Which book are you reading now? Volume XI

[SS-18 ICBM]

Tea, The Drink that Changed the World by Laura Martin. History of the drink, quite short though. Best part are the appendices that show an outline of the various kinds of tea and how to prepare and enjoy tea. I would just like to note my amusement at a classic text about tea being called the Ch'a Ching.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, Bernd Heinrich

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Finished A History of Saudi Arabia (2nd edition) by Madawi al-Rasheed, a tale of an absolute monarchy born by tribal conquest and religious conservatism allowed to flourish through the 1933 oil concessions. Issues of royal succession, Islamic radicalism, political repression, leadership in the Arab world, state security, minority rights, global terror, and goddamnit author M2 Bradley IFVs are NOT tanks.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Finished Understanding Popular Music Culture by Roy Shuker. One thing that stuck was how New Zealand's establishment didn't react in a stupid manner to the rising popularity of rock music. Good on you Kiwis.

Poring through Bienville's Dilemma by Richard Campanella. That trip is less than a month away and I need to have a map of New Orleans in my mind's eye before then.

 

[Mouthwash]

Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life by David Friedman

Don't mistake me for an Austrian, but the school can be useful for challenging common-sense paradigms. (I'm not very impressed with the book thus far, however.)

EDIT: Big mistake. The author can't write down a coherent idea without using about ten times the necessary amount of verbiage, and I became totally lost around the point where he used a graph with indifference curves to explain why the price of housing going up or down is always good for homeowners.

 

[Zkribbler]

The Lemon Thorn by Alfanso Guilin. It's about immigrant farm workers in the central California coast region. It's sort of like Steinbeck with a murder-mystery subplot. It's the only item I've ever seen on Amazon that has nothing but 5-star ratings.

 

[FriendlyFire]

The forever war = War is Hell

In The Forever War, award-winning New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins does not analyse how these wars happened and why, or where they have succeeded or failed; instead, he captures with searing immediacy, the human experience - and tragedy - of war.

We meet Iraqi insurgents and American soldiers, Afghan rebels and Taliban clerics. We travel to deserts and glaciers and mountaintops, to the scene of public amputations and executions, to suicide bombings and into the homes of the bombers themselves. The result is a visceral understanding of the War on the Terror, its victims, the people who fight it and the way these people feel.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Having just finished The Cult of the Presidency, I'm still fishing around for my next read. The Story of the Irish Race is a little too awe-struck with its subject matter, but I AM interested in an outline of Irish history, so I may continue in it. I just picked up a new novel called Map of Betrayal by Ha Jin. It's about a woman whose father was a Chinese spy in the US.

 

[Traitorfish]

Currently reading Villa and Zapata: A Biography of the Mexican Revolution by Frank McLynn. It's an interesting take on the topic, because McLynn's primarily an historical biographer, so here he's attempting to give a narrative of the Mexican Revolution by examining the careers of the revolution's most famous figures, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. At times this leads McLynn to cast the two in slightly archetypal moulds, trying to make their individual personalities carry more than they might actually be able to bear, although he does seem concious of this and attempts to balance it where possible. It's also a bloody good read, which makes a change from some of the rather dry academic history I've had to read lately.

Also reading Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. I'd rank it somewhere in the middle of the Culture novels: it doesn't have the elegance of Use of Weapons or Look to Windward, a bit too much of an adventure yarn, but also avoids the long-winded meandering that ruined Matter for me. And there's still a third of the novel to go, so it may dazzle me yet.

The Story of the Irish Race is a little too awe-struck with its subject matter

Well, naturally. Have you met us?

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Also reading Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. I'd rank it somewhere in the middle of the Culture novels: it doesn't have the elegance of Use of Weapons or Look to Windward, a bit too much of an adventure yarn, but also avoids the long-winded meandering that ruined Matter for me. And there's still a third of the novel to go, so it may dazzle me yet.

I found the finale plot of Phlebas to be underwhelming. But me telling you that will maybe only make you feel positively surprised I mean it was not terrible or anything. Though I don't
expect the culture series to ever be terrible.
On the other hand, while I haven't read the other two novels you mentioned, I very much liked Matter (but that was also the novel which introduced me to Ian Banks and the culture series and I suspect some bias in that). On the other other hand - Phlebas is IMO the weakest novel I have read so far.
My favorite at this point is Player of Games. It had the strongest and consistent suspense.

 

[Traitorfish]

See, I didn't really get into Matter. It was okay and it played with some really interesting concepts, but it played out like a pretty standard space fantasy adventure. Player of Games was better, but still basically a space-adventure. Windward and Weapons, were allowed to play out at their own pace, without feeling the characters were being hurried towards a grand finale, which I prefer.

The problem with Banks' sci-fi, I think, is that there's two different threads to it: Ian Banks, literary author, and Ian Banks, science fiction enthusiast, and which books you prefer will probably depend on which thread you prefer.

 

[Defacto]

​

"[...]At 11:44 a.m. on Saturday October 21 of an unspecified year after 2012 (evident by mention of a faded bumper sticker for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign) the small Maine town of Chester's Mill is abruptly and gruesomely separated from the outside world by an invisible, semipermeable barrier of unknown origin at this point.[...] " /Under_the_Dome

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Hm - I still vividly remember when I picked up my first Stephen King book on a holiday quit a few years ago. I have never consumed a book with such frantic passion as this one. I just could not stop reading. I would read at the dinner table. And it made me shiver for the sensations it produced in me. Have read more King since then, I always liked it, but that particular feeling never returned so far, reading whatever book.

See, I didn't really get into Matter. It was okay and it played with some really interesting concepts, but it played out like a pretty standard space fantasy adventure. Player of Games was better, but still basically a space-adventure. Windward and Weapons, were allowed to play out at their own pace, without feeling the characters were being hurried towards a grand finale, which I prefer.
The problem with Banks' sci-fi, I think, is that there's two different threads to it: Ian Banks, literary author, and Ian Banks, science fiction enthusiast, and which books you prefer will probably depend on which thread you prefer.

I feel a bit trapped by your try to pin it down. You said Matter was meandering, and I think that is what made it awesome to me because it was my introduction to the Culture universe, which blew me away (perhaps lacking proper Sci-Fi comparison), and its rapid change of settings and circumstances gave me a vast scope of the possibilities this universe enabled Banks to explore. Its finale was actually kinda lame to me in comparison.
However, it is true that I liked Player of Games mostly from a plot-driven POV. There was a clear direction of the whole plot, but I just never felt like I could guess what came next and I felt a very real sense of danger. That is a hard feat, I think, and it enchanted me. Also, the protagonist felt very relateable. Just a kinda numb but also - emotionally at least - pretty normal guy trying to find something which gave him some kind of meaning.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the two works you recommend. Sounds interesting.

 

[Mouthwash]

Hm - I still vividly remember when I picked up my first Stephen King book on a holiday quit a few years ago. I have never consumed a book with such frantic passion as this one. I just could not stop reading. I would read at the dinner table. And it made me shiver for the sensations it produced in me. Have read more King since then, I always liked it, but that particular feeling never returned so far, reading whatever book.

Same with me and Cell.

 

[Smote]

River of Stars - Guy Gavriel Kay
The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer
On What Matters - Derek Parfit

 

[edse]

I've also been caught in many of King's books but the Dark tower series exhausted me.

I just finished Kallocain by the Swedish writer Karin Boye. It's a dystopian novel written 1940 that reminds a lot of 1984 and Brave New World. Is it well know among international readers of dystopian literature? (In English online at http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/Literature/Literature-idx?id=Literature.BoyeKallocn)

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Same with me and Cell.

The title just always seemed so uninteresting to me. A cell-phone dosn't sound very horrific to me. That just makes me think of Scream (the movie).

I've also been caught in many of King's books but the Dark tower series exhausted me.

Ah yes, I will definitely read that in the future
But do you mean exhausted like a WoW-addict forgetting to eat sufficiently or that you felt like quitting at some point?

 

[JohannaK]

I think I only read The Shining by King. T'was good.

Yesterday I read In the Penal Colony and The Judgement, both by Kafka. Both are well-written and quite interesting, although for some reason I couldn't visualise the machine as well as I would have wanted to in the first one and the context of the second being rather obscure, it is to a degree confusing. Very interesting, though. I preferred the second.

 

[edse]

The title just always seemed so uninteresting to me. A cell-phone dosn't sound very horrific to me. That just makes me think of Scream (the movie).

Ah yes, I will definitely read that in the future
But do you mean exhausted like a WoW-addict forgetting to eat sufficiently or that you felt like quitting at some point?

I felt like it was a little bit too much (4250 pages according to Wikipedia). I read them all in a row and was really hooked but... I don't know, you like what you read and want to follow them to the end but still feel like it could have been finished already.

 

[Takhisis]

I think I only read The Shining by King. T'was good.

Gröning's TV short version, from 1994 IIRC, was more than just good. Eat it, Stanley Kubrick!