What are you reading?

[Mouthwash]

Unsure if there is another thread for this, but I just want to know what people here are reading. Give like 4 or 5 books on whatever subject (even fiction). Be sure to trash other people's lists!

Mine:

Critical Turning Points in the Middle East: 1915 - 2015 -Nayef Al-Rodhan
(terrible)

Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle -Stephen Biddle
(over my head)

What has Christianity ever done for us? -Jonathan Hill
(really nice)

Israel: A history -Martin Gilbert
(not as broad as I would have liked)

 

[Smellincoffee]

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step At a Time, Jeff Speck
Patterns of Home: the Ten Essentials of Enduring Design, Max Jacobson, Murray Silverstein, Barbara Winslow. A spin-off of Chritopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, which looked for the patterns of communities, cities, houses, and more.

 

[GhostWriter16]

Recarving Rushmore, by Ivan Elend

 

[TomYo689]

David McCullough 1776
Got it for xxx-mas

There's so many books that exist. When people talk about books and say authors and titles do people ever recognize them? Like to me it seems there's a few well known things then a giant sea of under publicized stuff. I doubt any of us has ever heard of any book that anyone else has posted.

 

[Flying Pig]

David McCullough 1776
Got it for xxx-mas

There's so many books that exist. When people talk about books and say authors and titles do people ever recognize them? Like to me it seems there's a few well known things then a giant sea of under publicized stuff. I doubt any of us has ever heard of any book that anyone else has posted.

There's a similar thread in the history forum in which it seems that most posters have at least heard of most of the 'classic' books being discussed there.

I'm currently reading AJP Taylor's The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918 and Graham Swift's Waterland

 

[ComradeDavo]

'Dune' by Frank Herbert.

I'm not reading much at the moment, just a few pages a day.

I did read all fo the currently released 'A Song Of Ice And Fire' books last years, in the space of about 7 months with a coupel sci-fi books in between.

After Dune i'm trying to decide between reading some more of the warhammer 40k Horus Heresy books or The Prefect by Alistair Reynolds.

I mainlt read sci-fi but sometimes historical boosk, mostly on communism. I have Comrades by Robert Service waiting on my shelf.

 

[Hygro]

I just finished "Death in the Haymarket" which taught me soooo much about American history I never knew. The fight for the 8 hour workday involved so much bloodshed and almost all of it came from police and militia and even the federal army, all backed by private business interests. Very little blood was spilled by the state or by business, as most of the anarchists, socialists, proto-progressives, laborists, good-people-ists, communists, thinking-ahead-of-their-time-industrialists, etc, committed no violence even when they were being shot by phalanxes of their country men.

It is the only thing that makes me truly sympathetic to the Southern cause in the Civil War-- the fear poorer white men had not just in becoming social equals to black men (racism, awful), but the real fear they would be enslaved by the factory system.

America knew about the fight for emancipation from too-much labor a decade before the Civil War, but almost all of the book takes place in the 1860s through 1880s in Chicago. People fought and died so we could earn a fair living while having time to spend with our families and develop our communities.

It wasn't until the 1930s until the 8 hour workday became a reality. But at least they could get the days shortened down from 14.

 

[Traitorfish]

Liberty or Death: Early struggles for parliamentary democracy by Ray Hemmings. Decent light read I picked up second-hand, told mostly as biographies of John Cartwright, founder of the upper/middle class Society for Constitutional Information, and Thomas Hardy, founder of the working class London Corresponding Society. Bit of a breather from the IR stuff which I am trying, and struggling, to get my head around.

Although, next on the list is the gloriously-titled Theories of International Politics and Zombies by Daniel W. Dresner, so I might get better...

 

[Dachs]

Donald R. Hickey - The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict. Quite definitive, at least in the (American-focused) paradigm in which it was written. If they ever come out with a Canada- or Britain-centric one that manages to avoid the outrageous chauvinistic excesses of that historiography, I imagine combining those two with Alan Taylor's highly fashionable borderlands transnational historical narrative would be something approaching the full story. (Latimer's 1812 was all right, I guess.)

 

[JohannaK]

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Meh, unwanted Christmas present, but now that I have it, why not read it?

The Gunslinger by Stephen King. Just started it, although in Spanish I guess it's less interesting than in English, because I decided to put it aside and read Stave Jobs before this one.

And soon enough, Beevor's Battle for Spain, which I asked a relative for my birthday.

 

[rugbyLEAGUEfan]

Anna Karenina....for the third time. Tolstoy is IMHO up there with Shakespeare in terms of providing insight into what and how emotions motivate human actions. I also like his easy to read, non intellectual style.

 

[Omni314]

Ra - Sam Hughs
A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle

 

[Farm Boy]

I just finished the Wheel of Time last night, which I had been reading as it was released for about 16 years. I feel so... tapped.

 

[Mouthwash]

The Gunslinger by Stephen King. Just started it, although in Spanish I guess it's less interesting than in English, because I decided to put it aside and read Stave Jobs before this one.

I love that book, but I think it's obvious that it couldn't be translated well at all. Also, do yourself a favor and don't read the revised version.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Antifragile, Nassim Taleb

 

[downtown]

I've working my way through a bunch of stuff that I have to review for work. I recently finished
Gridiron University: Higher Education's Uneasy Alliance with Big Time College Football and a novel called The Most Hated On, which was a 325 page alt history where Warren G Harding is resurrected to do battle with Heroin Dealers (one of our website's alumni wrote it as his debut novel).

I have a few more football books to plow through sadly. I'm hoping to get into some fiction that has nothing to do with politics, football, or higher education by spring, so I'm not totally burned out when fall comes back around.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

The Glorious Cause, by Robert Middlekauff. A great overview of the genesis, conduct, and aftermath of the American War of Independence, including the Parliament and Royal politics, and how all that played into everything, from the decision to tax the colonies for the French and Indian War, to the debates about repealing various acts, and the stationing of troops in Boston.

 

[Ajidica]

The Wars of the Roses by Alison Weir.
I got it for Christmas a few years ago and only got around to reading it.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

The Wars of the Roses by Alison Weir.
I got it for Christmas a few years ago and only got around to reading it.

How appropriate, given the recent unearthings in Britain.

 

[Traitorfish]

Picked up Henry Rollins Black Coffee Blues trilogy cheap at Oxfam yesterday. Almost finished the first book already- addictive stuff!