Which book are you reading now? Volume XIV

[Birdjaguar]

I think you revealed too many of the story's details.

 

[Kyriakos]

You can't shy away from that in literary analysis

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Harold Coyle's The Ten Thousand is the story of the US 10th Corps' trek towards the sea through a hostile Germany. The confusion, brutality, and pointlessness of war is examined through the viewpoints of various soldiers, politicians, and civilians. The author is skilled at narrating character moments and finding comedy even in the bleakness of conflict. The writing can sometimes be a bit too on-the-nose. Yes, Mr. Coyle, I understand the obvious parallels to Xenophon's Anabasis, there is no need to remind me.

 

[EnglishEdward]

I have just finished reading the history:

One Summer America - 1927 -

by

Bill Bryson

I still don't understand Baseball, but it inspired
me to watch a few clips of Wings (the 1927 Film).

 

[Birdjaguar]

I still don't understand Baseball,

It is simple. Sit around your TV or in a stadium drinking beer and then every so often you stand you and cheer because someone ran from A to B.

 

[AmazonQueen]

It is simple. Sit around your TV or in a stadium drinking beer and then every so often you stand you and cheer because someone ran from A to B.

So like watching cricket.

 

[AmazonQueen]

A good crop of books received.
3 Banks, 1 Pullman and a new copy of a history book that I made the mistake of lending to a friend but never got back.
Also a DVD of a film of a book I liked but have never seen and a boardgame too.
Some clothes, smellies and consumables as well.

 

[Bridog7]

Kermit's 12 Rules for Life. Good Firewood. Book that started the largest contemporary cult movement of climate challenge deniers who will bring the end to our world. But so as long as we pet cats on the street instead of fighting them it will set our own house in order so we can criticize the world. Must be nice to be swimming in fossil fuel billionaire money to have these kinds of opinions because you have to be a special kind of stupid to deny climate and change and not be paid for it. Atleast I didn't lose a fight to apple cider and get knocked out for 20 years for drinking it and now reduced to passing mashed potatoes with a grade of C-.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I started book 3 of The Three Body Problem series: Death's End. My wife gave me this book this morning:

Spoiler :

Where do our things really come from? China is the most common answer, but Thomas Thwaites decided he wanted to know more. In The Toaster Project, Thwaites asks what lies behind the smooth buttons on a mobile phone or the cushioned soles of running sneakers. What is involved in extracting and processing materials? To answer these questions, Thwaites set out to construct, from scratch, one of the most commonplace appliances in our kitchens today: a toaster. The Toaster Project takes the reader on Thwaites's journey from dismantling the cheapest toaster he can find in London to researching how to smelt metal in a fifteenth-century treatise. His incisive restrictions all parts of the toaster must be made from scratch and Thwaites had to make the toaster himself made his task difficult, but not impossible. It took nine months and cost 250 times more than the toaster he bought at the store. In the end, Thwaites reveals the true ingredients in the products we use every day. Most interesting is not the final creation but the lesson learned. The Toaster Project helps us reflect on the costs and perils of our cheap consumer culture and the ridiculousness of churning out millions of toasters and other products at the expense of the environment. If products were designed more efficiently, with fewer parts that are easier to recycle, we would end up with objects that last longer and we would generate less waste altogether. Foreword by David Crowley, head of critical writing at the Royal College of Art and curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

We picked up Nathan Pyle's Strange Planet yesterday. Excerpt:

 

[Takhisis]

Zhou Xingsi's Thousand Character Classic (translated into inferior Western tongue and annotated). A must-read in a sense.

 

[tjs282]

My post-Christmas reading-list (mostly courtesy of my mum):

Think I'm going to be busy for the next couple of weeks days...

 

[Kyriakos]

I am reading math-related stuff (only formal logic, though)

 

[abradley]

Harold Coyle's The Ten Thousand is the story of the US 10th Corps' trek towards the sea through a hostile Germany. The confusion, brutality, and pointlessness of war is examined through the viewpoints of various soldiers, politicians, and civilians. The author is skilled at narrating character moments and finding comedy even in the bleakness of conflict. The writing can sometimes be a bit too on-the-nose. Yes, Mr. Coyle, I understand the obvious parallels to Xenophon's Anabasis, there is no need to remind me.

Read it when it was first published (1993?), enjoyed.

Another, older book (50s), is Andrea Norton's Star Soldier which uses much of Anabasis as it's plot model. It starts with Earth as part of a space confederation, but only accepted in as a mercenary state that hires it's men as mercenaries to planets that need fighting men, the hero is a new recruit in one of the hordes that's hired as light infantry, in time they find a Heavy Mech horde is also on the planet and the Mech horde needs to wipe them out to keep their presence a secret. The light infantry horde is force to take a Anabasis type journey to escape.

The parallel with the Greeks hiring their armies as mercenaries is fitting.

Enjoyed.

ADDON
I read Anabasis long ago, it had one map in the paperback, here it is a shorten version on youtube w/map.

Addon 2
This is the first part

Couldn't find it earlier.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Alisdair Gray died 29/12/19 so I'll be rereading some of my favourites by him. Lanark, Poor Things and Unlikely Stories, Mostly.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Every time I think I have a handle on where The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu is going, he throws me for a loop. There have been a couple of plot-holey moments but overall he crafts a tight, unpredictable and altogether enjoyable narrative. The characters are still quite stilted though and that is more of a drag than it was in the last book. The first book was partially set in 1960's China (cultural revolution era) and that is so far outside of my cultural experience that the stilted dialogue was less noticeable as everything was so unfamiliar. This book has more content set in the near-future and is less alien and therefore the stilted dialogue sticks out more. Still amazing stuff. I have used about a dozen page markers/stickers on cool passages that I want to go back and analyze in detail when I'm through.

 

[Kyriakos]

Every time I think I have a handle on where The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu is going, he throws me for a loop. There have been a couple of plot-holey moments but overall he crafts a tight, unpredictable and altogether enjoyable narrative. The characters are still quite stilted though and that is more of a drag than it was in the last book. The first book was partially set in 1960's China (cultural revolution era) and that is so far outside of my cultural experience that the stilted dialogue was less noticeable as everything was so unfamiliar. This book has more content set in the near-future and is less alien and therefore the stilted dialogue sticks out more. Still amazing stuff. I have used about a dozen page markers/stickers on cool passages that I want to go back and analyze in detail when I'm through.

I read the wiki synopsis of the novels (obviously won't spoiler anything). It looks interesting/different as a plot.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

It definitely is interesting and I highly recommend them.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Every time I think I have a handle on where The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu is going, he throws me for a loop. There have been a couple of plot-holey moments but overall he crafts a tight, unpredictable and altogether enjoyable narrative. The characters are still quite stilted though and that is more of a drag than it was in the last book. The first book was partially set in 1960's China (cultural revolution era) and that is so far outside of my cultural experience that the stilted dialogue was less noticeable as everything was so unfamiliar. This book has more content set in the near-future and is less alien and therefore the stilted dialogue sticks out more. Still amazing stuff. I have used about a dozen page markers/stickers on cool passages that I want to go back and analyze in detail when I'm through.

Just wait until you get to Death's End! It gets more space oriented and more unpredictable. I'm halfway though it (321 of 600 pages) and have no idea where things will end up. Sure the books aren't perfect and there are some unlikely events, but the tale is well crafted and great fun. It is not your typical sci fi story. Keep going Hobbs!

EDIT: The science applied is new and different and I wonder how theoretically sound it is. But it is fun.

 

[Kyriakos]

EDIT: The science applied is new and different and I wonder how theoretically sound it is. But it is fun.

It's not like it can actually be tested. If

Spoiler :

you mean the dimensional stuff