Which book are you reading now? Volume XI

[cardgame]

Robert A Heinlein – The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

Isn't aging too well but entertaining nonetheless.

 

[Kozmos]

Which is probably doing his own ideas a disservice. I won't even bother to crack open a book so big. I'll just have to hope he didn't write anything that I would have found life-altering.

Well it depends entirely on content. What's the difference between reading one huge book or several of them that are a part of a series? If you don't find it interesting just drop it and move on to something you like.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I just finished The South Since the War, consisting of a northern journalist visiting the South five months after the war and complaining about hotels, trains, poor people who don't take baths, and the power of the aristocracy.

 

[Perfection]

Good And Real - Gary Drescher

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Real-Demystifying-Paradoxes-Bradford/dp/0262042339

Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point - Huw Price

http://www.amazon.com/Times-Arrow-Archimedes-Point-Directions/dp/0195117980

 

[Ajidica]

In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo by Michela Wrong.
Good 'slice of life' book on life in Zaire, with a focus on the early 90's. Not the greatest as far as in-text citations go, unfortunately. Quite readable and interesting.

Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War by David Edgerton.
I haven't really started this one yet, and it seems to be the British counterpart to Tooze's Wages of Destruction. Some of the Amazon reviews seemed to have a negative opinion of the author, saying the book felt unfocused with a few glaring holes. Any CFC opinions?

 

[Miroslav I]

"A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali" by Gil Courtemanche (1943–2011) published in 2003.
(first published in 2000. with the original French title: "Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali")
Translator (french to english): Patricia Claxton

also made a movie on that book:
"A Sunday in Kigali" (2006)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0463385/

 

[Smellincoffee]

The Americans: the Colonial Experience, Daniel Boorstin

 

[EgonSpengler]

Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer - 4/10

I just didn't get it. This book gets some good reviews, but it didn't intrigue me, inspire me, thrill me, or terrify me. It elicited almost no reaction at all. It's well written, I suppose, it goes down smooth, but I couldn't discern one character from another, and I would have a hard time telling you what the plot is. It's the first in a trilogy, so maybe all three are meant to be read at once - it is pretty short - but after finishing this one, I didn't run right out to get the second.

So Annihilation just won the Nebula Award for Best Novel 2014. Although I haven't read any of the other 5 nominees, I liked John Scalzi's Lock In and James Corey's Cibola Burn better, and while I haven't read Andy Weir's The Martian yet, it's gotten a ton of positive attention; and none of those were even nominated for a Nebula. Looking back at previous years' awards, I can see a lot of books I thought were just alright. I think the people who vote for the Nebula Awards just have a different take on things than I do.

 

[Borachio]

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon.

According to Vogue: "This stunner is already classed with Moby Dick and Ulysses". I can understand that. I've read the former and gave up half-way through the latter. Gravity's Rainbow is not an easy read by any means.

Vogue goes on: "Set in Europe at the end of WWII, with the V2 as the White Whale, the novel's central characters race each other through a treasure hunt of false clues, disguises, distractions, horrific plots and comic counterplots to arrive at the formula which will launch the Super Rocket... Impossible here to convey the vastness of Pynchon's range, the brilliance of his imagery, the virtuosity of his style and his supreme ability to incorporate the cultural miasma of modern life".

Umm.

I wonder if I'll finish this 902 page door-stop of a book.

 

[JollyRoger]

Ulysses is a nice warm-up for Gravity's Rainbow. Appears you gave up on Ulysses right before it started getting good.

 

[Borachio]

Sadly, I'm just not that intelligent to persist against an overwhelming tide of incomprehensibility.

But intelligence isn't immutable. So maybe in another 50 years I'll give it another go. I'll only be 112 and, you never know, I might find it a breeze.

 

[JollyRoger]

It is still fairly incomprehensible, but more in a more entertaining way. Gravity's Rainbow was kind of the opposite for me - it got less entertaining as it went.

 

[Borachio]

Oh? I must say it's got me tickled a little bit in the first 100 pages or so. But it definitely doesn't make life easy for the reader.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity - Marshall Berman

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, translation by C.H. Sisson and annotations by David Higgins. Almost the perfect copy, only missing Gustav Doré's illustrations.

 

[JohannaK]

Roland Barthes' Writing Degree Zero, with that mid-century French intellectual verbosity that makes books so needlessly dense yet somewhat attractive and ever pulling you forward.

 

[Snerk]

Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts.

The author is clearly a great admirer of Napoleon, not that that is necessary a bad thing. For the book is very well written.

 

[Miroslav I]

"Losing Nelson" (1999) by Barry Unsworth.

Was Nelson really such a hero people want to believe?

 

[Smellincoffee]

About to finish The Terrorist Next Door, about Bill Gale and the Posse Comitatus movement. More broadly it's about the farm/rural crisis and the upsurge of violent right-wing activism in the 1970s and 1980s. The Comitatus seems like the KKK with no robes, but even more obsessive about racism and fixated on fighting the government.

 

[Ajidica]

Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War by David Edgerton.
I haven't really started this one yet, and it seems to be the British counterpart to Tooze's Wages of Destruction. Some of the Amazon reviews seemed to have a negative opinion of the author, saying the book felt unfocused with a few glaring holes. Any CFC opinions?

Finished the book, wasn't a big fan of it. The author couldn't seem to decide if he was writing a popular history (in the Niall Ferguson style of "aren't white people awesome") or a scholarly history. Besides to odd shifts in tone, it often felt like he contradicted himself. For example, he spent several pages illustrating how the British scientific advances that won the war (like radar) weren't the result of some lone scientists toiling away in a lab, but rather the product of sustained government support. What then does he spend the rest of the chapter talking about? He spends the rest of the chapter talking about individual scientists and their personalities.
The feeling of contradiction continues elsewhere. The author clearly emphasized the fact that the UK was not some pokey little island, but rather the focal point of an empire that spanned 1/4 of the globe and ruled 1/5 of its people. He illustrated the immense economic might and sprawling trade networks of the UK, but then never went back to the role the colonies or the dominions played, beyond the odd mention.

Also, the author would occasionally call out the political affiliation of certain individuals in what often felt like partisan bickering; with Labour and academics being portrayed as hypocritical and counterproductive compared to the 'Mighty Whitey' of the Conservatives and Peers. It could very well be true, but the way the author went about it left a bad taste in my mouth.

All in all, not a great book. I didn't really learn anything I hadn't already learned about the UK during WWII that I hadn't already learned the broad strokes of.