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What are you reading?

spikepipsqueak said:
I ran across him by accident (recommendation from a parent I was talking to when I took the kids swimming)/ I got it from the library, and find it is part of a trilogy. The library has No 3 but not 2. :(
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I have lost count of the number of trilogies that I have found in Aussie libraries where tbey only have parts one and three.

I have never found a satisfactory explanation for this strange situation. Is it a quirk of library procurement policy? Is there a gang of book thieves who specialise in parts two? Do Australian readers just prefer to skip the middle of a long story?

It's a mystery. One day it might be solved, but I suspect only if we skip the middle part.
 
Quozl by Alan Dean Foster.

An entertaining Alien colonization of Earth novel....

Quote;
''I first read Quozl as a youth and it quickly became a favorite and often read book. So much so that it was destroyed through constant reading. I found a cherry hardcover copy in a used book store and blazed through the book in a day. Very entertaining and a fascinating commentary on the human condition through the eyes of alien colonists. ''
 
I've started a reread of Stranger in A Strange Land by Heinlein.

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A few I've started reading in the past few months:

Leadership and Self-Deception by The Arbinger Institute

A book on leadership with the simple premise that what delineates leaders from non-leaders is recognizing other people as having feelings and desires of their own, rather than treating them like objects.

Energy Leadership by Bruce Schneider

I haven't gotten too far into this one yet, but was recommended to it by a connection on Linkedin

The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux

Account of a trip in Africa by a world famous travel writer

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change by Elizabeth Eisenstein

Picked this one up at the library a few weeks ago. Title about says it all
 
The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul by Robert M. Price. Signature Books, Salt Lake City, 2012.
 
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The Golden Minute, by John Birmingham.

This is the sequel to his December 2016 book A Girl in Time, about a modern day game developer who, just as she strikes it rich with the latest viral smartphone app, gets accidentally dragged into helping a time traveling cowboy from 1876 find his lost daughter.

The first book was great fun and well researched, with visits to various historical periods, including a brief trip to a bizarre and terrifying alternate reality in which Hillary Clinton was defeated by Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election, an implausible (but arguably not impossible) event that leads to some scary consequences for our heroes.
 
A series of alternate World novels - Into the Storm by Taylor Anderson

''Pressed into service when World War II breaks out in the Pacific, the USS Walker---a Great-War vintage "four-stacker" destroyer---finds itself in full retreat from pursuit by Japanese battleships. Its captain, Lieutenant Commander Matthew Patrick Reddy, knows that he and his crew are in dire straits. In desperation, he heads Walker into a squall, hoping it will give them cover---and emerges somewhere else.

Familiar landmarks appear, but the water teems with monstrous, vicious fish. And there appear to be dinosaurs grazing on the plains of Bali. Gradually Matt and his crew must accept the fact that they are in an alternate world---and they are not alone. Humans have not evolved, but two other species have. And they are at war.''
 
I am embarking on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun again. The book is not only a ripping good story, but also serves as a quasi-travelogue. With Google, I followed the characters, on first read, through Rome and her environs (mid-C19 that is), and was able to really absorb myself in the whole experience. Hawthorne's descriptions are beautiful and inspiring. The characters have an other-worldly, transcendent nature. Hawthorne is decidedly not going for realism here.

I cannot recommend any novel more highly, except perhaps Portrait of a Lady and The Age of Innocence.
 
Models by Mark Manson.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12633800-models

Here's a book a number of different people have recommended me the last couple of years so I eventually gave in. It's a pick up artistry book. It's one of those books about how to attract women and get laid. What makes this one special is that it makes sense. The advice it gives is good solid advice. Every man should read this book. Every woman to. I'm too old and experienced for the information to help change anything. I learned all this myself the hard way. But I definitely agree with everything in it. It pedagogically explains stuff like what women mean when they like men who make themselves vulnerable. Something which I found extremely confusing when growing up.

It explains that it's easier to pick up women if you have a genuine emotional connection with her and explains how to work on yourself to help make it easier to get that. Great solid advice. I agree with all of this books advice.
 
I'm better at starting books than finishing them. At the moment, I'm in the middle of reading a bunch of things.

  • Some database textbook for a class
    I already turned in all the homework for an online course, but I still want to finish up the last couple of chapters. Plus, it gives me something to read while using the hamster wheel machines at the gym. Like many ebook textbooks, they just took the layout from the print version and didn't bother to reformat it for a new medium, so I sometimes find myself having to choose between pinching and zooming while on an elliptical machine, or else squinting as my aging eyes try to read all that teeny tiny text.
  • Stamped From the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi
    This is one of those books that is tough to read because every other sentence launches me into a stream of mental tangents and I get lost in thought and forget which sentence I was on and[ent]hellip[/ent] have you ever done that with a book? Anyway, it's a fascinating look at the history of racism, from the Muslim origins of the "curse of Ham" religious excuse for racism/slavery to the many times in American history that rich white people deliberately stoked the fires of racism in poor white people to distract them from how much they were getting screwed over.
  • The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon
    Oooh! It's finally available in ebook form! Yay! This is an old favorite fantasy book of mine. The worldbuilding is weak in that it seems to be based heavily on Tolkien and D&D, but it's fun for a variety of reasons.
    • First, it reads like you are listening in on someone else's pen & paper D&D game, provided the game is being played by good writers (unlike whatever you and your friends did around the kitchen table).
    • It offers incredible detail about military life for low-ranking grunts in a military unit in a pre-gunpowder civilization (e.g. where do you position the latrine pits during a siege?) such that I wonder how much she has studied military history. It almost reads like the fantasy equivalent of Tom Clancy novel.
    • In normal fantasy novels, the main character is a nobody on a farm when out of nowhere, some of the most important people in his/her world shows up and whisks him/her away on an adventure and suddenly the main character is interacting with the most important decision-makers and making decisions that change the course of the whole world. Here, we get a main character who slowly works her way up the ranks from a runaway sheepfarmer's daughter to a powerful paladin who advises kings. By the time she gets there, it feels earned.
  • Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism by Aron Ra
    This is pretty much the video series in book form, but it goes into more detail and includes revisions/corrections made along the way.
  • Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
    I've had the physical book forever and never quite got around to reading it, so I got the ebook and now it's still not being read because I have a bazillion books I still intend to read and am in the middle of reading. Argh.
  • Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, volume 3 by Ta-Nehisi Coates
    The Ta-Nehisi Coates run on Black Panther is one of my favorite comic book runs ever. He's obviously not from the comic book world and in some ways is still learning the medium, but he gives you so many juicy ideas and themes to chew on. Like Star Trek at its best, the ideas it inspires you to chew on take a front seat to things like plot or pacing.
  • The Invincible Ironman: Ironheart by Brian Michael Bendis
    I still don't understand what pissed people off about this character. She's certainly a relatable character for anyone who's ever been an intelligent teenager. Unfortunately, like the Black Panther comic books, I just have too many books that I'm juggling right now and this one keeps falling through the cracks.
  • A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss
    Wait. Did I finish reading this already? Is this my first or second time through? If I weren't simultaneously reading so many other books, I wouldn't be so [bad word] confused.
 
Blood and Fire by George RR Martin - 6/10

The other day, I wanted to get a game for a game for my kids and the toy store didn't have it, so I remembered that the book store had a toy section, so I popped in there to look for it (they didn't have it either). What they did have, however, was the latest George RR Martin novel. I'd been waiting for this for a while, so I picked it up. Not a paper copy from the bookstore, of course, because that would have been weird, but I downloaded the digital version from Amazon when I got back to the office.

Unfortunately, I then found out that it wasn't actually the latest novel in the Song of Ice and Fire series, but a prequel to that about the Targaryens conquest of the Seven Kingdoms. Then I found out that it wasn't actually a novel, but written as a history book and just describing all the things which had happened, so there weren't things like characters or storylines or anything like that. I was somewhat annoyed but didn't have anything else to read on the train ride home, so I kept with it for a bit. To my surprise, it was actually fairly interesting and engaging and I really got into it.

Not as good as an actual novel, but a good read for anyone who like the Game of Thrones universe.
 
Right now I'm going through a handful of histories and political books about South America. Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina. Not reading any of them through, mostly just browsing via the index.

Also picked up and am reading The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris, in addition to nearing the end of The Last Train to Zona Verde, now that I've gotten through some other books I was more interested in. Oh yea, and also Principle Centered Leadership by Stephen Covey, which seems to be utterly useless to me outside of the main premise, but it's a fun read.
 
We just finished The Man Who Found Time, about James Hutton, who discovered that the earth isn't 6000 years old. He caused uniformitarianism, the belief that all of geology can be explained in terms of forces that are acting today. Good read-aloud.

I'm also reading Bretz's Flood, which turns out to be about the man who ended uniformitarianism, or at least proved that sometimes catastrophe's mixed in among the uniform forces.

We just started the newest Tana French novel. Her prose is so beautiful. I'd recommend starting with In the Woods. It's my favorite still. I'm prejudiced against mysteries, but I make exception for French.
 
The Fire and the Fury. The Wolff book about the Trump presidency. He opens up with that his sources want to be anonymous. Ok, fine. So everything in the book isn't backed up by anything. He quotes people from one-on-one meetings with Trump where it's unlikely any of them talked to Wolff. He is also a mindreader because he knows what people are thinking.

But worst of all... anybody could have written this book. It lists everything Trump is known to have done, and then adds personal anecdotes about how sad Trump is about it. Well... duh. It says he's surrounded by yes-men. Everybody knows that. But it only does this. There's nothing positive anywhere. It's as if this book is written only to confirm liberal biases. I don't buy it. I think he just made it all up. Just educated guesses. I'll need something more substantial to trust it.

I'm very happy I pirated it. What utter shit
 
The Necessity of Atheism by David Marshall Brooks.

Published in 1933, yet still fresh.

Paints quite an ugly picture of the role of the Church during the dark ages in stifling science and medicine in favour of superstition and self interest.
 
Hey, he stole that title from one of my heroes, Percy Bysshe Shelley:

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Aint he purty tho? Sigh...:cheer:
 
WAB said:
Hey, he stole that title from one of my heroes, Percy Bysshe Shelley:

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Aint he purty tho? Sigh...:cheer:
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I read Shelly's book before starting on Brooks. Both are good, but Brooks goes into far more detail. His indictment of the Church and its role in promoting superstition and suppressing research and understanding of the natural world is excellent.
 
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