Which book are you reading now? Volume XIV
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H4run
Deity
You are going to have a lot of fun! That book is both inspiring and entertaining, I read both Musashi and Taiko by Yoshikawa, however I wonder why it looks quite thin in pages, because the novel contained more than 1000 pages.
Narz
keeping it real
The pages are thin, 970 pages in this version.
H4run
Deity
No no it's true, I actually compared it with Indonesian translation which is 1200 pages long, Engliah usually use fewer words in general.
A third of the way through Piketty's Capital in the 21st century and so far finding myself in agreement with those who feel his economics are as questionable as his statistical work is impressive. When he brings up Ricardian equivalence he just seems so confused and is conflating so many things it's painful.
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Reread "The Gospel according to Marc", by Borges.
Seems to be his last decent story (I personally dislike "The Book of Sand"), and in the prologue of the collection one finds the author's note that the story was inspired by a dream of someone else (like his earlier story, Emma Zunz).
The story itself is nice. A student arrives at the pampa, the vast plains of Argentina, and cannot leave due to a flood. His only company are three workers of the land, employees of his cousin (the cousin invited him, then left to the city). The student is curious enough to start reading parts of the bible to the silent and illiterate farmer family, and this leads to a disastrous misunderstanding - cause they end up thinking he is Jesus and his death on the cross will save them.
I like that the student doesn't fight back. He isn't active and seems to live in a dream, expecting to return to Buenos Aires. The almost feral farmers, on the other hand, are calculative enough to provide themselves with a reason to hate him enough so as to make the murder possible - but the murder only happened because they convinced themselves it is an act of their salvation.
Seems to be his last decent story (I personally dislike "The Book of Sand"), and in the prologue of the collection one finds the author's note that the story was inspired by a dream of someone else (like his earlier story, Emma Zunz).
The story itself is nice. A student arrives at the pampa, the vast plains of Argentina, and cannot leave due to a flood. His only company are three workers of the land, employees of his cousin (the cousin invited him, then left to the city). The student is curious enough to start reading parts of the bible to the silent and illiterate farmer family, and this leads to a disastrous misunderstanding - cause they end up thinking he is Jesus and his death on the cross will save them.
I like that the student doesn't fight back. He isn't active and seems to live in a dream, expecting to return to Buenos Aires. The almost feral farmers, on the other hand, are calculative enough to provide themselves with a reason to hate him enough so as to make the murder possible - but the murder only happened because they convinced themselves it is an act of their salvation.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Apparently I am working my way through "W".
I'm within 100 pages of finishing Blood of Empire by Brian McClellan. It is the last of his trilogy: Gods of Blood and Powder. The first two are Sins of Empire and Wrath of Empire. They are all really really good. There are other books and stories set in this really creatively done world. A 19th C like world with sorcery. The whole series is well written with cool characters.
EDIT: All done. Great story!
EDIT: All done. Great story!
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Dorsai!, by Gordon R. Dickson. I first read this novel many years ago, and decided to read it again. It's a kind of hybrid genre that includes space opera, military SF, and philosophy about the nature of humankind and how humans and cultures have changed and adapted by leaving Earth for other worlds. Dickson also had an interesting take on how an interstellar economy could work when you have over a dozen planets trading with each other.
Gordon Dickson was an author I wish I could have met, as he had a love of medieval history (one of the first generation members of the Society for Creative Anachronism) and filking. There have been numerous filksongs that were inspired by the Dorsai series.
I'd also recommend Lost Dorsai and Soldier, Ask Not if anyone's interested in checking these books out.
Gordon Dickson was an author I wish I could have met, as he had a love of medieval history (one of the first generation members of the Society for Creative Anachronism) and filking. There have been numerous filksongs that were inspired by the Dorsai series.
I'd also recommend Lost Dorsai and Soldier, Ask Not if anyone's interested in checking these books out.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
All present and accounted for. I'd assumed the book would start with the '80s wrestling boom with everything else condensed into a prologue, because that is how the narrative tends to go, but he makes a point of tracing the development of the sport from legitimate contest to rigged contest to staged contest in the early twentieth century, and detailing the rise and fall of the old territory system from the 1940s to 1980s. The greater part of the book is Hulkamania onwards, but the old days still get a solid third of the page count.
SS-18 ICBM
Oscillator
The Anabasis of Xenophon (English translation by Henry Dakyns) is about the travails of the Hellenic mercenaries hired by Cyrus to overthrow Artaxerxes of Persia. The mission goes sour and these Greek soldiers must find a way home. It is written mostly as a history, with matter-of-fact descriptions of events and peoples. A few things that stand out is having backstories after major figures are killed, meditations on leadership (mainly through Xenophon's speeches), and one of the first recorded depictions of bulimia in Westerm literature.
I had a friend who was into Pro wrestling in the early 1960s and he took me to matches to see those guys I listed plus more > Bobo Brazil, the Australian tag team guys.
hobbsyoyo
Deity
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This book is not what I thought it was and I'm a bit peeved about it.
You probably remember Gene Kranz from Apollo 13 as he was memorably portrayed by Ed Harris. If you are like me, you took his role in that movie (and the subsequent glorification of his persona after the movie came out) to mean that he played the pivotal role in developing space mission control at NASA. I have always thought he was the guy who built mission control into what it is. And the truth is that he was a founding member of the mission control effort, and he certainly presided over monumental missions as flight director as happened in Apollo 13.
But it turns out he wasn't the guy, he wasn't the bedrock foundation on which mission control concepts in the US are based. The guy was Chris Kraft, who hired and trained Gene and was the real motive force for mission control becoming what it is today. Gene was a side character in all that development, and while he rose to become the most prominent founding member in the public consciousness, that really was a post-facto development that came about due to the movie Apollo 13.
And so, this book so far has almost nothing to do with the development of the concept of mission control except to explain some key decisions that Chris Kraft made and how those played out in Gene's own experience. In other words I really need to read Chris Kraft's autobiography to get the insights that I thought this book would have.
Moreover, as an autobiography I find it pretty lacking. It seems to be mostly an abbreviated play-by-play of important missions that somehow skips over all the details. He's written very little about his life pre-NASA and almost nothing about his family in the book. Moreover, he maddeningly hints at the personalities of the people he worked with at NASA without really diving into any of it. Sure, it's his autobiography so I don't expect him to do a deep-dive on other people's lives, but one-sentence summaries don't help paint the picture of his life as filtered through his interactions with others. Frustratingly, he will drop half-sentences to the effect of '...he had a temper...' or, '....he was uncomfortable with leadership...' but again the lack of any detail to fill out these tidbits leaves the reader wanting.
As if to add insult to injury, I have read reviews of Chris Kraft's autobiography and it turns out he was more than happy to get personal (and even nasty) when it came to describing the people he worked with. Not that I want to read a trashy tell-all, but Kranz's autobiography is just so lacking as to be unsatisfactory. And on top of it all, he doesn't even dive too much into the technical details of mission control or the space vehicles themselves beyond the bare minimum to tell the story of what happened.
I'm about 1/2 way through and I'm thoroughly disappointment in this book. I used to get drafted into mission operations in a previous job and the mission operations lead would give a copy of this book to all of his hires to sort of ground them in mission ops so I thought this would be a great read. Now I'm sort of passing judgement on him because clearly he seems to have been taken by the movie version of Gene and didn't really think too much about him or his role in founding NASA mission control outside of the movie.
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Nylan
Characters Welcome
A Man For All Markets - E.O. Thorp
This guy solved Blackjack, Roulette (w/ Claude Shannon), and the pre-1990s stock market. Cool stuff.
This guy solved Blackjack, Roulette (w/ Claude Shannon), and the pre-1990s stock market. Cool stuff.
Josu
Emperor
Ended Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The shadow of the wind.
It's a while since I heard first about this book and it was in my To-Read list since more than 10 years.
I was afraid, because when a lot of people, who usually does not speak with me about books, suggests me reading one, It is usually a "meh" for me.
Well, i don't consider it a "meh", it was no best book ever, I don't consider it a great story, but it hooked my up, which is what I ask a book. Maybe in future I will read the sequels
Started Count Belisarius by Robert Graves.
It's a while since I heard first about this book and it was in my To-Read list since more than 10 years.
I was afraid, because when a lot of people, who usually does not speak with me about books, suggests me reading one, It is usually a "meh" for me.
Well, i don't consider it a "meh", it was no best book ever, I don't consider it a great story, but it hooked my up, which is what I ask a book. Maybe in future I will read the sequels
Started Count Belisarius by Robert Graves.
EnglishEdward
Deity
I am reading:
Lenin: The Man Behind the Mask
by
Ronald W Clark
It is interesting, particularly the first half that describes Lenin
and his company as Marxist revolutionary campaigners.
What comes across is that they were very nearly
all comfortably well off middle class intelligentsia.
Lenin: The Man Behind the Mask
by
Ronald W Clark
It is interesting, particularly the first half that describes Lenin
and his company as Marxist revolutionary campaigners.
What comes across is that they were very nearly
all comfortably well off middle class intelligentsia.
George Orwell had an interesting thought in his review on Hitler's Mein Kampf, that Hitler and Stalin's appeal lay in their offering followers an epic struggle to be involved in, one fraught with sacrifice and pain, but ultimately meaning. Orwell mused that this was far more attractive than drowsy, comfortable hedonism. When we consider that members of the well-fed, well-groomed upper classes are often finding political causes to get stirred up in - -- and this is true today as it was a century ago -- I wonder if it's because they're so bored by the meaninglessness of that comfortable existence that they feel compelled to find some cause to fight for.
Speaking of people who go astray, I'm reading Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist. Fascinating study of Kaczynski and the intellectual/cultural currents he grew up in.
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