What are we reading?

Started by Martok, March 05, 2012, 01:13:59 PM

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BanzaiCat


Gusington

Sarcasm. You were clearly not obtuse in your above post.


слава Україна!

We can't live under the threat of a c*nt because he's threatening nuclear Armageddon.

-JudgeDredd

Bison

Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Dolan50

I was looking for some books to read on the history of the Roman Empire and came across this site-
http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&Itemid=27&a=h

Lots of good reads here on a variety of subjects that I thought some here may find interesting and enjoyable.
A Corporate Executive,a Democrat and a Republican walk into a room.The CEO walks in first and notices 10 cookies on a plate and pockets 9 of them,then turns to the Republican and whispers in his ear  and says "The Democrat is trying to steal your cookie".

BanzaiCat

Quote from: Gusington on October 01, 2013, 08:54:14 PM
Sarcasm. You were clearly not obtuse in your above post.

I thought more isosceles, but my wife uses that obtuse word sometimes. ;)

Right now I'm reading lube and engine oil specifications, because work. Not nearly as interesting as Ender's Game unfortunately.

Gusington

Thanks for the above link Dolan.

And nice hypotenuse Banzai Cat.


слава Україна!

We can't live under the threat of a c*nt because he's threatening nuclear Armageddon.

-JudgeDredd

BanzaiCat


JasonPratt

I was thinking about writing up some niggling complaints about AMoL, but then I realized I couldn't do so without a lot of spoilage about how the story ends and who lives and who dies. (A lot of minor and major-minor characters die, btw, along with at least one outright major one -- and I'm not talking about Rand.)

So instead I'll just move along to finally finishing up some books I started late last year or early this year but had to put on hold while working through WoT. :)

First up: Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, which though slightly out of date (only goes up to 2007) pulls together a lot of scientific analysis on footprint and other data, and research into various hoax claims. (Turns out that the more classic claims of hoax don't logically add up as being able to reproduce the evidence, or anywhere even near it.) The book explains why a significant number of primate scientists from different fields have quietly come to regard North America, and probably other areas of the globe, to have been and still be the home of an unknown hominid. I'm about halfway through, and I'm impressed at the detail. (Details largely omitted or mocked away with what amounts to wish fulfillment by the more recent Abominable Science! by Loxton, Prothero and Shermer; but I'll put up a link to that, too, for anyone wanting to compare approaches. :) )
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

MetalDog

Martok, glad to see I have a partner in dislike for Robin Hobb.  I read her Assassin trilogy and have never been more disappointed in a series than that.
And the One Song to Rule Them All is Gimme Shelter - Rolling Stones


"If its a Balrog, I don't think you get an option to not consent......." - bob

bob48

I felt the same about the 'Liveship Traders' series. It was hard work to finish 'em .
'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers'

'Clip those corners'

Recombobulate the discombobulators!

Martok

Quote from: MetalDog on October 06, 2013, 09:47:23 AM
Martok, glad to see I have a partner in dislike for Robin Hobb.
I too am relieved to see there's at least a few of us here who feel that way.  Talk about an author who has interesting concepts/storylines, but then completely falls flat on their execution... 



Quote from: MetalDog on October 06, 2013, 09:47:23 AM
I read her Assassin trilogy and have never been more disappointed in a series than that.
That was my introduction to her writing as well.  I forced myself to read the entire (first) trilogy, as a good friend of mine (whose taste in books *generally* coincides with my own) said he just loved it, so I held on, waiting for it to get better.  Boy was that a mistake.  :( 




Quote from: bob48 on October 06, 2013, 09:54:50 AM
I felt the same about the 'Liveship Traders' series. It was hard work to finish 'em .
I believe it.  After finishing the Assassins trilogy, I actually began reading the first Liveship Traders' novel as well.  Finally, after about 150 pages -- it took me that long to realize it was going to be more of the same s**t as before -- I went, "WTF am I doing??!" and put it down.  I've never regretted that decision. 

"Like we need an excuse to drink to anything..." - Banzai_Cat
"I like to think of it not as an excuse but more like Pavlovian Response." - Sir Slash

"At our ages, they all look like jailbait." - mirth

"If we had lines here that would have crossed all of them. For the 1,077,986th time." - Gusington

"Government is so expensive that it should at least be entertaining." - airboy

"As long as there's bacon, everything will be all right." - Toonces

Pinetree

Quote from: Martok on October 06, 2013, 10:55:47 AM
Quote from: MetalDog on October 06, 2013, 09:47:23 AM
Martok, glad to see I have a partner in dislike for Robin Hobb.
I too am relieved to see there's at least a few of us here who feel that way.  Talk about an author who has interesting concepts/storylines, but then completely falls flat on their execution... 



Quote from: MetalDog on October 06, 2013, 09:47:23 AM
I read her Assassin trilogy and have never been more disappointed in a series than that.
That was my introduction to her writing as well.  I forced myself to read the entire (first) trilogy, as a good friend of mine (whose taste in books *generally* coincides with my own) said he just loved it, so I held on, waiting for it to get better.  Boy was that a mistake.  :( 




Quote from: bob48 on October 06, 2013, 09:54:50 AM
I felt the same about the 'Liveship Traders' series. It was hard work to finish 'em .
I believe it.  After finishing the Assassins trilogy, I actually began reading the first Liveship Traders' novel as well.  Finally, after about 150 pages -- it took me that long to realize it was going to be more of the same s**t as before -- I went, "WTF am I doing??!" and put it down.  I've never regretted that decision.

Her Soldier's Son trilogy is actually rather good. It's set in a more Victorian style world and the main character is really put through the ringer.
Gen. Montgomery: "Your men don't salute much."
Gen. Freyberg: "Well, if you wave at them they'll usually wave back."

Martok

That seems to be true for most of her main characters, though (being put through the ringer).  The problem -- at least for me -- is that her characters just aren't likable. 

"Like we need an excuse to drink to anything..." - Banzai_Cat
"I like to think of it not as an excuse but more like Pavlovian Response." - Sir Slash

"At our ages, they all look like jailbait." - mirth

"If we had lines here that would have crossed all of them. For the 1,077,986th time." - Gusington

"Government is so expensive that it should at least be entertaining." - airboy

"As long as there's bacon, everything will be all right." - Toonces

JasonPratt

#1093
Finished the 2007 book on Sasquatch science... whew! I'm far from stupid, but a lot of the technical discussion on how bones and muscles and things fit together went waaaay over my head. That'll have to be debated by experts on forensic reconstruction (among other scientists). Still it shows that the state of the evidence is such that it can be discussed and debated at that level.

I also finished the last part of Gibson's The Perfect War: Technowar In Vietnam, a book I actually started last November. (But remember I was busy reading a bunch of other books most of this year.)

Super-interesting analysis of Vietnam at many levels, but I stand by my criticism that the author (for whatever reason, possibly righteous dudgeon combined with competitiveness) failed to understand the actual thrust of Gelb and Betts' The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked. Gibson thought the book was intended to be another exculpation of failure as some kind of inscrutable mystery where good men just didn't try hard enough at a mechanistic application of commercialized war 'production'; in actuality, G&B's main thesis was to appeal to public records and other primary data to test the popular notion at the time of their study that civilian policymakers had foisted an unwanted war on the American people without their consent while ignoring military advice that could have won the war. G&B find both popular notions running up against the actual primary data: the policymakers listened to military advice, and routinely implemented as much of it as they thought popular opinion of US citizens wanted (even if not always as much as the leading generals wanted.) G&B's thesis runs nicely complementary to Gibson's, not antithetical to it. Maybe Gibson scanned a few pages quickly toward the end and from a few apparently 'telling' phrases decided paragraphs written (in context) to critique policy were trying to defend and promote it. Who knows?

Anyway, I heartily recommend both books, although TWar is much more in-depth (since Gibson's scope of thesis is much broader). One of G's more provocative conclusions, reached early in his book (and which I talked about in another thread a year ago), is that since WW2 American industry has run on what effectively amounts to a wartime economy, which brought us so many short-term benefits once WW2 was over that we've become institutionally addicted to it and now find it impossible to let go, which will eventually ruin our economy. (This book was originally written back in the mid to late 80s.) As I analogized it last year, we gave the American economy a nitrous boost to gun ourselves up during WW2, but never took off the nitro, and the long-term result is that our engine is going to explode. Or, putting the analogy another way, we got over a tragedy or medical difficulty in our life by drinking tequilas every day for a while, but then when the chronic hangovers happened we solved them by drinking another tequila. In the long term that ends only one way.

There's much, MUCH more to G's book than that, however.


This interview from a public access cable channel back during the book's initial release summarizes the points pretty well in an hour and 45 minutes:




Edited to remove the other two YT links, as it's really the same interview in two parts but with excerpts from the interview as a lead-in for an extra four minutes or thereabouts. So the links were redundant after all. Sorry. :)
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

Keunert

i am not far from stupid, i speak it fluently and have some friends and familY there too. nice place to be
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Oscar Wilde

Special K has too much class.
Windigo