Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[Hampshire Nanny]

This morning, I listened to the last 20 minutes of The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester. I haven't decided what to listen to next, but on my Kindle I'm still reading Torch of Freedom by David Weber and Eric Flint. I'm getting close to the end of the Honor Harrington novels.

[Yapyap]

I'm once again back to very little reading time, but since my last post many pages back, I've read The Case of the Missing Marquess, which is the first in the Enola Holmes series by Nancy Springer and turned out to be an enjoyable children's/YA mystery starring the younger sister of Sherlock and Mycroft.

I've also started The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith / JK Rowling, which has been slow going due to aforementioned lack of time, but I'm enjoying it so far (~55% in). I suspect it'll be similar to my reaction to the first Cormoran Strike book, i.e. enjoyable but not outstanding - this seems to be turning into a series I can solidly rely on to give me several pleasant (if occasionally gory) hours of reading, but not necessarily something I'll be jumping at on the day of release.

[Apache]

I just finished The Siege: Agent of Rome by Nick Brown. This was an enjoyable historical fiction novel set around 270 AD in Syria.
http://www.amazon.com/Siege-Agent-Ro...ds=siege+brown
I just started Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, from the Red Baron to the F-16 by Dan Hampton.
http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Sky-Figh...rds+of+the+sky
Apache

[ccowie]

Originally Posted by Hampshire Nanny

This morning, I listened to the last 20 minutes of The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester.

I loved The Professor and the Madman and I'm interested to know if this book is as good. I've read some early travelogues by Winchester as well and really like them. So, is it good?

I"m currently reading The Dispossessed for the book club and Fool Moon by Jim Butcher. Enjoying both.

[Rev. Bob]

I'm finally lucid enough to have gotten halfway through Skin Game.

My.

The stakes, they have been raised, no?

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by ccowie

I loved The Professor and the Madman and I'm interested to know if this book is as good. I've read some early travelogues by Winchester as well and really like them. So, is it good?

I"m currently reading The Dispossessed for the book club and Fool Moon by Jim Butcher. Enjoying both.

I'm also reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin and having just finished the 8th of 13 chapters, I'm wondering where the science fiction begins. So far everything that has happened could, with a few minor changes, be made into a historical novel or an alternate history.

I've brought my Kindle Touch out of retirement and am now using it for my bedtime reading. The Paperwhite is better (and lighter) for bedtime, but using a separate Kindles for different books allows me to make notes on both books in separate "My Clippings" files so they don't get meshed together. The book I'm reading—actually a re-read—is one of the most remarkable books of quotations on the planet: The Great Thoughts, Revised and Updated by George Seldes and David Laskin. The Great Thoughts by George Seldes was a reworking of his earlier book (which I also read twice), The Great Quotations; which at nearly 900 pages was actually longer than the The Great Thoughts. David Laskin, who was working with Mr. Seldes on the revised edition of The Great Thoughts when Seldes died at the age of 104, added selections of his own, and as far as I can tell, remained very faithful to the spirit of his mentor.

Seldes wasn't very big on the type of one-liners that fill so many books of quotations, but preferred instead to provide as much of the textual context in which the thought was embedded necessary in order to make the original author's intent abundantly clear. As an example of what I mean, here is the first quote listed under the letter "A":

EDWARD ABBEY
(1927–1989)
American writer
Desert Solitaire (1968)

Every man, every woman carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.
…the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need—if only we had the eyes to see. Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us—if only we were worthy of it.… No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dreams.

The philosophical underpinnings of George Seldes' understanding of what makes a thought great are best displayed in his own words in the introduction to the original edition:

Mr. [Aldous] Huxley seems to have sensed or suspected that I had been working for many years under the impression that “great” thoughts must necessarily mean “good” thoughts, that I was not including the great and powerful and most important evil thoughts of princes, kings, dictators, and demagogues who had, not only in ancient times but only yesterday, ruled a large part, in fact a major part, of the self-styled civilized world. Mr. Huxley concluded:

Although several of our century’s greatest evil thinkers had already gone to their rewards at the time Mr. Huxley wrote this letter—Hitler by his own hand and Mussolini shot by his own people then hanged by his feet from the rafters of a gas station—Stalin was still murdering dissenters by the tens of thousands; the nation which boasted one billion inhabitants, China, was still an absolute dictatorship; and their little imitators were ruling countries by force, by imprisonment, torture, and death, and at best by brain-washing and mind-manipulation, while addressing their populations and the world with words, good or evil, important enough to be recorded. While Mr. Huxley’s suggestion changed substantially the content of The Great Quotations, it has had perhaps an even greater effect on this book. I have endeavored throughout to represent the evil and destructive ideas of the ages that have periodically made the world a worse place in which to live.

[ccowie]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I'm also reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin and having just finished the 8th of 13 chapters, I'm wondering where the science fiction begins. So far everything that has happened could, with a few minor changes, be made into a historical novel or an alternate history.

Well, any fantasy with slightest bit of technology (dirigibles, ansible) was deemed sci fi in the 70s. But, I think that Le Guin did need to create a new world to tell this story and make the points I think she's trying to make. It should make for some interesting discussion with the club.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

The book I'm reading—actually a re-read—is one of the most remarkable books of quotations on the planet: The Great Thoughts, Revised and Updated by George Seldes and David Laskin.

This had the happy effect of recalling to me two books I liked very much, Seldes's autobiography, Witness to a Century, and Abbey's Desert Solitaire. I see I shall have to look out Great Thoughts to the detriment, no doubt, of my hopes of reducing my TBR.

Witness to a Century is particularly interesting for its journalist's "I-was-there" take on key events of the 20th century, in the process disabusing much received wisdom about how those events played out.

[Hampshire Nanny]

Originally Posted by ccowie

I loved The Professor and the Madman and I'm interested to know if this book is as good. I've read some early travelogues by Winchester as well and really like them. So, is it good?

I've listened to three books by Winchester, and read by him. The Professor and the Madman was one of them. The third was A Crack in the Edge of the World, about the great San Francisco earthquake. It, and The Map That Changed the World capitalize on Winchester's training as a geologist. I read some criticisms of his books for telling the gist of the story in the first chapter and then rambling around dragging in ancillary info and expanding on a story that you already know the end of. I don't object to this style at all. I love the fact that I was driven to Wikipedia to look up "oolites". His books make me think, and I wind up learning something.

I've enjoyed all of the books so far. I will be getting more of them with my Audible credits.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: The Dragon Lord by David Drake. His take on the Arthurian Legends it seems.

Two adventurers in Arthurian Britain. OK, but not much to the story arc.

Now for another recent purchase: What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton. A collection of essays about her favourite books. I suspect that this will add to my wishlist.

[DrNefario]

Originally Posted by ccowie

Well, any fantasy with slightest bit of technology (dirigibles, ansible) was deemed sci fi in the 70s. But, I think that Le Guin did need to create a new world to tell this story and make the points I think she's trying to make. It should make for some interesting discussion with the club.

It's a "What If?" Surely that's one of the primary templates for SF?

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by alansplace

Well I'm changing again by shoving The Paper Magician onto the back burner with Mr. Mercedes and starting another book, Outlander (Outlander #1) by Diana Gabaldon in response to:

Sigh! I'm sure getting flaky with what I'm reading. I just saw a netflix movie called Under the Skin and just had to read the book it was based on, also called Under the Skin by Michel Faber. I've read the first chapter thus far and it's quite intriguing (as was the film).

In Michel Faber's suspenseful first novel, Isserley, an unusual-looking woman with strangely scarred skin, drives through the Scottish Highlands both day and night, looking for just the right male hitchhikers. She picks them up, makes enough small talk to determine she's made a safe choice, then hits a toggle switch on her car, releasing a drug that knocks her victims out. She then takes them to the "farm" where she lives...

Spoiler:

-and where the "processing" takes place-a terrifying procedure involving the removal of various body parts.

[bfisher]

Just finished "but beautiful" by Geoff Dyer. A book of imagined moments in the lives of some of jazz's greatest - Duke Ellington forever on the road, Lester Young dying, Chet Baker's self-destruction ...
all told in Dyer's wonderful fictional non-fiction

[Synamon]

Before signing up for Kindle Unlimited and sampling the titles available there, I cleared the decks the last few days by reading a few books I didn't want to wait to read.

The latest Department Q mystery, The Purity of Vengeance by Jussi Adler-Olsen was unconventional and twisted, just like the previous books.

I read Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke and The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, both nominated this month in the bookclub. Rama was all about alien technology and a bit detail oriented for my tastes, although the first person account by the space commander did liven it up a bit. The Dispossessed was heavy on physics and politics rather than scifi, but it was interesting to read a utopia since currently the opposite, dystopia, is all the rage.

I skimmed through The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion which I'd seen mentioned in this thread. It was a romantic comedy from the perspective of an autistic spectrum man, which didn't work for me, but I can see the appeal if that's your thing.

Off to download some KU titles, starting with #5 in Elly Griffiths' Ruth Galloway mystery series and Hugh Howey's Sand.

[LovesMacs]

I've just begun The Báthory Legend, a historical novel by the Slovakian author Jožo Nižnánsky. The book is based around a real person, Elisabeth Báthory, a late 16th-early 17th century Hungarian noblewoman who gained notoriety as a serial killer.