So... Read any good books lately?

Cafe Society
21

One of my favorite non-fiction books is Alfred Lansing’s Endevour: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage - about Lord Shackleton’s last expedition. This is the story that was made into the movie Endevour recently, and is an astonishing journey of survival, trapped in the ice around Antartica Shakleton finds himself going from planning to cross the continent to trying to save every man in his crew. Phenomenal reading, and truly moving.

For Fantasy, I’d also suggest Barry Hughart’s books about Master Li and Number Ten Ox. I’ve only read one of the three, The Story of the Stone, but they’ve been brought up in several other threads recently, and I am assured that all three are excellent books. Set in Fuedal China, they involve magic, politics, and a fascinating look at the Middle Kingdom. The other two books are The Bridge of Birds and Eight Skilled Gentlemen.

Another fascinating book, and affecting, is The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrad. This chronicles Scott’s last expedition, and is written by one of the surviving members of the expedition. Heart breaking at times, especially when you come to meet some of those who died in the push to the pole.

(What? Did I go through a phase of reading all I could about Antarctic exploration? Well, yes. Why do you ask? :smiley: )

Other books I’ve enjoyed that I like to recommend:

Norman MacLean’s book about the Smokejumpers and the Mann Gultch fire: Young Men and Fire. At times a discourse on fire science, at others a discussion of the effects of forest fires, and how they’re fought, and always an attempt to understand what happened to the men who were trapped by the fire.

Josephine Tey’s charming book about Richard the Third, and presenting a contrarian view of the monarch: The Daughter of Time. This is fiction, and so many historians object to it greatly, and far too much is made from short evidence for it to be truly convincing, but it at least raises a reasonable doubt about Richard’s villainy.

22

I have a lot of doubt about Richard’s villainy. I’d start a thread but I think it’s probably been discussed. Off to search.

I recently finished a Richard III fantasy called The Court of the Midnight King by Freda Warrington. Plausible explanations for all the Tudor spin.

23

Recent non-fiction:
Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II by Robert Kurson. A fascinating story about a small group of deep water wreck divers who discover a U-boat off the Jersey coast in the early-mid 1990’s.

*Dewdroppers, Waldos, and Slackers: A Decade-By-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the Twentieth Century * Rosemarie Ostler. The subtitle pretty much covers it; each chapter gives a nutshell history lesson as it pertained to the prevailing slang.

*The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers * Tom Standage. A short but thorough look at the history of the telegraph (starting with the mechanical versions), and its influence on society.

24

I read * Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar * by Simon Sebag Montefiore. It talks about the details of the personal lives of Stalin, Beria, and Yezhov. (Stalin, for instance, liked to plant rosebushes and feed the birdies in his yard and once ordered his limo driver to give a ride to some kids waiting in the rain at a bus stop.)

25

Whoever said A Short History of Nearly Everything hit the nail on the head. I bought that book when it first came out (because Bill Bryson is my favorite author) and it was so much better than even my expectations of him. Well worth the time it takes to read it since it’s a fairly large book! Plus it’s funny. I laughed out loud on quite a few occasions.

I just finished reading Slaughterhouse by Gail Eisnitz. It’s a book everyone needs to read. After visiting a cattle slaughterhouse and witnessing what goes on inside first hand, I did some research online and came upon this book. It’s gonna disturb you and you’re gonna hate it. But you won’t put it down, I can promise you. If you want to know what “USDA inspected” really means, if you want to know how “clean” the food you eat and feed to your family is, and if you’re concerned with animal welfare even the slightest bit, you should read this book. It’s why I don’t eat beef anymore. The author tried to get the story aired on Dateline and 20/20, but the producers told her it was “too graphic for the public” so she decided to write a book about it. If news channels have no qualms about showing us suicide bombers, murder victims, and crime on a regular basis, just imagine what something has to be like to be considered “too graphic” for TV.

26

WOULD.YOU.PEOPLE.JUST.STOP.RECOMMENDING.FASCINATING.BOOKS?!!!

I am not even to the pile of books that I have from about three years ago "Whatcha reading…"Threads.
I hate you all. Bastids.

Re-Thinking How You Parent and Look at Time kinda books:

In Praise of Slowness: How a worldwide movement is challenging the cult of speed. By Carl Honore. [size=1] It is my new favoritest book and I am prolytizing it to everyone. Because we all need to slow down and see things. It is also well written & researched and a pleasant read.

Above All, Be Kind by Zoe Weil. Raising a humane child in challenging times. I got this one through the library and liked it so much that I bought it. It was my newest most favoritest book until the above book came along. Which I think I am going to bite the bullet and buy that one too.
Chick History
Susan B. Anthony Slept Here: A Guide to American Women’s Landmarks We owe our Foremothers so much for giving us the freedom we now have to waste our lives the way we want too.
Feminine Ingenuity: How women inventors changed America by ann Mcdonald.
If anyone else has any other books to recommend along these lines, please let me know. I love this kinda stuff!
Donbas: A true story of escape across russia by Jacques Sandulescue. I read about this guy by way of his wife being interviewed in Oprah’s Magazine and how she learned of the horrors her husband went through during WW2 in Russia in a slave prison camp years and years later. I was intrigued, bought it and totally captivated by what he endured and survived.

It made me start looking for stories like this and I am always open for Holocaust survival stories or the Human Spirit Endures Despite Atrocities Bio’s kinda reading.

There is also an excellent book on the history of chocolate and the battle between Hershey and Mar’s. I cannot remember the author or exact title right now, but it was down right fascinating. Someone help me out.
Holiday’s in Hell by PJ O’Rourke is one of the most poignant, funny, anti-travel writing peices I have ever read. ( He traveled to the worlds political hotspots and covered the riots, rebellions and just problems with other countries.) He is a brilliant writer overall.

27

A novel satisfying your anthropological and sociological requirements would be Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.
Using appropriate styles and mediums of record, the author relates the gripping tales of an American traveller in the Pacific in the 1840s, a English cad, gifted in music, in Belgium in the 1930s, an investigative journalist in mid-1970s California, a present-day London book publisher, a clone raised to work in a diner in a future Korea and what appears to be the end of civilisation in Hawaii.
All strung together with strand of continuity.
Kind of like Mitchell’s first book, Ghostwritten, but on a grander scale.

28

Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a laugh-out-loud book about punctuation marks, of all things. My sis-in-law handed to me for Xmas, and it’s a riot.

I’m currently on Orson Scott Card’s The Crystal City, which is the latest in his “Alvin Maker” series-- essentially an alternate look at North America in the 1700s/1800s if folkloric magic was real.

29

These both sound really great. I’ve heard about Eats, Shoots, & Leaves and it’s already on my list.

30

I used to read a lot of these kinds of books when I was a teen. (Seemed the appropriate follow-up to bed-time stories from Edward Rowe Snow, doncha know?) The only one I can recall with any kind of accuracy years later is Alexander Solzhenistyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Dennisovitch. If you haven’t read it, do so, it’s eminently readable, and horrific, without ever going beyond the one day being described. It is fiction, but considering Solzhenistyn’s experiences, I’m not going to say it’s innaccurate.

31

THANKS! It is now on my amazon wish list ! Wooooooooooo!

32

I just finished reading Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons a while ago, and I’m still reeling from it. It’s very much a head trip… Banks uses flashback very, very well. I still don’t know how I feel about the ending. It was good, most definitely, but man… makes you feel torn up inside.

33

Running on Empty by Peter Peterson is probably the only sensible and balanced piece of political writing I’ve read in a long time.

I’m currently reading Moby Dick. It’s a lot more engrossing than I would have expected. The 100 pages on the whaling industry were fascinating (and I don’t mean that sarcastically).

34

I’ve been re-reading books a lot lately, but two new ones I’ve just finished are

Maskerade by Terry Pratchett. This is only the second Pratchett novel I’ve read, set on his fantasy “Diskworld”. But it’s also a send-up of Gaston Leroux’s “Phantom of the Opera”, every stage and screen version of it, and of opera itself. It’s a hoot, because I’ve always wanted to comment on the stupidity of all the characters in Leroux’s novel, and Pratchetts says all the things I’d want to. “When you talkedc to Christine, it was hard to suppress an urge to look into her ear to see if you could see daylight coming through from the other side.”
A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by John Steele Gordon. If you ever undertook a big project that went bad, you hve to read this. It took 11 years and numerous attempts, with extensive redesigning of the cable and the equipment to finally succeed in this. The monetary cost was fabulous, and I’m amazed that they continued to find backers. Cyrus Field must have aged at leas twice as long as the project took. A good, but surprisingly short, read.

35

If you find yourself really fascinated with whaling and other matters nautical, I can’t recommend Edward Rowe Snow’s books highly enough. He’s got, I think, about 20 books each divided up into chapters about a ship, or some kind of nautical incident. They are great bathroom reading books. The problem is that many are out of print - your best bet to find them is see what your local library has, and see if the narration is something you’d be interested in reading further. However, one word of warning - he doesn’t get bogged down in details, but he doesn’t sugar coat things either: cannibalism, murder, and rape are all discussed.

36

I am curently reading Bill Bryson’s Neither Here Nor There, a hilarious record of his travels around Europe in the mid-nineties. For language buffs I recommend another Bryson book,* Made In America*, where he shows how the American language began diverging from English well before the Revolutionary War.

37

“Adam’s Curse: A Future Without Men” by Bryan Sykes.

However you might want to read “The Seven Daughters of Eve,” his earlier book, first.

Or, don’t read either of them, which is by far the best choice. They’re like mental crack. You can’t put them down once you start, you’ll be up all night and your family will think you’re in a book coma.

38

lessee, the last two books I read through were in November- Jan Karon’s SHEPHERDS ABIDING (another Mitford novel) and Hank Hanegraff’s THE LAST DISCIPLE (about the writing of Revelation by John & the unfolding of the Tribulation under the AntiChrist Nero Ceasar- it’s published by Tyndale, which also publishes the Left Behind series & Tim LaHaye is angry about it). If one likes the Mitford books, SA lives up to the rest. TLD is an interesting alternate view of Revelation & a not-bad Apostolic era romance- better written than the LB series for sure! L

Non-fiction I’m skimming- both Christmas presents from a pastor friend who also deals books- both volumes of The Autobiography of Herbert W. Armstrong and Israel Regardie’s The Eye in the Triangle- An Interpretation of Aleister Crowley…

39

That’s more incentive than warning to me.

Thanks for the advice.

40

The two most recent books I’ve read were “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell, and “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norris” by Susanna Clarke.

Cloud Atltas is a sort of collection of short stories set between 18th century and the far distant future. As you read further you discover the interconnecting links between the characters in the stories. It’s a great book, but very difficult to describe, and definitely not to everyone’s taste.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norris is set in the 1800s, during the Napoleonic wars, in a sort of parallel universe England where magicians still exist. Mr Norris and Jonathan Strange are two magicians, and the book is the story of how they came to be and their adventures. It’s very well written, reading more like a historical novel than a fantasy novel, it’s over 1000 pages, and there are several story threads to follow, but it’s an excellent book.