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What book is everyone reading at the moment?

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My current pile.
J. K. Rowling's Dumbledores's Army Reunites at Quidditch World Cup Final. Will the saga ever really end?

Jack Rinella: Becoming a Slave, The Theory & Practice of Voluntary Servitude

Patrick Turner: Serial Killer Doctors. Interesting, especially the coverage of Bodkin Adams.

Gordon Kerr: College Killers- School Shootings in North America and Europe

Geoffrey Canada: Fist Stick Knife Gun - A Personal History of Violence

John McWhorter: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue- The Untold History of English. Fascinating

Laura Antoniou - Cinema Erotica

Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot and the Greenshoe Folly. Her abandoned novella (which partly became Dead Man’s Folly) now published.

Jesse Bering: Perv- The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

 Robin Gardiner: The Great Titanic Conspiracy- Cover-Ups and Mysteries of the World's Most Famous Sea Disaster. Some research for a time-travel RPG scenario on the doomed ship.

Kathryn Joyce: Quiverfull - Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement. Stross was right about those nuts.

Witold Rybczynski: One Good Turn- A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw. Surprisingly fascinating.

Jim Wilson: Nazi Princess- Hitler, Lord Rothermere and Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe. More RPG research.

Michael McGuire: Believing- The Neuroscience of Fantasies, Fears, and Convictions. Can religion and other delusions be explained purely by neurosciences? Can they be fixed?

Paul Doherty: Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II. Part research and part pleasure, Dr. Doherty's non-fiction is as good as his novels.

Douglas Botting: Gerald Durrell- The Authorised Biography. I read and enjoyed a lot of Durrell in my teen years so I grabbed the bio.

S. T. Joshi: I Am Providence - The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft

David R. Montgomery: The Rocks Don't Lie- A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood. A brief summary; the flood didn't happen.

Raven A. Nuckols: Had the Queen Lived- An Alternative History of Anne Boleyn

Tim Hanley: Wonder Woman Unbound- The Curious History of the World's Most Famous Heroine. More bondage and sexual deviancy...
 
Lennart Hyland said:
I'm about halfway through Patrick O'Brian's Master And Commander, the first book in the Aubrey/Maturin series.

Its quite good so far! Though I've heard that book 2 and 3 are even better, so I'm looking forward to them.
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Oh dear, oh dear. You've got the habit then. There is no such thing as reading "Just One" or even two or three of the Aubrey/Maturin series. Or reading them just once.

I'm reading "Extreme Cosmos" by Bryan Gaensler - a young astrophysicist with the most lucid writing about cosmology I've come across. Published in 2011 so probably a few light years out of date. I had downloaded a podcast by him and was thrilled to see this book on display in the local library.
http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Cosmos-Brightest-Heaviest-Universe/dp/0399537511

Also "Lying" by Sam Harris - a long and persuasive essay which describes the harm done by the sorts of white lies we (well, I) usually justify.
http://www.amazon.com/Lying-Sam-Harris/dp/1940051002


Alan Rusbridger's "Play it Again: an amateur against the impossible." The Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian set himself an almost impossible task: to learn, in the space of a year, Chopin's Ballade No. 1 (a piece that inspires dread in many professional pianists).
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0099554747
 
_Trapped Under the Sea_ -- Neil Swidey

A book about an entirely preventable accident, and its aftermath. Well-written.

No, the situation doesn't have the poetry of _The Perfect Storm_.
 
_The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison_

I can't. Empathize with her or her writing, that is.

I'm sorry to leave youth behind, but not its foolishness.

A more-engaged review, here:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/30/empathy-exams-leslie-jamison-review

from that otherwise positive review:

The more instructive exemplars for the kind of essayism Jamison wants to practice are Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm, whom she either cites or passingly invokes, though neither is notably "empathetic" and probably the better for it.
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I'm trying to figure out for myself why I enjoy those writers, and why I can't really stand Jamison. Maybe there's a principle involved, or maybe it's the crazy family I grew up in. Don't want to go anywhere near your pain -- after that.

If you could read people's minds, your head would quickly explode. Why care about one person or one thing over another? For me, that's more than a rhetorical question. I'm really asking myself this.
 
Reading the Outlaws by W.E.B. Griffin.



Book VI in THE PRESIDENTIAL AGENT series
by W.E.B. Griffin
and William E. Butterworth IV
Published 28 December 2010.
Things are not exactly what they used to be for Charley Castillo. The former Presidential Agent’s Office of Organizational Analysis has been disbanded, he and his colleagues have been abruptly retired, and the sudden death of the President has brought a much more unsympathetic commander-in-chief into the Oval Office.
“Just how many bodies did this Castillo leave scattered all over the world?” the President asked.
“I really don’t know, Mr. President.”
“You’re the Director of National Intelligence!” the President snapped. “Shouldn’t you know a little detail like that?”
But just because Castillo is out of the government doesn’t mean he’s out of business. As experience has very painfully demonstrated to him, there are a number of things that the intelligence community can’t do, won’t do, or doesn’t do well, and he has the men and assets to help set things straight.
But the first opportunity, when it comes, is shocking: A barrel marked BIOLOGICAL HAZARD from an anonymous shipper arrives at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The barrel contains some of the most dangerous biohazard material on earth — all of which was supposed to have been destroyed during a raid orchestrated by Castillo on a secret Russian factory in the Congo.
Clearly, the message is that more of the deadly material remains, but who has it and what do they want? With lives at stake — possibly if not probably his own included — Castillo’s gut feeling is that he’s not going to like the answers one damn bit . . . .
 
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A year ago, I suggested the quality of the writing in Craig Johnson's Sheriff Longmire mysteries "justifies comparison to Hammett, Chandler, Ross Macdonald, John D MacDonald, Sue Grafton, and other luminaries of this genre." Now that I've finished the first seven of those novels, it's time for that comparison.

Johnson's been averaging one Longmire novel per year. Dashiell Hammett wrote many short stories, but only five novels. Raymond Chandler completed only seven. Of Craig Johnson's first seven, I'd say two are as good as Chandler's two best but not quite as good as Hammett's two best. None are as weak as Chandler's or Hammett's worst. The weakest of Johnson's first seven Longmire novels is on par with Robert B Parker's best Spenser novels.

As with Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series, time moves slower in the fictional universe. Johnson's first seven novels, which cover seven years of publishing, cover a year and a half of Sheriff Longmire's life.


Reading those books within a single year, I began to notice the body count, which would be easier to overlook in a series set in densely populated California, Florida, Chicago, New York, or Boston. Johnson's Longmire series is set in Wyoming, where the number of real-world homicides rarely exceeds 20 per year and is often a single digit. You'd expect most to occur within Wyoming's population centers, but quite a few have been depopulating Sheriff Longmire's already sparsely populated Absaroka County.


Johnson challenges readers with flashbacks, dream sequences, literary allusions, and a first-person narrative whose reliability may be compromised by ethanol, dehydration, hypoxia, hypothermia, concussion, or plain old wishful thinking:

"You believe that stuff?"

I was just as glad that he hadn't been privy to my experiences in this very area of the mountains more than a year ago, when I had seen and heard my share of strange things. "I believe there were spiritual signposts that these tribes put into place so that no matter how dire the situation, the members would never be tempted to do things the tribe considered absolutely taboo." I felt tired and slouched into the seat. "Imagine beginning to see people, things that no one else can see, and in punishment the real people around you begin drawing away—leaving you to these...spirits."

"Isn't that kind of like pitting the monsters of your imagination against the monsters of human nature?"

I smiled. "You have been reading your Dante." I stared out the side window and wasn't smiling when I made the next statement. "Wonder who would win."
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That's a key passage from early in Johnson's ambitious seventh novel, Hell is Empty. (Its title comes from Shakespeare's The Tempest.) This conversation refers to events of the first Longmire novel (The Cold Dish), asks the central questions that make this novel more than a murder mystery, and warns readers who haven't been reading their Dante they might want to see what Wikipedia has to say about the Inferno before reading further.

I stood and was a little uneasy, feeling confused and angry. "When I carried Henry and this kid off the mountain, I was dehydrated, hypothermic, concussed..."

"Like now?"

I bit my lip but could hardly feel it, remembered the balaclava and pulled it up over my nose. "Worse; a lot worse."

He laughed. "Well, the evening is young."
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I had the odd experience of reading this novel just two weeks before I embarked upon a long-planned trek through the area of its main action.


"They have left the trail and are now going across Paint Rock Creek."

"Then what?"

"Up"
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Those falls are at an elevation of about 10,000 feet. The summit, which cannot be seen in this photograph, is about 3000 feet higher.


Ross Macdonald is often regarded as master of the psychological detective novel because his protagonist Lew Archer recommended psychotherapy to clients and solved cases by exploring the emotional and family histories of victims and suspects.

Craig Johnson's folksy Sheriff Walt Longmire often distrusts his own self-analysis and tries to solve cases while treating people fairly. As an officer of the law, his professional obligation to pursue justice without interfering with the free lives of citizens provides much of the conflict, and much of the rest comes from his desire to favor friends, family, and voters without giving special favors. In my opinion, the Longmire novels offer more philosophical and psychological depth than Ross Macdonald's novels.

"And the moral of the story is?"

"What is it with you white people and morals? Maybe it's just a story about what happened."
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Hammett's Continental Op told you what happened. Johnson tells stories about what happened.
 
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I usually read to be in touch with a mind I admire, more than I read for the subject matter.

_Stringer_ is great.

Anjan Sundaram decides he's sick of the study of mathematics at Yale, and wants to be in touch with the real world. So he becomes a rookie reporter in the Congo, and experiences various misadventures.

I'm only half-way through, but I really like it so far.

(He could be completely misinforming me about the Congo, for all I know.)
 
jenspen said:
Oh dear, oh dear. You've got the habit then. There is no such thing as reading "Just One" or even two or three of the Aubrey/Maturin series. Or reading them just once.
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Haha well I just finished the second one Post Captain quite good but not like the first.

I absolutly want to continue on this series and start with the third book but I recently went by a pocketbook store and found a nice copy of 1984 by George Orwell. But we'll see, I guess I'm gonna rush through 1984 since I already miss Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin ;)
 
I'm not someone who should be arguing about the Duke Lacrosse case. Absolutely everything about it is Not My Thing.

I wasn't so sure about this until I read the first two chapters of _The Price of Silence_, and learned (what are purported to be) the basic facts of the case. Very quickly, I lost interest.

But I was rather surprised by two things:

1) That someone could actually write over 600 pages on a case where everyone acted like jackasses or worse, and then it went downhill from there.

2) That a huge crowd of people could care enough to "swarm" the reviews of Amazon. Of 147 reviewers, 93 gave it 1 star. Some of these 1 star reviews are rather articulate.

The book obviously isn't that bad (judging by the first two chapters). Clearly, passions are still running high. (Which is what I find slightly remarkable.)

As I said, I'm too much of a loner elitist hipster to care about this stuff, so I'll bow out, having raised an eyebrow. I'd mostly rather dwell on things I admire.

My wife -- who cares much more about issues related to this -- also finds the whole thing to be a sordid mess, so I'm not alone, at least in this house.

Wikipedia entry on the accusor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Mangum

Amazon reviews: http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Sil...s/1451681798/ref=dpx_acr_txt?showViewpoints=1

Dorothy Rabinowitz review in Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052702304081804579558413534190406

Done. No more.
 
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Anthony Beevor's Crete: 1941.

Currently he's providing a crash-course in the UK/Dominion's campaign on the Greek mainland, and the politics behind it on both sides.

Having just finished an American Marine's memoir (Robert Leckie), it's taken a little effort to get acquainted with the British historian's style again, but that's not to say it isn't readable. So far I'd definitely recommend it, just not for light bedtime reading.
 
Was that Leckie's A Helmet for my Pillow?

It is maybe 40 years since I read that. I know it was after my time in the Corps, and that ended over 50 years ago.

Maybe it's time to read it again? What did you think of it, Polaris?
 
xterra said:
Was that Leckie's A Helmet for my Pillow?

It is maybe 40 years since I read that. I know it was after my time in the Corps, and that ended over 50 years ago.

Maybe it's time to read it again? What did you think of it, Polaris?
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It sure was. I've been on a WW2 kick lately and had just finished his Challenge for the Pacific (about the overall Guadalcanal campaign). I liked that one a little better, actually. His descriptions of the jungle darkness and being shelled by battleships are fantastic, the dude could write.

I was disappointed with how much of his experiences in the HBO show were made up out of whole cloth when so much of Helmet would have been well worth depicting instead.

It was cool though finding out he recuperated in Martinsburg, WV, a 20 minute drive from my hometown.
 
Martin Amis's "Other people". Superb up until the horribly muddy ending.

The cop can't have been her previous would-be killer, so his only reason to introduce her to the (recently released from jail) killer in a derelict warehouse would be that he sympathised with the killer or was in cahoots and was playing an extremely deep game worthy of John le Carré.

Which negates much of the plot as she could have evaded his grasp countless times, unless Amis is cleverer than me which is always a possibility ;)
 
Just finished HAPPY,HAPPY,HAPPY by Phil Robertson. on how he started Duck Commander calls.Now I am starting the Book In the company of Heroes by Michael J Durant. The pilot of Black Hawk down
 
COLONEL said:
Just finished HAPPY,HAPPY,HAPPY by Phil Robertson. on how he started Duck Commander calls.Now I am starting the Book In the company of Heroes by Michael J Durant. The pilot of Black Hawk down
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Slight nit-pick: the pilot of the second UH-60 to be downed inside the non-green zone part of Mogadishu and the sole surviving pilot of either.
 
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