Which book are you reading now? Volume XI

[JohannaK]

I just read The Country Wife by Wycherley (or something like that). Fine play, for sure. I will shortly begin Henry V, as I organise a showing of Shakespeare cinematographic adaptations in the faculty and it's the first movie on the list.

 

[gay_Aleks]

Today, hopefully, I'll get around to reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and eventually, other Robert A. Heinlein books.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Seeing like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed, James Scott

 

[Traitorfish]

Any good? I enjoyed his book on South-East Asia, and I've been meaning to take a look at his other stuff.

 

[Imrahil91]

I finished a two-volume biography of Charles Darwin by Janet Brown recently. It was interesting because I learnt a lot, not only of the man himself, but also his science and Victorian society in general.

Do anyone have a good biography of someone interesting to recommend?

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Finished:
Protein Analysis and Purification: Benchtop Techniques by Ian M. Rosenberg. Very useful for what I will be doing.

From Genes to Genomes: Concepts and Applications of DNA Technology by Jeremy W. Dale and Malcolm von Schantz. Useful for what I'm currently struggling with.

Reading:
Global Navigation Satellite Systems by B. Bhatta. Yeah, telling your car how far it is from the next intersection using satellites is pretty complicated stuff.

 

[Kyriakos]

Hey SS-18, can you help with my questions about enzymes?

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=534184

particulary in the last post

 

[JohannaK]

After Henry V, I'm into Richard III. Already at the end of the first act it is visible that it is a much earlier work than the previous.

 

[imperialman]

Reading: CCNA For Dummies

Half way through the qualification, about time I started it.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Any good? I enjoyed his book on South-East Asia, and I've been meaning to take a look at his other stuff.

I found it insightful, but I'm biased toward works that this that denigrate top-down attempts to organic complex things like forests, cities, and economies. One work he quotes, Jane Jacob's Death and Life of Great American Cities, is largely responsible for me realizing some things are too complex to commandeer. Essentially Scott scrutinizes attempts by the state to impose order from the top down, and notes that it's often self-defeating (ignoring information that causes failure down the road); the most salient advantage to this kind of organization is that it increases the power of those doing the organizing.

 

[Flying Pig]

Glancing over at the pile it's currently Iron Kingdom, a history of Prussia by Christopher Clark; Empire of the Sun, an autobiographical novel by JG Ballard about childhood in wartime Shanghai, and the stubborn book of Roman history which I can't quite bring myself to finish.

 

[Old Hippy]

Empire of the Sun, an autobiographical novel by JG Ballard about childhood in wartime Shanghai, .

I just ordered that in at the the libary, about half an hour ago, as I'm watching it tonight on TV

curently reading 'Monash, the outsider who won the war' by Roland Perry a good read but it tends to forget the brithish were there too, just a bit

 

[dusters]

"Short introduction of quantum gravity"

 

[Takhisis]

Language and Culture, by Claire Kramsch, edited by H.G. Widdowson

 

[tony_]

The Society Of The Spectacle by Guy DEBORD

amazing!

 

[Takhisis]

Language and Culture, by Claire Kramsch, edited by H.G. Widdowson

And now Linguistics by Widdowson himself.

 

[Flying Pig]

Went to the library today and ended up reading EH Cline's 1177BC: The Year Civilisation Collapsed in one sitting. It was so inconsistent that it's difficult to summarise; I remember putting the book down with a feeling of frustration because the excellent bits were eclipsed by the simply shoddy. The reference to the year 1177 refers to an inscription in which an Egyptian Pharoah claimed to have destroyed the armies which had laid waste to the rest of the Near East, and the book addresses the general concentration of destruction in the great settlements of the Aegean and the Near East towards the turn of the 12th century BC. Certainly an engaging read, and I'm prepared to admit that he knows his stuff about the Hittites and Egyptians, but I'm not sure I found anything in there about the Aegean itself that I didn't greatly disagree with. It probably didn't help that he cited Niall Ferguson as one of his models.

 

[IncessantMace]

Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes To War by Max Hastings.

One of my professors gave it to me cause I wrote a long paper last year on how Britain was primarily responsible for failing to stop the outbreak of WWI (I got an A on the paper)

It looks good so far, And Foreign Secretary Grey was useless according to this and the primary sources I read last year.

 

[Mouthwash]

Went to the library today and ended up reading EH Cline's 1177BC: The Year Civilisation Collapsed in one sitting. It was so inconsistent that it's difficult to summarise; I remember putting the book down with a feeling of frustration because the excellent bits were eclipsed by the simply shoddy. The reference to the year 1177 refers to an inscription in which an Egyptian Pharoah claimed to have destroyed the armies which had laid waste to the rest of the Near East, and the book addresses the general concentration of destruction in the great settlements of the Aegean and the Near East towards the turn of the 12th century BC. Certainly an engaging read, and I'm prepared to admit that he knows his stuff about the Hittites and Egyptians, but I'm not sure I found anything in there about the Aegean itself that I didn't greatly disagree with. It probably didn't help that he cited Niall Ferguson as one of his models.

It destroyed my faith in humanity when he said that historians had an epic recounting of Suppiluliuma's reign and that it was just that nobody had bothered to write a book about it yet.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut; Six Wives: the Queens of Henry VIII, David Starkey