003, 11:44:16 PM
 Bolo Strike  by William H. Keith, Jr.

It looks like I need to go make a couple of corrections on the "death robot" thread.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on November 01, 2003, 12:19:08 AM
rtpoe's book about color sounds fascinating... I always want to know WHY and HOW things came to be as they now are. A recent read I absolutely loved was "Rural Studio" about the architect Sam Mockbee: http://www.bestwebbuys.com/books/compare/isbn/1568982925/isrc/b-home-search Another book on Mockbee's amazing work bringing economical, effective and even noble architecture and shelter to folks not able to afford such things: http://www.bestwebbuys.com/books/compare/isbn/093139452X/isrc/b-home-search

 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on November 06, 2003, 09:22:19 AM
Jack Higgins  In the Hour Before Midnight  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: BillN on November 06, 2003, 04:16:51 PM
"The Stone Cold Truth" as told by Steve Austin  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Jithero on November 06, 2003, 05:36:44 PM
I'm currently in the middle of Jim Hightower's  Thieves in High Places , but it's been slow going as he puts a lot of his odd "character" into his writing.  I guess it's meant to be funny/endearing but I would have preferred something a bit more straightforward.  I also stopped in the middle of  Milk: The Deadly Poison by Robert Cohen, as it is a bit TOO straightforward (lots of scientific information) and VERY repetitive.. as if he didn't really have information to fill a whole book.  Before that I finished off Return of the King, which I had read about half of back in 4th grade but wanted to finish in time for the film's release.  My favorite book of the past several years, though, is probably  You Are Being Lied To , a collection of socio-political essays by several authors.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Jithero on November 06, 2003, 05:42:05 PM
Rtpoe that sounds like an interesting book.  I used to work at an art materials company where we manufactured and sold a special Lapis Lazuli watercolor paint.  You can also taunt your vegan friends by letting them know that the sizing (glue that holds the cotton fibers together) in most paper is made from animal products.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on November 09, 2003, 07:12:07 AM
Yesterday I pollished off  Bootleg Skies by Paul Berge. The main character is a barnstormer that gets involved flying whiskey over from Canada during prohibition. A well written tale by a guy that knows his airplanes.

Currently working on Panzer Aces  by Franz Kurowski, translated by david Johnston. The accounts of six German tank commanders.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on November 30, 2003, 11:29:02 PM
Just finished  Band of Brothers  by Stephen Ambrose.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Jithero on November 30, 2003, 11:56:48 PM
Just want to revise my review of Milk: The Deadly Poison.  The last half of the book has some good info.  Just skip the first half (unless you're preparing a case against Monsanto...)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: 100ProofBE on December 01, 2003, 01:24:40 AM
Glad this thread got resurrected...

Recently:

- Siddharta by Hermann Hesse (one of my all-time fav books... not a Buddhist, but a wonderful story that I can read any time and enjoy)

- The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (85 bazillion people told me to... I had no choice. However, from a person who works in this field, I can tell you that Dan Brown is fairly well read in the current trends of religious scholarship in addition to being a pretty good action/suspense/thriller writer... actually reading his Angels and Demons at the moment)

- A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey by Kevin Murphy (Ex-MST3k actor (Servo, Bobo) feeds his need for cinematic sadism by going to the movies every single day for an entire year. More a commentary on the state of modern cinema than a collection of reviews. Some very funny stuff as well as some very sharp criticism of the modern moviegoing experience)

Other than that, I've mostly just been reading religious scholarship books while doing research for my doctorate thesis... I assure you, there aren't many page-turners in that group.

Proof out.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Dick_Woods on December 01, 2003, 07:16:43 PM
Jane is really into *the DaVinci Code*....I am almost finished with The Lion's Game, by Nelson DeMille...we are both diggin them in a big way...

-D  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Windlord on December 01, 2003, 07:53:38 PM
Just finished "Playing god" and "Fools War" from Sarah Zettel. I liked both, specially the first.
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on December 01, 2003, 09:52:10 PM
"April 1865" by Jay Winik.

Remember the "origins of the Civil War" thread? This book tells how it ended - and how things could have gone very, very, differently.

rtpoe
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: suicidebomber on December 02, 2003, 07:20:33 PM
The most recent book I read was Michael Crichton's TimeLine. It is a fantastic story written by a master storyteller. Pity the film took bloody liberties with the book!

Crichton does a lot of research for his novels, which really showed in this book. The Quantum Physics stuff is fascinating.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: tommy on December 02, 2003, 10:40:25 PM
kurt vonnegut BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

curtis white THE MIDDLE MIND

eric schlosser FAST FOOD NATION

all highly recommended by me. i got a B in english.

seriously all three are great.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on December 20, 2003, 01:27:04 AM
The other day I finished  Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays  by Stephen Hawking.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on December 20, 2003, 02:15:18 AM
Thanks for bumping this up, so I didn't have to.

Foul Ball by Jim Bouton

It's a diary about his attempt to save Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, MA.

From the introduction:

"A historic ballpark soon to be abandoned, a government that  ignores its citizens, a newspaper at war with its readers, the curious involvement of General Electric, and the shots are being called by a guy in Denver?"

A tale of small-town corruption that is lightened a bit by Bouton's wry humor. Ask for it at your local bookstore.

rtpoe

p.s. He had to publish it himself, for reasons discussed in the last chapter. And that's the most upsetting part of the entire story....  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on February 17, 2004, 11:09:56 PM
*gratuiutous bump*
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: RandomX on February 18, 2004, 12:36:59 AM
Methings Rtpoe is trying to get to 2k tonight  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on February 18, 2004, 11:01:40 PM
It's been a while since I've added to this thread, so I've got a few more to tack on.
 The Spy Who Came In From the Cold  by John Le Carre.
 Panzerkrieg  by Peter McCarthy and Mike Syron.
 Paying the Piper  by David Drake
 The Tyrant  by Eric Flint and David Drake
 Thieves' World: Turning Points  edited by Lynn Abbey
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on February 25, 2004, 07:10:28 PM
 Wine & War  by Don & Petie Kladstrup. The book was a Christmas present. Go Figure, I'm a history nut that makes wine.

Next up,  Battle Cry  by Leon Uris  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DrHyde on February 25, 2004, 07:26:47 PM
Mr. Undesirable by Scott Carpenter.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Goldeneye on April 05, 2004, 11:31:48 AM
I picked up Oscar Hijuelos' Pulitzer winner, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, at Barnes & Noble yesterday and couldn't put it down.  Ever read something where the language and prose are just so marvelous and lush and sensuous, even when the content is not at all sexual, that it turns you on?  It's hard to explain.  I wanted a cigarette after the first chapter.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on April 05, 2004, 01:46:32 PM
John Boorman's memoir "Adventures of a Suburban Boy" is excellent.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 05, 2004, 06:27:08 PM
 Chuck Amuck-the Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist  by Chuck Jones  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on April 05, 2004, 07:10:15 PM
Quote:

 Chuck Amuck-the Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist  by Chuck Jones  




Have it., read it, liked it.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on May 09, 2004, 08:20:53 AM
 The Sea Hunters  True Adventures With Famous Shipwrecks  by Clive Cussler & Craig Dirgo  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MermetTheHermit on May 09, 2004, 06:50:40 PM
Just finished The Culture of Fear, by Barry Glassner, 1999.  The subtitle explains its subject: Why Americans Are Afraid of The Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plane Crashes, Road Rage, & So Much More.  A real eye-opener; found out some things that surprised me.  But, of course, being the cynic I am, found out a lot that didn't surprise me one bit.  Concludes that not only is this a product of the manipulation of people's fears by government, business and media, but of our own inability to deal with the real problems in the world, which leads us to channel our fears of them into these things that amount to scapegoats.  A relatively quick but interesting read.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Artican_Velbades on May 09, 2004, 07:47:44 PM
It was several months ago, but  Battle Royale by Koushun Takami.  An excellent, fast-paced book that asks the question, "Could you kill your best friend?"  It stands alone as the only 616-page book I've read in one 6-hour sitting (not counting bathroom breaks).
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on May 10, 2004, 08:25:28 PM
Just read 'Minerva Awakes' & 'Sympathy For The Devil', both by Holly Lisle, last night.  Fantasy.  I liked 'Sympathy For The Devil' better.  It's about what happens when one woman, with all her soul, prays to God.
This is the prayer:
She looked up toward Heaven, and with her eyes wide open, she said, "Okay, God. I've had it. I've thought about this until I can't stand to think about it anymore, and now we're going to have to do something about it. You said that whatever we asked of you, if we had faith, you would give to us." She took a deep breath, and her hands clenched into fists.
"Hell is all wrong. You claim that we have free choice-the choice to love you or not, to follow you or not. But there isn't any choice to it. If a thief held a gun to my head and told me to give him my car keys or he'd kill me, I'd give him my keys . . . but nobody would say I did so of my own free will. And if he stuck the same gun to my head and told me to love him or else, I might pretend to love him . . . at least until I got hold of the gun.
"You're holding a gun to our heads, God. You're saying 'Love me or writhe in torment for eternity' and eternal torment is a pretty damned big gun for anything a person could do in eighty years.
"You claim to be a God of love. I say that only a sadistic, spoiled [censored] would torture someone for eternity, no matter what reason he had."
She exhaled slowly, and her eyes narrowed. "You said ask and believe. So now I'm asking. Let them have the chance to repent, God. All of them. Every single soul in Hell. Let them have the chance to learn from the mistakes they made; let them into Heaven if they repent.
"Until you do this, you can consider me a conscientious objector, protesting the policies of Heaven. When I die, you can send me to Hell, because I won't go to Heaven until every soul can find a way there, God. Every soul. No matter who they were, no matter what they did.
"Eternity is too long for a loving God to condone the torture of his [censored] ren."

The rest of the book is what happens when God grants this prayer, and Hell come to North Carolina...  
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DrHyde on May 10, 2004, 10:51:46 PM
Finished Mr. Undesirable by Scott Carpenter. Great book. Absolutely hilarious. Lenny's quest for revenge is a laugh riot from painting all the bricks on his house a different color to crucifying Santa Claus. I advise anyone who likes a good funny, revenge book to pick it up.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Goldeneye on May 11, 2004, 12:16:50 AM
Will do.  Crucified Santa?  Puts me in the mind of Skipping Christmas--a wonderful little Grisham novella I read back during the holiday season.  It's widely popular but apparently not for everyone--I reccommended it to a Jewish friend who didn't get it and lacked sympathy for all the characters to the point of hating them.  I thought the hand-in-hand annoyance and joy of Christmas was common knowledge to anyone who lived in our society around that time, but I guess you just can't relate to the story if you haven't lived it.  They're gonna fuck it up as a movie this winter.

Anyway, just finished Picnic/Lighting by Billy Collins, one of my heroes.  Not a novel but a poetry book, and a damn fine one at that.  Collins is amazing without writing that dreaded stuff you used to read in English class...he writes in plain English, words that fall out of our mouths every day.  He is classic without being inaccessible, important without being stodgy, profound without being inaccessible.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on May 30, 2004, 11:09:22 PM
 Paxos Tiger  by Ted Simon  
 Bones of the Earth  by Michael Swanwick
 The Last Place God Made  by Jack Higgins
 Panzer Commander  by Nans von Luck   - An excellent memoir
 Issola by Steven Brust  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: GizmoWidget on May 30, 2004, 11:19:05 PM
The last book I read anything out of was: The Hippocampal And Parietal Foundations of Spatial Cognition; N. Burgess, K. J. Jeffery, & J. O'Keefe, eds.  ISBN 9-780198-524526

And before that it was: The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970 - 1993 By Thomas S. Kuhn.  ISBN 9-780226-457987.  

This is my recreational reading...  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DrHyde on May 31, 2004, 06:18:39 AM
Various Vampire: The Masquerade books. Good stuff if you want real vampire stories rather than the cookie cutter movie crap.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: prinz on May 31, 2004, 09:40:38 AM
"Last stand of the Tin Can Sailor" The story of Taffy 3.. IMHO the US Navys finest hour! cheers PE  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: solvegas on May 31, 2004, 01:19:05 PM
Read that years ago . Imagine destroyers and jeep carriers against battleships and heavy cruisers and bluffing them into retreat ! Just amazing !    
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on May 31, 2004, 01:30:04 PM
Visual Illusions: Their Causes, Characteristics and Applications by M. Luckiesh (Dover edition) and...

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis... had a brief chat about this book with a sweetly voluptuous, pale-skinned and doe-eyed brunette named Rose in a Los Feliz coffee shop, but stupidly didn't ask for her phone number. Could kick myself in the head for that missed opportunity. A young woman who looked like that AND had read City of Quartz??? Undoubtedly, she was probably the ONE.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on May 31, 2004, 11:08:21 PM
No fair! I was going to revive this thread today!

"The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History" by John M. Barry

A look at how the US medical community handled the great influenza epidemic of 1918 (which killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has in 24 years). Good info on how influenza works, and why it's so tough to deal with. Plus a warning that we have to act fast whenever a new disease appears (SARS).

I've read "Bones of the Earth". Michael Swanwick has a neat idea on the end of the dinosaurs. Unfortunately, we can never know for sure...

I'll have to get that book on Taffy 3. I hope they all got some medals there!

rtpoe
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on May 31, 2004, 11:30:19 PM
Quote:

No fair! I was going to revive this thread today!
rtpoe  




Read faster.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on June 01, 2004, 12:55:01 AM
I'd like to get that one on Taffy 3 also.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: prinz on June 01, 2004, 09:30:59 AM
Quote:

I'd like to get that one on Taffy 3 also.  


I cant remember the authors name.. A friend who did an excellent model of the
"Samuel B Roberts" is reading it now . The Battleship that was firing at her started out using Armor piercing rounds thinking they were facing Cruisers..Roberts took several hits with minor damage as the rounds went clean thourgh her without exploding . Then as one survivor stated you could hear that the shells had a new pitch to them as they came screaming in.. They walked a salvo of high explosive shells from astern into her midships .The last shell in this salvo gutted her like a trout.  The book is very nicly done you will enjoy. cheers PE  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on June 02, 2004, 09:01:27 PM
It's by James D. Hornfischer.

And they did get a Presidential Unit Citation:
http://www.desausa.org/taffy_3_citation.htm

rtpoe
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on June 12, 2004, 12:26:51 AM
Thanks for that author.

My most recent:
 3001 The Final Odyssey  by Arthur C. Clarke
 Kull  by Robert E Howard
 Victory Call to Arms  edited by Stephen Coonts  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: GizmoWidget on June 12, 2004, 02:08:12 PM
Quote:

Visual Illusions: Their Causes, Characteristics and Applications by M. Luckiesh (Dover edition) and...



Pal, visual perception is my area of specialization.  If you're interested in anything in particular, let me know.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: prinz on June 22, 2004, 01:06:06 PM
Ringworld's Children  by Larry Niven  Yea Larry!  So nice to revisit the Ringworld after so long...PE  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on June 22, 2004, 03:26:53 PM
Will do GW.

Now starting Le Carre's new novel "Absolute Friends."
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: BillN on June 22, 2004, 06:43:31 PM
I heard that President Clinton's book does not require a bookmark.

Apparently he likes his pages bent over.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Hentaibee on June 24, 2004, 01:11:42 PM
re-reading some classical philosophers for university classess... Nietzsche and some others
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on October 11, 2004, 11:10:26 PM
Time to revive this thread - lots of new people may not have seen it.

"One Pitch Away: The Players' Stories of the 1986 League Championships and World Series" by Mike Sowell. This was the year the Angels came within one out of the pennant, and the Mets beat Houston for the NL title in a 16 inning thriller. Then the Mets beat the Red Sox to win the World Series ("Everybody remembers the ball through Bill Buckner's legs. Not the fact that the guy had over 2,700 hits in his career." - Gary Carter). After a recap of the games, Sowell checks in with key players to see how they've come to terms with victory and defeat several years later.

"Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants" by Robert Sullivan. Not as gross as one might think. Sullivan sets up camp at the end of an alley in lower Manhattan to watch city rats in their natural habitat. He winds up (in addition to studying the rats) musing on who the streets are named for, rats in NYC history, and the business of pest control (he spends a lot of time with pest control specialists and people from the city' health dept.). A fascinating insight to Rattus norvegicus that makes you respect them as living creatures. Almost.

rtpoe  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Scarlet on October 11, 2004, 11:18:15 PM
  Last week I read two of the Pern books: Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern and  Dragonflight.
and now I am begining Dragonquest.
All of these books are by a very talented writer, Anne McCaffrey
   
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zatoichi on October 12, 2004, 01:25:18 AM
Rereading, for the nth time, Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings (one of those books where you find something new everytime you read it).
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on November 05, 2004, 12:20:37 PM
Since I was having 'puter probs for a while, I caught up on some of my reading.

 H.M.S. Ulysses  by Alistair MacLean
 Midnight Never Comes ,  The Keys of Hell , and  Year of the Tiger  by Jack Higgins
 Black Thursday  by Martin Caidin
 March Upcountry, March to the Sea, and  March to the Stars  by David Weber and John Ringo
 1632  by Eric Flint
 1633  by Eric Flint and David Weber
 Sanctuary  by Lynn Abbey
 The Rescue by Steven Trent Smith
 The Real Hornblower, the Life and Times of Admiral Sir James Gordon, GCB  by Bryan Perrett. PE might find that one interesting.

Currently working on  In Flanders Fields, the 1917 Campaign  by Leon Wolf.
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on November 05, 2004, 12:37:17 PM
Working again on "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. It's a non-Eurocentric review of world history. More objectively academic than overtly leftist, it seems like it'll be excellent reading, particularly if you enjoy history sans most of the usual revisionist "the victors write the history books" veneer. Link to buy here.



It's an amazing time we live in, where a person can obtain THIS much info and analysis on such an expansive topic, delivered to your door for less than nine bucks!    
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on November 10, 2004, 10:27:09 PM
Interesting, Palomine, because I thought it *was* Eurocentric. After all, he tries to explain why it was that Europe came to dominate the world. (I say it has to do with accidents of geography; I am willing to elaborate on that if you like)

Be that as it may....

The Compleat Gentleman: The Modern Man's Guide to Chivalry by Brad Miner. An entertaining look at what it means to be a "gentleman" in the 21st century, and a plea for the revival of the concept (if not gentlemen themselves). Lots of historical anecdotes from the "Age of Chivalry" and the Titanic, and references from everything from the Boy Scouts to Emily Post:

"Far more important than any dictum of mere etiquitte is the fundamental code of honor, without strict observance of which no man, no matter how 'polished', can be considered a gentleman." - Emily Post, Etiquitte, 1922.

rtpoe
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Scarlet on November 11, 2004, 01:52:44 AM
  I am currently reading the third book,Circus of the Damned, in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series by Laurel K. Hamilton.
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Hentaibee on November 11, 2004, 04:24:17 AM
I'm devouring the works of Kafka that I hadnt read for study yet.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on November 11, 2004, 11:30:11 AM
Quote:

Interesting, Palomine, because I thought it *was* Eurocentric. After all, he tries to explain why it was that Europe came to dominate the world. (I say it has to do with accidents of geography; I am willing to elaborate on that if you like)

Be that as it may....  




I haven't finished it yet, so I can't comment from experience. However, in many regards European cultures have come to dominate large areas of the world (economically, culturally, geographically, etc...) ...that's not contestable. However, this book would appear to take a much larger view as to the why and how such things came to be, and judging only by what I've read so far it DOES seem to take a very broad view of other culture's involvement in various processes AND in other circumstances INCLUDING 'accidents of geography.'

I'll know more when I'm done... but it would look as if rather than glorifying European accomplishments, "Guns Germs and Steel" explains how/why the way things have come to pass may have been, in some respects, inevitable (as you suggest).

Added later:

So as not to make you wait til I'm done (not sure if you've already read it OR you were saying that you heard it was Euro-centric), I skimmed through it a bit more and it seems CERTAIN that it is not a traditional Euro-centric recitation of events and their causes... rather than try to sum it up myself, here's a quote from a review by Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford from the back cover:

Quote:

 
"This is a brilliantly writen, passionate, whirlwind tour through 13,000 years of history on all the continents---a short history of everything about everybody. The origins of empires, religion, writing, crops and guns are all here. By at last providing a convincing explanation for the differing develoments of human societies on different continents, the book demolishes the grounds for racist theories of history. Its account of how the modern world was formed is full of lessons for our own future. After reading the first two pages, you won't be able to put it down."





This book was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science and was also a national bestseller.

I think you'd like it rtpoe, if you haven't already read it of course.        
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: IceOwl on November 12, 2004, 04:56:13 PM
Just finished these two:

Fences and Windows by Naomi Klein

and

Chronicle Of A War Foretold: How MidEast Peace Became America's Fight by Norman Spector, former Canadian ambassador to Israel

Both are collections of news articles by their respective authors.

Fences and Windows is about the barriers put up by so-called free trade and globalization and the way they've been implemented, and what the people affected by these policies are doing to take back their lives from the bankers and economists that have made their jobs and rights disappear.

Chronicle of a War Foretold is about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and is mainly a collection of Norman Spector's views of what has happened there in the past decade or so.

The book I'm reading right now is Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada, and The Myth of Converging Values by Michael Adams, CEO of Environics Canada, which is a national statistics research company. So far, it shows some very interesting divergences between Canadian and American values. If you want to know what truly makes Canadians and Americans different, pick this one up.
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on November 14, 2004, 05:12:17 PM
Yes, I have read it, Palomine, but it was a while ago.

I guess we are having different interpretations of the term "Euro-centric". I'm thinking that it's Euro-centric in that Diamond looks for the underlying reasons why it was European nations and not others that came to eventually dominate the globe. But I concur that this is not the traditional meaning of the term, in that Diamond does not try to say that the dominance means that European civilization is therefore "better" than any other. They just had the right situation to give them a "leg up" on everyone else.

rtpoe
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on November 15, 2004, 12:07:53 PM
Your appraisal seems to jibe with what I gather thus far. Even in the prolog, the author provides anecdotal evidence as to why individuals in (what are often called) third-world countries may actually be better-equipped (intellectually) than their European counterparts.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on May 30, 2005, 12:12:50 PM
Break out the paddles...
Set 200 joules...
CLEAR!!!

 ZAP!!!

We have a pulse.

This was too good of a thread to let it stay dead.

I haven't been on line as much for the past several months, so I've been hitting the books. So, without further delay, here is the best of what I've read in the meantime.

 Tigers In The Mud  by Otto Carius - An excellent memior by a heavy  panzer commander
 The Sea Hunters II  by Clive Cussler and Craig Dirgo
 Natural History of the Black Hills and Badlands  by Sven G. Froiland
 The Tank Killers  by Harry Yeide - A history of U.S. tank destroyer units
 Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs  by Michael Novacek -The American expiditions to the Gobi Desert from 1990-1994
 They Are Soldiers  by Harold Coyle
 In Danger's Hour  by Douglas Reeman
 Pride Runs Deep  by R. Cameron Cooke - A well written novel that I didn't want to put down
 Grantville Gazette  edited and created by Eric Flint
 The Battle of Cowpens  by Kenneth Roberts
 Panzer Aces II  by Franz Kurowski
 Red Scorpion - The War Patrols of the USS Rasher  by Peter Sasgen - son of one of the plank holders
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on May 30, 2005, 09:00:19 PM
Just finished "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk" by Peter L. Bernstein.

A pretty good overview of the history of the science of probabilty, which segues into a history of economics. I guess the underlying thread is the search for the answer to the question of "What is an acceptable risk?"

Very light on the actual math, so your brain won't hurt... too much.

rtpoe
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: prinz on May 30, 2005, 10:00:59 PM
Just finnished The Da Vinci Code  by Dan Brown..pretty good read..cheers
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ZoD on June 02, 2005, 09:24:02 AM
Not neccesarily Eurocentric but you would have to say that Europe has always had a disprortionate role in terms of its size in comparison to its influence. Merely saying "europe was important" isnt neccesarily being Eurocentric.

 The Amtrak Wars by Patrick Tilley.
Fluff, but enjoyable post apocalyptic fluff. Also a ncie scenario and good character work, sometimes mired in conspiracy.

And, as always, going back and forth over the Sun Tzu. Trying to get a better understanding of such a simple subjetc is amazingly complex.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on June 02, 2005, 03:04:13 PM
Sherlock Holmes: My Life and Crimes by noted Holmes expert Michael Hardwick... basically a ridiculously detailed (and authentic seeming) memoir BY Conan Doyle's famous detective himself. Charming and engaging for any fan of S.H.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Duck_n_Cover on June 02, 2005, 03:46:48 PM
I have recently read "The Elegant Universe" and "The Fabric of the Cosmos," both by Brian Greene. if you have any interest in theoretical physics, they're really good, and avoid math (because, as a biologist by training, math makes my head hurt).
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Breasts on June 02, 2005, 04:05:58 PM
I just read "Time" by Stephen Baxter.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Chronicler on August 02, 2005, 12:01:19 AM
POWER vs. FORCE
Hay House, Inc.

Linux in a Nutshell
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on August 02, 2005, 01:27:35 PM
Cripes, this thread is for the intelligentsia only!
I'm just reading good old Fantasy.
"The Treasured One", book 2 of "The Dreamers" by David & Leigh Eddings.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ZoD on August 02, 2005, 05:04:45 PM
Brick Lane

by Monica Ali.

Its about an asian womans alienation in England. Depresssing but great.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on August 02, 2005, 05:51:31 PM
 The Story of Malta  by Brian Blouet. It covers from the bronze age to the 1980's. A tad dry in spots, but quite informative.
 Attack on Telemark by Knut Haukelid. The author took part in the raid on the heavy water plant and other resistance activities.
 The Battle to Save the Houston  by John Grider Miller. The light cruiser torpedoed in'44, not the heavy lost in the Java Sea.
 M*A*S*H Goes to Morocco by Richard **33** and William E. Butterworth. LMAO
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Quadhouse on August 02, 2005, 11:36:09 PM
Quote:

"The Treasured One", book 2 of "The Dreamers" by David & Leigh Eddings.




Good book.  I'm waiting for "The Crystal Gorge" myself.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Chronicler on August 04, 2005, 12:20:42 PM
Good stuff.

I just finished The Temple and the Lodge by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh.
It was written 16 years ago before the Masons got 'popular'. It makes a tenuous historical link between the Templars and modern Freemasonry but it also touches on some very interesting periods of European History. Very informative if not dry.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ZoD on August 04, 2005, 01:43:08 PM
Driving Over Lemons.

Chris Stewart. Very funny book about an englishman in Andalucia. LMAO
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Inherency on August 04, 2005, 02:44:31 PM
Armageddon Averted It was a great analysis of the latter years of the Soviet Union.  Of course, the real decline was much more politically reinforced than it was economic.  Kotkin provides a very impartial asessment of, in my opinion, one of the most intriguing political systems that has ever been.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Kenard on August 04, 2005, 03:44:44 PM
Iv read so many over the years, most sci-fi and fantasy.

Stephan Lawhead - Byzantium, Iron Lance, etc..  

Really enjoyable Historic Fiction relating to ancient cultures and places. The Iron Lance series Has to do with the finding and recovering of holy relectic during the first and second crusade.  I really enjoyed these books and would highly recommend them.

JK Rowling - Harry "freeking" Potter.

Yes, I thought Harry Potter was for 9 year olds too.  But I am impresssed with the flow, story and easy fun reading.  My dad hasnt been able to read a book in years since he always falls asleep reading. He tried Harry Potter and started reading again.  Definately relaxing fun stuff, well worth the read for any age.

Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time series

Some say they are long winded, but I found them enjoyable and good to read.  Its possibly compairable to the LOTRs and its about a 10 book series.  I think you have to be diehard fantasy to read them.  That said, Id rate them as one of the better sets of books Iv read.

maybe more another time.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on August 04, 2005, 08:43:17 PM
"The Devil Wears Pinstripes" by Jim Caple.

A nice little read about how evil the Yankees are. You think Steinbrenner's bad? George Weiss makes him look like an amateur. Yankee haters can revel in his list of the best moments (like when Andy Hawkins no-hit the White Sox but lost, 4-0).

rtpoe
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ZoD on August 05, 2005, 06:54:59 AM
I read the last Harry Potter the other day. Quite pleased that J.K Rowling decided to deepen the mood of the novels.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on August 16, 2005, 05:50:44 PM
 The Road to Damascus  by John Ringo and Linda Evans. A bolo faces a moral dilemma about following orders or doing what's right.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on August 27, 2005, 02:57:44 PM
 Lonely Vigil  by Walter Lord. The coastwatchers of the solomon Islands.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on August 27, 2005, 04:18:01 PM
Just bought (second hand) a 2 book omnibus of 'The Chronicles Of Amber' by Roger Zelazny.  It's been years since I read any of the books, it's almost like reading them for the first time.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheRover on August 27, 2005, 09:52:10 PM
 1776  by David McCullough.  Apparently something important happened that year.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on August 28, 2005, 08:30:20 AM
I just bought  1776  too, but haven't started it yet. I've got a few others in line first.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ZoD on August 28, 2005, 08:45:07 AM
Bill Bryson - im working through all of his stuff. Im on  Made In America at the moment.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on August 29, 2005, 08:42:49 PM
Race of the Century by Julie M. Fenster.

In 1908, when cars looked like this:
 
and roads were virtually nonexistent outside cities, and there was no such thing as a gas station - the Paris Match and New York Times sponsored a road race between their two cities. North to Albany, west to San Francisco, then shipped across the Pacific, across Japan, ferry to Vladivostok, across Siberia, into Europe, ending in Paris. Twenty-two thousand miles.

Six cars entered.

Three cars finished. Four men travelled the entire distance.

rtpoe
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Chronicler on September 23, 2005, 08:57:59 PM
Mafia Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the Gambino Crime Family by John H. Davis

Black Mass: The Irish Mob, The FBI and A Devil's Deal by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on September 24, 2005, 02:16:59 AM
'There Will Be Dragons' & 'Emerald Sea' by John Ringo.
Guest starring Bun-Bun from Sluggy Freelance!  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on September 30, 2005, 05:25:09 PM
 1634:The Galileo Affair  by Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis
 U-Boat Ace  by Jordan Vause. The story of Wolfgang Luth.
 In the Hour Before Midnight  by Jack Higgins
 U-Boats at War by Harold Busch
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: smiley on September 30, 2005, 06:13:14 PM
Quote:

Race of the Century by Julie M. Fenster.

In 1908, when cars looked like this:
 
and roads were virtually nonexistent outside cities, and there was no such thing as a gas station - the Paris Match and New York Times sponsored a road race between their two cities. North to Albany, west to San Francisco, then shipped across the Pacific, across Japan, ferry to Vladivostok, across Siberia, into Europe, ending in Paris. Twenty-two thousand miles.

Six cars entered.

Three cars finished. Four men travelled the entire distance.




I remember watching a really cheesy 60s film they made of that race one summer holiday long ago. The film was called, perhaps unsuprisingly, "The Great Race".

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059243/

As for good books. Just finished Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" trilogy (Quicksilver, The Confusion & System of the World) - highly recommended. Ploughing my way through Olaf Stapeldon's "The First and Last Men".
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on October 01, 2005, 02:28:53 PM
Re-reading the 'Crossroads' trilogy by Nick O'Donohoe.
Not often you can read a good fantasy where the heroine is a veterinarian.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Chronicler on October 04, 2005, 02:10:26 AM
The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital : The Masons and the Building of Washington, D.C.

by David Ovason
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on October 05, 2005, 10:18:11 PM
 Battle: The Story Of The Bulge  by John Toland
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ZoD on October 08, 2005, 03:47:43 PM
Chinua Achebe "things fall apart"

Faulkner "As I lay dying"

John McLeod "Beginning Postcolonialism"
 
The last book is nigh on impenetrable.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on October 09, 2005, 03:31:00 PM
I just bought 'The Callahan Chronicles' by Spider Robinson.
It's a collection of the first 3 'Callahan's Crosstime Saloon' books.  I've got the later Callahan's and Lady Sally's books, but it's been quite a few years since I read the first 3.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: GA_Matt on October 10, 2005, 07:57:47 AM
Stephen King: From a Buick 8
Tom Clancy and Tony Zinni: Battle Ready
Al Franken: Lies and The Lying Liars That Tell Them, a fair and balanced look at the right.
Ann Coulter: Treason (gotta be a little balanced here, but it's not worth the cover price, Stephen King's mom would call it "Bad Trash.")

There's a few more, but I haven't gotten around to reading all them, I'm trying to focus on fiction, because a lot of the non-fiction is bloody depressing.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Windlord on October 10, 2005, 09:38:26 AM
Red Mars, Blue Mars & Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
Hyperion, Endymion, The ascent of endymion by Kim Stanley Robinson
The last caton and The forgotten origin by Matilde Asensi
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ZoD on October 10, 2005, 01:52:23 PM
A rather funky german textbook.

Passwort Deutsch. No english all german, im struggling, but if i want to get onto this exchange to Berlin I have to pick it up quick.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Chronicler on October 10, 2005, 04:08:20 PM
OK here's one that's funky and depressing. I read this like four years ago but I take it everywhere I go.

The Hopi Survival Kit by Thomas Mails

It's not written very well but what makes this a good read is that the author collaborated with the last known living Hopi traditionalist that still has full knowledge of the old ways. Chief Dan Evehema is not recognized by the 'new' Hopi leadership as anyone of importance but what he does is give insight into old ways as the young become more and more like 'Bahanna'. The prophecies are 'fantastic' and might not be of any significance but people who can live for thousands of years in a desert must know a thing or two about survival.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: smiley on October 10, 2005, 04:36:01 PM
Quote:

OK here's one that's funky and depressing. I read this like four years ago but I take it everywhere I go.

The Hopi Survival Kit by Thomas Mails

It's not written very well but what makes this a good read is that the author collaborated with the last known living Hopi traditionalist that still has full knowledge of the old ways. Chief Dan Evehema is not recognized by the 'new' Hopi leadership as anyone of importance but what he does is give insight into old ways as the young become more and more like 'Bahanna'. The prophecies are 'fantastic' and might not be of any significance but people who can live for thousands of years in a desert must know a thing or two about survival.




Oh, I've heard about that! Ray Mears (British survival expert) was talking about it on Radio 4 the other week. It sound a bit like the survivalist version of "Zen &...Motorcycle Maintainence" - is that a fair assessment?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Chronicler on October 12, 2005, 12:26:48 AM
Quote:

Oh, I've heard about that! Ray Mears (British survival expert) was talking about it on Radio 4 the other week. It sound a bit like the survivalist version of "Zen &...Motorcycle Maintainence" - is that a fair assessment?


Many of the ways of the Native cultures existed for thousands of years and never developed beyond hunter/gatherer much, but they did exist for thousands of years. Our culture has really only been around for max, say 1000 years, if you consider the Norman Conquest the beginning of this civilization. Some people pin our culture on Rome, but I think they forget we lost the ability to make hydraulic concrete for about 1000 years or so. In a philosophical sense it's like what you mentioned only in a macro-cultural sense rather than the personal survivalist philosophy.

The culture Chief Dan talks about is a post-survivalist tradition that was passed down to Hopi for thousands of years that allowed them just enough civilization to keep crops healthy and consistent. It's really simple. I don't recall him getting specific on 'outback' survivalism but I'm sure he knows a few things. I think that they don't talk about that so much is a testament to the success of the agriculture that the Hopi people sustained. Hopi are not the plains 'Indians' everyone thinks of when this subject comes up. They are the anti-thesis to the assertion that the red man is a savage warlike beast. I think that undertone is very powerful, moreso than the prophecies contained in the book, though they are pretty interesting too.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on October 28, 2005, 06:23:44 PM
 The Tunnel At Loibl Pass  by Andre Lacaze
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on October 28, 2005, 10:42:52 PM
Demon by John Varley
The New Discworld Companion by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Briggs
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Dick_Woods on October 29, 2005, 06:44:26 AM
I am totally psyched...'NIGHTFALL' by Nelson DeMille has finally come out on paperback...the latest in the 'John Corey' series...

DeMille is DaMan
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Starscream on October 29, 2005, 06:54:38 AM
For wrestling fans, a book called "The Death of WCW" is a good read about how quickly a company can go under in this day and age. It has a lot of good insite in many of the stars of the business and how each played a role in the demise of the company that looked to have won the "monday night wars"
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on October 31, 2005, 09:27:55 PM
 Ring of Fire  edited by Eric Flint
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: NeoMyztikX on December 17, 2005, 02:34:04 AM
hehe i was looking for this topic

bump ^_^

lots of works by:

- william bradford
- anne bradstreet
- edward taylor
- jonathan edwards
- philip freneau
- phillis wheatley
- washington irving
- nathaniel hawthorne
- charles dickens
- edgar alle poe
- j.r.r. tolkien
- harriet beecher stowe
- mark twain
- walt whitman
- emily dickinson
- kate chopin
- w.e.b. du bois
- t.s. eliot
- F. scott fitzgerald (minus the great gatsby)
- william faulkner
- ernest hemingway (minus the man by the sea)
- langston hughes (including poetry)
- countee cullen (poetry only)
- tennessee williams (only a streetcar named desire)
- zora neale hurston
- ralph ellison
- toni morrison
- theodore roethke
- sylvia plath
- h.p. lovecraft
- james joyce (no ulysses)
- joseph conrad (apocalypse now, outpost of progress)
- and a massive amount of short stories ^_^
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Chronicler on December 24, 2005, 03:38:53 PM
Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America
by Les Standiford
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on December 24, 2005, 04:50:20 PM
Since we are all here because of a common interest, I really liked The Other Hollywood by Jennifer Osborne and Legs McNeil. The book is a tightly edited point-counterpoint (in the words of the participants) history of the movie and video porn business from 1970 to 2000.

For me the best part was based on original interviews, a short chapter entitled, "Vickie Killed the Nudie Cuties", which traced the origin of deep throat cocksucking among South Florida biker chicks in the early 1970s.

On a more personal note, Jennifer Osborne has what I consider the perfect look: Horn-rimmed glasses and huge boobs. Ah, to be twenty years younger!
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on December 24, 2005, 05:15:20 PM
Quote:

hehe i was looking for this topic

bump ^_^

lots of works by:

- william bradford
- anne bradstreet
- edward taylor
- jonathan edwards
- philip freneau
- phillis wheatley
- washington irving
- nathaniel hawthorne
- charles dickens
- edgar alle poe
- j.r.r. tolkien
- harriet beecher stowe
- mark twain
- walt whitman
- emily dickinson
- kate chopin
- w.e.b. du bois
- t.s. eliot
- F. scott fitzgerald (minus the great gatsby)
- william faulkner
- ernest hemingway (minus the man by the sea)
- langston hughes (including poetry)
- countee cullen (poetry only)
- tennessee williams (only a streetcar named desire)
- zora neale hurston
- ralph ellison
- toni morrison
- theodore roethke
- sylvia plath
- h.p. lovecraft
- james joyce (no ulysses)
- joseph conrad (apocalypse now, outpost of progress)
- and a massive amount of short stories ^_^




Quite a list, Neo. We all would have our own lists, of course, but I have two comments:

First, I'm glad you listed Harriet Beecher Stowe. I think Uncle Tom's Cabin is one of the best-imagined, best-constructed pieces of literature in any language. It is, IMHO, vastly superior to Moby Dick. It is too often seen as a political piece of fluff, usually by people who haven't read it.

Second, alas, you left Stephen Crane off the list. He was a marvel. His first novel was denounced as pornography and had to be published privately; his second novel forever changed war literature; and he was probably America's greatest poet. And he was dead by 29.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: foon4Balloons on December 24, 2005, 11:46:32 PM
Religious hit men, killer cops, Bollywood! and the name of the man who makes the best vadapav in all of Bombay.

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on December 26, 2005, 10:20:48 PM
 Masquerade, The Amazing Camoflage Deceptions of World War II  by Seymour Reit
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: prinz on December 27, 2005, 09:26:52 PM
1776 by David McCullough  excellent read on the first full year of the Revolutionary War ..
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: smiley on December 28, 2005, 12:23:57 AM
Colleen McCullogh's 6-book Rome series ("First Man in Rome", "The Grass Crown", "Fortune's Favourites", "Caesar", "Caesar's Women" and "The October Horse"). Not strictly historical, but *very* easy to read and good for making a formative period in western culture approachable.

T.H.White (of "Once and Future King" fame) on "The Age of Scandal" - 18th c. history (for work), and Roy Porter's "18th Century British History". Porter does great synoptical works (history of medicine, etc.) and it's interesting to see how he works on a smaller canvas.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: notty on December 28, 2005, 01:12:08 AM
I am reading a book called Grimm's Grimmest.  It's a collection of *unedited* Brothers Grimm tales.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: foon4Balloons on December 28, 2005, 03:25:07 AM
The secret to a good life: knowing when your through.

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Breasts on December 28, 2005, 09:03:15 AM
I'm currently reading

The final book in a damn good series.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: GA_Matt on December 28, 2005, 08:23:29 PM
Don't laugh, 50 Cent - From Pieces To Weight.

Not a bad book, but there's nothing heavy in there.  Next up is Stephen King & Peter Straub: The Black House.

I usualy listen to Unabridged Audio Books... makes life a little easier.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on December 29, 2005, 05:39:14 PM
Quote:

1776 by David McCullough  excellent read on the first full year of the Revolutionary War ..




And much better, IMHO, than his recent pedestrian and unfocused biography of John Adams.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on January 17, 2006, 09:20:38 PM
Can't let this get too far from the first page...

Spinning the Globe: The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters by Ben Green.

I read this over the weekend, and now I can't stop whistling "Sweet Georgia Brown". Or imagining "Goose" Tatum sinking a hook shot from midcourt. Or picturing Marques Haynes giving his teammates a rest in a tough one-point game (a real game, not an exhibition) by dribbling the ball for the entire fourth quarter. Or them playing in front of 75,000 people in West Berlin, or doing their "Magic Circle" routine for an audience of one - Pope Pius XII.

Now to try rolling the ball across my back, from one hand to the other....

rtpoe
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on January 21, 2006, 09:50:59 AM
 The Dinosaur Heresies  by Robert T. Bakker, Ph.D
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: no_fucking_coke on January 26, 2006, 03:23:50 AM
Arrogance &#9579; Bernie Goldberg

what an idiot
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on January 27, 2006, 11:20:56 PM
 The Aces Talk  by Edward H. Sims. Accounts and interviews with fighter pilots from 1914 -1970.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on February 25, 2006, 07:01:22 AM
 Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors  by James D. Hornfischer. Thanks for the recomendation PE, it's an excellent read.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Attalus on March 06, 2006, 12:31:38 AM
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo (Paperback)
by J.R.R. Tolkien
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on March 06, 2006, 06:24:37 PM
Quote:

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo (Paperback)
by J.R.R. Tolkien




Attalus, is that original writing, or is it a retelling, especially the Green Knight?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Attalus on March 06, 2006, 08:50:18 PM
It's a rework. But Tolkien has such masterful ways. One can almost taste Beowulf in this reading, if thou hast acquired.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: foon4Balloons on March 10, 2006, 08:11:04 PM
The best science fiction story ever.

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: foon4Balloons on April 09, 2006, 10:10:12 PM
Books good. TV bad.

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 09, 2006, 10:30:26 PM
Thanks for saving me from searching for this thread.

Anyhow, here goes:

 A Hymn Before Battle  and  Gust Front , both by John Ringo

 The Lost Battalion  by Thomas M. Johnson & Fletcher Pratt
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Quadhouse on April 10, 2006, 12:07:38 AM
Quote:

 A Hymn Before Battle  and  Gust Front , both by John Ringo






You definitely want to read  When the Devil Dances  and  Hell's Faire .  

You may want to look at  March Upcountry ,  March to the Sea ,  March to the Stars , and  We Few  which he wrote with David Weber.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 13, 2006, 04:09:03 PM
I finished  When the Devil Dances  yesterday, and started  Hell's Faire  last night. I've already read the first three of the "Prince Raj" series (I can't remember if I posted here about them, I'll check), but I think I'll wait a little while befre I pick up  We Few . I've still got another ton of books around here to read ftrst.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: notty on April 27, 2006, 02:39:46 PM
I just read the latest Raymond Feist:  Flight of the Nighthawks.  I would rate it four out of five.  All the characters I love made their appearances.  Unfortunately, the two protagonist trainees, Tad and Zane, were less than compelling.

I also just read a boat load of Punisher comics.  I love that guy.  Coolest man in the Marvel Universe.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 28, 2006, 09:44:16 AM
 As Eagles Screamed  (originally published as  Currahee! ) by Donald R. Burgett. A paratrooper's account from boot camp through the Normandy invasion.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on July 07, 2006, 06:53:00 PM
And now for something completely different:

Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think! Edited by Gary L. Hardcastle and George A. Reisch.

From The Argument Clinic sketch to The Meaning of Life, philosophical matters run throughout Python. 21 essays on things like "What Mr. Creosote Knows About Laughter" and "Monty Python and David Hume on Religion". You may never watch Python in the same way again.

rtpoe

p.s. What's really interesting is that this is Vol 19 in Open Court Publishing's "Popular Culture and Philosophy" series. Previous volumes included looks at "The Simpsons", Harry Potter, and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"...
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on July 08, 2006, 07:04:34 PM
 The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on July 09, 2006, 05:14:12 AM
I just picked up The Man Who Ran the Moon by Piers Bizony, about NASA Administrator James Webb.  Webb's centennial birthday comes up this October 8.  I'm thinking of celebrating.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Quadhouse on August 12, 2006, 12:14:28 AM
 One Foot in the Grave  and  Dead on my Feet  by Wm. Mark Simmons.  Forget what you know about vampires, werewolves, zombies, and all the other horror movie favorites.  These two books will change everything.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on August 12, 2006, 04:10:03 PM
Quote:

Quote:

 A Hymn Before Battle  and  Gust Front , both by John Ringo






You definitely want to read  When the Devil Dances  and  Hell's Faire .  

You may want to look at  March Upcountry ,  March to the Sea ,  March to the Stars , and  We Few  which he wrote with David Weber.




I just finished the first 3 books in this series.  Awesome stuff.  Spoiled ass heir to interstellar empire crashes on hell planet with 1 company of elite marine bodyguards.  By the end of the third book, they're off the planet, there's only about half a dozen marines left, but the heir is about the toughest fastest smartest most determined badass you'll ever want to meet.  Which is good, because in 'We Few' what's left of them have to take on all the rest of the interstellar empire, which has been taken over by a coup while they've been gone, and thinks they are all either dead or traitors...
I'm going to be going to the bookstore to see if I can find 'We Few' within minutes after finishing this post!  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on August 12, 2006, 04:50:17 PM
Quote:

 The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin




Hmmm. There are several versions out there, most of them redacted to remove certain observations Franklin made about the joys of sex. Even the most complete edition, by Jesse Lemisch in 1964, which included several letters to and from various women, redacted some of Franklin's observations...
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on August 12, 2006, 04:52:11 PM
And I just read I'm With The Band by Pamela Miller des Barres, one of the foremost groupies of my generation and a totally accomplished cock sucker.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on February 20, 2007, 03:20:47 PM
Since a lot of other threads have been resurrected lately, I might as well take my turn and bring back a fave of mine, again.

 Fighting the Flying Circus  by Capt. Eddie V. Rickenbacker
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ZoD on February 20, 2007, 03:40:13 PM
 Waterlandby Graham Swift. A fantastic novel that I had to read twice to remind mysel fit was that good. Themes like time, narrative and the human habit of storycrafting all make this worthwhile and charming as a read. Also, the only time in my life I will ever find East Anglia interesting.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Breasts on February 20, 2007, 03:48:05 PM
Quote:

...the only time in my life I will ever find East Anglia interesting.



  lol
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ZoD on February 20, 2007, 03:48:59 PM
Funny AND true.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: BillN on February 20, 2007, 04:18:39 PM
I read one recently called "UNLEARN!" by Dick somebody......


I'm awaiting "Somebody's Gotta Say It" by Neal Boortz.


Bill "cumon Amazon" N
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on February 23, 2007, 05:00:52 PM
Just finished:

Beau Brummel: The Ultimate Man of Fashion by Ian Kelly. The first "**29**" (i.e. famous for being famous), he created what would become (with minimal changes) the modern business suit. Then he crashed and burned in a spectacular fashion when his gambling debts caught up with him.

Next up:

The Trouble With Physics, in which Lee Smolin argues that the obsession with string theory is ruining physics.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on February 23, 2007, 05:20:18 PM
Whenever discussions seem caught up in an endless polyangular tug of war between "We've got to win in Iraq" and "We should never have gone into Iraq" and "Iran is playing us" and "Bush the Elder was a wuss for not killing Saddam" and "al-Qaeda gambled on our overreacting and won," I have to keep reminding myself that my single favorite book of analysis is George Friedman's America's Secret War.  Friedman works for Stratfor.com and is pretty much the only person I know who dares to identify the unmentioned elephant in the room, namely Saudi Arabia.  As a straightforward "The case for WMDs and Colin Powell's UN presentation was just TOO compelling" venture, the war makes  nightmarishly little sense; as a ploy in an elaborate geopolitical chess game to finally win some respect-via-fear from Saudi Arabia, it all begins to fit together.  When I read it, our world is still a mess, but at least it's a mess with some recognizable logic behind it.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on March 04, 2007, 09:29:36 PM
 Watch on the Rhine by John Ringo and Tom Kratman
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on March 10, 2007, 07:47:58 PM
Just got done with Blindsight by Peter Watts, and I'm still having trouble getting my mind around all the concepts in it. It's super-hard SF, where the science is "cognition science". What is intelligence? What is sentience? What's the difference?

Since the sales of the hardcover were so disappointing, Tor decided not to do a second printing. Watts was upset, so he grabbed back the rights to it and posted the entire thing on his  website. He also has added a hell of a lot of background info to his website.

Download it, read it, and if you like it, send him some money via PayPal.

(It's got vampires, too.)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on March 17, 2007, 08:50:17 AM
 BOLO!  by David Weber. The first two stories I've read in other anthologies, but they help set up the last two that were new for this book.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on March 31, 2007, 09:08:21 PM
 The Great Escape From Stalag Luft III  by Tim Carroll
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on May 05, 2007, 03:44:49 PM
 Old Soldiers  by David Weber. It picks up where  BOLO!  left off.
 Enemies of Fortune , a  Thieves' World  anthology edited by Lynn Abbey
 The Kuhfra Run  by Jack Higgins
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on May 06, 2007, 11:21:34 AM
David Weber & John Ringo - March Upcountry, March To The Sea, March To The Stars, We Few.

Military sci-fi, with great characterization.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on May 06, 2007, 11:59:00 AM
I'm reading a collection of Famous speeches throughout history,including some from Churchill,Stalin,Roosevelt,Marie Curie,and Oliver Cromwell.
I like reading books in the Reference section sof bookstores,such as more quotes,trivia,and collections of Philosophical analects.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on May 06, 2007, 09:36:37 PM
 The Easter Rising -  A Guide to Dublin in 1916  by Conor Kostick and Lorcan Collins
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ZoD on May 11, 2007, 02:48:11 PM
 Dinosaur Comics: Your Entire Family is Made of Meat
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: foon4Balloons on May 11, 2007, 05:09:44 PM
Definitely not a chick flick.
 
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Quadhouse on May 13, 2007, 01:31:56 AM
John Ringo's  Into the Looking Glass .
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on May 24, 2007, 10:51:52 AM
 Thermopylae-The Battle that Changed the World  by Paul Cartledge. This book is written for the die hard history nut.


Home"Good thing I qualify"vintner
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: notty on May 24, 2007, 12:21:30 PM
The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  It was horrible in a good way.  It won the Pulitzer.  I hope they don't make a movie of it.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on May 29, 2007, 05:15:56 AM
 Go In and Sink!  by Douglas Reeman
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on June 02, 2007, 10:48:41 AM
 Where Eagles Dare  by Alistair MacLean
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Breasts on June 02, 2007, 11:36:42 AM
Quote:

 Go In and Sink!  by Douglas Reeman



I remember reading that one years ago. About sinking the German tanker subs wasn't it? If I remember correctly.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on June 02, 2007, 01:28:17 PM
You are correct. That was the first mission.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Breasts on June 03, 2007, 04:37:17 PM
Quote:

You are correct. That was the first mission.



Cool. I'll have to find a copy and read it again. I remember it being really rather good.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on June 03, 2007, 09:13:54 PM
Speeches that Changed The World.It has speeches from Moses,to Oliver Cromwell to Marie Curie,to JFK.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on June 10, 2007, 08:35:06 PM
 M*A*S*H Goes To Miami  by Richard **33** and William E. Butterworth. I needed a comedy fix.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: gOOber on July 18, 2007, 06:02:37 PM
 Deep social commentary.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on July 19, 2007, 07:29:09 PM
Halsey's Typhoon by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin.

In WWII's Pacific Theater, the U.S. Navy suffered is heaviest losses not at the hands of the Japanese, but from a typhoon. "Bull" Halsey, in supporting the invasion of the Phillipines in December 1944, ordered his Third Fleet to refuel and resupply. With little weather information (and what he had was poor), he set the rendezvous point right in the path of a typhoon. This is the story of the little ships (USS Hull, USS Spence, USS Monaghan) that didn't make it, and their crew that survived (thanks to the captain of the USS Tabberer, who disobeyed orders to search for survivors).
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: notty on July 20, 2007, 10:40:45 AM
Acacia by David Anthony Durham.  It was a'ight.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on July 21, 2007, 05:28:37 PM
 Marathon Man  by William Goldman
I made the mistake of seeing the movie the night before a dental appointment. I compounded that mistake by telling him that. Of course, his reply was "I love that flick!" His sense of humor is as warped as anybodys' here. Mine included.

Home"Is it safe?"vintner
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Sadistyk on July 22, 2007, 01:22:44 AM
Just finished reading "Citizen Soldiers" by Steven Ambrose not too long ago.  Going to start "Band Of Brothers" by Steven Ambrose again tomorrow.  I've read  Brothers twice already, but it's still a good read and Ambrose is one of my favorite authors when it relates to WWII.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on August 19, 2007, 09:17:44 AM
 Wars of the Irish Kings  by David Willis McCullough
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Blax12 on August 20, 2007, 02:25:37 AM
 
If you are italian or interested in italian books, this is what I read during the last 3 weeks of holidays from work.

"Viva Israele" by Magdi Allam, an egyptian muslim journalist living and working in Italy.
His theory is that the muslim country only have one desire: death and destruction of Israel. While the only thing to do is to adfirm and protect Israel's right to exist as the expression of a cultur of "building" rather than a culture of destroying. It is the description of his life in Egypt as an Isreali hater adn its conversion to the pro-Isreal side.

"The Kennedy. History of a family who signed a century". By Gianni Bisiach. An intersting biography of the Kennedy family. But not very easy to read because of the continous jumping from a point to another. Bisiach is anyweay one of the first journalists who started not believing to the "Oswald-alone" theory.  

"La Casta. How italian politicians became untouchables". By G.A. Stella. A great book about how italian politicians are wasting money. The italian president of the republic is costing to us 4 times what Buckingham Palace costs to the English people. And the President of the region of Sicily is costing more than our president of the repubblic. Each barber in the private barber shop of the House of Representatives earns 100.000 euros per year....

previously I read the book "The Simpsons and the Philosopy". Very nice and well done...


Blax12
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on August 20, 2007, 04:37:01 PM
 The Last King  by Michael Curtis Ford. Historical fiction about Mithridites the Great.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on August 20, 2007, 07:15:02 PM
The Pentagon: The Untold Story of the Wartime Race to Build the Pentagon - And to Restore it Sixty Years Later by Steve Vogel

Built in 17 months, and rushed so fast to meet wartime needs that the builders were often working ahead of the blueprints. The "Battle of the Pentagon" in which Vietnam War protesters invaded. The bomb planted by the Weather Underground. And there's a great deal of eyewitness accounts of the 9-11 attack (which, thank goodness, managed to hit the only part of the building that had been renovated and strengthened at the time!), including one from a man who watched the plane fly right over his head and into the building. Even Donald Rumsfeld gets some credit for running to the scene to see how he could help.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on September 08, 2007, 09:58:55 PM
Back to history.

 Nignt Action  by Captain Peter Dickens. British motor torpedo boats vs German shipping off the Dutch coast.

 Night Raider of the Atlantic  by Terence Roberts. The story of Otto Kretschmer, the U-boat ace of aces.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on September 22, 2007, 12:44:30 AM
 Tin Cans  by Theodore Roscoe. US destroyer and DE action from WWII.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on September 25, 2007, 10:31:50 AM
 Victory - Into the Fire  Edited and introduced by Stephen Coonts. WWII fiction by Harold Coyle, Harold Robbins, and R.J. Pinero.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on September 25, 2007, 11:01:54 AM
Whoa, rtpoe, good call (sorry to have neglected this thread so long) -- I bought The Pentagon (the book, obviously) for my father.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Windlord on September 25, 2007, 05:26:42 PM
Darwin's Radio & Darwin Childs both by Greg Bear. It's an interesting series devoted to analysis the social reaction if suddenly a new human species appeared in our modern world. Part is writen in a thriller way like Da Vinci code, but with a good hard sci fi argument.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on September 28, 2007, 09:24:06 PM
 Six Days of the Condor  by James Grady
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on October 25, 2007, 08:50:29 PM
 Navy Diver  by Joseph Sidney Karneke with Victor Boesen
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: AZWolf on October 27, 2007, 06:20:27 AM
Suck it.......lol.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on November 17, 2007, 08:37:36 AM
 The Phantom Major (Previously published as "Who Dares, Wins")  by V. Cowles. The story of Stirling's raiders in North Africa.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: AZWolf on November 17, 2007, 08:43:12 AM
Death.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on November 17, 2007, 09:42:16 PM
"The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs" by Bill Jenkinson.

An incredible bit of research on every single game played by The Babe. Including post-season and exhibition games. Even though there was no TV, you had several newspapers covering each game. So Jenkinson was able to come up with distance estimates for each and every home run and long fly ball hit by Ruth, and estimates that in modern ballparks, he would have hit over 1,000 home runs in his career, including over 100 in 1923 alone.

Back when he played, centerfield at Yankee Stadium was 490 feet away... And the rule was that a ball going over the fence was fair or foul depending on where it landed, not where it left the field.

Lots of great anecdotes about just how great Babe Ruth was. Makes you appreciate him all the more.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: smiley on November 24, 2007, 08:07:24 AM
"Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs" by Lewis Page.

How the British Government, BAe and the General Staff have betrayed the British squaddie in the name of political advantage and overpriced pork barrel defence projects.

Some of the facts Page presents put a *whole* new (very unfavourable) complexion on these generals coming out of the woodwork to criticise the PM. Timeservers like Generel Mike Jackson are just as much part of the problem as the Labour apparatchiks and Civil Service drones in Whitehall.

 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on November 25, 2007, 05:00:58 PM
 Grantville Gazette II  - Sequels to  1632  Edited and Created by Eric Flint
 Cutthroats  by Robert C. Dick. A U.S. Sherman tank driver and commander on Leyte and Okinawa
 Dzur  - by Steven Brust. Vlad Taltos is at it again. I really like the comparison of preparing a fine meal to planning an assassination.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Quadhouse on November 25, 2007, 11:36:51 PM
John Ringo's  Choosers of the Slain .  

THIS IS IMPORTANT:  Don't read if you don't like reading about one hard core SOB killing terrorists, slavers, rapists, and others.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on December 25, 2007, 01:50:00 PM
 U-Boat War Patrol  by Lawrence Paterson. The photographic diary of U564 under Reinhard Suhren.
 1634: The Ram Rebellion  by Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on December 28, 2007, 10:45:59 AM
Most of the books I've been reading have been techie manuals and whatnot; however, I intend to borrow both The Secret and The Year of Living Biblically from the library, the former to see what all the fuss is about and the latter because I dipped into it the other day and found it to be very funny and interesting.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on December 31, 2007, 09:45:34 PM
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

So, how long would it take for all the works of Man to crumble away? With no one manning the pumps, New York City's subways flood in two days. Foundations rot away, buildings collapse. Farms turn back into forests. Dogs won't be able to compete with their wild cousins, but cats do nicely... Mount Rushmore lasts, because it's carved into very hard rock. The next species to evolve intelligence will have a mystery on whatever they use for hands.

And would the world be better off without us?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on January 13, 2008, 10:57:37 PM
 Ghost Hunting  by Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on February 01, 2008, 01:08:08 PM
 Shadow Kingdoms  - Robert E. Howard. A collection of stories first published in  Weird Tales  back in the late 1920's.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on February 10, 2008, 07:09:50 PM
 Working on the Edge  by Spike Walker. This is the book that inspired the Discovery Channel to create "Deadliest Catch". It gets in-freakin'-tense.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on March 30, 2008, 08:22:33 AM
 The Greedy Bastard Diary: A Comic Tour Of America  by Eric Idle. LMAO!
 American Guerrilla in the Philippines  by Ira Wolfert. The tale of Iliff David Richardson, A PT officer who was stranded on Leyte and was put in charge of the radio network.
 1776  by David McCullough
 Thunder Below!  by Admiral Eugene B. Fluckey. The last five war patrols of the USS Barb by her C.O.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on March 31, 2008, 08:33:40 PM
Our Dumb World by The Onion.

They manage to find *something* hilarious to say about every country.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: gOOber on March 31, 2008, 09:03:37 PM
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on April 01, 2008, 10:34:51 AM
Quote:

gOOber said:
   




I personally recommend "Dragon's Eggs" and "The TITS Dimension" by Z. Cupp Chestnut, late of Ed Lundt and now property of BustArtist.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: collared_cherri on April 01, 2008, 10:37:07 AM
I lubz da goobster!
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 24, 2008, 10:20:50 PM
 Given Up For Dead -Amarica's Heroic Stand At Wake Island  by Bill Sloan
 1635:The Canon Law  by Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on April 25, 2008, 02:17:43 AM
 Before Mao: The Life of Li li-san by Patrick Lescot. Probably an acquired taste for those of us who find the internal gossip of the Chinese Revolution interesting, especially Mao's sexual obsessions.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 27, 2008, 10:49:09 PM
 Iron Knights - The U.S. 66th Armored Regiment in WWII  - by Gordon A. Blaker
 Tank Sergeant -  by Ralph Zumbro
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Quadhouse on April 29, 2008, 10:36:05 AM
Glen Cook's  Cruel Zinc Melodies
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on May 03, 2008, 11:01:20 AM
 St. Patrick's Gargoyle  by Katherine Kurtz
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on May 19, 2008, 07:03:47 PM
 Elephants on Acid by Alex Boese - Quick looks at some very strange scientific experiments.

 The Warm Bucket Brigade by Jeremy Lott - A study of the American Vice-Presidency. Looks mostly at those who would go on to become president. Lots of cool trivia (e.g. Dick Cheney wasn't the only Veep to shoot someone, Andrew Johnson gave his VP Inaugural Address while **92**...), and since one in three VPs has gone on to the Presidency, you'd better pay attention to the candidates' choices.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on May 28, 2008, 08:00:47 PM
I've been trying to thin out the mess in my library the past few weeks, so here goes:

 A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Amaricans   Pirates, Skinflints, Patriots and Other Colorful Characters Stuck in the Footnotes of History  by Michael Farquhar
 Whip  by Martin Caidin
 The Heavy Water Raid  by John D. Drummond
 Path of the Fury  by David Weber
 H.M.S. Hood vs. Bismarck: The Battleship Battle  by Theodore Taylor
 The Glory of the Solomons  by Edwin P. Hoyt
 Three Hearts and Three Lions  by Poul Anderson
 Pacific Carrier  by Ruben P. Kitchen.  The USS Yorktown, CV-10
 Decisive Battles of the American Revolution  by Lt. Col. Joseph B. Mitchell
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on June 15, 2008, 09:06:40 AM
 50 Battles that Changed the World - The Conflicts that Most Influenced the Course of History  by William Weir
 Into the Teeth of the Tiger  by Donald S. Lopez.
 The Civil War as they Knew It  by Pierce G. Fredericks. Abraham Lincoln's words with Matthew Brady's photographs.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on June 15, 2008, 07:01:16 PM
Day of Empire by Amy Chua.  One of the easier-to-take world historical overviews I've come across.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Prolactin on June 15, 2008, 08:34:49 PM
Some recent reads:

 Devices and Desires - K.J. Parker: My second time through, and it's still one of my favorites.  The story revolves around a clash between two feudal societies and an early industrial nation, with one man at the center of it all.  The whole series is spectacular, but the first is by far my favorite.

 The Varieties of Scientific Experience - Carl Sagan: I'm guessing the title is a nod to William James, though his book is still sitting neglected on my shelf.  Essentially an account of Sagan's view of the universe, starting with the basics of cosmology and working towards the religious interpretations thereof.  A little simple and somewhat dated, but a good read if you're not in the mood to strain too hard. The author, by the way, was a prominent NASA engineer involved in several expeditions, including Viking and Mariner.

 The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - Robert Heinlein: My first Heinlein book, and I'm quit impressed.  While it's certainly science fiction, this is more a consideration of setting than of plot - a wonderful tale of revolution, and some very interesting thoughts on how an early Lunar society would function.

Next in line is Spook Country by William Gibson.  Loved Pattern Recognition, so I'm looking forward to this.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Breasts on June 16, 2008, 12:47:03 PM
 
I've read it before but it's a still a fascinating read and would recommend it to anyone.

Professor Niall Ferguson tells the spectacular story of the rise and fall of the British empire.
How did our own small, rainy island in the north Atlantic come to rule a quarter of the planet?
And how, in the process, did it create so many of the key institutions of the modern world?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on June 28, 2008, 10:49:18 PM
 Grantville Gazette III  - edited and created by Eric Flint
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on July 06, 2008, 04:41:08 PM
 Big Bosoms and Square Jaws by Jimmy McDonough. The best biography of Russ Meyer to date. This is my third time through it; each time I discover more.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on July 14, 2008, 07:14:53 PM
Almost done with Hollywood Horror: From Gothic to Cosmic by Mark A. Vieira.

A history of horror and scary movies, from the beginning of Hollywood up to about 1970, when cheap gore replaced true scares. Interestingly, those years are almost coincident with the life of Boris Karloff... The history is told through behind-the-scenes stories. Filled with hundreds of black and white production stills.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on August 09, 2008, 12:59:34 PM
 The Guns Of August  by Barbara Tuchman. The lead up to, and the early days of WWI.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on August 09, 2008, 01:43:16 PM
Quote:

homevintner said:
 The Guns Of August  by Barbara Tuchman. The lead up to, and the early days of WWI.




I love her writing style.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Dearc on August 09, 2008, 03:00:31 PM
"The Fundamentals of Extremism", by Kimberly Blaker.  She discusses the both casual and **76** advances of American Christians seeking to establish a more 'theocratic' government and society.  Second time read, but when I read it first, Nov 2003, I was either angry and/or terrified, being an atheist.  Domestically speaking, things aren't as bad in this area as before.

Before that, was Robert Boston's "Why The Religious Right Is Wrong About The Separation Of Church & State."

Next is "Today I Will Nourish My Inner Martyr", by Ann Thornhill & Sarah Wells.  This is a pick-me-up for hard-headed cynics like myself:

"Unlike me, the seasons of the year serve a purpose."
"Today I will discourage others to care about my needs & emotions."
"If someone compliments me today, I will seek out the hidden agenda."

This is so short, it'll be done in 2 days.  After that, I'm thinking of starting up S.M. Stirlings Draka Series.  Instead of going to Canada, British Loyalists relocate to South Africa, fight the Dutch (2 years earlier than in our time).  After WW2, they have most of the planet.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on September 13, 2008, 01:19:05 AM
 The Vaagso Raid - by Joseph H. Devins, Jr
 The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt  - By William Northdurft with Josh Smith
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ChrisR1 on September 13, 2008, 09:05:46 AM
 The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on October 06, 2008, 09:40:23 PM
 The Rising Tide  by Jeff Shaara. Historical fiction of WWII from North Africa through Italy.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: gOOber on October 12, 2008, 01:56:36 AM
I'm gonna be rich!

 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: evilkirk on October 13, 2008, 07:46:22 AM
Speaking of literature, I have just learned that Ridley Scott will be adapting Joe Haldeman's 'The Forever War'.
I always adored the book for its adult and compelling depiction of interstellar war. I found the main character
enormously sympathetic as he repeatedly went off to war for months at a time and was confounded by societal changes as decades would pass on Earth as a result of relativity.  I am curious,though, as to if the'll keep the story element of curbing the Earth's population by "teaching" every citizen to be homosexual.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: gOOber on November 20, 2008, 07:16:38 AM
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: midsize on November 20, 2008, 01:29:34 PM
Blood and Thunder -- by Hampton Sides.

A history of the US conquest of the southwest focused on the life of Kit Carson, and the subjugation of the Navajo.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on November 25, 2008, 10:09:06 PM
 1634 The Baltic War  by Eric Flint and David Weber
 No Man's Land   by John Toland
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on November 25, 2008, 10:34:50 PM


 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: gOOber on December 02, 2008, 10:53:04 PM
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on December 02, 2008, 11:28:40 PM
I just finished re-reading  The Mayor of Castro Street, the late Randy Shilts's biography of Harvey Milk. It's an amazingly well-written story of San Francisco, of social change, and of how Milk earned the loathing of the gay "establishment" by connecting with people who weren't supposed to like gays.

Incidentally, there are some amusing asides, like Senator Diane Feinstein, who is now very social with gays, but who in 1973 didn't bother to hide her distaste. We all mellow with age, I guess.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on December 21, 2008, 07:20:46 AM
 Vagabond Halfback - The Life and Times of Johnny Blood McNally  by Denis J, Gullickson. A good bio about one of the most colorful characters of the early days of pro football and inaugural class member of the hall of fame.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Dearc on December 23, 2008, 08:55:15 PM
"Where Have All The Soldiers Gone?" by James Sheehan.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on December 27, 2008, 03:48:29 PM
 Bloody Sunday  by James Gleeson. "How Michael Collins's Agents Assassinated Britain's Secret Service in Dublin on November 21, 1920"
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on January 06, 2009, 08:59:13 PM
 Red Road From Stalingrad  "Recollections of a Soviet Infantryman" by Mansur Abdulin
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Breasts on January 07, 2009, 12:57:52 PM
 Tigers in the Mud: The Combat Career of Panzer Commander Otto Carrius Written by Otto Carrius himself.
A very interesting book.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on January 08, 2009, 03:21:16 PM
Agreed. I enjoyed reading that one a few years ago.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on January 19, 2009, 06:43:40 PM
 Capitol Men, in which Philip Dray describes the careers of the first black congressmen, against the background of Reconstruction.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on January 22, 2009, 07:08:07 PM
 People of the Dark, The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard, vol. two
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on February 06, 2009, 09:10:15 PM
 The Squad and the Intelligence Operations of Michael Collins  by T. Ryle Dwyer
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Lesbian Bob on February 18, 2009, 09:31:49 PM
 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on February 19, 2009, 02:25:52 PM
Wow, Lesbian Bob! I'm impressed. That's cool.

I just finished Joseph Ellis's  American Creation. It wasn't nearly so interesting as the Sapphic sisters and their horsey escapades.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on February 19, 2009, 07:18:16 PM
From the title, that book should be about Lesbian Horses, not Lesbian Women!  Of course, that would be weird.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on March 14, 2009, 11:21:32 AM
 As Told At The Explorers Club  - Edited by George Plimpton

 Six Days in June  by Eric Hammel. How Israel won the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on March 15, 2009, 06:10:10 PM
I finally read Barack Obama's first book,  Dreams From My Father, which is vastly better than most books by politicians. He had a lot of courage to write the book because, while he roams across a lot of topics, the focus of the book is his exploration of his father, who left when he was two or three and whom he didn't see again, and who was killed in an auto accident when Obama was 21. He starts with the tales his mother and her family told him as a chi1d, about this wise, courageous African exchange student; and as an adult Obama did the research to discover a father who was deceptive, promiscuous, politically inept, and a lousy driver.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on March 16, 2009, 06:41:23 PM
"Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)" by Tom Vanderbilt.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Hugeboobfan on March 16, 2009, 08:02:23 PM
"The Autobiography of Henry VIII" by Margaret George.  Obviously not an actual autobiography, but a fun read for fans of English history.  The book is as fat as Henry was in his later years, but flows along quickly.  Here's a teaser (page 110):

Quote:

Her body pressed hungrily against me; I could feel her breasts through the thin nightdress.  She had extraordinarily large breasts for such a small, slight girl, I thought, from somewhere inside myself. *







*note: this is a fictional description of Katherine of Aragon on her wedding night to Henry, when she was 23 years old.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: AZWolf on March 21, 2009, 05:38:30 AM
About to dig into "Atlas Shrugged."

I already know I won't agree with it, but I want to read it and understand my enemies that much better.  Plus will get to talk about it with my even more liberal friend who loaned it to me.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on March 21, 2009, 01:46:44 PM
A little history:

 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on March 21, 2009, 02:51:53 PM
"Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury",a collection of closing arguments from some of the most historic legal cases in the US.I finished H.William Kunstler's argument at the trial of the Chicago Seven,Gerry Spence's at the Silkwood case,and now I'm reading one by Claire Foltz,first woman attorney in California.
The author states that these closing arguments are so long-winded that in today's Television-and-internet-deluged society,most juries' attention spans would gas out after the first paragraph.I however find them great to read.Makes me want to go into law.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 18, 2009, 11:34:11 AM
I've finally caught up a little bit and made a very small dent in my library.

First, the fiction:
 Winged Escort  by Douglas Reeman
 Space Infantry  a collection edited by David Drake
 Into The Storm  the first of the  Destroyermen saga by Taylor Anderson. I've got to get my hands on the next two of the series.
 Ring of Fire II  edited and created by Eric Flint

And now for the non-fic:
 Heroes of the Army  by Bruce Jacobs
 Hell's Brigade  edited by Charles Goodman
 The Mosquito Fleet  by Bern Keating
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ChrisR1 on April 19, 2009, 01:41:30 AM
 Infrastructure: The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape by Brian Hayes.

So many answers as to how our civilization runs and what all the bits and pieces we see are.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Quadhouse on April 20, 2009, 11:31:36 AM
Jim C. Hines' "The Stepsister Scheme."  You'll never look at fairrtales the same way again.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on April 20, 2009, 08:01:53 PM
Quote:

Zealot said:
"Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury",a collection of closing arguments from some of the most historic legal cases in the US.I finished H.William Kunstler's argument at the trial of the Chicago Seven,Gerry Spence's at the Silkwood case,and now I'm reading one by Claire Foltz,first woman attorney in California.
The author states that these closing arguments are so long-winded that in today's Television-and-internet-deluged society,most juries' attention spans would gas out after the first paragraph.I however find them great to read.Makes me want to go into law.




It sounds interesting. When I started practicing law in the early 1970s the rule of thumb was that juries expected about an hour of summing up. Now judges try to limit us to 20 minutes.

Kunstler, BTW, was a real rock star of a lawyer in his day. He had groupies in virtually all large U.S. cities, and he loved big, real big, boobs. I felt honored to deposit my bodily fluids into the same young lady (a law review editor) whom Bill K was seeing. For a law review editor, she was very hot. Gawd, I miss the '70s!
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 21, 2009, 06:49:41 AM
 Altered Carbon  by Richard K. Morgan. Another piece of sci-fi that i didn't want to put down.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Hugeboobfan on April 21, 2009, 07:09:09 AM
Quote:

homevintner said:
 Altered Carbon  by Richard K. Morgan. Another piece of sci-fi that i didn't want to put down.




I'll have to try some of his sci-fi sometime.  I recently read The Steel Remains, which was Morgan's first try at fantasy, and I wasn't very impressed.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 21, 2009, 05:57:23 PM
I'd never heard of him before last week when one of the docs loaned it to me.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 27, 2009, 08:42:59 PM
 Guerrilla Submarines  by Edward Dissette and H.C. Adamson
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Bonecracker on April 27, 2009, 09:42:49 PM
The Purpose Drive Life (again!)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ChrisR1 on June 02, 2009, 11:24:04 PM
Just finished Brownies and Kalashnikovs: A Saudi Woman's Memoir of American Arabia and Wartime Beirut by Fadia Basrawi. An extremely interesting look into the Arab world through a series of very atypical experiences.

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on June 03, 2009, 01:22:08 PM
I just went on a David Weber jag.  Read the 4 book "Empire Of Man" series that he wrote with John Ringo, then "In Fury Born", a 2 book omnibus.  Good military sci-fi.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on June 09, 2009, 11:29:18 PM
Great Battles of World War I: In the Air  compiled by Frank C. Platt
The Pride and the Anguish  by Douglas Reeman
The Hill  by Ray Rigby
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Q_BE on June 10, 2009, 03:08:11 PM
I've been reading Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America (http://**21**/?http://www.amazon.com/Guilty-Liberal-Victims-Assault-America/dp/030735346X) by Ann Coulter.

She's like curry--you can only take so much of her at a time, but damn, does she spice up the conservative spectrum of arguments.

She's also not half-bad looking, judging by her cover photo on said book.

Q-"Ann says what others dare not say"-BE :P
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on June 23, 2009, 11:07:32 PM
The Lost Fleet
               Dauntless
                  Fearless
                  Courageous
                  Valiant
                  Relentless

        by Jack Campbell

The Excalibur Alternative  by David Weber
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on July 08, 2009, 07:10:49 PM
Arbeits - Kommando - by Elvet Williams
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on July 28, 2009, 08:21:25 PM
1634: The Bavarian Crisis by Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on July 28, 2009, 09:53:24 PM
"Android's Dream"

Another rollicking good sci-fi yarn from John Scalzi
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on July 30, 2009, 12:59:39 AM
Reading the Sten series by Allan Cole & Chris Bunch.  Military sci-fi, an 8 book series.  I think it would make a great movie series, which makes sense since Cole & Bunch worked as scriptwriters in Hollywood for at least part of their careers.  For all I know, they still may.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on August 04, 2009, 07:15:25 PM
D Day by David Howarth
Personal accounts more than grand strategy.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on August 09, 2009, 09:06:22 AM
Colonel Sun by Robert Markham(Kingsley Amis)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on August 09, 2009, 10:10:02 AM
Say, vint, is that a non-Fleming James Bond novel?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on August 09, 2009, 10:47:27 PM
Correct! It was written after Fleming died, and was dedicated to him. I bought it used at a sale a few years back, and finally got around to reading it.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on August 11, 2009, 08:01:29 PM
Just finished Hammer's Slammers by david Drake.I bought it when I was in high school but I had severe ADD in those days.Now that I've finished it,I can say it wasn't really that good.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on August 13, 2009, 07:38:00 PM
Good Book, by David Plotz

In which the Author collects his essays from Slate.com, where he, a non-observant Jew, read every single word in the Old Testament for the very first time, and discovered many things, including the origins of common sayings (e.g. the "writing on the wall"), the "messy" parts that people deliberately pass over (e.g. the story of Dinah), that the purported heroes really aren't very heroic, and the real heroes are those who dare to confront and question God.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on August 22, 2009, 10:57:41 PM
Aku-Aku by Thor Heyerdahl
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: gOOber on August 25, 2009, 12:08:27 PM
 ::)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: luvdemwhoppers on August 25, 2009, 12:17:34 PM
no time to read...to bizzy on here. ;D
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on August 25, 2009, 01:25:43 PM
The Tortall Novels by Tamora Pierce.  Aimed at young people apparently, but I like them a lot.  All young ladies coming of age in a fantasy world.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on August 26, 2009, 11:03:08 PM
The Spy In The Castle - by David Neligan
Dublin Castle during the 1919-21 Anglo-Irish War.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on September 08, 2009, 05:28:48 PM
Retreat, Hell! - by Jim Wilson
The 1st Marine Division fighting their way back to the Sea of Japan from the Chosin Reservoir.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Breasts on September 08, 2009, 05:57:38 PM
That's an amusing coincidence as I'm currently reading The Korean War by Max Hastings ;D
A very interesting book. Especially the section on The Battle of the Imjin River (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Imjin_River) 8)

P.S. Re Chosin. Wasn't that the famous "We're not retreating, we're advancing in another direction" incident?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on September 09, 2009, 01:25:51 AM
You got it.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on October 10, 2009, 08:10:56 PM
Malta   The Thorn in Rommel's Side   By Laddie Lucas
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Q_BE on October 12, 2009, 09:19:43 AM
I plan on reading Glenn Beck's new book "Arguing with Idiots" and Sarah Palin's memoir.

Q-"Should be fun"-BE
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on October 15, 2009, 02:30:50 PM
The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson.

A retelling of the well-trod story of Joseph Priestly. One of the interesting footnotes to history is that in their long correspondence John Adams and Thomas Jefferson mentioned Alexander Hamilton three times and Priestly fifty-some times. He was chased out of England for his Unitarian ideas, and landed in the U.S. when we were accepting of such things. Now I suspect he would be treated to the opposite way.

But for newbies to the history of science, it's a good book, including the dreary details of how Ben Franklin mapped the Gulf Stream. It was all about postal delivery.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: prinz on October 18, 2009, 02:23:48 PM
"Castles of steel" story about the battle of Jutland...Quite a good take on the subject..
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on October 18, 2009, 05:22:59 PM
"Castles of steel" story about the battle of Jutland...Quite a good take on the subject..

Always an interesting topic, although my favorite naval battle was Tassafaronga Strait, for its foreshadowing of asymmetric struggle. The few books that have been written about it are a crashing bore, alas.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Breasts on October 18, 2009, 05:42:22 PM
"Castles of steel" story about the battle of Jutland...Quite a good take on the subject..

"There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today." ;) :)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on October 18, 2009, 09:41:48 PM
Who's the author of that one, Prinz?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: luvdemwhoppers on October 20, 2009, 04:58:12 PM
 :P :P
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on October 21, 2009, 07:05:26 PM
:P :P

Everybody's a critic...
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on October 24, 2009, 03:28:09 PM
Besides, I'm sure Mike is more a Dostevsky kinda guy.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: luvdemwhoppers on October 24, 2009, 04:56:51 PM
no doubt, albeit the paperback versions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwFW834Mrcc
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: maniac704 on October 26, 2009, 05:50:10 PM
Presently reading Mirror Dance by L.M. Bujold, as I've finally gotten around to reading her Vorkosigan saga.  So far, I give an enthusiastic thumbs-up to the series as a whole.

Finished Falling Hard by Mark Law not too long ago, it's an interesting and well-written account of the history of judo through Law's own studies of the art.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: prinz on October 26, 2009, 09:45:12 PM
Who's the author of that one, Prinz?
  Robert Massie. wrote castles of steel....Also just read   "Sea Of Thunder"  by Evan Thomas  a superb read on 4 commanders at leyte Gulf..The last and greatest fleet battle of modern times.. Thomas also wrote "John Paul Jones"... quite a take on Capt. Jones.... cheers
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: prinz on October 26, 2009, 09:55:12 PM
Always an interesting topic, although my favorite naval battle was Tassafaronga Strait, for its foreshadowing of asymmetric struggle. The few books that have been written about it are a crashing bore, alas.
  Ah Yes Tassafaronga ! Tenacious Tanaka breaks it off in our collective ass! 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on October 27, 2009, 06:52:55 AM
Thanks for the info, Prinz. New additions for my wish list.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on October 27, 2009, 11:14:35 PM
"Tear Down This Myth" by Will Bunch.

It's rather funny reading all the negative reviews/comments on places like Amazon. They clearly haven't read the book, since if they did, they'd realize that Bunch hasn't written a Reagan-bashing piece, but rather a history of how the GOP deified him, and how that has clouded their minds.

I remember a Doonesbury cartoon, in which it was claimed that Reagan suffered from a strange vision problem that made him only able to look backwards through a rose-tinted haze. Seems the Reagan worshippers are doing the same....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on November 01, 2009, 10:41:59 AM
Stonewall in the Valley by Robert G. Tanner.
Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on November 01, 2009, 11:26:57 PM
Night Watch by Terry Pratchett.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on November 09, 2009, 10:19:30 PM
Crusade by Taylor Anderson. Second in the "Destroyermen" series.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Q_BE on November 10, 2009, 12:04:01 AM
Desperate Networks by Bill Carter. Fascinating chronicle of the challenges facing network TV in a new media age...and it was written several years ago. It's even more relevant today. :D

Q-"I highly recommend it"-BE
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on November 10, 2009, 10:08:39 PM
I'm still reading "Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury".I'm on the statements of Vincent Bugliosi for the Manson Murders.It's good.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on December 04, 2009, 10:26:42 AM
Doesn't really fit this thread, but what the hey.  I was killing time in the library the other day and happened across a novel called Genesis by one Ken Shufeldt.  It is staggeringly, appallingly bad.  But the real fun is, you don't even have to read it.  Instead, look it up on the Amazon site and then check out the reader reviews.  A few meekly try to defend it, but the majority dumps on it -- to my happy relief.  It's not often that I feel very closely attuned to my fellow humans, but I felt personally vindicated reading all those negative reviews.

As we aspire ever higher, sometimes we also need to doublecheck how far we can sink.  I'd say Genesis makes a good floor.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on December 04, 2009, 12:53:09 PM
I can't wait for my local public library to get a copy of "Ted Williams at War" by Bill Nowlin, so I can read about his nearly five years as a Marine Corps flight instructor and fighter pilot.

Quote
Shot down once, on his third mission, Williams was lucky to escape with his life. He was back up and flying less than 24 hours later....Imagine Alex Rodriguez or Barry Bonds flying dive-bombing missions in close air support of troops on the ground, taking anti-aircraft fire as they pulled out of dives as low as 500 feet.  -  Publisher's jacket copy

Just the thing for the cold winter months before Spring Training starts again...
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on December 04, 2009, 02:42:28 PM
In Fury Born by David Weber.  Strictly military sci-fi, with a great female heroine, until a mythological fury gets involved...
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on December 04, 2009, 03:18:08 PM
The Battle For Germany by H. Essame
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Quadhouse on December 07, 2009, 11:18:27 PM
In Fury Born by David Weber.  Strictly military sci-fi, with a great female heroine, until a mythological fury gets involved...

Damn it.  You beat me to it.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: gmoney42 on December 08, 2009, 12:30:43 AM
World War Z by Max Brooks

if you like zombies- this is the ultimate novel.
It's about zombies over-running the entire world told in first person accounts.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on December 11, 2009, 11:46:38 PM
Beka Cooper Book One: Terrier, and Book Two: Bloodhound, by Tamora Pierce.  Believable police fiction set in a fantasy city, with a 16-17 heroine who kicks ass.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: RandomX on December 15, 2009, 09:02:27 PM
I just finished the Dark Tower series. Well, the first four books were fantastic.

I just wizzed through 3 mediocre books and I'm almost done with Her Fearful Symmetry which is a pretty good book. (The second book by Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on January 05, 2010, 08:31:29 PM
Jhegaala by Steven Brust
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on January 06, 2010, 06:32:55 PM
Jhegaala by Steven Brust

Is that a new Vlad Taltos book?!
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on January 06, 2010, 06:45:52 PM
It's Vlad alright. Copyright was '08. I love this freakin' series.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on January 07, 2010, 07:02:13 PM
'08?  I have all of them up to Dzur, so I've been lagging behind.  I guess I now have a good use for that Chapters gift card I got for Christmas...
I also have the series that started with The Phoenix Guards and ended with Sethra Lavode, set in the same universe but earlier than the Vlad Taltos series.  I highly recommend those too.  Actually, I recommend anything that Steven Brust has ever written.   :D
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Shara on January 07, 2010, 07:22:42 PM
8th attempt on Ulysses by that crazy Irishman... still can't get through
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: prinz on January 09, 2010, 08:11:20 AM
Crusade by Taylor Anderson. Second in the "Destroyermen" series.
good series Ive read the first now waiting for paperback of 2nd...good ol four stackers!
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on January 09, 2010, 01:44:41 PM
Paperback came out back in November. I think the third is out in paperback in April.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: SwitcherX on January 10, 2010, 10:03:25 PM
Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb.   It's one of those books that makes you think. 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on January 12, 2010, 03:18:08 PM
8th attempt on Ulysses by that crazy Irishman... still can't get through

You, too, Shara? I tried five or six times; finally, I decided that Finnegan's Wake would be more accessible. There's a couple of years I'll never get back!
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on January 14, 2010, 09:04:31 PM
The Nazi Rocketeers-Dreams of Space and Crimes of War" by Dennis Piszkiewics. The German rocket program from start to finish with Wernher von Braun and crew.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Ladon on January 14, 2010, 11:31:55 PM
The Belgariad by David Eddings
The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett
The Lioness Quartet and the Wild Magic Quartet by Tamora Pierce
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on January 15, 2010, 12:10:25 AM
I still have to get the Wild Magic books.  I've got all Tamora Pierce's Tortall novels up to the present time.  Right now I'm re-reading her "Protector Of The Small" series.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Ladon on January 15, 2010, 01:27:14 PM
For the longest time, I remembered reading the first three books of Lioness in elementary school, but couldn't remember much more than a few fleeting scenes and the name Alanna (which, interestingly enough, is a perfect cross between my name and my sister's)

My sister-in-law moved out and left her library-borrowed copy of Squire, so I decided to read it before returning it to the library.  About halfway through, it hit me...this was the same world I remembered from grade school.  I laughed for at least fifteen minutes, then checked with the library for the rest of the books.

Need to get the Protector series books, I've only finished Squire.  By the way, I meant the Immortals War rather than Wild Magic.  You're probably thinking of the Circle of Magic by the same author.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on January 15, 2010, 08:07:00 PM
You're right, I was thinking of Circle of Magic.  I saw you use a title that was unfamiliar to me from Tamora Pierce, and since I had all of the one line, I automatically assumed you meant the other.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on January 17, 2010, 10:43:24 AM
Badass by Ben Thompsom. Forty of the greatest ass-kickers from history. I just found out about the site for this, and I'm working my way through it now.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on January 17, 2010, 05:35:26 PM
Badass by Ben Thompsom. Forty of the greatest ass-kickers from history. I just found out about the site for this, and I'm working my way through it now.

That is a badass site, homevintner.   ;)
Now, I'M going thru it, too.  I love this guy's writing style.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on January 17, 2010, 07:34:51 PM
It is highly addictive.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Shara on January 18, 2010, 07:00:59 AM
You, too, Shara? I tried five or six times; finally, I decided that Finnegan's Wake would be more accessible. There's a couple of years I'll never get back!

Finne's is worse... I was in a focus group trying to decipher it... we didn't decipher a single page
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on January 26, 2010, 10:58:58 PM
Q: How did the Russians bear living under the Tsar?
A: They thought about what it would be like afterwards, and then it didn't seem so bad...


Hammer and Tickle: The Story of Communism, A Political System Almost Laughed Out of Existence by Ben Lewis

Essentially the history of the Soviet Union, as told through "anekdoty" (its humor).

Three men found themselves in the same shack in the Gulag, and got to talking about how they got there. "I was always five minutes late for work," said the first. "So I was arrested for sabotage." The second one said, "I was always five minutes early, so I was arrested for spying." The third man said, "I was always on time. So I was arrested for having a Western watch..."

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Ladon on January 27, 2010, 01:07:34 PM
I'm on the last The Circle Opens story, after reading all the Circle stories.  I'm just wishing she'd give us some info on their adulthood, maybe save the world or something.  I've noticed, some authors like "individual saves entire world" stories, while others prefer "individual saves his/her world" but doesn't really touch the world as a greater whole.  I suppose the latter is more realistic, but it seems like the four Circle kids could grow up to have a very interesting purpose.

Anyway, tonight it's on to Belgariad book four, though I can't remember the title.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on February 21, 2010, 12:52:13 PM
The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan. D-Day
Boy Scouts of Ameica-A Centenial History by Chuck Wills
Stuka Pilot by Hans Ulrich Rudel
Sage by Col. Jerry Sage "Dagger" of the O.S.S. The Cooler King of Stalag Luft III. The man who Steve McQueen's character in "The Great Escape" was (loosely) based on.
And a re-read of the five "Lost Fleet" books by Jack Campbell-see page 10 of this thread.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on February 23, 2010, 02:09:44 PM
I'm on the last The Circle Opens story, after reading all the Circle stories.  I'm just wishing she'd give us some info on their adulthood, maybe save the world or something.  I've noticed, some authors like "individual saves entire world" stories, while others prefer "individual saves his/her world" but doesn't really touch the world as a greater whole.  I suppose the latter is more realistic, but it seems like the four Circle kids could grow up to have a very interesting purpose.

Anyway, tonight it's on to Belgariad book four, though I can't remember the title.

Well, she's on the sequel to "The Circle Opens", called "The Circle Reforged".  She's done the first 2 books in it so far.  I haven't read any of the Circle books so far, as when I went to the bookstore I was only able to obtain volumes 2-4 of "Circle Of Magic" and volumes 1, 3-4 of "The Circle Opens".  I have the remaining volumes on order.

I've just read the latest in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, "Unseen Academicals".  A really funny neat exploration into how football (soccer to us North Americans) evolves very quickly in Ankh-Morpork.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MunchWolf on February 23, 2010, 03:59:31 PM
Finished the Thursday Next series ... it's about a cop who travels through books.  5 books in the series (and two in the Nursery Crimes series), makes these 7 books by Fforde a must read for English linguistical fans.

-Munch "plus the Cheshire cat is in em as a librarian .... woot" Wolf
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Shara on February 25, 2010, 06:49:32 AM
catcher in the rye
huckleberry finn (again)
incredibly loud and extremely close
the romance reader (don't!!!)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on March 14, 2010, 07:44:42 PM
Just finished reading Dennis L. McKiernan's "City Of Jade", the latest in his Mithgar books.  Unfortunately, I didn't like it nearly as much as most of the others in this fantasy series, partly because the first half of the book was leftovers from "Silver Wolf, Black Falcon".
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 04, 2010, 02:02:14 PM
Castles of Steel by Robert K. Massie
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 14, 2010, 10:50:25 PM
Maelstrom by Taylor Anderson. Third in the Destroyermen series
Kilo Class by Patrick Robinson
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 19, 2010, 11:25:52 PM
Final Patrol by Don Keith. True stories of WWII submarines
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: solvegas on April 19, 2010, 11:41:30 PM
Final Patrol by Don Keith. True stories of WWII submarines


Hey Homevintner, you seem to like military books. Have you ever read " Blindman's Bluff " ? It's about declassified submarine operations during the Cold War. You might enjoy it if you haven't read it. Guess I'm a little prejudiced since I served on several boats from 1975 to 1993 ( not continuously ).
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 19, 2010, 11:47:57 PM
I read Blind Man's Bluff years ago. It was a good read.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on April 23, 2010, 01:42:45 PM
Final Patrol by Don Keith. True stories of WWII submarines

I've always wished that John LeCarre had done a series about George Smiley in Germany during WW II. The Cold War was hard on George.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on May 05, 2010, 10:34:54 PM
The Children of Hurin - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Steel Wave - Jeff Shaara
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Quadhouse on May 06, 2010, 11:08:14 AM
Magic Lost, Trouble Found, Armed & Magical, The Trouble with Demons, and Bewitched & Betrayed by Lisa Shearin. 

What happens when you become bonded with a all-powerful magical item that also eats souls and drives those bonded to it insane?  Raine Benares finds out. 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on May 09, 2010, 01:12:04 AM
[The Lost Fleet  Victorious/i] By Jack Campbell. Book six of the series.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on May 10, 2010, 07:13:07 PM
Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch.

A look at how conspiracy theories in the 20th century (from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and "Evil Jews Inc." to the 9/11 "truthers" and beyond) have poisoned serious discourse, and lined the pockets of people like Dan Brown.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on May 14, 2010, 12:47:24 AM
The Luck of the Draw by Captain C. Kenneth Ruiz
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on May 15, 2010, 05:24:44 PM
It's rare when a book has a big effect on me.  There was "Dune" in my adolescence, then for sheer adventure there was "Shibumi" and "Noble House" in my twenties, while in non-fiction I also discovered "The Specialist" by someone calling himself Gayle Rivers, some of the sweatiest reading in my life.  Later I discovered Theodore Roszak's "Flicker," a wry metamystery which asks if our new audiocultural subculture may be fundamentally evil.  (The novel gives the year 2014 as some sort of diabolical target -- I guess we'll find out, huh?)

But now I've just gotten done with Bill McKibben's "Eaarth" (note spelling).  It is the most jolting of ecological books.  Basically, the Earth I was born on in 1960 is gone, possibly forever.  The latest data indicates that we could all switch to solar and wind and bicycles and all that good thing tomorrow and a cascade of effects could still go on boosting atmospheric carbon and overall warming.  We have really and truly kicked ourselves out of Eden.  We can manage it, level it off, but it will never be quite the same.  How, afterall, do you "reglaciate" a mountain range? (The usual "reglaciation" is the cycle of Ice Ages, and we've just sabotaged the onset of what would have been the immediate next Ice Age.)  Key to all this is the oceans, which are not absorbing (and keeping) CO2 as much anymore as they did in the past, and if they should ever reach a point where they actually CONTRIBUTE more CO2 than they're taking on, that would be one hellacious turnaround indeed.

McKibben himself is weirdly optimistic, probably because a) he already has a solar-powered Vermont hideaway and b) he's a successful activist.  Me, I need at least one extra book to help round out reading this.  An adequate one is "The Great Reset" by Richard Florida.  
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on May 18, 2010, 07:29:12 PM
Well, Druul, we have more in common than I thought. I've only known a couple other people who read Shibumi, but I love it [Do you recall the ultimate CIA insult? "You mean you planned an operation based on Arab intelligence?"]

And don't worry about Eaarth. The planet, and life itself will do just fine. We, on the other hand, are expendable.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Hiram on May 20, 2010, 12:01:05 PM
Fly Fishing by J R Hartley... :)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on June 11, 2010, 10:32:48 PM
The Rhinemann Exchange By Robert Ludlum
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on June 12, 2010, 06:18:09 AM
Ahh, not just Ludlum, but early Ludlum, before he began to weird out and insist on elite superspies round about The Holcroft Covenant and The Parsifal Mosaic.  My personal fave from his early period is The Chancellor Manuscript.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: BigEyes on June 12, 2010, 07:35:33 AM
Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October
4-5 times now.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on July 02, 2010, 07:19:10 PM
The Big Short by Michael Lewis. Twenty years ago he wrote Liar's Poker as, he tells us, a warning to his peers to avoid investment banking, and do something useful like marine biology or poetry.

Instead, his peers and younger folks found an even scummier way to scam the poor: Sub-prime mortgages. Interestingly, this book is about the dozen or so people who saw the current Depression coming, figured out how to make money from it, screamed to anyone who would listen what was happening, and, when they saw no one listening, went short.

Interestingly, they are almost all social misfits, including one Asberger's sufferer.

And even more interesting, the Asberger's sufferer tipped off Goldman, Sachs to what was happening. He did this in 2002, before Henry Poulson was known outside of Wall Street.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Shara on July 03, 2010, 01:36:31 AM
with the risk of sounding like an elitist faggot (Though I don't use mac), I only read the classics ;)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on July 04, 2010, 03:58:59 PM
with the risk of sounding like an elitist faggot (Though I don't use mac), I only read the classics ;)

So, Spiderman and Batgirl are classics?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: servomoore on July 04, 2010, 04:53:30 PM
Failed States by Noam Chomsky because I have no problems admitting I am becoming an elitist faggot.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on July 04, 2010, 05:00:07 PM
Failed States by Noam Chomsky because I have no problems admitting I am becoming an elitist faggot.


I haven't read it yet, but I will. Perhaps we should start a Society of Elitist Faggots!
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on July 04, 2010, 05:10:49 PM
I like Chomsky -- but only in rationed doses.  If I read too much of him too consistently I start believing that the United States has pursued only the most evil possible policy in the most evil possible way.  The far left and the far right seem to share an interesting vanity but in opposite ways: the far right says all evil can only be foreign, the far left stops just short of implying that all evil can only be domestic.  I'm not inclined to give America that much credit in either field.

Thus in this way I can remain ruggedly macho while retaining access to my feminine side. 8)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on July 04, 2010, 06:46:43 PM
Mostly I read Chomsky's work on linguistics. He's the Darwin of linguistics.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: servomoore on July 05, 2010, 01:58:29 PM
I haven't read it yet, but I will. Perhaps we should start a Society of Elitist Faggots!

Sure! I even have a new avatar for our S.E.F. ready:

(http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p249/servomoore/avatar-1elitist.png)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on July 30, 2010, 07:28:09 PM
American Lion by Jon Meacham. Andrew Jackson in the White House.
Doughboy War edited by James H. Hallas. Thousands of personal accounts of the war to end all wars, from the lowliest private up to Gen. Pershing.
Patton's Best by Nat Frankle and Larry Smith. An informal history of the 4th armored division. Written by a Sherman tank commander.
Free as a Running Fox by Wing Commander T. D. Calnan. "It is the duty of every P.O.W. to escape..."
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on August 16, 2010, 07:22:16 PM
Last Call by Daniel Okrent

If you ever wanted to know just how Prohibition (the 18th Amendment) happened, this is the book to read. The short version: a group of primarily rural, primarily Anglo-Saxon moralists took advantage of political opportunity (the new Income Tax meant that the gov't didn't need all the revenue from alcoholic beverages, for one thing) and, in part, war hysteria (once the Great War began, no one was going to listen to men with names like Busch and Pabst), among other things.

You'll also find out about the loopholes in the Volstead Act, how they got there, and how they were exploited. How the economy of a little French island off the coast of Newfoundland boomed. How Prohibition was essentially an "unfunded mandate".

And how hypocrisy became entrenched in American political culture....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on August 16, 2010, 07:38:25 PM
I like Chomsky -- but only in rationed doses.  If I read too much of him too consistently I start believing that the United States has pursued only the most evil possible policy in the most evil possible way. 

I know what you mean. Like, people who believe in government conspiracies have never worked for the government.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on August 17, 2010, 02:24:44 PM
My favorite line from that "X-Files" movie -- Martin Landau saying of FEMA "These people don't make mistakes!" 8)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Q_BE on August 17, 2010, 03:10:14 PM
I've been reading my Introduction to Sociology—er, I mean Liberalism 101— textbook cover-to-cover, and it's a fascinating exploration of the liberal mind, since, as you know, there really is so much space in there to cover, because they're so empty to start… ;D

Q-"I prefer the ACTUAL sciences, thank you"-BE :P
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on August 22, 2010, 11:24:43 PM
Where Eagles Dare by Alistair MacLean - probably about my 4th reading
Flight of Eagles by Jack Higgins
The Battle of the Huertgen Forrest by Charles B. MacDonald
The Complete Hammer's Slammers   Vol. 1 by David Drake
The Best of the Bolos - Their Finest Hour by Keith Laumer
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on August 23, 2010, 10:32:34 PM
Just finished "At Any Price",the second in David Drake's "Hammer's Slammers" novels.It had some interesting story concepts,but I felt it took too long to tell a story which seemed very short.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: number3fac on August 24, 2010, 03:36:29 PM
I just finished "The Accidental Time Machine" by Joe Haldeman, about a physics grad student at MIT that accidentally creates a forward-only time machine (I'd heard about the novel after reading other forums discussing that recent episode of Futurama).  It was a quick read and quite good, though a couple parts of the resolution left me scratching my head.  I'll have to reread those parts again after letting them stew for a bit.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on August 24, 2010, 05:25:18 PM
I just finished "The Accidental Time Machine" by Joe Haldeman, about a physics grad student at MIT that accidentally creates a forward-only time machine (I'd heard about the novel after reading other forums discussing that recent episode of Futurama).  It was a quick read and quite good, though a couple parts of the resolution left me scratching my head.  I'll have to reread those parts again after letting them stew for a bit.

I'm tempted to read that, given your description. I've followed a bit of the real physics of time, including the evidence that time travel could only go back as far as the invention of the machine in which one traveled. Is that what you mean by "forward-only"?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: number3fac on August 24, 2010, 06:06:37 PM
I'm tempted to read that, given your description. I've followed a bit of the real physics of time, including the evidence that time travel could only go back as far as the invention of the machine in which one traveled. Is that what you mean by "forward-only"?

In this instance, it means that the time machine only carries its passengers into the future (along with itself), and cannot travel into the past.  This was also the case in the Futurama episode; the Professor didn't want to deal with any paradoxes from messing with the past.  However, apart from the fact that the time machines only allowed for "forward-only" travel (and the protagonists began searching for backwards-capable time machines), there isn't much similarity between the episode and this book in terms of plotline, which meant that they both held my interest and I found each quite enjoyable.  The novel is only a couple hundred pages in length, and it's not a difficult read...so it should be feasible to get from start to finish over the course of a few free afternoons.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on August 24, 2010, 11:44:12 PM
If I can jump from books to movies for a moment, you guys should check out "Primer (http://www.primermovie.com/index.html)", about a couple of engineers who accidentally invent a time machine in their garage.

A perfectly logical time machine, too. Not one of these things where you dial in a date and then off you go, but a box where the arrow of time is reversed inside it.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: number3fac on August 26, 2010, 05:02:39 PM
Now that I think about it, Isaac Asimov's "The End of Eternity" is an interesting novel with a time-traveling organization whose members are, in fact, limited to traveling only within a span encompassed by the creation of a Time Displacement Field (or some such term).  So while they can travel forward and back without a problem, they cannot travel back in time to a point earlier than the Field's origin.  I recall there being some interesting discussion about social engineering implemented by the organization, and I think that organization was referenced in one of the later Foundation novels (tying it in to his Robots/Empire/Foundation series, though none of that is required reading for "The End of Eternity").  It's been a while since I read it, but certainly worth revisiting...to the library!
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on August 28, 2010, 11:46:34 PM
Grantville Gazette IV - Edited and created by Eric Flint
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: RandomX on August 29, 2010, 10:46:25 AM
I'm about 80% through Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, which I'm really enjoying. I love Russian literature! My only complaint is every time someone asks what I'm reading on my Kindle, I sound super pretentious.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Q_BE on August 29, 2010, 05:58:10 PM
I'm about 80% through Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, which I'm really enjoying. I love Russian literature! My only complaint is every time someone asks what I'm reading on my Kindle, I sound super pretentious.

That's hot. I've read War and Peace myself (I ought to go read it again). :P

Q-"Everything about you is sexy"-BE :D
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: RandomX on August 29, 2010, 06:04:54 PM
I've read most of Tolstoy and loved it. I picked up The Idiot for super cheap at a used book store and it sat around until I went through the rest of my monster pile. Then I discovered it was a free kindle book, so I'm reading it that way.

I think after this I'm going to read Discworld or World War Z for something easier to digest, but I'm definitely planning to read more of Dostoevsky in the future!
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on August 29, 2010, 09:05:24 PM
My favorite Russian novel joke is Woody Allen's comment that after he took a speed reading course, he was able to read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It's about Russia.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Shara on August 30, 2010, 07:28:52 AM
recently:

William Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night; or, What You Will
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Troilus and Cressida
All's Well That Ends Well
Measure For Measure
Othello, the Moor of Venice
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus
Timon of Athens
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Cymbeline
The Winter's Tale
The Tempest
The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth
Sonnets

(Have to teach a Shakespeare course)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on August 30, 2010, 08:01:41 AM
My favorite Russian novel joke is Woody Allen's comment that after he took a speed reading course, he was able to read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It's about Russia.

There was a pretty bad "Get Smart" TV movie about KAOS developing a weather control machine, basically a giant electric fan at the North Pole.  The one good joke in it is when Max gets into a fight in a library.  A KAOS man lunges at Max with a knife, but Max randomly grabs a huge book and stops the knife.  Then he notices the title, and declares "NO ONE gets through War and Peace!"
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: servomoore on September 07, 2010, 02:55:18 AM
The Cartoon History of The Universe Volumes 1 & 2 by Larry Gonick.
My personal favorite is early Chinese history, since it's fairly unfamiliar territory and Gonick seems to have been very taken with it to and here he pauses to really illustrate the personalities. The emergence of the Chin empire deserves it's own I, Claudius equivalent (which I'm sure it has, I just don't know about it.) I will never forget learning about Lu Pu-Wei, Hsiang Yu's epic rivalry with Liu Pang, Li Ssu's brilliant and eloquent defense of tyranny and evil in a ruler centuries ahead of Machiavelli.

I will concede Gonick does not have the most sophisticated sense of humor (ugh, puns are reprehensible things) and sometimes it might seem intrusive. Still, recommended reading even if you usually hate comics.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Night Lord on September 10, 2010, 10:32:46 PM
I'm reading Omnivore's Dilemma right now. It's quite good.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on September 11, 2010, 03:32:20 PM
The Complete Hammer's Slammers   Vol. 2 by David Drake
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on September 22, 2010, 03:08:36 PM
Clear The Decks - Daniel V. Gallery
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: solvegas on September 22, 2010, 10:51:03 PM
Clear The Decks - Daniel V. Gallery


He wrote a book a long time ago called " Capt'n Fatso " which I still laugh about when I think about it. Admiral Gallery has the distiction of being the only US Navy Captain which captured an enemy ship and brought it back as war booty in WW2. It was the first time it had been done since the war of 1812. The U boat now sits as a exhibit in Chicago's Museum of Science and Technology.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on October 17, 2010, 10:51:34 PM
1635 : The Dreeson Incident Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on October 29, 2010, 11:22:57 PM
Just finished "The Sharp End",the most recent book in Drake's "Hammer's Slammers" series.In the future drug cartels will be at war over planets to grow their illicit crops.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: brakblake on October 30, 2010, 12:06:17 AM
Geopolitics of Emotion by Dominique Moisi
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Shara on October 30, 2010, 07:44:30 AM
Making my way through the dickensian library
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: espy on October 30, 2010, 12:48:17 PM
"Anatomy of a Fraud Investigation" by Stephen Pedneault

If it's not already on your Christmas wish list, don't delay... I bet they're flying off the shelves.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on October 30, 2010, 04:10:06 PM
For decades I've believed the U.S. intelligence factory should hire John LeCarre. How else to explain that the week after a network of Russian sleeper agents is rolled up, his publisher brings out Our Kind of Traitor about... rolling up a network of Russian sleeper agents?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on October 30, 2010, 04:26:51 PM
If only "The Tailor of Panama" had been "The Tailor of Iraq" ...
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on November 01, 2010, 04:31:02 PM
If only "The Tailor of Panama" had been "The Tailor of Iraq" ...

Interesting. I think the LeCarre myth started with Panama, because we invaded later that year, but you're absolutely correct--The theme of the book was false intelligence manufactured by careerists to preserve their jobs, and that was certainly what happened in Iraq.

For having been with British intelligence for only a few years, he certainly came to understand it well.
Title: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Ouroboros on November 03, 2010, 08:19:19 PM
Edit: Wow i suck, someone K.O. this for me.

In my interminable quest to find new interesting books to read I thought that I would ask the bearchive community if you've read anything good lately?

I just finished off two novels, Alan Greenspan's autobiographical The Age of Turbulence and John Ringo's Live Free or Die. Greenspan's book gave quite an interesting view behind one of the preemininet economic forces who's tenure spanned from President Regan to the second President Bush. Although I may not agree with all of his views it was a much more interesting read than I expected when I picked the book up. Ringo's Live free or Die was a quick science fiction romp that reminded me a bit of Asimov's foundation series in following the development of civilization albeit over a shorter time span.

So what are you reading?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Shara on November 03, 2010, 08:49:48 PM
searchfail hun: http://forum.bearchive.com/index.php/topic,66802.420.html
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on November 13, 2010, 05:40:12 PM
The Kencyr books by P.C. Hodgell.  I've had "Godstalk" and "Dark Of The Moon" for years, but Baen books finally picked Ms. Hodgell up and I'm able to read the last 3 books for the first time.  Great fantasy series, wonderful heroine.   :D
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on November 20, 2010, 07:26:56 PM
I just finished the closing argument of Vincent Bugilosi at the trial of Charles Manson.I learned that the Tate/LaBianca murders were done over two consecutive nights.Now I'm starting the chapter on the My Lai Massacre trial.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on December 20, 2010, 10:13:20 AM
Since I haven't been here lately, or even on line as much as usual, I've been hitting the books. Hard.

Sea of Thunder by Evan ThomasFour commanders in the pPacific Theater, WWII
Tom Barry  IRA Freedom Fighter  By Meda Ryan. Commander of the West Cork Flying Column during the 1920 war of independence.
The Complete Hammer's Slammers v3 by David Drake
The Druid by Leonard Mosley. The only German spy not caught and executed or turned by the British during WWII.
Panzer Aces III by Franz Kurowski
Hunters from the Sky by Charles Whiting. The German parachute corps 1940-1945
Ghost; Kildar; Choosers of the Slain; Unto the Breach; andA Deeper Blue all by John Ringo
along with several others not worth going into.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Shara on December 20, 2010, 11:11:59 AM
so when are you teaching the class on WWII?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on December 20, 2010, 11:21:02 AM
You're not the first to make a comment like that. I just like history as a whole. I'm currently working on I Rode With Stonewall by Henry Kyd Douglas. He was the youngest member of Gen. T. J. Jackson's staff.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Shara on December 20, 2010, 12:24:20 PM
history or military history? I had a roommate with similar interests
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on December 20, 2010, 02:39:47 PM
I'm working on Mark Twain's autobiography. It is slow going.

Shara, I love all kinds of history (I know you didn't ask me, but I'm answering.) For me WW II has a special interest because it is often referred to as a "good" war, or at least a "necessary" war. For someone who believes that there has never been a "good" war, it is challenging.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: solvegas on December 21, 2010, 12:16:06 AM
history or military history? I had a roommate with similar interests

When I was taking history class in High School, Mr Masters said that history was essentially the study of war interrupted by brief periods of peace.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on December 21, 2010, 12:18:52 AM
Both, Shara.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: brakblake on December 26, 2010, 09:51:24 AM
When I was taking history class in High School, Mr Masters said that history was essentially the study of war interrupted by brief periods of peace.

I've heard that more than once in my history classes....but then again...i was a History major in college  8)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on December 26, 2010, 10:49:55 AM
I've heard that more than once in my history classes....but then again...i was a History major in college  8)

Interesting. Over the years I've gone through about 30 theories of history, the military being one, though out of favor for about a generation. My two favorites are the Pirean thesis (that western civilization reached its pinnacle in 1200 and has been downhill since) and the infectious disease theory.

One of my favorite historical figures, Helen Keller, subscribed to the great man theory. She thought George Washington and Nicolai Lenin were the greatest.

About thirty years ago there was a book about the 100 most influential people, based on a combination of how many people they affected and how deeply they affected them. Mohammad was first, Newton second, and Jesus third. It was a great analytical tool for discussion.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on December 26, 2010, 08:12:47 PM
Just read David Weber's new book, "Out Of The Dark".  Very hard military sci-fi, until the end.  The earth gets it's butt kicked by an alien race for 9/10's of the book, until the finally piss off the wrong person enough.  His name happens to be Vlad Drakul...
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: brakblake on December 26, 2010, 09:07:33 PM
Just read David Weber's new book, "Out Of The Dark".  Very hard military sci-fi, until the end.  The earth gets it's butt kicked by an alien race for 9/10's of the book, until the finally piss off the wrong person enough.  His name happens to be Vlad Drakul...

Wait a moment....isn't that practically the same as Battlefield Earth? :P


Interesting. Over the years I've gone through about 30 theories of history, the military being one, though out of favor for about a generation. My two favorites are the Pirean thesis (that western civilization reached its pinnacle in 1200 and has been downhill since) and the infectious disease theory.

One of my favorite historical figures, Helen Keller, subscribed to the great man theory. She thought George Washington and Nicolai Lenin were the greatest.

About thirty years ago there was a book about the 100 most influential people, based on a combination of how many people they affected and how deeply they affected them. Mohammad was first, Newton second, and Jesus third. It was a great analytical tool for discussion.


I never really paid attention to those types of theories...mostly because they didnt come up in class (ever! lol) But I jsut like general history because i KNOW i'm goign to hear something that i didnt know/hear before...even in the most basic of history classes. :D
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on December 27, 2010, 03:32:49 AM


I never really paid attention to those types of theories...mostly because they didnt come up in class (ever! lol) But I jsut like general history because i KNOW i'm goign to hear something that i didnt know/hear before...even in the most basic of history classes. :D


Yes, you usually don't get into it unless you take a course in historiography. I took one to understand how to analyze historical writing. One of the ironies of popular American history writing has been the widespread bias toward the "great man" theory, given that most of the leaders of the Revolution openly detested the "great man" theory.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on December 27, 2010, 03:31:28 PM
Wait a moment....isn't that practically the same as Battlefield Earth? :


I wouldn't read Battlefield Earth if you paid me good money.  I'm allergic to the name "Hubbard".   :P
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: espy on February 25, 2011, 02:23:30 AM
 :o
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on February 25, 2011, 02:57:46 AM
I heard a lecture by Christopher Ryan, author of Sex At Dawn about sex and human evolution. I have got to read that book! He believes that we use sex for social interaction and bonding more than reproduction, pointing out that only people, bonobos, and dolphins have sex when reproduction is impossible.

Last week in a different thread I mentioned that I had participated in MFM threesomes mostly as a male bonding experience. Hmmm. Maybe I'm more aware than I thought.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: espy on February 25, 2011, 10:05:19 AM
He believes that we use sex for social interaction and bonding more than reproduction, pointing out that only people, bonobos, and dolphins have sex when reproduction is impossible.

I'll admit I'm rarely thinking of baby names when I'm playing "hide espy jr".
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on February 25, 2011, 08:01:29 PM
The next time somebody posts asking, "How can I get laid?" I can recommend this book that a friend found featured on the "new book" table at her branch of the Seattle Public Library.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on February 27, 2011, 09:33:42 AM
A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson. How the Athenians and Spartans fought the Peloponnesian War.

Distant Thunders by Taylor Anderson. Fourth in "The Destroyermen" series.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on March 08, 2011, 08:24:53 PM
Halfway through "The Sherlockian" by Graham Moore. A work of historical fiction (not my usual cup of tea but since I devour anything Holmes-related...) it features twin storlyines: one involving Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and another involving a contemporary Holmes scholar. It's decent so far, but perhaps I expected a bit more given the reviews, which were filled with praise. Still, since I'm stuck waiting for the return of "Sherlock" to PBS... ;)

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on March 09, 2011, 04:14:56 AM
Love Sherlock!  ::)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Hark on March 09, 2011, 08:59:09 PM
"End of Faith" by Sam Harris.

Almost 1/2-way through, but just finished a chapter regarding Muslims and their inability or unwillingness to "modernize" their faith, or it will destroy the world as we know it.  Given the current political climate here in the U.S., especially with the rise of Christian politicians subtly hinting that REAL Americans want a theocracy (insinuated cynicism), I can't wait to finish this book.

I don't wish to be insulting or offensive, but I'm a die-hard atheist, and any politician that says "God told me..." scares the fuck out of me.   >:(
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: AgentDee on March 09, 2011, 11:54:58 PM
I just finished Steven King's 1074 page epic book "under the dome" wow, I just read its being made into a miniseries in a joint venture with Spielburg, I am SO gonna watch it!
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on March 10, 2011, 02:05:46 PM
I just finished Steven King's 1074 page epic book "under the dome" wow, I just read its being made into a miniseries in a joint venture with Spielburg, I am SO gonna watch it!

I wish you luck, Dee. I felt the same way when a mini-series was made out of The Stand twenty or so years ago. But they left the sex out.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MrsPacman1 on March 10, 2011, 05:13:16 PM
I wish you luck, Dee. I felt the same way when a mini-series was made out of The Stand twenty or so years ago. But they left the sex out.

Oh, thank GOD. I thought I was the only one who was disappointed about that.  :P

Just finished thumbing through and partially reading, "Cobain Unseen" by Charles R Cross. Very cool book. There are recreations of letters to his bandmates and family, journal pages, homemade cards, polaroid photos and various artwork. He was allowed into the Cobain "vault" by his estate (read: Courtney Love) to go through his immense collection of oddities and rare toys. If you're into Nirvana or even into people who have interesting collections, I definitely recommend it.

Mrs*'Maximum Overdrive' was my favorite King movie*Pacman

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on May 09, 2011, 07:43:41 PM
Having recently acquired a tablet computer with an eBook reader, I went poking around through the included library link and on the Internet Archive for some free books to download and start reading. I came across Will and Ariel Durant’s magnum opus, The Story of Civilization, eleven volumes (plus an epilogue work) covering the entire history of the western world through the Age of Napoleon (After working on the series for decades, they died before they could complete it).

I’ve already started reading The Age of Faith (since the Middle Ages is a particular interest of mine), and now I want to read the whole darn set. Their style is clear and easy, and they write for the general audience. It’s the sort of thing people don’t create anymore: grand overviews of History and Culture for the general public.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: brakblake on May 12, 2011, 07:54:19 PM
Just finished up an interesting read that makes me feel slightly better about people in my generation: 

Not Quite Adults: Why 20-somethings are choosing a slower path to adulthood, and why it's good for everyone. By: Richard Settersten PH.D, & Barbara Ray

http://www.amazon.com/Not-Quite-Adults-20-Somethings-Adulthood/dp/0553807404/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1305247504&sr=8-1

In addition to that, over the last 4 weeks i've also finished 2 other books:

Behind the Japanese Bow by: Boye Lafayette de Mente

http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Japanese-Bow-Boye-Mente/dp/0844284912/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1305247756&sr=1-1 (i wish there was a better link than this)

And something about how the US has so screwed up the Far East through various underhanded campaigns by the CIA and various forms of foreign policy over the last 100ish years....interesting stuff.....Dont remember the name and therefore can't provide a link)




All things told, I have probably read about 500 pages worth of informative books in the last 4 weeks....(which is some giant leap larger than the 500 pages worth of books that I had read in the previous 7+ months). And it's fairly amazing how much I read in the day when I'm looking for a job XD
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on May 12, 2011, 09:38:02 PM
Having recently acquired a tablet computer with an eBook reader, I went poking around through the included library link and on the Internet Archive for some free books to download and start reading. I came across Will and Ariel Durant’s magnum opus, The Story of Civilization, eleven volumes (plus an epilogue work) covering the entire history of the western world through the Age of Napoleon (After working on the series for decades, they died before they could complete it).

I’ve already started reading The Age of Faith (since the Middle Ages is a particular interest of mine), and now I want to read the whole darn set. Their style is clear and easy, and they write for the general audience. It’s the sort of thing people don’t create anymore: grand overviews of History and Culture for the general public.

Wow! Brings back memories! I read most of it in high school; in a lot of ways the work is dated (As it should be--the first volume is nearly 100 years old), but it is a really good framework for more detailed studies. Their relationship was also interesting. She was 14 or 15 when they married.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: calcifer on May 15, 2011, 01:32:01 AM
Anyone who digs history should check out "American Pharaoh."  It's a chilling account of Chicago's Mayor Daily Sr.  It's quite a horror story for a biography.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ROUNDandHEAVY on May 15, 2011, 06:49:28 PM
One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy by Stephen Tunney! (http://www.tower.com/one-hundred-percent-lunar-boy-stephen-tunney-hardcover/wapi/117207737)
(http://i43.tower.com/images/mm117207737/one-hundred-percent-lunar-boy-stephen-tunney-hardcover-cover-art.jpg)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on May 15, 2011, 06:57:45 PM
Anyone who digs history should check out "American Pharaoh."  It's a chilling account of Chicago's Mayor Daily Sr.  It's quite a horror story for a biography.

Uh, just for the record, his last name is spelled "D-a-l-e-y".

Does the book include some of the comedy of the Daley years, like the alderman who would get up at random intervals and proclaim, "God bless Mayor Daley," and sit down? I worked on one of Leon DesPres's campaigns; it was interesting. Mike Royko probably did the best writing of the Daley years. I recall one of Royko's columns about an alderman whose body was found chained to his desk with a couple dozen bullets in him. He started with, "Alderman X got into an argument with the Mob over who ran the __th Ward. It looks like it wasn't Alderman X."

As much as I felt Daley was a problem, I had to admire his pragmatism. During the 1960s he worked out a deal that the Mob got to name six state representatives, three state senators, and one Congressman. When I was there the late Frank Annunzio was the Mob's man in Congress. He was a reliable vote for most everything except gun control. What made that pragmatic was that everybody knew who was who. Other cities, like Newark and New York didn't have those deals, so you never knew who was in the Mob's pocket and who wasn't. Later the Mob just bought Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. It was cheaper and worked out better for them.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: BigEyes on May 15, 2011, 07:29:37 PM
Author: Jim Butcher
Titles: The Dresden Files

I read/re-reading all the available paperbacks.  Not bad for a murder mystery with magic in a modern time setting.  lots of snarky dialoge comebacks.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on May 25, 2011, 10:30:45 PM
Just finished Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang.

Huang manages to weave a great story out of biographies of Chang Apana (the Honolulu detective who became known as the 'real life' Charlie Chan), Earl Derr Biggers (Chan's creator), Warner Oland (the actor who brought him to the screen), a history of Hawaii, and Chinese-American race relations.

The latter is important; Chan became a stereotype, which keeps him from being mentioned in the same breath as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Sam Spade. What's strange is that Charlie Chan movies were very popular in China...

"They think it demeans the race... Demeans! My God! You've got a Chinese hero!" - Key Luke, who played Chan's Number One Son in the movies.

"Insignificant molehill sometime more important than conspicuous mountain." - Charlie Chan in Egypt
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: number3fac on May 26, 2011, 01:34:28 AM
Author: Jim Butcher
Titles: The Dresden Files

I read/re-reading all the available paperbacks.  Not bad for a murder mystery with magic in a modern time setting.  lots of snarky dialoge comebacks.

I've heard good things about these books since the short-lived SciFi series was made.  If you've seen it, which one was better?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: BigEyes on May 28, 2011, 06:04:33 PM
I only saw a part of of one ep.  been looking at getting the dvd 1 season.
As in most cases the video/Movie doesn't compare to the Books. (edit out parts)
guess I have a better imagination that hasn't been wash out by Hi-teck entertainment.


I've heard good things about these books since the short-lived SciFi series was made.  If you've seen it, which one was better?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on May 30, 2011, 02:33:43 PM
Badass - The Birth of a Legend  by Ben Thompson
Benjamin Franklin - An American Life by Walter Isaacson
Kampfgruppe Peiper At The Battle of the Bulge by David Cooke and Wayne Evans
Battles Yet Unsung by Timothy J. O'Keeffe. The U.S. 14th armored division in WWII
Grantville Gazette V created and edited by Eric Flint
Michael Wittman and the Waffen SS Tiger Commanders of the Leibstandarte in WWII, Vol I by Patrick Agte
Currently reading Vol.II
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on May 30, 2011, 07:30:56 PM
Kampfgruppe Peiper At The Battle of the Bulge by David Cooke and Wayne Evans


HV, I've always been more intrigued by the other aspects of Peiper's career, though the Malmedy massacre is his most familiar contribution to Americans. As Himmler's secretary during the invasion of the USSR he probably knew more about the scope of the Einsatzgruppen massacres than anyone else who was not a Nazi Party member. When he was murdered in 1976 while shilling for Porsche, I couldn't help but think that there was some universal force of justice.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on June 18, 2011, 05:26:31 AM
Just read back on this a few pages, and somehow I've only now noticed that MaxBigfoot seems to be a Tamora Pierce fan.  Tamora turns up pretty regularly at the Pittsburgh SF convention, being held this year, just like before, in late July.

Bought my Dad a book, but had fun reading it myself first.  Plain, Honest Men by Richard Beeman.  A timeline of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, complete with a sense of place and some handy biographies of men I might otherwise never hear about.  James Wilson, who comes across as meek in that "1776" play, proves to be very visionary.  Some intriguing details, like a mob killing a widow named Korbmacher just a few blocks away on suspicion of witchcraft.  Wild to think that if Washington hadn't been there, barely ever saying anything but simply lending his gravitas to the occasion, we might have gone with a multiple executive, a more British parliamentary system.  Reading it, I have to agree with Jefferson, the Constitution ain't no ark of the covenant.

Today marks the 224th anniversary of Hamilton arguing that we should do away with state governments and invest extraordinary powers in an "elected monarch."  Our Electoral College is a holdover from this sort of dogged post-imperial refusal to simply trust the people.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on July 05, 2011, 10:22:10 PM
Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, in which, among other things, one is told of all the myriad difficulties surrounding pooping in zero gravity..
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Quadhouse on July 09, 2011, 07:39:27 PM
The **83** Beauty by Mercedes Lackey.  The latest in her Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: AlfonzeMephesto on July 09, 2011, 09:31:20 PM
The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell are all excellent reads. Not sure if many of you are into Sci-Fi, but The Ender Saga by Orson Scott Card is one of my favourite book series of all time.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: calcifer on July 12, 2011, 10:14:05 PM
"A Dance with Dragons" by George R.R. Martine comes out in two days!  I can't wait!  (but I have to, since it won't be delivered until Saturday)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on August 08, 2011, 07:16:44 PM
Last Men Out: The True Story of America's Heroic Final Hours in Vietnam by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin.

(NOT to be confused with The Last Men Out by Tom Downey)

The story of Operation Frequent Wind, the evacuation of Saigon (especially the American Embassy) in the final days of the Vietnam War - as told by the Marines who were there.

I'm not going to get into any debates about the Vietnam War (that can be for another thread) here. Just admire and be awed by the men who serve as our embassy guards....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TysonWarm on August 08, 2011, 07:37:29 PM
That sounds like a very good read about Operation Frequent Wind.  I have been to Saigon 7 times.  My old lady is from there.  I will have to look for that next.  I just finished reading the Millenium series by the late Stieg Larsson.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. 

Whoa Bundy.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Bad Kitty on August 09, 2011, 03:34:45 AM
I've been re-reading Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: a trilogy in four (err five) parts".

Someday I'll have the whole thing memorized  :D
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheBoobGuy on August 09, 2011, 05:00:26 AM
When you do i'll challenge you. Fantastic series.

I've just started re reading the Discworld series.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on August 19, 2011, 11:38:36 PM
15 Minutes: General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation by L. Douglas Keeney

Essentially a collection of anecdotal stories woven into a tapestry covering the history of the Strategic Air Command - the people with the B-52 Stratofortresses ready to bring nuclear annihilation to the Soviets, fifteen minutes after the "Go!" order.

Reading this made me rethink General Curtis "Nuke them 'til they glow" LeMay. Sure, he wanted more and bigger bombs and bombers, well beyond any rational requirements for death-dealing. But for him, it was important to make it clear to the Commies that no matter what they could throw at us, there would be an untouchable force ready to hit back at them even harder. As a strategy, "Mutual Assured Destruction" gets a bad rap these days.... but we are still here, aren't we?

Oh, and LeMay's reason for favoring bombers? You can recall a bomber up to the last second (Dr. Strangelove aside). With land-based missiles, there are several temptations. Since the enemy knows where the launch sites are, there's always the temptation to launch them before the sites get hit. And Hollywood has suggested that we could be stupid enough to give control of the missiles to some sort of automatic launch system (Colossus: The Forbin Project, War Games, Dr. Strangelove).
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TysonWarm on August 20, 2011, 10:17:16 AM
That sounds interesting, but another good book about LeMay is "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay."  It is a biography on his life all the way from his boyhood.  That quote where he allegedly said "bomb them back to the stone age" is explained in there also.  He firebombed Tokyo during World War II.  He was an interesting man.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Bad Kitty on August 29, 2011, 02:59:15 PM
Been reading up on tantra lately. It's a long standing interest of mine (moreso the eastern variants though, rather than the western 'sex-yoga' style).
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on September 29, 2011, 07:12:03 PM
I'm on Ch5 of "The Yoga of Jesus",but Paramahansa Yogananda.There seems to be a lot of existential philosophy in the Gospel according to John,as the writer claims.

Also,I am reading "Redliners" by David Drake.It's about colonization of other planets by a Earth,which is under control by a Global fascist directorate,which has sent a large group of Chicago city dwellers,called "cuts",to an unsettled frontier planet,and the Strikeforce sent to police the planet is made up of Special Ops who can't do anything but fight.I'm a Drake fan.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Bad Kitty on September 30, 2011, 04:57:01 AM
been taking a break from reading books just lately.
feeling a little under the weather, working a lot, etc. just not a lot of excess energy for side hobbies.
I kinda want to read some bit of paperback fiction fluff though, I rather enjoy those :)

There seems to be a lot of existential philosophy in the Gospel according to John,as the writer claims.
I know why that is. But I doubt I could elaborate without sparking off a religious dispute. And those are rarely fun.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on September 30, 2011, 08:14:42 AM
If you ever need to get religion off your mind, you can PM me.  I'm the guy who called St. Paul "overrated."
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TysonWarm on September 30, 2011, 07:57:24 PM
Been reading A Stolen Life: A Memoir by Jaycee Dugard.  Terrible thing to be abused by your captor for 18 years and being so young you can't even really comprehend what he is doing to you. 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on October 22, 2011, 05:49:51 PM
The Spartans - The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece  by Paul Cartledge
1635: The Tangled Web  by Virginia DeMarce
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Bad Kitty on October 23, 2011, 04:16:53 PM
been thinking of reading more Lovecraft lately.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: number3fac on October 24, 2011, 01:06:17 AM
I've been re-reading Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: a trilogy in four (err five) parts".

Someday I'll have the whole thing memorized  :D

Have you read the followup short story, "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe"?  If not, I recommend it!
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Quadhouse on October 31, 2011, 01:32:56 PM
Just finished reading Citadel by John Ringo.  Book 2 of his Troy Rising trilogy.  In my opinion, it's a better telling of what could happen if humans actually met aliens.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on December 04, 2011, 11:35:30 PM
The Shetland Bus by David Howarth. Delivering ageants and assorted supplies to Norway and taking out refugees by small fishing boats.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on December 12, 2011, 07:48:10 PM
Then Everything Changed by Jeff Greenfield

Greenfield, author and political analyst, adds his considerable knowledge and experience to the "alternate history" field with this surprising and insightful trio of essays. He takes great care to avoid creating words for historical personages, instead taking what they actually said (albeit in different contexts) and using that to bring his hypotheses to life.

His first essay deals with the prospects of a John Kennedy administration. The early 1960s are fertile ground for counterfactual history. Given the constitutional crisis resulting from Richard Pavlick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Paul_Pavlick)'s assassination of Jack Kennedy before he had been confirmed as president by the Electoral College, it's no wonder. We all know how Lyndon Johnson took the reins of power through the sheer force of his personality and guided us through that crisis. But without it, Greenfield suggests that the charisma of Kennedy would have blinded us to his utter lack of political experience and the many scandals waiting to happen just below the surface. The "Sixty Minutes War" is also quite popular among writers, who love to speculate on what could have happened if Johnson hadn't suffered a heart attack in the middle of the crisis, or Vice President Humphrey hadn't quickly called Kruschev and worked out a deal while the mushroom cloud was still rising over Guantanamo. Greenfield reasons that Kennedy's masterful use of the media during the crisis would have embarrassed the Soviets into backing down (helped along by a back-channel deal involving our Jupiter missiles in Turkey). His conclusion, that a Kennedy presidency would have the net result of just delaying Johnson's civil rights legislation by four years, is eminently plausible. Though his speculations on the progress of the Vietnam War have to be nothing more than that - pure speculation.

He really hits his stride in the second essay. He looks at the little known assassination attempt by Sirhan Sirhan on Robert Kennedy. Knowing many of the key people involved in Bobby's campaign, he is able to pin the turning point to campaign staffer Steve Smith's shoes. Smith said that he preferred working in his stocking feet, but that June night at the Ambassador Hotel, he was too elated over the results of the primary to focus on crunching the numbers. So when Kennedy and his party passed by his room on the way to the ballroom for the victory celebration, he decided to join in. So he was in his usual spot in the front of the pack when Kennedy and his team slipped out through a kitchen. Smith saw Sirhan and was able to tackle him before he could get more than one wild shot off. Greenfield chooses to speculate on what could have happened if Smith had decided to kick his shoes off and relax instead.

He feels that a Democratic campaign without Kennedy would have been a chaotic mess, with no one to really represent the anti-war wing. The chaos would have continued right up to the convention in Chicago, where, instead of the comparatively quiet protests, the city (in Greenfield's view) would have erupted in outright riots. The scene as he describes it makes you feel happy and relieved that Kennedy was there and went in person to one of the demonstrations to calm them down (even though he was rather confrontational). Greenfield goes on to describe how a revived Richard Nixon, after some time in the political "wilderness", returned to capture the Republican nomination and then the presidency on a "Law and Order" platform. And instead of Kennedy's winding down and withdrawl from Vietnam, he has Nixon escalating the war by bombing Cambodia, eventually leading to a communist dictatorship taking over that country. In the end, Greenfield says, the same lust for power and sense of entitlement that led to the scandals of the Kennedy administration, tarnishing Bobby's legacy, would have brought down Nixon as well.

Greenfield really shines here, with his intricate knowledge of the workings of primaries, campaigns, and conventions. Where he drops the ball is when he makes unnecessary guesses as to the effect of politics on popular culture. For example, he boldly surmises that a 1970 movie (based on a 1968 book) set in a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War would have come to symbolize the "inanity and insanity" of the Vietnam War, and would be made into a TV series that would run for over a decade. Seriously, Jeff? The movie was given a mediocre reception by both the critics and the public; how in any world could it have been a success?

Greenfield runs off the rails into flights of sheer fantasy in his final essay centered on the 1976 presidential campaign. He finds a moment buried in the October 6th debate between President Ford and Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter. He notes that Ford flubbed an answer to a question asked by Max Frankel of the New York Times. When given a chance to clarify his response, Ford deftly recovered. Greenfield guesses about what would happen if Ford, behind in the polls but closing quickly, had not recovered his own fumble.

He figures that the flub would have been fatal, as the press would have not let him forget his error. He might, says Greenfield, have made a good showing in November, but not enough for a victory. As it was, he just squeaked by thanks to the rules of the Electoral College. While Greenfield concurs that the economic problems that plagued the Ford administration would have hampered Carter as well, he finds a key difference in their handling of the Middle East. Carter was completely inexperienced in foreign policy. This would have worked against him when dealing with the decline of the Shah of Iran. With an indecisive Carter in charge, claims Greenfield, the more radical elements in Iran would have taken over after the Shah's death, and the hostage crisis at the embassy in Tehran would have dragged on to the end of Carter's sole term in office rather than having been settled in six days.

While Carter's good nature may have helped resolve the stagnated peace talks between Egypt and Israel, according to Greenfield, the net result would have been a reactionary coup in Egypt, leading to the creation of an international terrorist network with its sole goal the destruction of the United States. It's clear that Greenfield is talking nonsense with this one. The rise of the moderates in the Middle East is one of the things that Ford was not directly involved in; it very well could have happened in a Carter administration as well. Greenfield goes further into fantasy land when he picks Ronald Reagan to win the presidency over Gary Hart in 1980, and then again in 1984! Look, we all know Hart wasn't the best of presidents (his personal failings overwhelmed anything and everything he accomplished in his two terms), but after seeing all the flaws in Reagan (clearly pointed out by Greenfield), how could any sane person have re-elected him?

Greenfield again speculates in a little silliness on the side. Senator Al Gore's tireless campaigning on behalf of electoral reform is well known, but without the close results of the 1976 election (where Carter actually won the popular vote) to motivate him, he figures that the freshman Congressman would have found another cause. Having him win a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on environmental issues is a bit much, though....

 ;)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on December 13, 2011, 06:34:38 AM
Got this for my father's birthday in September.  He's a historian who's not usually into alternative history, but he found this passable.

By the way, I wouldn't mind seeing more suggestions here -- I tend to gift with books, but there are no longer readily accessible bookstores where I can browse around for hours, the selection seems worse these days, less of those off-the-beaten-trail kinds of books that make a gift feel special. :(
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on January 16, 2012, 08:25:22 PM
Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race but Changed the Nation by Scott Farris

America loves Winners.

When it comes to Presidential elections, the losers are often consigned to the dustbin of trivia questions. For example, poor Alton Parker, who lost to Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, is still waiting for some historian to write him a proper biography!

But often, as Farris point out in this collection of biographies, the losers are still important political figures that had and still have something to say. Barry Goldwater (1964) and George McGovern (1972) each changed the fundamental philosophy of their parties. Al Smith's loss in 1928 convinced America's Catholics that they had better get off their asses and do something to counter the anti-Catholic prejudice that cost Smith the election. And after losing to Lincoln in 1960, Stephen Douglas went back onto the campaign trail and put his considerable oratorical skills to use, convincing people that whatever they thought of Lincoln, it was vitally more important to rally behind him to preserve the Union.

At some point in time, many people thought that people like Thomas Dewey and Adlai Stevenson were good enough to be president. Even if they didn't make it, they are still worthy of honor and respect.

Farris also includes a chapter on one of the most underappreciated parts of our political process - the concession speech.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on May 14, 2012, 09:09:42 PM
Banzai Babe Ruth by Rob Fitts

A lot of reviewers focus on how the 1934 visit of a team of baseball all-stars to Japan was an attempt at improving relations between the US and that country. I didn't see it that way; the influence of the State Department was minimal. Other than making sure everyone had passports and reminding them that they needed to be on their best behavior since they would be representing their country as well as their sport, the diplomats had little to do with the barnstorming tour. It was the brainchild of a Japanese newspaper publisher, who wanted it as a promotion for his paper. Diplomacy had nothing to do with it.

Given that, though, if you want to know about the history of baseball in Japan, this is the book for you. It was this tour that led directly to the first professional baseball teams in Japan. Many of the stars assembled to play the Americans became the nucleus of the Tokyo Giants.

You'll meet Jimmy Horio, a minor-league outfielder from Hawaii who hoped his stint with the Japanese All-Stars would help get him attention and a call-up to the major leagues. There's pitcher Eiji Sawamura, fresh out of high school, who, thanks to a quirk in the stadium, was able to strike out Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig, and Charlie Gehringer (Hall-of-Famers all) in succession. And Moe Berg, who on his own initiative snuck around with his movie camera and took clips of places that were off-limits to outsiders. And The Babe, of course, at the end of his playing career, hoping the experience could help him land a managerial job...
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on May 15, 2012, 04:05:49 AM
Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris. It covers the period from his trip to Africa in 1910 to his death in 1919. One of the qualities of great history writing is to remind us of things that were so common that few people wrote of their significance. For example, until the 1920s or later virtually all adult Americans could identify scores of wild birds by their calls. For relaxation Roosevelt would sit on his porch ovelooking Long Island Sound after supper until he had identified 40 or 50 bird species. Now I doubt one could find that many species.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: AgentDee on May 18, 2012, 02:46:27 AM
Just read Carte Blanche the new 007 novel that was written as a literary reboot of James Bond in book form.  the Ian Flemming estate hand picked the writer to relaunch 007 for a new generation.  it is a darn good book, a lot more reality and less fantasy and gadgets that were in the older movies.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on May 19, 2012, 09:03:22 AM
I just finished "Rolling Hot" by David Drake.A reporter is doing a story on Hammer's Slammers on another planet in a state of war,and before he knows it he's aboard one of their combat cars as a gunner rather than an observer.He starts out as a wimpy,privileged mama's boy trying to make a living for himself and in two days he's a raspy-voiced combat hardened veteran.War does that to you in the far reaches of space,it seems.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: AgentDee on May 20, 2012, 02:55:50 AM
I've been re-reading Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: a trilogy in four (err five) parts".

Someday I'll have the whole thing memorized  :D

is that the one in the black hard cover with built in book mark?  if so I have it, I only read up to the Restaurant at the end of the Universe part of the stories so far.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on June 05, 2012, 12:27:49 PM
I just finished "The Tank Lords",another of Drake's "Slammers" series.I'm now starting on "The Armor of Contempt" by Dan Abnett.It's one of a number of novels based on the "Warhammer:40,000" role-playing game.It's common for any movie adapted from a video gameor even a board game(like "Battleship") to be a flop;I'm about to see if the same goes for a novel.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on June 05, 2012, 06:29:10 PM
The Story of Jane by Laura Kaplan. Between 1820 and 1973 a tiny minority of religious zealots enacted laws against abortion state-by-state as part of a scheme to subjugate women. A few groups of women fought back, and none so successfully as Jane. My favorite part was the acknowledgements section; a couple of women I knew had been involved, but never said anything.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on July 09, 2012, 07:32:55 PM
Conquered into Liberty by Eliot A. Cohen

Cohen, an expert on "strategic studies", looks at two centuries of conflict in one of the most significant theaters of war in America: the "Great Warpath", know to most people as the Lake Champlain region. Before the era of steam and steel, Lake Champlain was the express route between Montreal and Albany. The struggles for control of the area played a vital part in the histories of both the United States and Canada, and as Cohen shows, the battles fought there still have much to teach us.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ChelseaCharmsFan on July 09, 2012, 09:52:36 PM
Have finished reading 5 books recently.

All good books.

I recommend them.

Sacré Bleu - By Christopher Moore.  Have read all of his books and they are all hilarious.  Even read the Comic book he did.  This book was not his usual way of writing, which is cool.  He tried something different and it worked.  It got crazy towards the middle and then end of the book, just like his other books.

Chomp - By Carl Hiassen.  One of his best.  As usual, a lot of crazy ideas in the book, but the thing is, they are all based on true stories.  He puts them together to make a hilarious book.

Star Wars - Darth Plagueis - By James Luceno.  I was so looking forward to this book and it exceeded my expectations.  One of the best scenes in all the 6 live action Star Wars movies is in 'Star Wars : Episode III - Revenge Of The Sith.'  The opera scene when Anakin Skywalker meets up with Chancellor Palpatine and Palpatine explains the story of Darth Plagueis.  Totally awesome scene with weird opera music and some weird ass looking squid aliens in the background swimming in the air.

Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Plagues of Night (Star Trek - The Next Generation) - By David R. George III.  First of a trilogy of books that continue with The Typhon Pact series of books that has featured stories that invole 'Star Trek - The Original Series', 'Star Trek - The Next Generation', 'Star Trek - Deep Space Nine', and 'Star Trek - Voyager.'  Does not include 'Star Trek - Enterprise', but mentions events from the series, so it is involved in one way.  This is a good start to a new trilogy of books that involves mainly the Enterprise crew from 'Star Trek - The Next Generation.'

Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Raise the Dawn (Star Trek - The Next Generation) - By David R. George III.  The second book in the new trilogy of books in the continuation of The Typhon Pact series.  It involves the Enterprise crew from Star Trek - The Next Generation, and it is getting very good and I am looking forward to the third book in the trilogy.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: calcifer on July 18, 2012, 11:41:18 PM
I've enjoyed "The Passage" a few months ago, and want to get my hands on the sequel "The Twelve" which my local library has yet to produce. If I don't get it soon, I might just use my Amazon gift credits to just buy the damned book....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Quadhouse on July 26, 2012, 02:24:38 PM
Queen of Wands by John Ringo.  For a fantasy book, it had some very interesting arguments about religion.  I also liked the Warehouse 13 crossover at the end of the first half of the first story.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on July 27, 2012, 03:04:06 PM
Queen of Wands by John Ringo.  For a fantasy book, it had some very interesting arguments about religion. 

Hmmm. A fantasy book with interesting arguments about myths...
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on October 08, 2012, 06:19:43 PM
Sex on the Moon by Ben Mezrich

Thad Roberts is a hotshot young researcher at NASA in Houston. He and his group of friends come up with a daring game of "can you top this" for their parties. Thad, after sneaking his way onto the Space Shuttle flight simulator (it was too easy - no one asked any questions about what he was doing there), noted that his supervisor/mentor was one of the few people in the world allowed to handle moon rocks - and he kept samples in a safe in his lab...

The Last Great Senate by Ira Shapiro

Oh, for the good old days, when senators actually worked for the good of the country instead of the good of their party... Shapiro was a Senate staffer during the Carter administration, and he tells the good inside stories of how things got done back then, when you had senators like Jacob Javits, George McGovern, Edwin Muskie, and Birch Bayh who really gave a damn about doing the right thing.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on November 26, 2012, 07:42:47 PM
Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-75 by George J. Veith

It's a bit dry and tedious in spots, but since it is probably the first complete chronicle of the end of South Vietnam to use source material from both sides, I'm willing to give Veith a lot of slack. Especially since he has enough battlefield stories to make up for it. For example, he tells how the Battle of Ban Me Thuot turned on a broken firing pin... ("For want of a pin, the skirmish was lost. For want of a skirmish, a base was lost....")

Veith's main theme is that unlike what the American Lefties would have you believe, the government of South Vietnam was not a corruption-riddled cesspool, her military was not incompetent, and the people of South Vietnam most certainly did *not* want to welcome their Communist "liberators". And it was the shameful refusal of Congress to provide even minimal aid that basically signed their death warrant.

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on November 27, 2012, 04:10:19 AM
So where do you want to waste the next 50,000 American lives propping up a failed colonial government? We didn't sign anybody's death warrant, because it wasn't ours to sign. ~One of those American Lefties
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on December 03, 2012, 06:14:57 PM
I know we have a lot of SF readers here, so I'm mentioning this as sort of a notice/warning...

The Bowl of Heaven by Larry Niven and Gregory Benford

Essentially an updated version of Ringworld, it's not that bad.

Except for the ending, which I quote here in its entirety:

"End of Volume One. Volume Two, "Shipstar", will follow soon."

The thing that pissed me off about this ending is that there's no indication on the cover or anywhere in the promotional materials (that I've seen) that indicates the book is the first in a series.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: salem on January 05, 2013, 07:01:12 AM
Phantoms by Dean Koontz

Timeline by Michael Crichton

The Slap by Christian Tsiolkas
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on January 06, 2013, 06:06:59 PM
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Tim Egan.

It's a biography of Edward S. Curtis. As such, it is also a study in a valuable obssession, and a pretty good study of the deceptiveness of group thinking. In 1900 vritually all white Americans believed that Native Americans were vanishing; it was accepted "wisdom" that by 1950 there would be no more. Racists though that was good; liberals wanted to integrate them into "mainstream" culture as painlessly as possible. Edward Curtis chose to try to record as much of their lives as he could before they vanished, and produced a great volume of both art and ethnography.

I am hoping that Egan follows up with a volume about Edward's younger brother Asahel, who devoted most of his life to recording the development of an industrial proletariate.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on January 07, 2013, 08:09:09 PM
Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation by Deborah Davis

Booker T. Washington, president of the "Tuskeegee Normal and Industrial Institute", had been traveling across the US to raise funds for that school for blacks. He'd met many important and influential people during his journeys. Theodore Roosevelt had just come in to the Presidency, and was looking for advice on the many government appointments he had to make. It was natural for the two to correspond on the matter.

On October 16, 1901, Roosevelt had a couple of appointment decisions to make. When he heard that Booker T. was in DC, it was the easiest thing for him to invite the educator to the White House to discuss things over dinner with the rest of the Roosevelt family....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: ge_medic on January 07, 2013, 10:37:56 PM
Steel Boat Iron Hearts by Hans Goebeler

Interesting look at the U-505. Hans also seems to get with enough women to require a gallon of penicillin.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on January 08, 2013, 12:56:23 PM
Horror Screenwriting by Devin Watson.It started out with some very good details about writing the ideal horror script,but most of it was very generic material concerning screenwriting in general.I also have The Filmmaker's Book of The Dead by Danny Draven,which I will begin tonight.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on March 25, 2013, 06:48:55 PM
1912: The Year the World Discovered Antarctica by Chris Turney

I'm sure you all know about Amundsen and Scott, but by no means were they the only people leading expeditions to the Antarctic that year. There was Douglas Mawson of Australia, whose team filled in some 2,000 miles of coastline on the map. A German expedition under Wilhelm Filchner went to check on the question of whether Antarctica was a single land mass, or two masses connected by an ice shelf. And Nobu Shirase of Japan led a team there just to do some general research (and because why the heck not?).

Today, with Google Maps and its ilk, there's practically no place on the planet that is unknown. It's astonishing to see just how little of Antarctica was known when these men set out.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Eliza D on March 26, 2013, 02:27:41 AM
I know we have a lot of SF readers here, so I'm mentioning this as sort of a notice/warning...

The Bowl of Heaven by Larry Niven and Gregory Benford

Essentially an updated version of Ringworld, it's not that bad.

Hi rtpoe!

What's the basic premise of the book?  Ringworld was just that: a world in a vast ring.  Is this Bowlworld?  :P

Honestly, I had a love/hate relationship with the Ringworld books.  Great concept, but somehow the series never lived up to its potential, I thought.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on March 26, 2013, 10:09:24 PM
"Bowlworld" it is!

A giant bowl with a hole at the very bottom, it's rotation sets up a magnetic field that is used to pinch a plasma jet out of the star at the top center of the bowl and aim it out back through the hole for propulsion.

In other words, Dr. Gregory Benford is having fun with plasma physics.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: solvegas on March 26, 2013, 10:35:47 PM
Well Mr Smartypants, if the bowl is full of chicken soup, what are the physics involved ?  ??? ;) ;D
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: DruulEmpire on March 27, 2013, 08:40:52 AM
I imagine that would involve the physics of a chicken franchise employing the labor of entire galaxies. :P
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Eliza D on March 27, 2013, 10:38:13 AM
"Bowlworld" it is!

A giant bowl with a hole at the very bottom, it's rotation sets up a magnetic field that is used to pinch a plasma jet out of the star at the top center of the bowl and aim it out back through the hole for propulsion.

In other words, Dr. Gregory Benford is having fun with plasma physics.

Okay: how big is the bowl?  There's a captive star at the "top"?  What, online with the rim, you mean?  I'm thinking the bowl would have to be, at least, an A.U. in diameter at the rim. 

Now, my next question: is the bowl "open" like Ringworld, with an atmosphere?  I don't see how that could be if there's a hole at the bottom of the sea bowl.  All the air would flush out the bottom and then they'd have to call it "ToiletBowlWorld".  :P
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on March 27, 2013, 09:41:41 PM
Yeah, we're talking a bowl with a radius of 1 AU or so. I recall something about a "membrane" of some sort that kept the atmosphere in place.

Trust me, though, it's not worth reading just to satisfy the intellectual curiosity.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Eliza D on March 27, 2013, 11:02:19 PM
The membrane kept the atmosphere from leaking out the bottom?

And you say the book isn't worth it.  Why?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on March 28, 2013, 09:16:18 PM
I'm not sure about the membrane. That's one of the problems with the novel; it was poorly edited, if at all. There are clear glitches in the narrative:

Quote
(1) On one page Tananareve is roughly picked up and thrown into a holding tank. One the very next page, she's with the other group on the other side of a diamond wall. Two drafts of the 'landing party is broken in two' event, perhaps?
(2) There are two different descriptions of the treatment of one person's serious injury which immediately follow each other. Said treatment describes *the* injury in two different ways and it is treated by two different people. Either the first person shoved the metal rod back into the guy for the next person to take out again, or this is two different drafts of the same event.
(3) At one point the captain leaves the bridge and a page or less latter leaves the bridge again. Did he get lost? Or is this two different drafts?
(4) Near the end of one chapter an offhand comment is made that communications from Earth stopped 100 years ago for no apparent reason. Yet a few chapters later we are treated to a page of discussion of the latest communication from Earth as if it were a routine event. So this *published version* hasen't even decided if the Earth has gone missing or not?
(5) It was previously established that ship has been in motion for approximately 80 years. How then can they have lost contact 100 years ago? Is one supposed to take the time since last contact to be *Earth* time?! For what possible reason? Have the authors even decided, at this early stage of story development, how far Glory is from Earth and how long it would take to get there?
 - Scott R Crittenden, Amazon reviewer

And the ending.... "Unsatisfying" is being polite. There's no build up to a cliffhanger, nor any sense of resolution to even one of the plot threads. Just a "To Be Continued" blurb.

I really did toss it across the room in disgust when I finished it. I've never treated a library book like that before.

There are better ways to spend your time. Cleaning your toilet is one....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Eliza D on March 29, 2013, 01:35:14 AM
Oh.

Well, now.  That's different!   :P

Thanks for the heads up!

I'm glad that Cris apparently has a better proofreader than Niven!  ;D
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on May 15, 2013, 08:25:03 PM
Antigone  (http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/antigone.html)by Sophocles

The third in his trilogy of plays about Oedipus (or at least the third of the three that survive).

OK, I admit I haven't read it since high school. But recent news stories have pretty much recapitulated the story.

We all know how Oedipus unintentionally killed his father and married his mother. The trilogy expands on that legend. Oedipus and Jocasta had a couple of kids. After Oedipus goes into exile at the end of Oedipus the King, he leaves his sons Polyneices and Eteocles to share the rule of Thebes. During Oedipus at Colonus, Eteocles decides he doesn't want to share, and he kicks Polyneices out. Needless to say, Polyneices raises an army (the "Seven Against Thebes") and comes back to take Thebes for himself. The two brothers kill each other in the battle, leaving Uncle Creon to rule.

At the beginning of Antigone, we find that Creon has decreed that while Eteocles should have a full state funeral for his defending Thebes, Polyneices the Traitor is to be left outside, "unwept, unsepulchered, a treasure to feast on for birds looking out for a dainty meal." He also decrees the death penalty for anyone who tries to bury him.

This doesn't set well with Antigone, who insists that burying the dead far more important than any earthly law, one of the "unwavering, unwritten customs of the gods … not some trifle of now or yesterday, but for all eternity."

Sophocles also touched on the theme in his play Ajax, where another good man turns terrorist. Agamemnon the King refuses to allow Ajax to be buried; Odysseus insisted that maintaining a hatred after death was pointless and unfair.

Quote
AGAMEMNON: You will make us appear cowards this day.
ODYSSEUS: Not so, but just men in the sight of all the Greeks.
AGAMEMNON: So you would have me allow the burying of the dead?
ODYSSEUS: Yes; for I too shall come to that need.

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on August 05, 2013, 08:46:08 PM
Here is Where by Andrew Carroll

Carroll travels across the US. visiting places of no small historical import that have somehow been overlooked in our desire to memorialize and landmark things. He covers literally dozens of footnote places in history, like the home of Dr. Loring Miner in Sublette, Kansas - the local doctor who in early 1918 realized that the cases of flu he was dealing with were unlike anything that he - or anyone else - had ever seen. That was the initial outbreak of the Spanish Flu epidemic, which killed tens of millions worldwide.

Or the Heights Arts Theater in Cleveland, where on November 14, 1959, police confiscated the reels of the movie Les Amants and arrested the owner Nico Jacobellis on the charge of "possessing and exhibiting an obscene film". The resulting case, Jacobellis v. Ohio, went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Jacobellis' favor. Justice Potter Stewart agreed with the majority:

"It is possible to read the Court's opinion in Roth v. United States and Alberts v. California, 354 U.S. 476, in a variety of ways. In saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which, in those cases, was faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable. I have reached the conclusion, which I think is confirmed at least by negative implication in the Court's decisions since Roth and Alberts, that, under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0378_0184_ZS.html

His essays are generally short, and he comes across as a smart friend telling you about the cool places he's been to, and the people he met there. He takes care to get the assistance of local historians and property owners, since in pretty much every case they have important stories to tell.

If there's one drawback, it's that there are no photographs. Carroll talks about taking a lot of pictures; couldn't the publishers have included some?

On the website for the book - http://hereiswhere.org/ - he notes that the book is part of a larger project to get these places properly marked for history and the edification of the citizenry. The list of "Events" has a few places where he has managed to get some markers placed.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: number3fac on September 16, 2013, 10:45:13 PM
I've got "Brave New World" on my bookshelf.  It's been years since I read it, and have been pondering going back to it.  Then I found the "Better Book Titles" blog, which posits revised names for literary works.  Here's the take on that book:

(http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsani2m3mV1qczxc6o1_500.jpg)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on October 03, 2013, 09:29:37 PM
"Path of the Warrior" by Gav Thorpe I just finished.It was a Warhammer:40,000 novel,but not as good as Dan Abnett's work.I'm now on Dan's book,"Titanicus",which features giant robots like in "Pacific Rim".
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on December 02, 2013, 07:50:07 PM
Command and Control by Eric Schlosser

A detailed history of how our nuclear arsenal has been commanded and controlled over the decades. And how the Air Force, Pentagon, fought to get control of the nukes from the President...

There's also a lengthy and detailed recounting of the explosion of a Titan II missile - with an actual "on alert" warhead - in Damascus, AR in 1980, wrapped around a history of attempts to make nuclear warheads safe (in that they will only explode when you want them to).

A lot of reviewers are considering it "scary" to see just how close we have come to disaster on more than one occasion. I'm not so easily frightened by past "what ifs". I'm more worried that Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, and all the other nuclear wannabees might not be even aware of our past mistakes, and thus unable to learn from them...
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on December 02, 2013, 08:17:03 PM
I've got "Brave New World" on my bookshelf.  It's been years since I read it, and have been pondering going back to it.  Then I found the "Better Book Titles" blog, which posits revised names for literary works.  Here's the take on that book:

(http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsani2m3mV1qczxc6o1_500.jpg)

Uh, you do realize that the little thumbnail is unreadable, and won't enlarge?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxiMoundsSexyBigTitsAndSexyBigAss on December 03, 2013, 10:04:22 AM
Stephen King's 'The Shining' sequel, 'Doctor **82**.'  Still reading it.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: tdotter on January 10, 2014, 04:27:53 AM
Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
I own the book,the movie and the soundtrack.I thought this book is much better than the overrated Catcher in the Rye and the S.E Hinton "youth gone wild" books.
This is a case where I think the movie is just as good as the book.Although I would have to say the book is a little better because it conveys Alex's isolation after he is released from prison a little better than the movie.However,I would recommend watching the movie before reading the book because the movie does an obviously better job of conveying how much music was important to the main character Alex than the book.It amazes me how many stories about youth don't include anything about music and how much it means to them.In many ways the kind of music that you listen to at that age is the only identity that you have.Fuckin Metal for me!
The only problem I have with the book is some of the slang used by the characters.Most of it you will know what it means but other slang words will take a few times reading it to get what it means.Other than that,it's a great book and movie as I'm sure most of you on here already know.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: number3fac on January 18, 2014, 10:25:27 PM
Uh, you do realize that the little thumbnail is unreadable, and won't enlarge?

Right-click on it, select "open in new tab".  It'll be full-size there.  This works for a lot of "embedded" (I think that's the term) images in Forum posts.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on August 02, 2014, 09:51:27 PM
The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Romance That Changed the World
by Greg King and Sue Woolmans

So, World War I (The War to End All Wars....) began when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot (along with his wife, Countess Sophie Chotek).

But what sort of people were they? What was the deal with the "morgantic" marriage? Why did they go to Sarajevo, and who was in charge of the security arrangements? What happened to their children?

The Romanovs of Russia get the spotlight, but this tragic family story is little known. The brutal snubbing of Sophie at court functions and other appearances (If they wanted to attend the opera, they couldn't sit together - he got a luxury box seat, she had to sit down in the regular seats), how their two sons spent time in concentration camps...

King and Woolmans spent a lot of time with their descendants, listening to old family tales, and reading what little family correspondence remains. A fascinating look at some overlooked people in history.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: gOOber on August 08, 2014, 02:11:08 PM
 :-[
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on December 13, 2014, 10:20:18 PM
These, plus dozens of other since my last post in this thread.

The Fireflies of Port Stanley by Marc Jones. Alternate history of the Falkland war.
Dog Company: The Boys of Pointe du Hoc by Patrick O'Donnell
Ship of Ghosts: The Story of the USS Houston by James Hornfischer
Battle of Dogger Bank: The First Dreadnought Engagement by Tobias Philbin
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo By Tom Reiss. The story of General Dumas, father of Alex.
Over the Wine Dark Sea by Harry Turtledove
Dome City Blues By Jeff Edwards
A Devil of a Whipping: the Battle of Cowpens By Lawrence E. Babits
Give Me a Fast Ship: The Continental Navy and America's Revolution at Sea by Tim McGrath
Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of The U.S. Navy by Ian W Toll. The Constitution and her sisters.
The Belisarius series by Erik Flint an David Drake
The  Weird West series by Mike Resnick. Doc Holiday meets steampunk
The Crimson Worlds series by Jay Allen. Just waiting for the last one.
Caught up on the Destroyermen series by Taylor Anderson
Also waiting for the next offering of The Lost Fleet universe from Jack Campbell.

 I might go back and dig up some more titles.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: salem on December 15, 2014, 04:13:57 PM
I had only ever read one Stephen King book, Misery, so I decided it was time for another. I loved Misery, a truly terrific book.

The one I chose was 'Salem's Lot'

Have to say I really enjoyed it. Of course the made-for-tv miniseries from the late 1970's takes one or two mliberties, but is actually a pretty faithful representation. It starts off slow, woth King setting the scene over a long period (he seems to like to flesh out every minor character of a small town in intimate detail) but once the story gets going it is unputdownable!

Brilliant. Very bleak though, a sense of pervading hopelessness seems to dog the last 100 pages. However, excellently written and extremely enjoyable.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on December 17, 2014, 04:19:43 PM
An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean - Antarctic Survivor by Michael Smith. The man who went on three of the four great British expeditions with Scott and Shackleton, and made a 36 mile solo trek across the Ross Ice Shelf in 18 hrs to get help for a pair or comrades.
The Dead and Those about to Die: D-Day: The Big Red One at Omaha Beach by John C. McManus.
Gray Tide in the East by Andrew J. Heller. An alternate history of the First World War where the Kaiser attacks Russia and not France via Belgium.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: salem on April 05, 2015, 06:02:20 PM
I don't know how familiar anyone on here is with the Bernard Cornwell 'Sharpe' novels, but I recently read 'Sharpe's Havoc' a novel which depicts Lieutenant Richard Sharpe and his merry band of riflemen helping to send Marshall Soult's French army packing from Portugal.

The Cornwell 'Sharpe' series really are an excellent read, highly recommended. They are meticulously researched and move along at a breakneck pace.

The novels themselves have a chronological order, but aren't written that way. Indeed the first novel Chronologically was written AFTER the novel that takes place LAST chronologically!

The novels (chronologically) begin with a young Sharpe in India and go through his act of bravery which promotes him from the ranks through fighting at Trafalgar, Portugal, Spain and Waterloo. The last novel chronologically to feature Sharpe takes place a few years after Waterloo and features Napoleon.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on April 06, 2015, 06:44:33 AM
I don't know how familiar anyone on here is with the Bernard Cornwell 'Sharpe' novels, but I recently read 'Sharpe's Havoc' a novel which depicts Lieutenant Richard Sharpe and his merry band of riflemen helping to send Marshall Soult's French army packing from Portugal.

The Cornwell 'Sharpe' series really are an excellent read, highly recommended. They are meticulously researched and move along at a breakneck pace.

The novels themselves have a chronological order, but aren't written that way. Indeed the first novel Chronologically was written AFTER the novel that takes place LAST chronologically!

The novels (chronologically) begin with a young Sharpe in India and go through his act of bravery which promotes him from the ranks through fighting at Trafalgar, Portugal, Spain and Waterloo. The last novel chronologically to feature Sharpe takes place a few years after Waterloo and features Napoleon.

I was introduced to his work thru a series of television shows about 20 years ago... Great programs. I can't recall if they were BBC or U.S. grown.

---------------------

Scorpions by Noah Feldman is an interesting kind of literature, a group biography. He took four of Franklin Roosevelt's SCOTUS appointees--Frankfurter, Black, Douglas, and Jackson--and followed their intellectual development, and the emergence of comprehensive constitutional thought from 1935 to 1955 or so. It's a good read, but it is the story of complex inter-relationships, and a mere 400 pages isn't enough.

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Robin_K2 on April 06, 2015, 05:10:53 PM
I've been re-re-reading all the Sherlock Holmes short stories. Every single one, and I'm almost done. I'd forgotten how wonderful they are. It's not the mysteries so much as the style of writing and the atmosphere Conan Doyle creates.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on April 06, 2015, 05:46:44 PM
I've been re-re-reading all the Sherlock Holmes short stories. Every single one, and I'm almost done. I'd forgotten how wonderful they are. It's not the mysteries so much as the style of writing and the atmosphere Conan Doyle creates.

Yes! I thought I was the only person who did that.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: salem on April 06, 2015, 06:29:50 PM
Yes! I thought I was the only person who did that.

I have them all, but have read surprisingly few. I suppose it's a bit like me with Stephen King, Bernard Cornwell, Michael Crichton and James Herbert, I like the thought of reading them occasionally so I can always look forward to reading something really good for a long time to come.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on April 09, 2015, 03:00:01 AM
The really good stuff is just as good with subsequent readings.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: salem on April 09, 2015, 01:54:30 PM
That is certainly true. Timeline is my favourite book, I read it every year. I think it may be time to give the old Sherlock tales a try.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Robin_K2 on April 09, 2015, 03:27:15 PM
Last night I started another book that I've read many times: H.G. Wells "Outline of History," in two volumes.

It's fascinating. Wonderful, unique views throughout -- considered generalizations and conclusions about major periods of time, with special consideration to countries and continents whose histories usually do not figure in American school texts.

Some of it is rather dated. But that the opinions are Wells' opinions makes up for that. He was both ahead of his time and a product of his time.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: homevintner on April 16, 2015, 10:04:31 PM
Beat the Last Drum-The Siege of Yorktown by Thomas Fleming
South Pacific Cauldron-Word War II's great Forgotten Battlegrounds by Alan Rems
Boston 1775 by Francis Russell
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: pedonbio on April 16, 2015, 11:08:49 PM
Last night I started another book that I've read many times: H.G. Wells "Outline of History," in two volumes.

It's fascinating. Wonderful, unique views throughout -- considered generalizations and conclusions about major periods of time, with special consideration to countries and continents whose histories usually do not figure in American school texts.

Some of it is rather dated. But that the opinions are Wells' opinions makes up for that. He was both ahead of his time and a product of his time.

Yep. Other people may have invented The Bomb, but he came up with the idea and the name.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: gOOber on April 30, 2015, 03:43:48 PM
 ::)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Palomine on May 01, 2015, 12:13:02 AM
My esteemed colleague Prof. M. (Holmes' nemesis) recently recommended Andy Weir's "The Martian" to me and I read it in two sittings. It was entertaining and reality-based (for SF). :)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on May 01, 2015, 10:43:15 PM
Mars Girl by Jeff Garrity

The United States’ first attempt at colonizing Mars is in big trouble. The lander has been damaged – somehow – and is drifting off course. Worse, sixteen of the seventeen people aboard are dead, leaving only a teenaged girl alive.

Will she land safely? Will she be able to make it to the prefab, pre-landed restaurant/shelter? Will a rescue mission be able to reach her in time? How will the corporate sponsors of the mission be able to profit from this? How will the news network with exclusive coverage of the landing keep people glued to their screens, and keep the merchandise moving? How will the government spin this disaster to their advantage?

Can our intrepid...er, hero, the ace reporter Ray Barker, find a big enough story while stuck in a small lakeside town in Michigan to keep his name and face on the news?

It's fast-paced and action packed, and the scenes shift rapidly from Okinisee, Michigan to the White House to the headquarters of MASSnews, "the USA’s best choice for contemporary news hits." Garrity manages to keep it all under control; using chapters shorter than those of James Patterson helps with the rapid shifts. The tone is light; he never gets in your face with satire or social commentary. You can, if you choose to do so, read it as a rollicking good sci-fi action yarn instead of biting social satire, and still enjoy the heck out of it.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on June 01, 2015, 06:36:30 PM
Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide
by Eric Bogosian

Not just a recounting of the genocide, or the story of Soghomon Tehlirian, who with the support of the radical Armenian Revolutionary Federation assassinated Talat Pasha, the Ottoman Minister of the Interior who was most directly responsible for the genocide, but a decent general history of Armenia and its people up to the end of the 20th century.

Not being a historian with an agenda, Bogosian uses his talents as a writer to simply tell the tale. Tehlirian and the other Nemesis conspirators are not made out to be heroes. The governments of Turkey, Russia, and even Germany are not vilified. It's about as dispassionate a recounting as one could want.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on January 11, 2016, 09:18:06 PM
Ultima by Stephen Baxter

I didn't know that this was a sequel to Proxima when I got it off the library shelf (there was NOTHING on the jacket copy to suggest that); I thought it was just a novel set in the same milieu. I pretty much don't care for novel series - I get my books from the library, and they don't always have the complete set. Given that I like Baxter's style, and the thing was over 400 pages long (easily a full Sunday afternoon), I figured I'd give it a shot.

It's a cool action-adventure novel set across multiple alternate universes, leading up to a rather huge infodump at the end that sort of explains what the "kernels" and "hatches" are - kind of. It can get confusing keeping track of the characters (they get separated, and their story lines are told concurrently), but it's loaded with awesome ideas.

The asteroid Ceres being deliberately crashed into Mars! The Roman Empire surviving, and gaining spaceflight!! The Incan Empire - IN SPACE!!! Amazing ideas!

And I didn't really need to have read Proxima.....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on April 18, 2016, 06:23:20 PM
A couple of recent reads:

Famous Works of Art, And How They Got That Way by John B. Nici

Nici looks at twenty great works of art and discusses the events that launched them to popular fame. A blockbuster auction price, an artist with an interesting life, hitting the right nationalist buttons, and even the right placement in a museum can all catapult a piece to superstardom.

Time Salvager by Wesley Chu

The Future plunders the past for lost technologies. Similar to Kage Baker's "Company" stories, but a LOT more action-packed. First in a series, but it's still self-contained.

The Strange Case of Doctor Doyle: A Journey into Madness and Mayhem by Daniel Friedman, MD and
Eugene Friedman, MD

A biography of Conan Doyle's early years, wrapped around a reconstruction of a "Jack the Ripper Tour" he once took. The fascinating bit is that the authors note that from what we know of the young Doyle, he fits the profile of Jack the Ripper.....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on May 31, 2016, 09:00:27 PM
BALLOT BATTLES: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States
Edward B. Foley

While everyone's paying attention to the shenanigans over access to voting, Prof. Foley argues that what happens after the ballots have been cast is just as important.

When the first count was done in Virginia's attorney general election in 2013, the margin of victory was 32 votes. When the dust finally cleared after several months of legal challenges and counts and recounts in Washington's gubenatorial election in 2004, the margin of victory was 137 votes. It took over seven months for Al Franken to be confirmed as the winner of Minnesota's 2008 senatorial election (and that was one that Foley cited as a good example of resolving an electoral dispute)

This isn't unusual; Foley recounts close and disputed elections going back to the 1790s. Given that history, he argues quite convincingly that we need a method of resolving close elections in place BEFORE it happens again.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on September 06, 2016, 09:47:13 PM
Come on, someone else here has to be reading books....

The Apache Wars by Paul Andrew Hutton

Subtitled "The Hunt for Geronimo, The Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy who Started the Longest War in American History".

For over 25 years, battles and skirmishes were fought in southern Arizona and New Mexico between the US Army and the Apaches. Hutton gives a wonderfully detailed account of the conflict, being fair to both sides. If there is a villain, it's the US government in Washington - the rivalries between the Army and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the constant shuffling of people appointed to oversee the whole thing kept anyone from managing to find a way to end the strife. But that's all background stuff; you can practically feel the ground under your feet with Hutton's vivid writing.

In addition to Geronimo and the Apache Kid, you'll meet legends like Cochise, Kit Carson, and Tom Horn.

If you're a Western buff, or history aficionado, you'll love this work.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on September 07, 2016, 06:13:31 PM
"Out Of The Dark" by David Weber.  What for most of the book is a hard military sci-fi alien invasion novel, turns into something entirely different when a huge twist which is only hinted at in the first 3/4 of the book, comes to fruition.  I'm still not sure if I like it or not, even though it's surely gripping, as the human race is definitely on the losing end of the war for most of the book.   :-\
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on September 07, 2016, 07:54:08 PM
"The Trial" by Franz Kafka.
It's happening for real now.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on September 21, 2016, 06:57:08 PM
Mary Roach is at it again....

Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War

It's about the science behind helping our men and women in uniform be more ready to fight. Testing fabric for uniforms.... how to protect soldier's hearing from loud noises while still letting them be able to hear faint sounds.... wondering if diarrhea has ever compromised a Special Ops mission.... why there aren't any effective shark repellents....

It lags in the last few chapters (getting enough **82** in submarines), but like all her other books, it's a fun and insightful read.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: KBTs on September 23, 2016, 09:29:30 AM
"Lawrence of Arabia's War: The Arabs, the British, and the remaking of the Middle East in WWI"

One detailed version of how the recent Middle East got the way it was before it got the way it is.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on November 28, 2016, 07:54:35 PM
The Only Rule is it Has to Work
by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller

The dream of every fantasy sports player - what if you could run a team FOR REAL?

Lindbergh and Miller, two baseball writers and sabermetricians (stat nerds), got the chance to play "general manager" with the Sonora Stompers, an independent team in California. They were given free rein to apply all their number-crunching expertise, from drafting players to setting up lineups to making defensive shifts.

The Stompers, by the way, are at the bottom of the heap - really - in professional baseball. "If the [Moneyball] A’s were a 'collection of misfit toys,' as Micheal Lewis wrote, then we’ll be building a team out of toys that got recalled because they were choke hazards."

The question Lindbergh and Miller kept asking was "Why wasn't this player signed by anyone else?" They did manage to assemble a decent team - on paper. But then reality started setting in, and they learned the most important thing about managing a team......

http://www.theonlyruleisithastowork.com/
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on January 16, 2017, 06:48:56 PM
The Perfect Horse by Elizabeth Letts

The tale of how the Lippizaner horses of Vienna's Spanish Riding School were grabbed by the Nazis for a breeding program, and then rescued in the last days of the war.

If you love horses, you'll love this. I'm not a horse buff, so..... A pretty good war story, at least.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on February 23, 2017, 10:15:32 PM
Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome
by Shawn Levy

The rebirth of Rome after WWII.....

Fashion designers Pucci, the Fontana Sisters, Emilio Schuberth.... Frederico Fellini.... Marcello Mastroianni... Egypt's exiled King Farouk, and other slumming aristocrats.... Hollywood legends Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston... New stars like Sophia Loren, Gina Lollabrigida, and Anita Ekberg.....

And the photographers who captured it all: Tazio Secchiarioli, Pierluigi Praturlon, and Marcello Gepetti.... the first "paparazzi".....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on March 17, 2017, 10:19:11 PM
Charles Stross' "Laundry" series. Magical realism, with a foreboding sense of Lovecraftian doom tempered with a satire of government bureaucracy.

In The Atrocity Archives, IT specialist Bob Howard runs up against neo-Nazis trying to summon a "frost giant" to bring about the next Reich. The Jennifer Morgue deconstructs the "James Bond" archetype. In The Fuller Memorandum, we find out the background of "Angleton", Howard's mysterious boss and mentor. In The Apocalypse Codex, Howard deals with a religious cult actively trying to bring about Doomsday. The Rhesus Chart and The Annihilation Score introduce vampires and superheroes, respectively - each time perfectly fitting them into the rules of the milieu.

I just finished The Nightmare Stacks..... Would you believe an army of Elven mages invading England?

Alex Schwartz is a new "recruit" to the Laundry. He's one of the vampires that survived the end of The Rhesus Chart, and happens to be the "Agent On The Scene" when the advance scout for the invasion appears. If you ever wondered how a dragon would do against a modern jet fighter....

Stross continues to add more to his version of England, while staying true to local custom and geography (aside from the occasional bit of artistic license). And that's particularly important in the way the novel comes to an end. By around the 2/3 mark, I had a good idea of how the whole thing would be wrapped up. As it turned out, I was pretty close. The biggest difference was that Stross managed to bring it all to a perfectly satisfying conclusion in less than one page.

I practically jumped out of my chair, shouting "YES! YES! THAT IS FREAKIN' AWESOME!!!"

(By all that's holy, if you do get your hands on the book, don't read the last two pages unless you're going to read the rest of it first.)

Of course, there's going to be (at least) one more novel in the series. It's going to be impossible to keep magic a secret, now that a few thousand Elven mages are wandering around near Leeds, and there are about as  many human casualties and a couple of destroyed aircraft to deal with....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Hark on March 20, 2017, 11:29:19 AM
Currently reading Robert Reich, "Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few." I'm fairly light in economic & financial knowledge, but he makes it easy enough to follow along. Though I'm learning smaller details, overall it confirms what I've already knew that the GOP and many corporatist Democrats have sold us out to Big Oil, Big Pharma, the military industrial complex, and Wall Street. I can only do 1 chapter at a time, since I get angry, and this was written BEFORE our new 'Cheeto Jesus.'
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Bramlet on March 20, 2017, 06:54:04 PM
Thomas Sowell's auto-biography.

I just started V. D. Hanson's "Carnage and Culture"
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on July 04, 2017, 09:22:21 PM
Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth
by Holger Hoock

A look at the Revolutionary War, concentrating on those other aspects of war that aren't often included in the history books.

The mob violence between "Patriots" and "Loyalists" in the years before the shooting started. There's a good description of what it's like to get tarred and feathered.... The plundering and pillaging that accompanied the armies, and looting by the populace. Hoock tells of one coastal town in Maine that was only lightly shelled by the British - but was completely destroyed by looters. The treatment of prisoners of war....

Hoock rightly calls it a "Civil War", since a good deal of the conflict pitted Colonial against Colonial. The Battle of Kings Mountain, for example, was fought between Patriot and Loyalist militias. There was nary a Redcoat in sight.

It's a very good look at something you thought you knew all about....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on July 05, 2017, 12:11:14 AM
I can only do 1 chapter at a time, since I get angry

I know the feeling. That was exactly how I felt when I read:

The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, by Wole Soyinka

During the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), Prof. Soyinka was imprisoned by the military government, without trial, for 22 months. He spent most of that time in solitary confinement, tortured almost every day, and banned by the government from access to books, pens, and paper. Despite this great privation, Soyinka was somehow able to produce this prison memoir, largely on pieces of toilet paper with homemade ink, and have it smuggled out of his jail cell.

"In October 1969, when the civil war came to an end, amnesty was proclaimed, and Soyinka and other political prisoners were freed. For the first few months after his release, Soyinka stayed at a friend’s farm in southern France, where he sought solitude. He wrote The Bacchae of Euripides (1969), a reworking of the Pentheus myth. He soon published in London a book of poetry, Poems from Prison. At the end of the year, he returned to his office as Headmaster of Cathedral of Drama in [the University of Ibadan]."

In 1971, The Man Died was published.

In 1986, Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first African to achieve the honor. The citiation described him as one "who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence." His Nobel acceptance speech, "This Past Must Address Its Present" (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1986/soyinka-lecture.html), was devoted to South African freedom-fighter Nelson Mandela, and was an outspoken criticism of apartheid and the politics of racial segregation imposed on the majority by the Nationalist South African government.

Even all these decades later, Prof. Soyinka has never received a formal apology for his imprisonment and torture by the Nigerian government. Nor has anyone ever explained why exactly he was jailed.

Like I said, I can only take one chapter at a go of The Man Died. In fact, I don't think I've ever read the entire book, so infuriated does it make me.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on July 22, 2017, 11:04:14 PM
Liberty's First Crisis by Charles Slack

The story of the Sedition Act of 1798, which came about when one political party tried to silence dissent...

Slack digs deep to find (and tell) the stories of the handful of people who were actually prosecuted under the law. An inebriated boatman who complained about the noise from President John Adams' parade.... The publisher of the newspaper Aurora, the loudest critic of the government.... A pugnacious Congressman from Vermont....

He spends some time at the end discussing what the First Amendment really means in this regard. He concludes that while certain types of speech can be punished after the fact (to refer to a famous example, if you shout "FIRE" in a crowded theater, you're responsible for what happens next), the government cannot make laws that specifically prohibit a type of speech in advance.

A worthwhile read, considering the current political climate...and it was written two years ago....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on October 04, 2017, 09:07:23 PM
October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
by China Miéville

I knew the author as a SF writer, not a historian. This work is a non-fiction chronicle of the Russian Revolution in 1917. It's a really, really good account of the events, unencumbered by ideology or commentary.

I found that a bit of a drawback, though. Miéville doesn't get into any motivations or psychology of the principals involved. But it's still a good start if you want to know *how* Russia went from the Tsar to Lenin in one year.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on October 10, 2017, 12:09:02 PM

I found that a bit of a drawback, though. Miéville doesn't get into any motivations or psychology of the principals involved. But it's still a good start if you want to know *how* Russia went from the Tsar to Lenin in one year.

That sounds like a great book, because I too have always wondered why the October Revolution was so successful in the land of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on January 12, 2018, 10:57:20 PM
Bump.

The Taking of K-129
Josh Dean
Dutton Books
Copyright 2017 by the author

Those of you old enough to have lived through Ancient History may recall hearing stuff in the early 1970s about mining manganese nodules from the ocean floor. One of Howard Hughes' companies contracted the building of a huge ship, the Glomar Explorer, to see if these nodules could actually be scooped up in any way that could possibly be practical and profitable.

Years later, it came to light that the mining operation was actually the cover story for collecting something even more valuable and outrageous: a sunken Soviet ballistic missile submarine.

Josh Dean approaches the story from an interesting angle. Not from the Cold War geopolitics, not from the cloak-and-dagger world of the CIA, but from the engineering challenge of creating something that could filch a submarine from the ocean floor - while keeping that truth a secret. And he does this by having interviewed the people who were there and knew it all - because they designed and built the thing.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on January 13, 2018, 01:34:13 AM
Howard Hughes was his generation's Elon Musk, except that HH was much more of a ladies man. If I'm not mistaken, HH was Stan Lee's inspiration for Tony Stark aka Iron Man...and Elon had a cameo in Iron Man 2 (https://www.youtube.com/embed/-wC4rLguuYI)...bringing us full circle.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: solvegas on January 13, 2018, 10:36:49 AM
Howard Hughes was his generation's Elon Musk, except that HH was much more of a ladies man. If I'm not mistaken, HH was Stan Lee's inspiration for Tony Stark aka Iron Man...and Elon had a cameo in Iron Man 2 (https://www.youtube.com/embed/-wC4rLguuYI)...bringing us full circle.

Let's hope Musk doesn't become as weird and paranoid as Hughes became as he got older.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on January 13, 2018, 06:08:17 PM

Let's hope Musk doesn't become as weird and paranoid as Hughes became as he got older.

Indeed his sad end (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes#Death) was weird, as was the whole drama over the various wills that he supposedly wrote, including a handwritten one which one day just happened to appear on the desk of an official of the Mormon church (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes#Estate) and which -- surprise! -- gave the bulk of his estate to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. That "will" was eventually unmasked as a forgery, and legally Hughes was deemed to have died intestate.

Unfortunately, the public persona of Howard Hughes was not helped by the hoax "biography" written by Clifford Irving.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on January 30, 2018, 10:39:20 PM
ISLAND OF THE BLUE FOXES
by Stephen Bown

Start from Moscow with a veritable army of 3,000 scientists, artists, engineers, and support staff. Go as far east as you can, over thousands of miles of poorly mapped territory. When you reach the outposts on the Sea of Ohkotsk, build ships to sail across to Kamchatka, where you'll set up a new outpost. From that outpost, sail east to explore the Alaskan coast.

Come back years later, with detailed reports on everything.

Bown argues that The Great Northern Expedition was the largest and longest scientific expedition ever conducted (unless you count space exploration, which in this case you shouldn't). Expedition Leader Vitus Bering left his name all over the map (including Bering Island, where he was stranded through a winter with the crew of one of the two ships that explored Alaska), and naturalist George Steller gave his name to many newly identified creatures.

It's pretty good, but could be longer. Bown blows across Siberia a bit too quickly, and I didn't get much feeling for the suffering of the men stuck on Bering Island.....

But for those of you who think Lewis and Clark were a big deal......
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: salem on February 02, 2018, 08:19:32 PM
Recently read Doctor **82** Stephen King's sequel to The Shining.

The Shining is an amazing novel, such well written characters, the setting of the hotel and its grounds is so well written it almost feels like you are actually there.

Doctor **82** follows the now grown up Danny Torrance and his struggle to overcome his alcohol addiction so as not to end up like his father. There is also a creepy band of travellers, a semi-immortal bunch called the True Knot, who search out children with the Shining and torture them to steal their 'Steam' so that they can prolong their lives.

King has crafted another solid novel here, although not a patch on the Shining, it is a good read. It does almost feel like it was written with a movie deal in mind as the action in it would translate to the big screen extremely well. I do believe in fact that the novel has indeed been optioned for a screenplay.

It doesn't feel as intricate as other King novels, but I think this can be explained by the fact that for many years King has been pondering what happened to young Danny Torrance and probably had the idea mostly formed before writing it. You get the impression that the book was written quickly, not because it is badly written but more to do with the fact that King himself probably enjoyed writing it so much he most likely breezed through writing it since he probably feels he knows the main character's history so well. It is rare indeed for King to write a sequel, and I am glad he chose to do a sequel to the Shining.

Interesting note, the town of Jerusalem's lot gets a mention in passing.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on June 08, 2018, 11:44:58 PM
Three that recently crossed my desk, with approval.

The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball's Golden Age
by Sridhar Pappu

1968 was a major year for the US. You can probably rattle off a dozen things that were going on back then, that radically affected the country. Pappu looks at what was going on in baseball at the time, and the intersection of the sport and society. It's not "just" a baseball book.

The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions
by Peter Brannen

A look at the Big Five mass extinctions, through field trips and interviews with the scientists trying to figure out what happened. It's done in a clear style and light, friendly tone. The people he meets are all excited about what they do, and eager to share their knowledge.

And the fossils and evidence are a lot easier to find than you'd think. You don't have to schlep out to the Gobi or Wyoming. Cincinnati sits atop a half-billion year old sea bed. Fossils from the Devonian practically fall out of highway cuts around Cleveland. The Palisades of northern New Jersey? Those are the lava flows from the end of the Triassic. One of the best fossil footprint beds is in the middle of Connecticut.

Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History Making Race Around the World
by Matthew Goodman

You may have heard of Nellie Bly's attempt at beating Jules Verne's fictional Around the World in Eighty Days. But the same day she left. Elizabeth Bisland of The Cosmopolitan magazine left on the same journey, traveling in the opposite direction. Goodman follows both women on their journeys, and gets in to the realities of long distance travel in the late Victorian era. And he finishes it off by completing the biographies of the women.

Oh, by the way, Bly cheated......

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on June 10, 2018, 04:12:03 PM
Those last three books look quite fascinating. Thanks for bringing my attention to them, rtpoe.

Since the chances of me ever being able to watch Hamilton on Broadway with the original cast (including Lin-Manuel Miranda in the title role) is now nil, I intend to tackle the biography by Ron Chernow that started it all. (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/292945/alexander-hamilton-by-ron-chernow/9780143034759/)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on July 27, 2018, 11:03:00 PM
Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History by Mike Pesca

I love a good alternate history tale, and good sports writing (especially about baseball). Pesca gets a bunch of sports journalists (and a few **29** fans) to muse on a "What Might Have Been" in sports. Some are serious ("What if Muhammad Ali Had Gotten His Draft Deferment" by Leigh Montville), some are downright silly ("What if Basketball Rims Were Smaller Than Basketballs" by John Blois). All are of reasonable length - perfect 'bathroom reading', as it were.

Many different sports get their due - Track, horse racing, and the Olympics get essays. If I have a complaint, it's that there's only one baseball essay that refers to an actual in-game play, and doesn't really dig deep into the alternate historical path. So here's my attempt to make up for that.

In the 1937 All Star Game, Earl Averill hit a line drive back to the pitcher. It hit Dizzy Dean on the foot, breaking his toe. Dean didn't properly recover from the injury; he hurt his arm trying to go easy on the foot. That pretty much ended his career.

Let's say that the liner just missed Ol' Diz. He continues to excel, leading the Cardinals to more championships in the late 1930s. The team's general manager was Branch Rickey. With more victories to his credit (and presumably more pay), his ties to St. Louis are strengthened. When the Dodgers come around in the mid 40s looking for a GM, Rickey decides to stay where he is.

Rickey still wants to integrate baseball, but as far as race relations are concerned, St. Louis is as "Deep South" as Atlanta or Birmingham. He hesitates..... and in 1948, the New York Giants bring up Monte Irvin to break the "color barrier"....

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on October 01, 2018, 07:21:10 PM
The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War
Joanne B. Freeman

You think things are ugly now? Back in the 1840s and 1850s, there were over 60 incidents of violence in the halls of Congress. From knives being pulled to outright brawls to one actual, honest to goodness duel (fought in a field in Virginia, but the whole lead up to the duel took place in the House of Representatives).

Freeman takes great advantage of the diary of Benjamin Brown French, a lawyer and newspaperman from New Hampshire who managed to land a job as a clerk in the House of Representatives in the 1830s, and stayed in government service all the way to the presidency of Andrew Johnson. That pretty much gave him a front row seat for all the action.

Freeman notes that many of the clashes in the House were pretty much the result a clash of cultures. The South had its "code of honor" that was totally alien to the North, so when a Southern representative challenged a Northerner, the latter really had no idea how to respond in a way that let tensions get diffused. And the telegraph, along with tremendous innovations in newspaper publishing, meant that people could read about things that happened in the Capitol within hours - in a highly partisan press, naturally. Your constituents expected you to fight on their behalf - sometimes literally - and they'd know about it if you didn't....

Yes, Senator Preston Brooks' attack on Senator Charles Sumner gets mentioned. To give you an idea of the culture in Congress, Brooks was roundly criticized for two things. Not the attack itself, but for not announcing his intention to attack, and for attacking an unarmed man......
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on October 16, 2018, 09:42:10 PM
How To Invent Everything by Ryan "Dinosaur Comics" North

Billed as a guide to kickstart a technological civilization when you're stuck in the past, it's actually a rather fun look at technology. North points out some of the stupid things mankind took its sweet old time developing. When you've got fire and fabric with a tight enough weave (which we had in the Neolithic Era), what's stopping you from making a hot air balloon?

Key things you'll need to know how to do are make soap (Sanitation, people! Kill germs! (by the way, Germ Theory is another significant tech advantage)), charcoal, and a kiln. The latter two let you create fires hot enough to smelt metal.

I think he spends a bit more time than necessary on Music; I'd have included a bit on Algebra instead. "Numbers that Don't Suck" are one of his key inventions, but I think you'll also need a simple set of mathematical symbols (+, -, =, x, etc.) so you can write actual equations and not have to do everything as a word problem. Try it - take something as basic as the Pythagorean Theorem (which you will now name after yourself) and use it in calculations where you have to write out "The value of the length of the hypotenuse, when multiplied by itself, equals the sum of the values of the lengths of the other two sides, when those two values have been multiplied by themselves."

It's a fun book, and even if time travel isn't invented, it should still be useful when civilization collapses.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on November 09, 2018, 03:08:30 AM
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It (https://amzn.to/2zA8h5q), by Chris Voss

You think your job is tough? Compared to the author of this book, your job is probably a cakewalk. For almost a decade, he was an international hostage negotiator for the FBI, dealing with life and death decisions made in a split second. After he left public service, he started a consulting firm and wrote this book.

The book is centered around what Mr. Voss calls The Five Big Ideas:

  • Negotiation begins with listening, making it about the other people, validating their emotions, and creating enough trust and safety for a real conversation to begin.

  • Use mirrors to encourage the other side to empathize and bond with you, keep people talking, buy your side time to regroup, and encourage your counterparts to reveal their strategy.

  • Tactical empathy brings our attention to both the emotional obstacles and the potential pathways to getting an agreement done.

  • Giving someone’s emotion a name, otherwise known as labeling, gets you close to someone without asking about external factors you know nothing about.

  • “No” provides a great opportunity for you and the other party to clarify what you really want by eliminating what you don’t want.


Whether you're trying to get a real estate deal done, or you're trying to make sure that your cousin comes back in one piece from a hijack attempt, this book has some fantastic strategies and skills to learn. Highly recommended.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on February 25, 2019, 07:36:42 PM
The Labyrinth Index - Charles Stross

This is probably going to be the last novel in his "Laundry Files" series - because after this, how do you raise the 'threat level' any higher?

A being that allows itself to be referred to as Nyarlathotep has become PM of Great Britain, and is behaving like you'd expect an intelligent Elder God would who believes that the continued existence of humanity is key to its own survival.

The US counterpart to The Laundry, the "Deeper State", for lack of a better term, is in league with / in thrall to a being who accepts the name 'Cthulhu'. They have cast some sort of invocation that has caused virtually all Americans to have forgotten that there is such a thing as a President. The President is being hustled around from secret location to safe house by the handful of Secret Service agents who were awake and on duty when that spell was cast.

Mhari, an actual vampire who needs to drink blood to satisfy the parasites that would otherwise eat her brain, has been given a mission by the PM, which she has no choice but to accept. Take a team of assorted other Laundry agents (including an autistic elven sorceress and policeman who has, thanks to the magic that's been unleashed by CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, become a superhero), infiltrate the US, rescue the President, and break the Deeper State's hold over the country. And, if it's not too much trouble, stop them from trying to wake Cthulhu....

It's a bit tough to keep track of what's going on; the IMF team (no, Stross doesn't call them that, but it does seem a lot like a Mission: Impossible assignment) is broken up into groups for tactical reasons, so the POV jumps around quite a bit. And for followers of the series, there are old characters to remember as well as new ones to get to know. Not much of the humor that characterized the earlier stories, either. But given what's at stake here, I suppose there's not much room for levity.

It's a lot of fast-paced action, and once again Stross seems to have his technical details down pat - at least as far as the needs of the story are concerned. Given how it builds on all the previous novels, you do NOT want this to be the first one of the series that you read. But if you have read them, you'll enjoy this one just as much.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on May 20, 2019, 08:02:43 PM
After the Miracle: The Lasting Brotherhood of the '69 Mets
by Art Shamsky and Erik Sherman

Fifty years ago, the New York Mets shocked everyone by blowing past the Cubs to win the NL East, the Braves to win the NL Pennant, and the Orioles to win the World Series. Shamsky was one of those Mets, and he realized that his remaining teammates weren't getting younger. What if he got as many of his old friends together as he could, and went off to visit Tom Seaver at his California home?

Most of the book is an oral history of the Mets' 1969 season. A few of the stories will be new to most fans.

The real bittersweetness of the book is that these fine men aren't getting any younger, and this just might be their last chance to get together. Shamsky, Ron Swoboda, and Jerry Koosman are still as sharp as ever, but Seaver's Lyme Disease is affecting his memory and confining him to his home and vineyard, and Bud Harrleson is in the early stages of Alzheimers'. Following them as they use old nicknames and retell old stories is heartwarming.

This is a "Boys of Summer" for the current generation of fans.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on June 02, 2019, 02:31:30 PM
Reading "Great science Fiction By Scietists" a collection of short stories by writers who were also celebrated scientists. Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were included.
Although the stories were all published prior to 1962(and some as early as 1927), some of them have stood the test of time in forewarning about the consequences of science run amok.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Bramlet on June 03, 2019, 05:31:54 PM
Book written by Leszek Kolakowsky. Sadly only in german:

"Mini Traktate über Maxi Themen."

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on June 03, 2019, 09:37:02 PM
Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier's First Gunfighter by Tom Clavin

A biography of James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok, which cuts through a great deal of the legends to give a decent and vivid story.

Some fun facts: He once umpired a baseball game, was interviewed by Henry "Dr. Livingstone, I Presume" Stanley, married a circus impresario, and, on some expeditions against the natives, worked with Arthur MacArthur, an Army officer whose son Douglas you might have heard of.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: solvegas on June 03, 2019, 09:58:23 PM
Arthur MacArthur, father of Douglas MacArthur was awarded the Medal of Honor during the Civil War ( 1861 - 1865 ) and Douglas was awarded a Medal of Honor for the audacious escape from Corregidor island in the Philippines and nominated by President Franklyn Roosevelt in WW2 ( 1941 - 1945 when the USA was involved ). Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall did not agree BUT Roosevelt didn't care and awarded it anyways.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on June 03, 2019, 10:17:33 PM
I'm about to start Way of the Wolf by Jordan Belfort.


Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on July 15, 2019, 07:14:50 PM
ˇCuba Libre!: Che, Fidel, and the Improbable Revolution That Changed World History
by Tony Perrottet

Perrottet has spent years researching this, digging in archives that even the Cubans hadn't touched. So he's got all sorts of details about the rebels and the rebellion, including things like what Errol Flynn was doing there.... Yes, they did let women into the ranks, and not just to cook and do laundry. And they won over the support of the locals in the Sierra Maestra by paying cash for their supples.

From the promotional copy:

But less is remembered about the amateur nature of the movement, or the lives of its players. In this wildly entertaining and meticulously researched account, Tony Perrottet unravels the human drama behind history's most improbable revolution: a scruffy handful of self-taught subversives—many of them kids just out of college, literature majors, and art students, and including a number of extraordinary women—defeated 40,000 professional soldiers. ˇCuba Libre!'s deep dive into the revolution reveals fascinating details: How did Fidel's highly organized lover Celia Sánchez whip the male guerrillas into shape? Who were the two dozen American volunteers who joined the Cuban rebels? How do you make land mines from condensed milk cans—or, for that matter, cook chorizo ŕ la guerrilla (sausage guerrilla-style)?

Here's Ed Sullivan who flew into Havana to interview Castro for his (Ed's) show in January, 1959 - when the US hadn't lost its infatuation with him:
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on October 06, 2019, 12:14:23 PM
This book has caught my eye: Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds (https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Hurt-Me-Master-Your-ebook/dp/B07H453KGH/).

Here is the author bio.

"David Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL and is the only member of the U.S. Armed Forces to complete SEAL training (including two Hell Weeks), the U.S. Army Ranger School (where he graduated as Enlisted Honor Man) and Air Force Tactical Air Controller training.

An accomplished endurance athlete, Goggins has completed over 60 ultra-marathons, triathlons, and ultra-triathlons, setting new course records and regularly placing in the top five. He once held the Guinness World Record for pull-ups completing 4,030 in 17 hours, and he’s a sought after public speaker.

Over the years, he’s shared his story with hundreds of thousands of students across the country, numerous professional sports teams, and the staff at Fortune 500 companies."


Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on October 07, 2019, 08:26:45 PM
This one is next for me:
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on October 08, 2019, 12:56:09 AM
If Hollywood ever does a movie based on this book, Tommy Lee Jones should play Andrew Johnson.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on November 12, 2019, 09:47:21 PM
Betrayal in Berlin by Steve Vogel

Yeah, I'd known about Operation Gold, the secret British-American tunnel under the border between West and East Berlin in order to tap into East German (and therefore Soviet) phone lines. And the massive amount of valuable intel they picked up.... And how the project was compromised even before they started digging, because the Soviets had a mole in British Intelligence.... And how they decided to leave the tunnel alone, because he was too valuable an asset....

But Vogel has fleshed all of that out - by interviewing people involved, from the daughter of the farmer whose orchard was over the tunnel, to George "Diamond" Blake himself, the Soviet agent who the KGB felt was more valuable than anything the West could get from listening in on their phone calls.

It's a great read, and the story of the tunnel is just the middle of the work. The rest is a biography of Blake, which goes a long way to explain why someone might consider Communism a viable alternative to Western Capitalism. And it covers his life after the tunnel was uncovered (in more ways than one), including his exposure, arrest, trial, imprisonment, escape, and flight to Russia....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on June 05, 2020, 05:41:08 PM
Creature Features by John Stanley.  I had bought this book back in 1981, and it's never left my bookshelf since.  I just bought the 2000 version, (the newest I could find), and it's just as good as it's predecessor.

John Stanley hosted "Creature Features" in San Francisco for 6 years, and has been writing on Horror, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy for the San Francisco Chronicle for at least 30 years.  Creature Features is reviews of over 6000 different movies in these genres, giving ratings, synopsis', and pertinent info about each one.  What makes it better than just a great reference guide is his sense of humor in writing the synopsis', and the ones for the worst movies are the funniest.

If you'd like to check out his work, he has a site: http://stanleybooks.net/catchall.htm
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Bramlet on June 06, 2020, 04:43:58 AM
I am starting reading "The Case For Trump" – Victor Davis Hanson
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on November 05, 2020, 10:45:38 PM
Got to be a pretty small book! (grin)

Anyway:

The Kingdom of Nauvoo by Benjamin E. Park

Kicked out of state after state, Joseph Smith and his followers bought land in Illinois on the shore of the Mississippi River. There, they built a community and began to live their lives according to Smith's teachings. As they grew in number, and rumors of what was going on there spread, they started making enemies. Missouri, for one, wanted Illinois to hand over Smith because they had some outstanding warrants for his arrest.

The big question that they were asking was if a state will not protect the religious liberty of its residents, would the federal government come to their aid?

Religious freedom was a big issue in the 1840s. The Mormons weren't the only sect trying to set up an independent community where they could be free from persecution.

Lake, however, doesn't get into that issue much. But this is still a worthwhile read, since he's taken advantage of the recent opening of the LDS archives to write an incredibly detailed history of Nauvoo. It's a good look at a forgotten part of American history.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on November 05, 2020, 11:16:46 PM
Now: Traction: Get A Grip On Your Business by Gino Wickman

Synopsis:

Traction is a book that presents
 a system for organizational health and growth. It is
 a true system: do this, and then this, and then this, in this order, consistently, and this good stuff will likely happen. This system is called the EOS System® (the Entrepreneurial Operating System).

This book is the first part of a comprehensive system complete with forms, coaches, long-term connections to help a company move forward effectively. The top three points of the book:

1. We need to be reminded of the basics of being a business.  This books reminds us of these basics.

2. Each business needs a usable system: to plan for the future, to get all things done, and to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.  This book provides such a system.

3. We all need to know what to do at work – individually, and as part of the larger team.  This book is a very good “this is what needs to get done; this is what you need to do” book.


People have been on my case for not reading this so I finally succumbed. I'm glad I did.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Hiram on November 06, 2020, 02:49:14 AM
Derren Brown's television and stage performances have entranced and dumbfounded millions. His baffling illusions and stunning set pieces - such as The Seance , Russian Roulette and The Heist - have set new standards of what's possible, as well as causing more than their fair share of controversy. Now, for the first time, he reveals the secrets behind his craft, what makes him tick and just why he grew that beard. Tricks of the Mind takes you on a journey into the structure and pyschology of magic. Derren teaches you how to read clues in people's behaviour and spot liars. He discusses the whys and wherefores of hypsis and shows how to do it. And he investigates the power of suggestion and how you can massively improve your memory. He also takes a long hard look at the pararmal industry and why some of us feel the need to believe in it in the first place. Alternately hilarious, controversial and challenging, Tricks of the Mind is essential reading for Derren's legions of fans, and pretty bloody irresistible even if you don't like him that much...
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on November 08, 2020, 08:03:39 PM
I just finished "Paying The Piper" from David Drake's "Hammer's Slammers" series.Great military sci fi.Now I'm about halfway through "The Forlorn Hope",which he also wrote.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on December 24, 2020, 08:14:40 PM
Derren Brown's television and stage performances have entranced and dumbfounded millions. His baffling illusions and stunning set pieces - such as The Seance , Russian Roulette and The Heist - have set new standards of what's possible, as well as causing more than their fair share of controversy. Now, for the first time, he reveals the secrets behind his craft, what makes him tick and just why he grew that beard. Tricks of the Mind takes you on a journey into the structure and pyschology of magic. Derren teaches you how to read clues in people's behaviour and spot liars. He discusses the whys and wherefores of hypsis and shows how to do it. And he investigates the power of suggestion and how you can massively improve your memory. He also takes a long hard look at the pararmal industry and why some of us feel the need to believe in it in the first place. Alternately hilarious, controversial and challenging, Tricks of the Mind is essential reading for Derren's legions of fans, and pretty bloody irresistible even if you don't like him that much...

Will add that to the list.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on December 24, 2020, 08:14:56 PM
I just finished "Paying The Piper" from David Drake's "Hammer's Slammers" series.Great military sci fi.Now I'm about halfway through "The Forlorn Hope",which he also wrote.

Military sci-fi?
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on December 25, 2020, 02:48:43 PM
It's not really a book, per se, but I've been reading this huge fanfic by Diane Castle called "The Secret Return Of Alex Mac".  It crosses over a lot of different shows, movies, and books.  It's huge, clocking in at over 1.1 million words, but so far it's been riveting my attention.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on December 25, 2020, 04:17:54 PM
That sounds fascinating! Remember that Fifty Shades of Grey began as an adult fanfic of the Twilight series of novels :)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on December 25, 2020, 05:25:03 PM
That sounds fascinating! Remember that Fifty Shades of Grey began as an adult fanfic of the Twilight series of novels :)

It is fascinating, but I'm thinking I bit off a huge project.   :o
Turns out, this story is a sequel to another she did, and it's so popular that it's turned out to be the beginning of a shared universe series of works that is being written in by at least 10 other authors, plus herself.  Probably over 20 million words have been written in it, by some pretty talented authors.   :o :o :o
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on December 25, 2020, 07:09:55 PM
I wish I could stop being so lazy and do NaNoWriMo
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on December 26, 2020, 02:02:38 AM
I wish I could stop being so lazy and do NaNoWriMo

I didn't know you were a writer, Zookie!  Did I miss a post where you mentioned it before somewhere? 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on December 26, 2020, 02:20:50 AM
A wannabe writer, I suppose. I always wanna start but just never seem to get around to it. Life being what it is and all.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on December 26, 2020, 10:08:49 PM
Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry by Mel Watkins

A biography of one of the bigger stars of the 1930s. Watkins doesn't focus on the racism, but rather on Perry's life itself. How he worked the "Chitlin Circuit" during the 20s, and reported regularly on his travels and work to the Chicago Defender, one of the nation's top Black newspapers. How he was a "bad boy" who couldn't be bothered to show up on time for his movie work, and was constantly getting pulled over for DUI. How he was stuck in the same acting style, which severely limited the roles he was offered......

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on December 26, 2020, 11:17:08 PM
"The Forlorn Hope" and "Paying the Piper" by David Drake.Either one would be great to make into a movie.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: salem on January 14, 2021, 09:16:16 PM
Northern Lights by Philip Pullman.

I've not seen the movie 'The Golden Compass' or the 'His Dark Materials' tv series yet, but I think I will now.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on June 22, 2021, 08:18:37 PM
Strange Bedfellows: Adventures in the Science, History, and Surprising Secrets of STDs by Ina Park MD, MS.

The subtitle suggests that this book is going to get into the biology of STDs - the life of the microbes, the problems they create, etc. It doesn't. Without being either puritanical or lewd, Dr. Park (her first name rhymes with 'vagina' - her formulation, not mine), basically recounts tales from her time in the trenches as a specialist in the identification and treatment of STDs, and some of the latest work in their treatment and prevention. There's stuff on the development and practice of contact tracing, the "microbiome" of the vagina, the time Dr. Park dressed up in a giant condom....

It's done with a light and humorous touch, because, as Dr. Park firmly believes, we shouldn't be afraid of sex - or the (treatable) complications.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on July 18, 2021, 01:07:34 AM
Strange Bedfellows: Adventures in the Science, History, and Surprising Secrets of STDs by Ina Park MD, MS.

The subtitle suggests that this book is going to get into the biology of STDs - the life of the microbes, the problems they create, etc. It doesn't. Without being either puritanical or lewd, Dr. Park (her first name rhymes with 'vagina' - her formulation, not mine), basically recounts tales from her time in the trenches as a specialist in the identification and treatment of STDs, and some of the latest work in their treatment and prevention. There's stuff on the development and practice of contact tracing, the "microbiome" of the vagina, the time Dr. Park dressed up in a giant condom....

It's done with a light and humorous touch, because, as Dr. Park firmly believes, we shouldn't be afraid of sex - or the (treatable) complications.


That sounds like a very interesting book. We all could do with some proper sex education, always good to learn!
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on July 19, 2021, 06:45:32 PM
Bolivar: American Liberator by Marie Arana

The greatest world leader you've never heard of; Arana turns Simon Bolivar's life story into the epic that he deserves - without being either hagiographic or dismissive of his achievements. Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia all count him as their founder.

There really needs to be a movie about him.




Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on July 26, 2021, 08:48:22 PM
Bolivar: American Liberator by Marie Arana

The greatest world leader you've never heard of; Arana turns Simon Bolivar's life story into the epic that he deserves - without being either hagiographic or dismissive of his achievements. Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia all count him as their founder.


Panama too. And even Cuba owes a debt of gratitude to him.

Another little-remembered fact: After the founding of the Second Republic of Venezuela in 1813, he led forces into Bogotá, Colombia to liberate the city in 1814. His intent was to march into Cartagena, gather more forces and free Santa Marta from Spanish rule, but was unsuccessful. A year later he retreated to Jamaica, survived a number of assassination attempts, and then later retreated to Haiti. He sought for and received vital material support from the president of the recently-independent southern republic of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion. Pétion had one condition: that Bolívar pledge to end chattel slavery in every country in South America where Spain held sway.

On June 2, 1816, with Haitian soldiers, Bolívar landed in Venezuela and fulfilled his pledge, pretty much single-handedly abolishing chattel slavery in nearly the entire continent of South America, a good fifty years before Lincoln signed the "Emancipation Proclamation".

"On 17 December 1830, at the age of 47, Simón Bolívar died of tuberculosis in the Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino in Santa Marta, Gran Colombia (now Colombia). On his deathbed, Bolívar asked his aide-de-camp, General Daniel F. O'Leary, to burn the remaining extensive archive of his writings, letters, and speeches. O'Leary disobeyed the order and his writings survived, providing historians with a wealth of information about Bolívar's liberal philosophy and thought, as well as details of his personal life, such as his long love affair with Manuela Sáenz. Shortly before her own death in 1856, Sáenz augmented this collection by giving O'Leary her own letters from Bolívar."


His story is truly inspiring and amazing. He definitely deserves the big-screen treatment, although I think a mini-series would more do him justice.


Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on August 02, 2021, 06:57:41 PM
The Madman's Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History
by Edward Brooke-Hitching

There used to be these things called a "cabinet of curiosities". From the late Renaissance to the late Victorian era, collectors would put all their "treasures" into one cupboard or room, without regard to any systematic organization.

This wonderfully illustrated book is a "cabinet of curiosities" for all the weird books that have been made over the millennia.

Works that aren't "books" in the way we consider them. Books that aren't really books. Books made of things other than paper. Books bound in human skin, or written in blood. Books of the occult. Books supposedly written by spirits. Books written in code. Alchemical texts, books of imaginary creatures, and pseudoscience tracts. Literary hoaxes. Novelty books. Books so small you need a magnifying glass and a needle to read them. Books bigger than their reader.....

A collage of sample photos, made by someone else:

Upper left: The "Codex Gigas" (or Devil's Bible), the largest existing medieval manuscript. The 74kg tome is said to have been written in one night by a monk charged with diabolic power.

Upper right: An Italian 'prayer book pistol', which was custom-made for Francesco Morosini, the Duke of Venice (1619-94). The gun can only fire when the book is closed via a trigger-pin concealed in silk thread that's designed to look like a bookmark.

Lower left: A human skull covered in prayers for the deceased, collected by Robert Baden-Powell during an expedition to Ghana in 1895.

Lower right: A portable oak commode disguised as a book with the title "A History of the Low Countries" (Histoire des Pays Bas). It was made in France in 1750.

Center: 'A passage of Martian writing channelled through the hand of the French psychic Helene Smith' as found in the 1899 book "From India to the Planet Mars" by University of Geneva psychologist Theodo Flournoy.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on October 07, 2021, 08:55:30 PM
So this year's Nobel Prize in Literature has been given out to some author you've never heard of. Seems that this is the case, more often than not. That's fair, there are lots of great authors in the world. They don't all have to be American or even write in English.

But I was wondering - outside of an educational situation, have any of you actively sought out works by a Nobel Laureate to read on your own?

An essay by SF author Robert Silverberg tipped me off to the works of Jose Saramago (1998 Nobel). Saramago's novel Blindness can't be anything BUT science fiction. I got it from my local library, read it, and loved it. Then I read Death with Interruptions, which is a delightful fantasy in the "Death takes a vacation" mode. One of those little "book sharing" boxes in my neighborhood yielded a copy of The Cave, which, while not explicitly SF or fantasy, is partly set in what can best be described as an arcology.

I wonder what else I might be missing......
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on January 10, 2022, 08:40:07 PM
Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive
by Philipp Dettmer

A comprehensive and simple - without being simplistic or over-simplifying the subject - book on the workings of the human immune system, by the founder of the "Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell" YouTube channel.

There's a section on how the body deals with bacterial infections, and one on how it fights viruses. There are chapters on HIV (when the immune system itself is targeted by the disease), allergies (when the immune system overreacts), autoimmune disorders (when the immune system forgets it's not supposed to attack you), and cancer (when you WANT the immune system to attack you), and (of course) COVID.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on October 10, 2022, 06:46:02 PM
The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation
Scott Carney and Jason Miklian

In November, 1970, a cyclone slammed into East Pakistan. It was the deadliest storm in history, leaving some half a million dead in its wake. Fifteen months later, after a brutal and genocidal war, the nation of Bangladesh was born. As Carney and Miklian show, the events were not unconnected.

Not only did the Partition of India split the subcontinent into Hindu (India) and Muslim (Pakistan) sections, but Pakistan was geographically separated into West (Punjabi) and East (Bengali) parts. Being larger and more prosperous, it was easy for West Pakistan to oppress the Bengali in the east. The disruption after the storm passed presented President Yahya Khan with the perfect opportunity to deal with those nasty Bengali once and for all, especially with an election coming up….

Through a mass of documentation and interviews with people who were there, Carney and Miklian have recreated the setting and placed you right in the action.

We are clinging to a palm tree with Mohammad Hai, the son of a farmer, as the eye of the hurricane passes directly over his home. There’s Bengali football star Hafiz Uddin Ahmad, deciding to join the army as a way to get more respect. American expats Candy and Jon Rohde, using their local contacts to organize a relief effort....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on October 16, 2022, 12:54:45 AM
The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results
by Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan

From Gary Keller, author of The Millionaire Real Estate Agent: It's Not About the Money...It's About Being the Best You Can Be! and Jay Papasan, this book has made more than 575 appearances on national bestseller lists; been #1 Wall Street Journal (http://Wall Street Journal) bestseller, New York Times bestseller, and USA Today bestseller; been translated into 40 languages; won 12 book awards; and voted Top 100 Business Book of All Time on Goodreads.

The TL;DR: learn how to focus on the one thing that makes you money, and never falter. Because as the old saying goes, "if you chase three rabbits at once, you will catch none of them."


Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on November 09, 2022, 07:18:22 PM
River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile
Candace Millard

Publisher's blurb:
Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for England. Burton spoke twenty-nine languages, and was a decorated soldier. He was also mercurial, subtle, and an iconoclastic atheist. Speke was a young aristocrat and Army officer determined to make his mark, passionate about hunting, Burton’s opposite in temperament and beliefs.

From the start the two men clashed. They would endure tremendous hardships, illness, and constant setbacks. Two years in, deep in the African interior, Burton became too sick to press on, but Speke did, and claimed he found the source in a great lake that he christened Lake Victoria. When they returned to England, Speke rushed to take credit, disparaging Burton. Burton disputed his claim, and Speke launched another expedition to Africa to prove it. The two became venomous enemies, with the public siding with the more charismatic Burton, to Speke’s great envy.


Millard (and the reviewers) try to make it a bit of an indictment of Colonialism, but I didn't buy it. It's a great adventure story, that notes that being the first to see something (sure, local Africans knew about the lake and the river that came from it; no one argues that point) isn't enough to get credited with its "discovery" - you have to properly identify what it is, and formally announce that to the world.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on January 03, 2023, 08:59:22 PM
The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us
by Steve Brusatte

Dinosaurs get ALL the love. Sure, they were big and mean and weird and fascinating and they died out dramatically.

But what of mammals? We are mammals; so why shouldn't the story of that line of creatures get some appreciation?

Brusatte does a darn good job!

From the change in skull structure that started Mammals on their way, to the development of teeth that could do more than just cut or chomp (seriously, he makes that fascinating!), to growing huge once the dinosaurs were gone from the scene, to going back into the water to become whales et al. (there's a great chain of fossil evidence to show how it happened), to the weirdness of mammals in South America....

The topic really needs to be told in more detail (mammals have been around for much more time than those overrated dinosaurs), but for now, Brusatte's overview is a great read.


Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on October 11, 2023, 06:51:26 PM
Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments
Joe Posnanski

It's not really a collection of essays on why baseball is great, or even a history of the game. It is Posnanski using his skills as a master teller of tales to share some great, amazing, heartwarming, and outright hilarious moments from all levels of the game.

A retired star pitcher teaches a Little Leaguer how to throw the knuckleball, and she uses it to throw a perfect game. An actual potato appears on the field of play in a minor league game. A team in the College World Series perfectly pulls of a trick play.

He even includes a few movie moments - because, seriously, what other sport has as many great and varied movies as baseball?

There are actually 108 of these moments (if you include the Introduction and Epilogue - same number as the stitches on a regulation baseball - and are all short enough for quick reading.

Here's what another reader had to say about it:

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on November 13, 2023, 07:13:26 PM
Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different
by Philip Ball

Ball brings us up to date on the latest thinking and experiments in quantum physics, putting to rest (he hopes) some of the stupid analogies that have become all too common, explaining - in not too much detail; you'll just have to trust him - that when you look at the mathematics, almost all of the befuddlement goes away.

It comes down to more of a philosophical question: What can we know about the universe, and how do we know it? if there are limits to our knowledge, what does that mean for how we perceive reality?

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: Zealot on November 16, 2023, 12:50:33 AM
Just finished "The Military Dimension",an anthology of short stories by David Drake.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: jmikeh on November 16, 2023, 02:08:17 PM
Killers of the Flower Moon. Very good read. Not seen the movie yet
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: solvegas on November 16, 2023, 10:05:14 PM
Killers of the Flower Moon. Very good read. Not seen the movie yet

Saw the movie and it is good. It is 3 1/2 hours long, and it didn't have an intermission. Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio should both be able to get Oscars. Because of its length, you should go to the toilet beforehand since you don't want to go during the movie and miss any of the story. 
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on November 25, 2023, 09:33:19 PM
Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

A history of portable - if not "pocket" - calculators, from the abacus and tally boards to the personal computer.

Among those profiled are:

The Curta, a masterpiece of mechanical engineering.
The Casio 14-A, the first all-electronic calculator.
The Olivetti Programma 101, a transistorized programmable desktop model.
The Busicom 141-PF, which relied on the Intel 4004 - the first integrated circuit CPU.

For a lot of them, the business and design history behind them is the real story.

The Sumlock Anita MK VII, with its "nixie" tube display (and using vacuum tubes for the computations):
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: solvegas on November 25, 2023, 09:59:04 PM
My first electronic calculator I bought was the Texas Instruments TI-30 back in 1977. Before that I had a Slide Rule aka slip stick.  :)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on November 27, 2023, 04:09:32 PM
I've still got a Texas Instruments TI-36 Solar that I got when I went to technical college in 1989.  It still works fine.   :)
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on December 11, 2023, 09:33:00 PM
The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage by Tom Ireland

A "phage" is a virus that attacks bacteria. They're everywhere, and arguably what keeps people who swim in the polluted waters of the Ganges from contracting all sorts of bacterial diseases. Ireland tracks the history of their discovery and early medical use (by a rather eccentric self-taught biologist who kept lying on his resume and pissing off the medical "establishment", and then the no-good Godless Communists in the Soviet Union who wouldn't use good ol' American antibiotics), and just before he gets to the point where you think he's another nutjob pushing an "alternative" medical treatment, he deftly points out some of the problems (and not just bureaucratic) with their use, and checks in with current researchers studying the weird little things.

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on January 02, 2024, 06:50:22 PM
1932: FDR, Hoover, and the Dawn of a New America by Scott Martelle

Not just a look at the presidential campaigns (including the machinations behind the nominations), but the other things going on in the US at the start of the Great Depression. You'll meet Walter W. Waters, the leader and organizer of the "Bonus Expeditionary Force" (Martelle gives a great and wonderfully detailed account of that whole march). Pauline Sabin, of the Women's Organization for the National Repeal of Prohibition. Milo Reno, president of the National Farmers Holiday Association, who organized "farm strikes" that saw farmers withholding their goods from market in protest of ruinously low prices. And in a bit of a sidebar story that encapsulates two other prominent threads in American society in 1932, there's Angelo Herndon, a union organizer in the South who found a welcome in the Communist Party (they didn't care about the color of his skin), who found himself facing the death penalty in Georgia on the charge of calling for insurrection and revolution....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on January 06, 2024, 10:36:45 PM
My First Printing Backer's Copy arrived yesterday!

Desmond Devlin started writing for MAD in the early 1980s at the age of 19, and eventually became one of the magazine’s most frequent spoof writers.... Tom Richmond...drew a substantial chunk of MAD parodies after 2001’s TV spoof "Malcontent in the Muddle...."

The two decided in the wake of MAD’s not-quite-cancellation that they wanted to keep the tradition alive. Now they are. It won’t be under the MAD banner, but in November the two are releasing Claptrap, a crowdfunded collection of 12 MAD-style movie parodies.

A big part of why MAD struggled to stay relevant, and eventually limited the amount of new material it put out, was that it couldn’t keep up with the rest of the comedy world.

“In the age of the internet with instantaneous commentary on events that happened five minutes ago,” Richmond explains, “having the time it takes to produce a magazine, you couldn’t be timely enough anymore.”

“It’s just a shame,” he continues, “that people prefer memes that somebody puts together in three minutes as opposed to a Jack Davis two-page spread that he spent four days doing.”


https://www.tcj.com/keeping-mad-alive-a-look-at-claptrap/

I haven't finished it yet, but I would like to note that the Table of Contents is done up like a menu from a hoity-toity restaurant, and even the Index has jokes in it!

Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on January 15, 2024, 09:54:53 PM
A City on Mars
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

If someone commits a crime at a lunar base, whose laws apply?

That's one of the questions considered here. Almost everyone who dreams about settling the Moon or Mars talks about the engineering challenges. They forget that there are a LOT of other issues that WILL come up. We know nothing about prenatal development in low gravity, for example. It's going to take at least a year to get to Mars - accidents are going to happen on the way. How do you do surgery in zero-G? What's the difference between res nullius and res communis, and what do those Latin terms have to do with outer space? Oh, and any privately run / corporate-owned outpost will have to be run along the lines of a company town - for good or ill....

The good news is that there ARE legal precedents that can be applied and adapted to the situation (international law is going to be just as important a field for settling the Moon and Mars as biochemistry - so hit the law books!). But we still need a HECK of a LOT of long-term scientific study before we should even begin to think about setting up permanent outposts around the Solar System.

The Weinersmiths favor what they call the "Wait and Go Big" approach. Get all the problems solved *first* - THEN move tens of thousands of people to the off-world colonies....
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on February 21, 2024, 12:39:45 AM
Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

A history of portable - if not "pocket" - calculators, from the abacus and tally boards to the personal computer.

Among those profiled are:

The Curta, a masterpiece of mechanical engineering.
The Casio 14-A, the first all-electronic calculator.
The Olivetti Programma 101, a transistorized programmable desktop model.
The Busicom 141-PF, which relied on the Intel 4004 - the first integrated circuit CPU.

For a lot of them, the business and design history behind them is the real story.

The Sumlock Anita MK VII, with its "nixie" tube display (and using vacuum tubes for the computations):

Sounds like a good read. I love "history of technology"-style books.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: TheZookie007 on February 21, 2024, 01:06:36 AM
Factfulness: Ten Reasons Why We’re Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think
by Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund

I picked up this book the other day and it's a thought-provoking work.

"None of us has enough mental capacity to consume all the information out there. The question is, what part are we processing and how did it get selected? And what part are we ignoring? The kind of information we seem most likely to process is stories: information that sounds dramatic.

Imagine that we have a shield, or attention filter, between the world and our brain. This attention filter protects us against the noise of the world: without it, we would constantly be bombarded with so much information we would be overloaded and pa ra lyz ed. Then imagine that the attention filter has ten instinct-shaped holes in it -- gap, negativity, straight line, and so on. Most information doesn't get through, but the holes do allow through information that appeals to our dramatic instincts. So we end up paying attention to information that fits our dramatic instincts, and ignoring information that does not.

The media can't waste time on stories that won't pass our attention filters.

...And the unusual stories we are constantly shown by the media paint pictures in our heads. If we are not extremely careful, we come to believe that the unusual is usual: that this is what the world looks like."
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: solvegas on February 21, 2024, 07:18:13 AM
A book I've read, and which remains to this day the most influential book in Naval history and it's considered the US Navy's de facto Bible to this day, written in 1890 and strongly influenced the German Navy whose enormous expansion scared the British and started a Naval race in Europe which was one of the reasons that led to World War 1 (1914-1918) and also influenced the Japanese which led them to whip the Russians in 1905 in the Far East and now has influenced the Chinese to compete against the USA, it is not a warmongering book but it tells nations that the most important asset to maintain their power and deter others from attacking them is due to a need for a more powerful Navy.  Essentially, he who controls the sea, controls commerce and he who controls commerce, controls the world.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: rtpoe on March 04, 2024, 09:06:20 PM
Ever come across a novel that, while you were reading it, had you thrilled by the action and entranced by the concepts being explored, but when you finished it, had you thinking, "Wait, that actually failed from a storytelling perspective!"?

That's what happened to me with Exordia by  Seth Parkinson.

An alien "thing" appears in a remote valley in Kurdistan. The US sends a team of specialists to investigate and figure out what it is and why and how it's making things around it - including people - get really weird. All while another alien is threatening to wipe out the human race. Sounds cool, doesn't it.

EXCEPT..... Before that even happens, we meet two characters. Anna is a Kurdish refugee with a Trauma in her past (who JUST HAPPENS to be from the Very Place where the alien Thing appeared), and "Ssrin" is an alien she meets and befriends. The whole first section is about them getting to know each other - so you'd think they'd be the focus of the novel. Nope. They are shanghaied by the gov't, who needs a Local Guide for their team of specialists.....and then Anna is shoved aside in the narrative, and the alien is pretty much ignored in the story.

And then at the end, the team takes control of the Thing, finds out it's a spaceship, and decides "Woo hoo! We've got a spaceship! Let's go exploring, and find those aliens that just wiped out human civilization, and, well, we'll figure it out when we get there."

Uh, people? Maybe you shouldn't act so excited? A little sadness and even anger would be appropriate here, considering the Bad Alien a) detonated a globe-spanning EMP that fried 99% of electronics, b) nuked dozens of major cities, and c) your response to that attack was to launch EVERY NUKE YOU COULD (around 4,000 - Parkinson keeps count) at that one valley in Kurdistan in the HOPE that you'd overwhelm the Bad Alien's defenses???

Sorry, but I can't buy a story where the characters end up acting as if nothing ever happened in the hundreds of pages before the final scene.
Title: Re: Read any good books lately?
Post by: MaxBigfoot on March 05, 2024, 03:13:55 PM
Thanks for the head's up!  That sounds very unsatisfying, and I will stay away from it.