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What are you reading?

The Passage by Justin Cronin

It starts off as a government experiment gone bad, which ends up turning people into things which I wouldn't necessarily call vampires, but more like vampire-esque ghouls that are more or less immortal. That is, they apparently don't die natural deaths. They can be killed through a puzzling soft spot in the chest, but the rest of them is armor plated (something like that).

It was a good read for the first 150 pages or so, but now it's bogged down into a post apocalyptic thing that's very slow paced and strangely inconsistent. Like, the vampire things can't be out in the daytime but manage to run down a few of the characters during the daytime. So the characters run into a mall where it's dark, which is where the vampires can get them.

I'm not quite ready to donate this one to the local landfill just yet, but it's getting there. I mean, apparently this is the first of a trilogy, and unless this one gets better fast, I'm not going to bother with the other two.
 
I found a gem at our (best) local, used book store.

'Pioneer Days in London' (Ontario) published by The London Historical society in 1921. I've been searching for Canadian social history for the last two years and this one offers some of the best reading on the subject I've found to date. It seems to focus on this area from about 1790 - 1850, when the town was in it's initial development phase.

Not only is it localized to the city I'm living in now, but I'm getting a semi-modern perspective from the era the book was published in, not a lot of political correctness, just a biased compilation of un-filtered facts known about the era.

Cost me about 60 dollars cdn which is quite high, but no way I'd be able to find it again if I didn't make the purchase.
 
Finally bought On the Historicity of Jesus and why we have reason to doubt by Richard Carrier.

Absolutely fascinating. There has been so much scholarship done on the New Testament it's hard to understand why anyone still believes the books are factual.
 
Science News. Discover magazine. James Thurber - Writings & Drawings, and a lovely picture book called Dancing with Jesus - Featuring a Host of Miraculous Moves.

And just a word to wise should you decide to try the Dancing with Jesus moves, never combine the 'Water Walk' with 'The Carpenter Clog'. Damn near blew my knee out.
 
For our teen+parent book club it's

The Wednesday Wars
by Gary D. Schmidt

In this Newbery Honor-winning novel, Gary D. Schmidt offers an unforgettable antihero. The Wednesday Wars is a wonderfully witty and compelling story about a teenage boy’s mishaps and adventures over the course of the 1967–68 school year in Long Island, New York.

Meet Holling Hoodhood, a seventh-grader at Camillo Junior High, who must spend Wednesday afternoons with his teacher, Mrs. Baker, while the rest of the class has religious instruction. Mrs. Baker doesn’t like Holling—he’s sure of it. Why else would she make him read the plays of William Shakespeare outside class? But everyone has bigger things to worry about, like Vietnam. His father wants Holling and his sister to be on their best behavior: the success of his business depends on it. But how can Holling stay out of trouble when he has so much to contend with? A bully demanding cream puffs; angry rats; and a baseball hero signing autographs the very same night Holling has to appear in a play in yellow tights! As fate sneaks up on him again and again, Holling finds Motivation—the Big M—in the most unexpected places and musters up the courage to embrace his destiny, in spite of himself.
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And for the Adult book club it's
Plainsong (Plainsong #1)
by Kent Haruf

A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.

In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known.

From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together—their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.

Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, Plainsong is a novel to care about, believe in, and learn from.
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And for me it's

The Bands of Mourning
Brandon Sanderson

Introduction
With The Alloy of Law and Shadows of Self, Brandon Sanderson surprised readers with a New York Times bestselling spinoff of his Mistborn books, set after the action of the trilogy, in a period corresponding to late 19th-century America.

Now, with The Bands of Mourning, Sanderson continues the story. The Bands of Mourning are the mythical metalminds owned by the Lord Ruler, said to grant anyone who wears them the powers that the Lord Ruler had at his command. Hardly anyone thinks they really exist. But now a kandra researcher has returned to Elendel with images that seem to depict the Bands, as well as writings in a language that no one can read. Waxillium Ladrian is recruited to travel south to the city of New Seran to investigate, and along the way he discovers hints that point to the true goals of his uncle Edwarn and the shadowy organization known as The Set.
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I usually have several going at once...
 
credoconsolans said:
Finally bought On the Historicity of Jesus and why we have reason to doubt by Richard Carrier.

Absolutely fascinating. There has been so much scholarship done on the New Testament it's hard to understand why anyone still believes the books are factual.
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Cool, I will look for that. I like Richard Carrier's stuff. I first encountered him when he used to post with us here - back when it was the "Internet Infidels" as part of the Secular Web.
 
Rhea said:
credoconsolans said:
Finally bought On the Historicity of Jesus and why we have reason to doubt by Richard Carrier.

Absolutely fascinating. There has been so much scholarship done on the New Testament it's hard to understand why anyone still believes the books are factual.
Click to expand...

Cool, I will look for that. I like Richard Carrier's stuff. I first encountered him when he used to post with us here - back when it was the "Internet Infidels" as part of the Secular Web.
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Didn't know that! Amazing. Well, the guy's certainly done his homework on this book. VERY convincing.
 
Colonel Sanders said:
The Passage by Justin Cronin

It starts off as a government experiment gone bad, which ends up turning people into things which I wouldn't necessarily call vampires, but more like vampire-esque ghouls that are more or less immortal. That is, they apparently don't die natural deaths. They can be killed through a puzzling soft spot in the chest, but the rest of them is armor plated (something like that).

It was a good read for the first 150 pages or so, but now it's bogged down into a post apocalyptic thing that's very slow paced and strangely inconsistent. Like, the vampire things can't be out in the daytime but manage to run down a few of the characters during the daytime. So the characters run into a mall where it's dark, which is where the vampires can get them.

I'm not quite ready to donate this one to the local landfill just yet, but it's getting there. I mean, apparently this is the first of a trilogy, and unless this one gets better fast, I'm not going to bother with the other two.
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the other books are much better, more character driven and complex.
 
DrZoidberg said:
bigfield said:
So it is a book by Bill French! :laughing-smiley-014

French has no qualifications in the social sciences. He simply doesn't know how to do the science, and therefore his claims about the integration of Muslims are utterly worthless.

This on par with referencing Bjorn Lomborg or Christopher Monckton on climate change. You can't claim to be a rational thinker while simultaneously demonstrating such a failure in critical thinking.

Don't demand other people read the Qu'ran when you have not read it yourself. Comments like "Anyone can as it's available in any library, or book store" are frankly bizarre, considering that I can visit the Sceptics Annotated Qu'ran online. I'm still not going to read it, just as I am not going to read any other holy book.

As always, your claims of 'shooting the messenger' are completely misguided. You aren't anyone's messenger; you are 100% responsible for the garbage that you post on this forum and people will continue to call you on it.
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The biggest problem with the Quran is that it's written in verse. Words were chosen for their rhythm and sound rather than legal precision. Vague metaphors are used heavily. If you want to read it in English I suggest getting one of those where each sura is has several translations side by side. The first two Quran translations I read might as well have been different books. And then the third was completely different again. Seeing them like this side by side really helped. In hindsight I should have read it like that to begin with. When Muslims say you have to read the Quran in the Arabic original to understand it, it's not because Arabic is a magical language, it's because of it's poetic style. You got to hear it spoken as it was written in the original to get it. Anybody who says "look what the Quran says. Interpreting any other way is wrong" I just laugh. Vaguest fucking book ever written. It's all over the place. Open to interpretation like a mother fucker. When people go "Islam only has fundamentalism. There is no liberal Islam"... also, have clearly no fucking clue.

Here's a resource with 114 English translations side-by-side. That may be overkill :)

http://www.islamawakened.com/index.php/qur-an

edit: Isn't this a bit of a derail from this thread?
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once i got stuck in a county jail for 16months were only religious reading materials were allowed. after the bible in english and spanish, lots of esoteric buddhist stuff, i got a bilingual koran and tried to use it to learn arabic, with some minor assistance from the nation of islam guys (who, btw, know jack shit about arabic). fucking nightmare.
 
Archer

Three episodes into this season and it seems to have gotten its groove back. It's been uneven for the last two.

8/10
 
Also started looking at 'The Letters of Adam Hope', 1834-1845.

Adam Hope was the son of a semi-wealthy Scottish tenant farmer, had a decent education while in Scotland, but had to find his own career so emigrated to North America and became a business man.

It was put out by the 'Champlain Society', which also put out The Eldon House Diaries that I mentioned above.
 
credoconsolans said:
Rhea said:
Cool, I will look for that. I like Richard Carrier's stuff. I first encountered him when he used to post with us here - back when it was the "Internet Infidels" as part of the Secular Web.
Click to expand...

Didn't know that! Amazing. Well, the guy's certainly done his homework on this book. VERY convincing.
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I've read only a little bit of his stuff, most of it from II/Sec Web, but in my recent binge-watching/listening of atheist material on YouTube, I came across several of his talks. He certainly makes some strong arguments for a mythical Jesus (as opposed to a historical one).
 
Read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad years ago and enjoyed it, so I thought I'd read it again but found I couldn't get absorbed by Conrad's writing style this time and gave up about a third of the way through.
 
Bought another older Canadian history on the weekend. It's a man writing his recollections of growing up in pioneer Canada, published in 1875.

Cost me another pretty penny but it's pure gold if you have a genuine interest in the period. On the other hand 50 dollars doesn't seem so bad when it'll keep me entertained for life and will only increase in value.
 
The Turner Diaries

This was the book that in large part inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma. Somehow I ran across its title in conjunction with some work I'm doing. Anyway, it's about an underground group who, after having their guns confiscated, forms and then begins guerrilla operations against the government (blowing up a federal building via ammonium nitrate explosives in a van), black people, and Jews.

It's quite violent and hateful and I quit about halfway through. What was interesting to me though, was that I could see how it would appeal to someone who is poorly read, racist, and angry. For all of its poorly written-ness, it does have an adventure-like quality to it that would appeal to low thinking bumpkins.

I wouldn't recommend giving it a read, but it is an interesting glimpse into the minds of the ignorant 2nd Amendment crowd, their fears, and their ideals. It's also informative in that had this book not become so infamous, and quickly shunned, it could provide even more inspiration for Trump-tards today.
 
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