Khadaji's Whatcha Readin' - March 2013 Edition

[Cat_Whisperer]

Leftover business from last month’s thread -

I’m reading this recommendation from last month’s thread, “Dust.”

@Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela

Is that the book by Edmund Conway? For some strange reason, the Toronto Public Library doesn’t have anything by him. I may have to actually buy it.

Yup, that’s the one.

@Athena

Reading Pure now. Pretty good post-apocalypse story. The world is divided into “Pures”, people who were protected from the Big Bad Nuclear Bomb and now live in a protected dome, and the “Wretches” who somehow survived the detonation. The wretches tended to meld with whatever was close when the bomb went off - a bicycle, other people, a dog - and that makes for some pretty creepy people. The second book in the trilogy is also out, and I’ll probably read that one, too.

Another one for my list.

@JohnT

Rather late in my updates, some of these should really be in the February thread, but as they say on Earth: C’est la vie…

Destroyer of Worlds, Larry Niven & Edward Lerner. Oops, another series. Double-oops - this is the third in this series. Hate it when that happens. Space opera, for those of you who are Niven fans, this series is billed as a prequel to Ringworld. Pretty good.

Supervolcano: Eruption, Harry Turtledove. Another series - I need to pay better attention when I buy books. Yellowstone National Park erupts with a fury unseen for 600k years and fucks our shit up. As disaster porn, it’s OK - could have been more disastery. I think the really bad shit is going to happen in the next book (mass starvation, years without a summer, etc.)

Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years, Paul B. Carrol & Chunka Mai. I like business profiles and this one was pretty good. The last 40-50 pages were a bit of a slog once the authors got away from the profiles and descended into biz-school speak. Still, a worthwhile read and definitely the best book I’ve read by a guy with the awesome name of “Chunka Mai.”

Firestar, Michael Flynn. A re-read, this book was at times just so early-mid 1990s that I commented on it to my wife. It probably was a bit more believable 20 years ago, but now it comes across as a Libertopia fantasy about how to create a private space industry, complete with meddlin’, over-regulating governments, corporate espionage, etc. I used to recommend this book highly… now I’ll recommend it with reservations.

American Icon: Alan Mullaly and the fight to save Ford Motor Company, Bryce Hoffman. A decent business profile of Ford Motor Company from 2005-2010. Could have been more detailed, imho, and suffered because the author had the approval of Alan Mullaly and Bill Ford (so he pulled his punches at times (at best, at worst you could describe many passages as flat-out hero-worshipping)), but all-in-all it was a relatively honest look at FMC during the Great Recession.

Currently starting the rest of the books in the “Destroyer of Worlds” series - there are three of them, but they are Larry Niven so they should be pretty fast reads. FWIW, I’m keeping a spreadsheet of all the books I’m reading in 2013 - so far I’ve read 21 books, a total of 10,066 pages. 13 fiction books (6,858 pages) and 9 non-fiction books (3,208 pages.)

And more for my list!