What Book Are You Reading? Issue.8

[JonathanStrange]

Give Me Back My Legions! by Harry Turtledove --- so far (about 40% in) it's been mediocre. It's competently written but I've not read a single page or encountered a single scene that's memorable or dramatic. I'm beginning to think Turtledove's Teutoberger Wald battle scenes are going to be pedestrian too.

 

[Dachs]

A collection of Wodehouse novels, and The Warrior Generals: Combat Leadership in the Civil War, by Thomas Buell.

 

[Kan' Sharuminar]

D-Day by Anthony Beever, and I suppose I had better get back into Ice and Fire by reading the first part of A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin.

 

[Imperialmajesty]

A collection of Wodehouse novels, and The Warrior Generals: Combat Leadership in the Civil War, by Thomas Buell.

I have heard good things about Wodehouse. What is his writing style like?

 

[Huayna Capac357]

It's funny. Has a lot of puns, but not bad ones.

 

[Dachs]

I have heard good things about Wodehouse. What is his writing style like?

It's...well, it's different. Dude does a very good job of stringing out what would seem to be a relatively simple problem in through a lot of twists. Lots of good humor, both laugh-out-loud bits and everything else. No, it's not really pun-based humor. Read the Jeeves and Wooster ones, though, those are the best.

 

[cardgame]

The Brethren by Robyn Young

 

[Phlegmak]

I just finished The Confidence Man by Herman Melville. It's one of the worst books I've ever read. I can't recommend it for anyone.

 

[wilbill]

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, by Michael Dobbs.

Lots of previously unavailable information about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. We just thought we came close to nuclear war. It was an even closer call than we knew.

 

[GoodGame]

Started reading Shadow Kingdoms, a collection of Robert E. Howard reprints from Weird Tales pulp magazine. Interesting to see the evolution of an author from his very first work, and he writes decent prose being a bit of a poet, and kind of has an Edgar A. Poe inspiration in a pulpy way. But basically these are pulp fiction tales from the 1920s, a wee bit racist (but not overtly supremacist ) and action/revenge/investigation type short, short stories.

 

[Imperialmajesty]

It's...well, it's different. Dude does a very good job of stringing out what would seem to be a relatively simple problem in through a lot of twists. Lots of good humor, both laugh-out-loud bits and everything else. No, it's not really pun-based humor. Read the Jeeves and Wooster ones, though, those are the best.

Hmm... might pick it up.

 

[kristopherb]

Finaly read 1984. I posted that i was reading this on my 1984th post.
This is my 2000th post.

 

[Love]

Still reading the constant gardener.

It's awfully slow

 

[thetrooper]

Still reading the constant gardener.

It's awfully slow

Agreed. And watching the movie before you read the book doesn't help much...

 

[Dachs]

Finished the command studies from the ACW. Delving into David Eicher's complete history of that conflict in one volume now.

 

[Tristan_C]

Herbert Marcuse - One-Dimensional Man
Edmund Wilson - To the Finland Station
Charlotte Bronte - Shirley
Geoffrey Hosking - The First Socialist Society
Leon Trotsky - History of the Russian Revolution
Georg Lukacs - History and Class Consciousness
Noam Chomsky - Failed States
Noam Chomsky - Profit Over People
Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead
Tom Clancy - The Hunt for Red October
Edward Crankshaw - The Shadow of the Winter Palace
Nick Salvatore - Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract
John Stuart Mill - On Liberty

Well that's refreshingly diverse. I need to read a Chomsky and Salvatore book, having already given time to Ayn Rand and that lot. I disliked the social contract, BTW; I didn't even think it was useful, much less convincing.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, by Michael Dobbs.

Lots of previously unavailable information about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. We just thought we came close to nuclear war. It was an even closer call than we knew.

I listened to a radio program a while ago called "The Cold War Declassified". Apparently, Russian nuclear submarines were given orders to fire at the captains' discretion, and they didn't receive the call to stand down until two days after (communications problems).

 

[wilbill]

I listened to a radio program a while ago called "The Cold War Declassified". Apparently, Russian nuclear submarines were given orders to fire at the captains' discretion, and they didn't receive the call to stand down until two days after (communications problems).

Dobbs makes no mention of this incident and I tend to think he would have. He certainly didn't leave out any of the other near misses that occurred so I suspect this may have been one of several false or greatly enhanced stories that sprang up around the events of the missile crisis. The Soviet ballistic missile subs in 1962 were armed either with SS-11 (Scud) missiles or SS-13 with a range of about 350 miles. The Golf class subs that carried them were generally not hard for the US Navy to detect. Four Soviet Foxtrot subs were on their way to Cuban waters when the crisis developed. Due to the fact that the diesel-electric Foxtrots were required to surface daily to recharge batteries and send Moscow a report and receive orders, 3 of the four were tracked and forced to the surface by American destroyers and helicopters. It ssems likely that SSBN's in the area would have suffered the same fate.

There were plenty of close calls anyway. On the final Saturday of the crisis, while diplomatic events were reaching conclusion, an American U-2 was shot down while overflying Cuba. The local commander of the SAM battery fired his missile without higher authority. Another U-2 on a mission over the North Pole to gather air samples following Soviet nuclear tests went off course and overflew eastern Siberia for several hours.

Most frighteningly, it was only recently made public that the Soviet forces had already received and made operational the nuclear warheads for most of the missiles in Cuba. This included the tactical cruise missiles which would have been used against any American invasion. Kruschev had made it clear that the Soviet commanders were not to use their nukes without his authorization, but Soviet weapons had few "fail-safe" provisions. The US intelligence services remained unaware of the presence of the warheads so there was a lot of pressure on Kennedy to launch an invasion "before" they arrived.

Those of us who were alive during the crisis knew things were getting touchy, but were unaware just how close a thing it was.

 

[Phlegmak]

I read fragments of the book The Secret a few weeks ago. If anyone doesn't know, it's a self help book. The people who made The Secret are evil geniuses in my opinion, seriously. They're evil because their book offers no help whatsoever to the person who reads it. They're geniuses because it's nigh lawsuit proof when good things fail to happen to the reader. They collect millions, laughing all the way to the bank, and have given absolutely nothing to the consumer. Their books will eventually end up in the landfill and they'll be forgotten.

For those who don't know, The Secret is meant to help the reader attain the things he wants. He does so primarily with positive thoughts. And I don't mean "if you do good things, good things will happen to you" but rather the thoughts themselves have some power. The logical conclusion of that is if you simply think positive thoughts, with no other action, good things will come to you.

It's nigh lawsuit-proof because if good things fail to happen to the reader, the writers of The Secret can simply say, "You have to wait longer" or "You weren't actually thinking positively enough".

It's pure genius, and extremely evil.

 

[warpus]

For the past year and a half (yeah, i'm usually only reading on the bus, so I get like 10-20 pages in every day or so, maybe less on average) I have been going through the following:

read Dune: Butlerian Jihad
read Dune: The Machine Crusade
read Dune: The Battle of Corrin
read Dune: House Atreides
read Dune: House Harkonnen
read Dune: House Corrino
re-read Dune
re-read Dune Messiah
re-read Children of Dune
re-read God Emperor of Dune
re-read Heretics of Dune
re-read Chapterhouse: Dune

Now I'm reading the next book in the series, Hunters of Dune.

I'm on page 50 or so, and so far so good. The change from Frank Herbert's writing style to Brian Herbert's/Anderson's took a bit to get used to, but I'm enjoying the ride.