Which book are you reading now? Volume XIV

[Synobun]

Smoke Bitten by Patricia Briggs, the 12th book in the Mercy Thompson series.

Honestly, this series probably just needs to die at this point.

 

[Kyriakos]

While Tanizaki's first period was one where he tried to emulate writers like Dostoevsky and Poe, I like a few of his short stories. The Thief (which you can easily find online) is a very good one.
Later on he becomes full japanese, and is some kind of over-sexualized and bizarre anime, but there are again a few good stories, such as Sunkin's Portrait.

 

[Ajidica]

Who Killed Hammarskjold?: The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa by Susan Williams
https://www.amazon.com/Who-Killed-H...ZZQKV2THG96&psc=1&refRID=QBSCR5K04ZZQKV2THG96

The book is, as the title suggests, about investigating the death of UN Secretary Dag Hammarskjold who was killed in a plane crash outside the Ndola airport (in what is now Zambia) in 1961 while on a peace missing to talk with the secessionist province of Katanga. The author goes into a lot of detail on the British hostility to Hammarskjold -especially in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and the efforts by the Central African Federation (what is now Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia) to preserve white rule in Africa. It's a good book, although the author assumes the reader already has a working knowledge of the Congo Crisis and Katangese secession, along with the Union Minere du Haut Katanga and Tanganyika Concessions.
One criticism of the book I have is although Williams explicitly refers to Ludo de Witte's The Assassination of Lumumba where de Witte conclusively demonstrates Hammarskjold wanted Lumumba out of the way* in favor of African leaders more compliant to Western commercial interests like Kasa-Vubu; Williams repeatedly presents Hammarskjold if not supporting Lumumba, at least being sympathetic to African nationalists. While she may just have been presenting how Hammarskjold was seen by the white Rhodesians, British, Belgians, and Katangese; it came across as though she was believed Hammarskjold was sympathetic to Lumumba.

Another issue I had with the book is that the binding was a bit dodgy and the middle half inch or so of image plates spread out across two pages was effectively cut out. This basically made the airport approach map of Ndola and the crash map of Hammarskjold's plane impossible to reference. Some of the single page image plates were sort of useless and would have been better served by replacing them with images of the scans from the possible South African disinformation documents she talked a lot about.

On the whole, good book; although the author at times leaned a bit too far into the "real-life thriller novel" for what should have been a historical investigation.

*Although not necessarily to the same extent as the Belgian elimination definitive

 

[EnglishEdward]

I have just finished reading:

Hearts Undefeated

which features women's accounts of life during WW2

as edited by

Jenny Hartley

 

[EgonSpengler]

Wool, by Hugh Howey (2012)

Post-apocalyptic drama, about people who have spent their whole lives in a "silo", a very large subterranean shelter. First in a trilogy.

 

[Takhisis]

Arranged Marriage, a collection of short slice-of-life stories of Indian (and Indian-'murican) women by Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni. Recommended.

 

[Josu]

Ended Homo Deus.
Started The Plague by Albert Camus

 

[EgonSpengler]

Smoke Bitten by Patricia Briggs, the 12th book in the Mercy Thompson series.

Honestly, this series probably just needs to die at this point.

I read Laurel K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series back in the '90s - the first 6 or 8 of them, maybe - and she's still churning them out. I think she's up to 25 or something.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

This is going to sound super arrogant but I felt that this book didn't offer anything new. It would be easy to dismiss this as me not being the target audience, but I don't think that's really true. I think the sort of person who's going to be drawn to a pseudo-philosophical book on the future trajectory of technology and the human race will have at least a cursory understanding of all the major trends. Therefore to be really compelling, the book has to go deep on at least some of, if not all, these major topics. Martin Rees doesn't really do that here; some of the sub-chapters are only paragraphs or a few pages long and all together he sorts of skims over the top of every major field without really exploring them.

He does have some good philosophical insights on how society must adjust to the coming world but again these are too shallow and all too often lack historical context to help frame the issues for the reader. It's not a bad book, but if you're a tech nerd that reads a lot of tech news then this isn't worth a read.

This book, on the other hand, does a much better job of deep-diving into the material while simultaneously avoids getting caught up in the hyper-fine minutiae. Obviously this isn't exactly a fair comparison as Origins restricts itself mostly to physics and astronomy whereas On the Future covers everything from gene editing to space colonization to cyborgs.

Still, Origins is a thorough exploration of the physical universe grounded in easy-to-parse language. There was really only one or two brief passages that were confusingly written, which is something of a blessing when talking about quarks and leptons and thermonuclear fusion. I quite enjoyed this book and recommend it for those that want to learn about the history of the universe and physics, even if you don't have a strong background in the field.

 

[Birdjaguar]

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

A friend bought this for me for Christmas. I avoid reading paper books unless they're educational, so it took me a while to get to this as the library holds for the ebook were long (12+ weeks) and then I had other holds to get through when it finally opened up.

She said she bought it because I asked for it, and that I really wanted it. I have no recollection of this whatsoever. If I had to guess, though, someone told me the writing style was similar to mine, and then I told her about it. I'm fairly vocal about utterly despising how I write fiction; it is the complete opposite style of the fiction I like to read, so writing things takes a certain stubbornness and disgust to suffer through.

The beginning of the book was quite a slog. Like I said, I don't like reading the way I write, and it rings true that the style used in this book is similar to mine. I was very close to giving up on it.

But I persevered, and my enjoyment of the book quickly ramped up. At my settings, the book was 2060 pages long. It took me a week or so to read the first 900 pages and then I read the remaining 1100 in a single day.

I saved a lot of excerpts from the book. First time I've done that. The last page, in particular, felt very "me."

I downloaded it just now. [crosses fingers]

Really fun book. I'm enjoying it enormously.

 

[Josu]

Ended Albert Camus' The plague.
Liked it, but have not enjoyed too much. IMHO far away in quality from The Stranger

Started Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The shadow of the wind

 

[AmazonQueen]

Ended Albert Camus' The plague.
Liked it, but have not enjoyed too much. IMHO far away in quality from The Stranger

Started Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The shadow of the wind

I'm reading The Prisoner of Heaven by Zafon atm. Liked The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game by him.

 

[IglooDame]

Since I tend to watch ABC's national news most nights, I picked up Front Row at the Trump Show, by Jonathan Karl (ABC's longtime WhiteHouse correspondent) and I'm about halfway through it. I don't think it's going to change anyone's opinion of anything (if you don't like Trump, it'll reinforce it, if you do like him, you're not reading something by an Enemy of the People in the first place), but it is interesting filling in some gaps and coloring in some lines. Karl has an easy reading style, the only knock is that his bitterness about Sean Spicer's treatment of him comes across a bit more heavily than needed.

 

[Josu]

I'm reading The Prisoner of Heaven by Zafon atm. Liked The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game by him.

BTW and a bit OT. Carlos Ruiz Zafón follows spanish naming custom. This means that his paternal family name is Ruiz. Carlos Ruiz is kinda John Smith, that's why he includes maternal family name, otherwise probably no one would call him Zafon.

 

[AmazonQueen]

BTW and a bit OT. Carlos Ruiz Zafón follows spanish naming custom. This means that his paternal family name is Ruiz. Carlos Ruiz is kinda John Smith, that's why he includes maternal family name, otherwise probably no one would call him Zafon.

Its good to learn

 

[EnglishEdward]

I have just finished re-reading a collection of 20 science-fiction short stories titled

Human Is?

by the late great Michigan born

Philip Kindred Dick

I recomend it as a good introduction to those new to Sci-Fi.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Progress of a sort.

George R.R. Martin making strides on ‘Winds of Winter’

Writer has several films in development and is part of a railway ownership group

Copyright © 2020 Albuquerque Journal

BY ADRIAN GOMEZ

JOURNAL ARTS EDITOR

The enforced isolation has been tough on the world.

For George R.R. Martin, it’s helped him to write. The Santa Fe resident posted on social media Wednesday, “I have to confess, after half a year of pandemic, I am showing signs of cabin fever. If nothing else, the enforced isolation has helped me write. I am spending long hours every day on THE WINDS OF WINTER, and making steady progress.”

The highly anticipated “The Winds of Winter” has been a decade in the making and is the next in the “Song of Ice and Fire” series, which the TV show “Game of Thrones” was based on. Martin says he is writing in an actual cabin in the mountains.

“I finished a new chapter yesterday, another one three days ago, another one the previous week,” he writes on his blog. “But no, this does not mean that the book will be finished tomorrow or published next week. It’s going to be a huge book, and I still have a long way to go. Please do not give any credence to any of the click-bait websites that like to parse every word of my posts as if they were papal encyclicals to divine hidden meanings.” Martin also wrote about books he’s been reading. He said other things are going on in his life as well.

“I bought a railroad … well, I bought a third of a railroad,” he wrote.

 

[Ajidica]

Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword. The book is set in a fantasy version of Viking England when an Elf-prince steals a human child and replaced it with a changeling. The human child is raised as an elf, becoming a master of swordplay and magic while the changeling falls into the curse of a vengeful witch, slaughters his family, and seeks revenge on the human child he replaced. Anderson does a good job giving the book the vibe and tone of north Germanic poetry; with valor and tragedy playing out in a sort of gotterdamerung between the elves and trolls.

 

[Birdjaguar]

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

A friend bought this for me for Christmas. I avoid reading paper books unless they're educational, so it took me a while to get to this as the library holds for the ebook were long (12+ weeks) and then I had other holds to get through when it finally opened up.

She said she bought it because I asked for it, and that I really wanted it. I have no recollection of this whatsoever. If I had to guess, though, someone told me the writing style was similar to mine, and then I told her about it. I'm fairly vocal about utterly despising how I write fiction; it is the complete opposite style of the fiction I like to read, so writing things takes a certain stubbornness and disgust to suffer through.

The beginning of the book was quite a slog. Like I said, I don't like reading the way I write, and it rings true that the style used in this book is similar to mine. I was very close to giving up on it.

But I persevered, and my enjoyment of the book quickly ramped up. At my settings, the book was 2060 pages long. It took me a week or so to read the first 900 pages and then I read the remaining 1100 in a single day.

I saved a lot of excerpts from the book. First time I've done that. The last page, in particular, felt very "me."

I finished it up tonight and downloaded book 2 in the story.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Good Design Practices for GMP Pharmaceutical Facilities is a collection of articles edited by Terry Jacobs and Andrew Signore about creating factories that follow current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) as mandated by US Food and Drug Administration regulations. It starts with a profile of the pharmaceutical industry that identifies current (for 2017) trends: subcontracting R&D, product acquisitions, the rise of biologics, continuous production, single-use systems, and cost pressures. These are explored in further chapters that cover structures, equipment, processes, and procedures. Concepts are illustrated by pictures (some in color), diagrams, and charts. Appendices cover novel drug delivery methods and future trends in biologics. Overall, a detailed work whose only glaring weakness is not considering the sustainability impact of disposable single-use systems in enough detail.