Added the somewhat strange The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth to the pile - it's written entirely in tetrameter sonnets, which makes it easy to dip in and out of.
Which book are you reading now? Volume XI
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ParkCungHee
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Pleasant reading this month. Just finished The Impossible State By Steven Cha, and now I'm on The Nazi Conscience.
What would say about the former? I've been thinking about picking it up.
I'm starting The Maltese Falcon, being in a mood for vintage detective stories.
Great thread for cultured peoplez - glad to be part of it. Currently reading Gorbachevs Memoirs, History of India, Statemanship of Charles IV.(Holy roman emperor) and just finished Don Quijote which was fun...
ParkCungHee
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Absolutely the best read for understanding the DPRK in the context of international relations. Pretty much spot on in all it's assessments, I think. If you're interested in that, why the DPRK hangs on, or the nuclear crisis, absolutely can't recommend it enough.
ParkCungHee
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Pretty much only two complaints:
1) The parts where he tries to burnish George W. Bush's image get a bit repetitive.
2) The parts where he goes off to point out how very, very stupid the NY Times editorial board has been on North Korea comes is also overly long, and comes across as a bit beneath a book like this.
1) The parts where he tries to burnish George W. Bush's image get a bit repetitive.
2) The parts where he goes off to point out how very, very stupid the NY Times editorial board has been on North Korea comes is also overly long, and comes across as a bit beneath a book like this.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
I decided to read through Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England before my students have to write an essay about it in a couple of weeks. Really interesting stuff, not just as an historian but also as a communist. It was written in 1844, so it's pre-Marx and pre-Manifesto. Engels still puts forth the idea that a revolution is brewing amongst the working class that will "make the French Revolution look like child's play." It's based on his own two-year ethnographic study amongst workers in the Manchester area, so it's remarkably detailed, but also not dismissive of long-term socio-economic trends in Britain, stretching back to the heyday of the cottage industry, and how mass-production has steadily displaced those people, among others.
SS-18 ICBM
Oscillator
So what prevented that revolution?
Anyway, Handbook of Alternative Fuel Technologies with sections by Sunggyu Lee, James G. Speight, and Sudarshan K. Loyalka. Delightfully technical but not too mathematical. Don't know why it uses units like cubic foot and btu if it's a scientific text though.
Anyway, Handbook of Alternative Fuel Technologies with sections by Sunggyu Lee, James G. Speight, and Sudarshan K. Loyalka. Delightfully technical but not too mathematical. Don't know why it uses units like cubic foot and btu if it's a scientific text though.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Incidentally, he could be taken to be speaking about the Chartist movement's edging toward revolt in 1848, concurrent with the other revolts in Europe. Or perhaps that hasn't come yet. It's not a scientific statement, he just said "I think something big is coming because of how awful the proletariat is treated."
Hiking my way through Richard Fortey's Earth: An Intimate History of the Planet.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
My office just moved to a new building, which we're sharing with a department that occasionally sells books. So I bought a Ursula L. Guin novel (forget which one, never read anything by her), something by Robert J. Sawyer that I haven't read, a weird book by a guy who never writes fiction, a couple other good sounding sci-fi titles and..
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.. That's the one I decided to read first... and so far it seems to be mostly relevant advice. I think I'm going to read it all and see if it can teach me anything about how to lead a better life. Hopefully it doesn't say anything about not wearing pants, as awesome as that actually sounds.
it's 5 books for $1 for most of those, so I'm definitely going back there tomorrow.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.. That's the one I decided to read first... and so far it seems to be mostly relevant advice. I think I'm going to read it all and see if it can teach me anything about how to lead a better life. Hopefully it doesn't say anything about not wearing pants, as awesome as that actually sounds.
it's 5 books for $1 for most of those, so I'm definitely going back there tomorrow.
A somewhat dated history of Rome called From the Gracchi to Nero by HH Scullard. Good on the facts and attention to detail but the interpretation of the data is often lacklustre: he swallows Caesar's claim that he had no desire to fight the Civil War almost unquestioningly. One particular passage stood out:
The anachronism of imposing the Roman conception of a 'Gaul' which 'should' be united is horrible - it seems far more about 1945 than about 50 BC. The first draft of the book came out in the fifties, and it seems like he didn't properly revise the text since then.
The anachronism of imposing the Roman conception of a 'Gaul' which 'should' be united is horrible - it seems far more about 1945 than about 50 BC. The first draft of the book came out in the fifties, and it seems like he didn't properly revise the text since then.
Just finished Iain Gately's Tobacco and am plugging away at Collision of Empires, about 1914 in the East.
I read the short story "The Yellow Sign", from the collection "The King in Yellow".
I really am disappointed. It is nearly as bad as some 'horror' story by Kipling and a phantom beast, which i luckily have almost entirely forgotten by now. :\
Only good point in this story was the sentence with the yellow sign, and that is what, 6 words? (6 and 6 and 6 to be exact).
I really am disappointed. It is nearly as bad as some 'horror' story by Kipling and a phantom beast, which i luckily have almost entirely forgotten by now. :\
Only good point in this story was the sentence with the yellow sign, and that is what, 6 words? (6 and 6 and 6 to be exact).
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