Which book are you reading now? Volume XIV

[MaryKB]

My wife was lent The Mental Load by a friend of hers, and suggested that I should read it as well.

The author is the mononymous "Emma", a French computer tech (according to the potted bio at the back). It's a collection of cartoons, some wry, some annoyed, some funny, about the cartoonist's life, and things she's learned, and wants to share. Haven't looked to see if the cartoons have been published online anywhere, but they might have been.

Off the top of my head, @Synsensa, @Lexicus, @hobbsyoyo, and @MaryKB (to name but 4 of you lovely CFCOT-ers) might also enjoy/ sympathise with/ cringe at (parts of) it.

I looked this up, very interesting. Most members at this forum should be reading this comic to learn something.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Halo: Contact Harvest by Joseph Staten is the story of how the human-alien conflict in the Halo series begins. It focuses on developing Sergeant Avery Johnson, an important supporting character in the later games. It has an engaging style with good action and breezy writing. The book also has great world-building shining a light on everyday life in a number of planetary and shipborne settings, the alien society of the Covenant, further details on the technologies of said universe, and the history of the species involved. I will never cease to be amazed how a game where you can headshot a 13-year old kid's online avatar and teabag them while disparaging remarks on your ethnicity and parentage are hurled your way can have such deep lore.

Berries: A Global History by Heather Anderson is a short book on fruits that are (culinarily-defined as) sweet, juicy, round, and small. The sections of the book illustrated well by color photographs cover production, mythology, biology, and histories as food, poisons, and medicine. Brief appendices cover botanical details, various recipes, and informative resources. The only issue I have is relatively poor coverage of scientific details compared to other ones.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I started reading "A Farce to be Reckoned with" by Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley, but then got distracted when I found audiobooks of "The Kingkiller Chronicle" by Patrick Rothfuss were posted to YouTube. I read them just last year but am enjoying listening to them now.

 

[EnglishEdward]

I have just finished reading:

Tommy Atkinson

by the late Australian author

John Laffin

As militaria, it is quite interesting although he does get a bit repetitive in trying
to define the common characteristics of the ordinary English soldier.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I'm getting pretty excited about having a little one but there is some scary stuff in here about the birth.

The book did make one excellent point on fatherhood - it's only since the industrial revolution that fathers withdrew from proactive parenting. The division of labor that industrialization allowed for made things go side ways. Now a lot of dads are being more active participants in raising kids and think it's like this cool new trend but it's really a reversion to the norm.

 

[warpus]

I just finished reading the Dreaming Void by Peter F Hamilton

Holy mother of Gord, I loved the ending and how things came together, not only from the Void trilogy but from Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. I admit I laboured through all these books, but now everything seems to be picking up towards some sort of grand finale maybe.

As soon as I finished this book I picked up the net book,The Evolutionary Void, which is what I'm reading now.

 

[Kyriakos]

Alice in Wonderland.
For possible use in the final part of my seminar (I doubt it)

 

[EnglishEdward]

I have just finished reading:

The City in the Middle of the Night

by the US author

Charlie Jane Anders

It starts off very good with some interestng ideas about the descendants of colonists
getting by living on a non rotating planet with a hot side and a cold side, but drifts into
an emotional lesbian transpecies Mills and Boon style love drama that is not my style.

 

[Cutlass]

 

[Phrossack]

Finished The Squad and the intelligence operations of Michael Collins by T. Ryle Dwyer. Again, not an academic work, and does a lot of summarizing and quoting from the testimonies of the Squad's members, but still a decent intro to the subject. The IRA's intelligence network was truly incredible during the War of Independence, and it seems little happened in Ireland without them knowing about it. They routinely intercepted, deciphered, and disseminated British reports and orders even before the intended recipients did, and could count on the aid of people all over most of Ireland and even some in England. I'm now looking up the testimonies directly and just read Frank Thornton's.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Cybersecurity Blue Team Toolkit by Nadean Tanner is focused on the specific tools used to secure systems and networks, particularly open source ones like Metasploiter. It still covers important cybersecurity concepts such as the Principle of Least Privilege, but it is not suited for those seeking theory and generalities. The book is aimed at a nontechnical audience (e.g. networking basics, walking through installation instructions) and has caveats on the legality of using certain tools like penetration testers.

 

[Phrossack]

Not a book, but I'm now reading through the official Irish Bureau of Military History witness testimonies from the 1950s of those who took part in the Easter Rising and the War of Independence.

About three down, 1,770 to go.

Up next is The James Connolly Reader, the collected writings of the Irish socialist revolutionary.

 

[Ajidica]

@Phrossack if you are interested in a book on obscure conflicts, I would recommend A J Venter's Portugal's Guerilla Wars in Africa or Ludo de Witte's The Assassination of Lumumba.
Slowly working my way through Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Time of Phillip II and Talbot Mundy's Tros of Samothrace.
Mundy is an interesting figure, a near contemporary of Robert Howard (Conan!) he was a British author who after spending time in India and joining the Theosophist movement, because staunchly anti-colonial. Tros is about a Greek refugee prince/priest who flees to Britain to assist the druids - who are followers of the Old Ways like Tros- in defeating the imperialistic Romans. According to wikipedia, the book caused a bit of a stir when it was released because it portrayed the Romans, especially Julius Caesar, as bad guys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talbot_Mundy

 

[Phrossack]

@Phrossack if you are interested in a book on obscure conflicts, I would recommend A J Venter's Portugal's Guerilla Wars in Africa or Ludo de Witte's The Assassination of Lumumba.
Slowly working my way through Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Time of Phillip II and Talbot Mundy's Tros of Samothrace.
Mundy is an interesting figure, a near contemporary of Robert Howard (Conan!) he was a British author who after spending time in India and joining the Theosophist movement, because staunchly anti-colonial. Tros is about a Greek refugee prince/priest who flees to Britain to assist the druids - who are followers of the Old Ways like Tros- in defeating the imperialistic Romans. According to wikipedia, the book caused a bit of a stir when it was released because it portrayed the Romans, especially Julius Caesar, as bad guys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talbot_Mundy

I have a backlog at the moment, but when I was in my African conflict phase (triggered by playing Far Cry 2), I did read a book on the Rhodesian War and a pair of books on the Border War (32 Battalion and 19 with a Bullet). I also started on Africa's World War before tragically drowning in the alphabet soup of People's Fronts of Judea. Even the author admitted readers might want to throw up their hands in confusion at the mess of acronyms and special jargon! It was interesting reading, though the author was surprisingly personally involved in some of the politics described.

Speaking of Lumumba, I did just watch The Siege of Jadotville. I had no idea about the Secretary-General!

 

[Ajidica]

I have a backlog at the moment, but when I was in my African conflict phase (triggered by playing Far Cry 2), I did read a book on the Rhodesian War and a pair of books on the Border War (32 Battalion and 19 with a Bullet). I also started on Africa's World War before tragically drowning in the alphabet soup of People's Fronts of Judea. Even the author admitted readers might want to throw up their hands in confusion at the mess of acronyms and special jargon! It was interesting reading, though the author was surprisingly personally involved in some of the politics described.

Speaking of Lumumba, I did just watch The Siege of Jadotville. I had no idea about the Secretary-General!

Ha! I also got interested in independent Africa after playing Far Cry 2!
If you are interested in learning more about the death of Hammarskjold, Susan William's released a good book recently on it, Who Killed Hammarskjold? The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa. It goes into great detail on the political situation in British Rhodesia, Katangese/Belgian/Anglo mining interests, and South African skulduggery.
I echo the issues with Prunier's book (Africa's World War) being an alphabet soup of People's Fronts of Judea. Romeo Dallaire's Shake Hands with the Devil is an excellent, albeit extremely depressing, book.

 

[Takhisis]

Tros is about a Greek refugee prince/priest who flees to Britain to assist the druids - who are followers of the Old Ways like Tros- in defeating the imperialistic Romans. According to wikipedia, the book caused a bit of a stir when it was released because it portrayed the Romans, especially Julius Caesar, as bad guys.

It's amazing how a power-hungry man who sought office to be protected from prosecution and then started war after war (killing hundreds of thousands and eventually leading to the elimination of an entire people) in order to gain -and then stay in- office to avoid debtors' prison has for so long been hailed as a hero.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Halo: The Cole Protocol by Tobias Buckell is book about the early stages of the Human-Covenant War, focused on an asteroid habitat where both sides seem to have found an uneasy truce. It shows the grittier side of the Halo universe with war refugees, Insurrectionist smugglers, and clashing agendas within both sides. Sangheili/Elite culture is given a bit of a spotlight. While the action is good, the novel suffers from underdeveloped characters, either killing them off before we get to know them or cramming so many viewpoints not enough attention is given.

___

The 2-Hour Job Search by Steve Dalton is about using technology and focused approaches to search for jobs faster. The two hours mentioned refers to the preparations required to obtain and maintain networking contacts. There are three basic steps. First is prioritizing a list of employers by initial impression, posting recency/frequency, and the presence of potential contacts. This is followed by using short emails aimed at helpful contacts and tracking them within 3 and 7 day windows. The final step, contingent on securing information interviews from contacts, involves doing research, proper questions, and follow-up.

While the book does fall to the usual career advice work pitfalls like a reliance on anecdotal evidence and overselling, it does have some solid advice like focusing on contacts who want to help you. It has a realist approach that acknowledges you can't control outcomes reflected in Troubleshooting sections and the algorithmic approach that removes the need for hemming and hawing. Moreover, the book is a great starting guide for those with little of knowledge of jobs search principles.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Berries: A Global History by Heather Anderson is a short book on fruits that are (culinarily-defined as) sweet, juicy, round, and small. The sections of the book illustrated well by color photographs cover production, mythology, biology, and histories as food, poisons, and medicine. Brief appendices cover botanical details, various recipes, and informative resources. The only issue I have is relatively poor coverage of scientific details compared to other ones.

The books you find are always so fascinating to me. You have some great, varied taste. Every time I read your posts I feel like I should read more non-fiction, but then I look at my home library and it tells me otherwise

 

[Takhisis]

I found myself a collection of Thomas Mann's short stories (including Death in Venice, Tonio Kröger and other essentials).

 

[Ajidica]

Reading Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin and being about half way in, I'm fairly unimpressed by it. Sorkin is clearly aping the style of the classic Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by focusing heavily on people's recollections to show all the corporate politics and "in the boardroom" scenes. That worked in Barbarians because that is what the book was fundamentally about: a Shakespearean tragedy of hubris and pride. However, Sorkin only starts once the Great Financial Screw-Up was starting, so there is no coverage of the dynamics that prompted these banks and firms to make increasingly risky bets. He also spends basically no time covering the economics of the situation, either in why mortgage backed securities were so profitable for financial institutions or why a downturn in the American mortgage industry posed an existential threat to world economy. The author's research of interviewing involved parties to try and reconstruct "in the boardroom" scenes means that his interviews are almost entirely with people who are trying to salvage their reputation (cough Lehman Brothers cough). Since Sorkin didn't really cover any pre-2007 stuff and doesn't really go into the economic background to the crisis, it has the odd effect of making the financiers that plunged us into the crisis the "heroes" of the book.
Given that we have Adam Tooze's Crashed, I don't see much need for anyone to read Too Big to Fail if they are looking for a history of the crisis and why it happened. Unless a lot of economics is hiding in the second half, I rate the book a 1/5 for an account of why the crisis occurred and a 3/5 for a general history of the crisis.
Sorkin is also terrible about footnoting his sources. I get that he can't really footnote personal interviews, but one instance that stood out to me was when he mentioned how a Reuters headline captured the spirit of the week, but didn't provide a footnote or endnote to the actual headline. His history also feels a bit dodgy in spots, like how he talked about Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac accepting poorer quality loans as part of a Clinton/Bush era push to bring homeownership to "underserved borrowers" and that lead in part to the GSE's financial problems. No direct source is presented in the text. However, in Crashed, Tooze notes (and cites) that although the GSE's were under government directive to expand their lending operations, all loans they issued had to conform to some fairly strict requirements. The infamous 'ninja loans' (no income, no job or assets) were the product of private financial institutions. (Though Tooze notes that the GSE's pioneered the concept of mortgages being a "originate to distribute/securitize" instrument that turbocharged the profits of financial institutions in the 2000s before it all came crashing down.)