What Are You Reading?

I'm currently finishing up Joe Haldemans "Worlds" series, which comprise of:
Worlds
Worlds Apart
Worlds Enough and Time

Just finished up a bio of Samuel Adams and now I've finally got 'round to reading The Federalist Papers. So far I'm one essay in.

JG Farrell 'Troubles'

Finished reading Atlas Shrugged. Liked it but Rand could have her characters go on and on and on......the seventy page speech (not sure of the exact page count) by John Galt was painful to get through.

Read the Overton Window. MEH!!! I wouldn't call it a thriller as it was kinda boring. However two things.....

#1 The concept of the Overton Window (a real theory not made up by Beck) is interesting and you can see it when you look back in history.

#2 A lot of stuff in the book is true. The book is followed by a afterword that lists all the sources of the stuff listed in the book. For instance the phone booth in the desert was real (until it was torn down). Another is Donald Rumsfeld announced to the world that the US Government lost track of $2.3 trillion dollars. The date? September 10, 2001. The book also shows the dangers of conspiracy thinking by people linking things together that really are separate or things which are misinterpreted.

Right now I've started on: Ayn Rand - The Virtue of Selfishness

My brain needed a bit of a break so I'm reading one of Ringo's Legacy of Aldenata. The man just doesn't borrow, he STEALS - it has Heinlein's MI and Laumer's Bolos in it. However, it's passable.

I've really got to find time to read Stirling's Dies the Fire. And back through the Boorstin's knowledge series.

"Black Confederates" by Charles Kelly Barrow" - guess who recommended that one?

Just finished "Steel My Soldier's Hearts" by David Hackworth - very good account of soldiering in Vietnam and what it takes to win guerilla warfare. Should be required reading at our service academies, especially in this day and age.

Now reading "Press On" by Chuck Yeager. Much lighter than the last two. Very entertaining so far.

shootER agrees: *Steel* My Soldiers' Hearts. And my copy is autographed.


D'oh!! braggart!!

Gonna be working some overnights standing guard at a fireworks tent starting Friday. Guess that means I'll be picking up some reading material. Probably be some cheesy Star Trek books or something, though.

My kiddo gave me a 15 pound book of science history, a wonkin monster.

Thankfully it has lots of pictures so I'm able to get through it.

Uncle Albert agrees: What, no "Jeep Repair for Dummies"?

They don't get that specific. I can only find Car Repair for Dummies.

Try Feymans's 6 Easy Pieces or 6 Not-So-Easy Pieces for a really interesting science read.

Picked up Ayn Rand's Anthem.

I think George Lucas stole her novel when he made THX-1178.

She has a story where there are no individuals but the people are called names like Eqaulity 7-2521. Man leaves in a special city while the outside world is forbidden. Everything is sterile and supposed to be "Utopia" and everyone has to work. Someone says "fuck this" and ends up getting chased out of the city and the city forces stop chasing at the edge of the city.

I wonder who he stole Star Wars from.

That's easy.

Picking up The Origin Of Species, still reading The Brothers Karamazov when possible, and reading back over Sickness Unto Death in my Kierkegaard Anthology.

You know shopping for books there is a couple things I hate:

First I hate that it seems the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Vampire section has become almost 90% fantasy/vampire.

Second what drives me crazy is to pick up a book turn it to the back cover and see a picture of the author. I want to know what the book is about not what the author looks like. I refuse to buy books that don't tell me what it's about.

Worse, it's pandering, ephemeral vampire crap. They're bodice-rippers for the emo set.

The same thing happened to genre fiction sections, only with witches, right after "The Craft" hit theatres.

Y'know what's even worse is the current practice of shrink-wrapping books. Hey, if I can't leaf thru it in the store, I ain't buying it.

And while I'm whining, what the hell is the deal with bookstores and their habit of randomly rearranging their shelves just when you've gotten used to where everything is?

I've not yet run into shrink wrapped books.

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It was bad enough, a while back, when Sci-fi was corrupted by fantasy. The two have nothing to do with each other, IMO. But the vampire thing as its own entity within the section is too much.

John Dies at the End by David Wong

I read Marley and Me on holiday.

I started bubbling, made worse by all the sunscreen all over me, rubbing it into my eyes.

Looked like a right tit, sitting by the pool!

I've discovered Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" books. So far I've completed Bad Luck and Trouble, and am almost done with The Enemy. Only 12 more to go after that.

I hope John comes out all right...

^ Don't let the title fool ya (read it online last year, Don Coscarelli Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep is making the movie)

Right now I'm on Glenn Beck's The Overton Window. It's a better read than Vince Flynn's Term Limits so far, but that's not saying much. The prose is tighter, yet more colloquial at the same time, in a Steve King sort of way. The character / plot points are really hammered though, if it were a pop-up book, the tab would have a "this is evil/wrong" sign on it in some passages. Think This Present Darkness or Left Behind.

Another chapter or so, absent any improvement, & I'm bailing for Cussler's The Chase.

Classic Sci-Fi from 1973!!!!!!!

Fun stuff!!!!!!!!!!

A challenging, but compelling read.

Ruled Britannia by Harry Turtledove.