What are you reading?

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@meric@nwom@n

Re: What are you reading?

Post by @meric@nwom@n »

kristina wrote:Just back from a visit to the folks, so LOTS of reading time in airports and on flights.

I reread "Death of an Expert Witness" by P.D. James (I love her writing), and "In a Sunburned Country" by Bill Bryson. I want to visit Australia. Today. Really.
Just reading In a Sunburned Country now. Go visit OZ !

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Guinevere
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Guinevere »

Just finished my first Rebus novel -- Dead Souls. Kind of heavy for a 'tec novel, but it dealt with some difficult subjects. Not sure how I felt about it. Again, I think the female characters are a bit thin, and Rebus incredibly flawed -- which kind of overtook the "story." Perhaps in the context of the series seeing growth would be more enjoyable, but I read detective stories for amusement and down time, I read other kinds of books to contemplate weighty issues.

Also read my first Peter Robinson - Gallows View (Inspector Banks), which I liked very much, being "lighter" than the Rebus book.
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké

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Gob
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Gob »

I have to agree on Peter Robinson, being lighter, but still a damn good read. (I have all of his.)

If you like a lot of humour, and a bit of pathos, in crime / police procedural novels, try the "Frost " series, by R D Wingfield. They are a much better read than the TV series (David Jason) made of them.

Just reading"Old Flames" by John Lawton, one of a very deep series of crime novels set in late 50's / early 60's UK. (The Inspector Troy novels.)

Heavy going, and need a bit of history to enjoy them, but worth the effort. Probably the best "author find" of the last year.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Timster
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Timster »

Any Patricia Cornwell (aka Kay Scarpetta) fans?

Tanacia just saw the movie adaptation of Risk [I haven't seen it yet.] and was totally impressed.

And trust me, this is not her genre. I have read almost every book she has written and enjoyed them all.

A bit formulaic? sure. But very technically sound from a forensic point of view. And I rather enjoy the genre from a smart and savvy female perspective. very Unlike Murder She Wrote and being delegated to being just a "Dame with nice Gams".
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer-

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Crackpot
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Crackpot »

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Okay... There's all kinds of things wrong with what you just said.

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BoSoxGal
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by BoSoxGal »

Yard sales, Crackpot. ;) Also, check around to see if there is an infants/children's resale shop anyplace near where you live or travel - I worked in one in my youth, and it was amazing the fabulous quality baby furniture/supplies/clothes that could be had at a fraction of original price.



I am presently embarking into the world of Terry Brooks, reading The Sword of Shannara. My beau is a huge fan and lent me his childhood copy.

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For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan

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Crackpot
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Crackpot »

It's quite a good book it yells you things you could pick up used, things you should buy new and what things you don't need. As well as impartial ratings on the myriad of crap that's out there.
Okay... There's all kinds of things wrong with what you just said.

Jarlaxle
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Jarlaxle »

Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg

BSG: If you like fantasy books, I suggest Robert Salvatore. :)
Treat Gaza like Carthage.

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Guinevere
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Guinevere »

Surely a book entitled "Liberal Fascism" is pure fantasy :mrgreen:

I loved the Scarpetta books. Once I read one -- because I was bored and it was available at someone's beach house -- I raced through the rest of them and waited with anticipation for the rest. Really a well done series.

Currently on the nightstand:
Jane Eyre
The Lace Reader
The Wild Girl
A Calculated Risk
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké

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kristina
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by kristina »

I'm getting ready for a lightning visit to New England, and am taking "A Year in Provence" for tonight's redeye (I can never sleep on planes....grrrr)

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Gob
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Gob »

Just starting "Belching Out The Devil" by Mark Thomas.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

Andrew D
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Andrew D »

All of my reading plans went by the wayside when I encountered in our "library" (our house so full of books that we cram them into every available space) a copy of Joseph Heller's Something Happened. I had read it when it was new (mid-70s), but I had forgotten most of it. I reread it, and it is so phenomenally good that I immediately reread it again. One of the great novels of the twentieth century.
Reason is valuable only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe.

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Gob
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Gob »

Andrew D wrote:All of my reading plans went by the wayside when I encountered in our "library" (our house so full of books that we cram them into every available space) .
Envious! I still have a couple of thousand books in a mate's attic in the UK. I should charge him for their insulation value!
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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SisterMaryFellatio
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by SisterMaryFellatio »

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Hysterical....

Always thought she did a good West Country accent now I know why.

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Guinevere
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Guinevere »

Just started (well, hell, I've read three of them in the past 8 days) Tess Gerritsen's series about Boston Police Detective Jane Rizzoli and ME Maura Isles (yes, its also a new summer series on TNT). Great books, fast reads, very entertaining!
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké

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Gob
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Gob »

Signal Red

Just started this, it's a "novelisation" of The Great Train Robbery. I may or may not finish it. I'm finding the writings a bit lumpy, with chunks of "period detail" lumped in rather unartfully.

Saturday night I reread "Mort" by Terry Pratchett, just for some light entertainment.

BUT!! I'm awaiting delivery of;
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Synopsis
A reinvestigation of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" poses an alternative solution to the case that is based on hidden clues within the story's text, in a fan's recreation that illuminates unusual interstices between Doyle's fiction and the real world.
Being a HUGE Sherlokian, and one time member of the "Dartmoor Hounds" I'm anticipating this with glee. I only hope it's not a let down.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Gob
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Gob »

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Just re-reading this. If you like your humour thought provoking, and bone dry, it's a hoot...
Sometimes you think he must be making it up; but he's not. In the autumn of 1998, officials of the Department of Education were treated by their new Labour masters to a lecture by Dr Edward de Bono on his "six hats thinking system", which the doctor described as "the first new way of thinking to be developed for 2,400 years since the days of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle". Civil servants, he said, should put on a red hat while talking about hunches or instincts, a yellow one while listing advantages of a project, and a black one while adopting the role of devil's advocate.

There are limits, thank goodness, to the gullibility of officialdom, and multi-coloured hats never became government policy. Yet the fact that the ruling class even invited a man who peddles such tosh is one sign among very many in this joyous, exhilarating, angry and deadly assault on the march of unreason that gullibility is stalking the planet.

Wheen's thesis is simply stated. Reason is on the retreat. The values of the Enlightenment - "an insistence on intellectual autonomy, a rejection of tradition and authority as the infallible sources of truth, a loathing for bigotry and persecution, a commitment to free inquiry, a belief that (in Francis Bacon's words) knowledge is indeed power" - are daily being betrayed. And, armed with a sizzling pen, a filing cabinet as big as the Albert Hall, and a banner bearing the legend "scepticism and sobriety", the crusading Wheen has come to open our eyes to the dangers of that betrayal.

The annus horribilis in this process, he says, was 1979: the year when Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran dedicated himself to recreating the middle ages, and when at home, Margaret Thatcher, flanked and egged on by a bizarre collection of economic and philosophical mentors, set out to re-establish what she imagined to be Victorian values. The subsequent sleep of reason has everywhere, he says, bred monsters, some comical, others sinister; and, over 300 pages he parades them before us.

Here are pedlars of Nostradamus, and writers of newspaper horoscopes, and academics preaching the End of History, and believers in UFOs, and proclaimers of hidden meaning where no meanings exist (see for instance the ludicrous formulas, much loved by the Daily Mail, which uncover strange prophetic texts in the Bible). Here are the Reagans taking guidance from their astrologers; and the Clintons with their woolly advisers and their conversations with the late Eleanor Roosevelt; and the Blairs with Carole Caplin and co.

Some of the evidence Wheen quotes here goes way beyond parody: Hillary Clinton, for instance, telling the New York Times she was seeking a theory which would "marry conservatism and liberalism, capitalism and statism, and tie together practically everything: the way we are, the way we were, the faults of man and the word of God, the end of communism and the beginning of the third millennium. Crime in the streets and on Wall Street, teenage mothers and foul-mouthed children and frightening drunks in the parks, and the cynicism of the press and the corruption of the press and the corrupting role of television, the breakdown of civility and the loss of community." All part of the search for simple one-sentence answers to what reason tells us are the tangled and complex truths of the real world.

And here are the deconstructionists, preaching the truth that there are no truths, in language so dense and obscure that when one sceptical academic wickedly parodied it, they at first hailed his insight and then tried to maintain that they hadn't been hoaxed. And here are the management gurus, promulgating new age formulas some of which would hardly look out of place in the output of the Raelian movement, interspersed with plonking platitudes marketed for hundreds of guineas per paragraph.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/fe ... tion.news1
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Guinevere
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Guinevere »

Absolutely terrific so far:

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“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké

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dales
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by dales »

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Your collective inability to acknowledge this obvious truth makes you all look like fools.


yrs,
rubato

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loCAtek
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Re: What are you reading?

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