What are you reading?

[Zavulon]

I think the last Safehold book was 5 years ago.
An unfortunate trend with sci-fi and fantasy authors is starting a series and not finishing. Weber, George RR Martin, Patrick Rothfuss, Robert Jordan (although dying is a valid excuse in his case lol).

Talking about George RR Martin, his "Tuf Voyaging" series is pretty nice, ironical and logically complete, but his "Song of Ice and Fire", is pure overvalued commercial work, and I'm not sure it should be finished at all. Say nothing about TV-adaptation, that totally ruined the work.

 

[g5000]

westerns are pretty rare now I read all of Louis La Moure ( cant spell his last name) books long ago, I really like sci fi but mostly for the action not the science. Ringo put out a series on a new kind of zombie like plague that devastates the world, Black Tide Rising is series name.

Snow Crash does not get deep into science. It's one of the most original books I've ever read.

If you like Black Tide Rising, you might like The White Plague by Frank Herbert.

 

[JBG]

I just finished reading A Conservative History of the American Left by Daniel J. Flynn. Daniel Flynn convincingly draws a more or less straight line between the Utopian colonies of post colonial New England to the climate change panic of the 21st century. The book explains that utopianism is often attractive, particularly to people who want to believe it and want to believe in it. Perhaps four words, from the description of the belief in the New Deal, sum it up best: "Action, not outcomes, mattered."
But I digress. The book starts with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock: "\

The Pilgrims, like America's secular communists of the nineteenth century, hoped to build a city upon a hill. And like other sectarian groups that later found refuge in America, the Pilgrims attempted to build their utopia upon communist principles****Under communism, which reigned in Plymouth colony from 1620 to 1623, Pilgrim bellies and investor wallets starved, Historians look back and ascribe myriad causes for these lean years. But the man whom the Plymouth colonists elected as their governor more than thirty times emphasized the role communism played in the colony's early woes. In Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford wrote:

"For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense."

The author makes the case that the more things change, the more things stay the same. The New Harmony commune in Indiana collapsed in ruins in the 1820's and 1830's. Some similar colonies fared marginally better, some worse. Some became sexual playgrounds for their leaders. Certain exploits, including those of the famous researching Alfred Kinsey, are unprintable.
The author traverses the 1960's and the self-immolation of a prosperous, promising era on college campuses. Shades of what is happening now.
In the early 2000's, the "climate change" hysteria has taken over:

Hysteria over global warming combined the worst of the primitive and the modern. Global warming emerged as the Armageddon for people who ridicule people who believe in Armageddon. The disturbing omens that primitives divined from mysterious eclipses, crippling droughts, and foreboding skies, urban sophisticates saw in ever-so-slight changes in the weather-save they had the nerve to call their auguries science. From the climate-controlled, indoor world where man presses a button to make it hot or cold, breezy or not, man hubristically imagined himself the master of the outdoor weather, too. Not the sun, not volcanoes, not the wind currents, but man was exclusively responsible for global warming a theory more heavily steeped in narcissism than pre-Copernican notions of a geocentric universe. And if gluttonous man could destroy the world, enlightened man could save it. Global warming allowed true believers to cast enemies as evil destroyers and themselves as noble redeemers.
Mankind stood on the brink of the end times. Sacrifices to the gods-offerings of recycled cans, forbearance from flushing the toilet, holocausts of SUVs-might appease Mother Nature. Failure to make the proper oblations certainly would unleash her righteous wrath.

Quoting Al Gore:

“Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem…Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis."

…. (T)he solutions curiously antedated, and are endorsed independent of, the problem. Public restrictions on use of private property, state punishment of large corporations, international bodies dictating national laws, and other long-standing dreams of the Left somehow reemerged as curatives to environmental woes. Alas, if the problem disappeared, the true believers would urge enactment of these suspect solutions as enthusiastically as ever.

A Conservative History of the American Left is clearly a tour d'force and worth the read (though it is a slog because so much information is new and unfamiliar). Then why am I giving it a "four?" The author does indulge in some demonization of the Left. While I am no fan of FDR, he comes close to calling him a Communist. Like many books of this genre, for example The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives' War on Fun by Noah Rothman, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson and others, the books do not concede any redeeming value to other beliefs. Put simply, they are strident.

I personally am not a conservative, though I am open to their ideas. This book doesn't help inch me to the right.

 

[Montrovant]

Talking about George RR Martin, his "Tuf Voyaging" series is pretty nice, ironical and logically complete, but his "Song of Ice and Fire", is pure overvalued commercial work, and I'm not sure it should be finished at all. Say nothing about TV-adaptation, that totally ruined the work.

I don’t care if something’s commercial or not, only if it’s well written and engaging. A Song of Ice and Fire is both IMO…what we have of it.

 

[Zavulon]

I don’t care if something’s commercial or not, only if it’s well written and engaging. A Song of Ice and Fire is both IMO…what we have of it.

As for me, it's "good", but merely "ordinary good" not "exellent" or "extraordinary".
There are no new ideas (or, at least, I didn't find them), and ideas is something what we are usually looking for in books.

 

[Skull]

Never read Orwell's 1984, but saw the later movie version with John Hurt & Richard Burton. Now I will read the book. Here is a pdf version for those who wish to dip into it:

https://files.libcom.org/files/1984.pdf

 

[Zavulon]

Never read Orwell's 1984, but saw the later movie version with John Hurt & Richard Burton. Now I will read the book. Here is a pdf version for those who wish to dip into it:

https://files.libcom.org/files/1984.pdf

Good book about a British version of totalitarism. Some good predictions about the modern world.

 

[Zavulon]

Just started "The Call of Cthulchu" by Lovecraft.

I was told that this work is useful for bettter understanding of American sense of fear (and it's difference from Romano-Germanic fear).

View attachment 948484

Nice book. As for me - too many "observations" and "feeling" and almost no actions. Very educative. Learned something about American fears. Are you actually afraid of small towns and other racial groups (and mixed races)?

 

[JBG]

This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row.
Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand).

The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick suc-cession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then.

This little vignette, from Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond has little to do with the central topic. It is one of the ingenious touches that the author employs to maintain people's focus through a very dense and scholarly work. To say the book is exhaustively researched would be an understatement.

Guns, Germs and Steel starts out with a question supposedly posed to the author by a New Guinea native, about why Europeans, rather than New Guineans conquered the world. The book's premise is that race and culture are not a factor. Geography turns out to be the central factor, enabling the Europeans (and others on a smaller scale) to conquer the world. I was exposed to the "Germs" portion of this hypothesis in the book 1491: The Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Mann posits that horses and rats were that vector and suggests that much of North America's Native American population was reduced by 90% to 98% by the spread of those diseases. In other words the migrant European population found far fewer Native Americans than had existed half a century before. If the native population was dense enough to have the famous major Aztec, Mayan and Inca cities and in the Midwest cities such as Cahokia, there was enough population to support transmission of highly contagious diseases.
Smallpox, diphtheria and typhoid raced through the native populations in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. In addition to the numbers killed, their leadership was decapitated, resulting in disorganization. Diamond mentions but does not emphasize this, focusing on the spread of crops, animal domestication, tools and weaponry. It is not surprising that Guns, Germs, and Steel appears in the bibliography of 1491; I stopped at the local library today and checked.

Earlier, when making notes, I noted that "(t)he book reminds me of what I flipped from article to article in the World Book. I just finished reading the chapter about Pizarro‘s conquest of the Incas. I feel like I am back in 1965 and 1966 reading the old encyclopedias." That holds true. Overall, I give the book four stars. I rarely give five. Here my quibble is that the book does drag in places, especially near the end. The 2003 postscript was less informative than I had hoped. Otherwise, a great read.

 

[Zavulon]

This little vignette, from Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond has little to do with the central topic. It is one of the ingenious touches that the author employs to maintain people's focus through a very dense and scholarly work. To say the book is exhaustively researched would be an understatement.

Guns, Germs and Steel starts out with a question supposedly posed to the author by a New Guinea native, about why Europeans, rather than New Guineans conquered the world. The book's premise is that race and culture are not a factor. Geography turns out to be the central factor, enabling the Europeans (and others on a smaller scale) to conquer the world. I was exposed to the "Germs" portion of this hypothesis in the book 1491: The Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Mann posits that horses and rats were that vector and suggests that much of North America's Native American population was reduced by 90% to 98% by the spread of those diseases. In other words the migrant European population found far fewer Native Americans than had existed half a century before. If the native population was dense enough to have the famous major Aztec, Mayan and Inca cities and in the Midwest cities such as Cahokia, there was enough population to support transmission of highly contagious diseases.
Smallpox, diphtheria and typhoid raced through the native populations in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. In addition to the numbers killed, their leadership was decapitated, resulting in disorganization. Diamond mentions but does not emphasize this, focusing on the spread of crops, animal domestication, tools and weaponry. It is not surprising that Guns, Germs, and Steel appears in the bibliography of 1491; I stopped at the local library today and checked.

Earlier, when making notes, I noted that "(t)he book reminds me of what I flipped from article to article in the World Book. I just finished reading the chapter about Pizarro‘s conquest of the Incas. I feel like I am back in 1965 and 1966 reading the old encyclopedias." That holds true. Overall, I give the book four stars. I rarely give five. Here my quibble is that the book does drag in places, especially near the end. The 2003 postscript was less informative than I had hoped. Otherwise, a great read.

The book is nice, but the very conception of "the geographic determinism" while has a big portion of truth is too simplificated, as for me. The author write, say, about lack of domestificable animals in North America and Africa, but we known that the same deer was domestificated in North Eurasia and was not domestificated in North America. And while the hunters and gatherers in America and Eurasia were quite similar, there were significant differences, too.
Anyway, the part about "steel" (about not growing, but mining resources) was just marked, not described.

 

[Zavulon]

And his next book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" ask pretty good question but failed even to search in the proper direction, by, say, ignoring The Bronze Age collapse (the end of the first globalisation).

 

[JBG]

The book is nice, but the very conception of "the geographic determinism" while has a big portion of truth is too simplificated, as for me. The author write, say, about lack of domestificable animals in North America and Africa, but we known that the same deer was domestificated in North Eurasia and was not domestificated in North America. And while the hunters and gatherers in America and Eurasia were quite similar, there were significant differences, too.
Anyway, the part about "steel" (about not growing, but mining resources) was just marked, not described.

I don't disagree. He was trying too hard to involve anything about biology or race. I'm no racist but there are differences among groups.

 

[Zavulon]

I don't disagree. He was trying too hard to involve anything about biology or race. I'm no racist but there are differences among groups.

Differences both biological and cultural.

 

[JBG]

Differences both biological and cultural.

Exactly. Political correctness has its limits.

 

[JBG]

I just finished reading Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Changed America (Paperback) by Les Standiford. Over the years, Carnegie has had a more beneficent image. Frick gets the moniker of being the "bad boy" who unleashed unnecessary bloodshed at the Homestead Steel Mill in 1892. It seems that Carnegie almost deliberately absented himself, left the hard decisions to others and let others take the blame for actions that he "was for until he was against."

As for the book itself I give it a 3.5, rounding it up to four stars. Until the descriptions of the end of the strike and the legal bloodbath between Carnegie and Frick, it does move slowly. For history buffs it is a very worthwhile read.

Frick, obviously intelligent, correctly foresaw what the results of world governance would be:

As I understand it, then, the proposition is to pledge the United States, now the richest and most powerful nation in the world, to pool its resources with other countries, which are largely its debtors, and to agree in advance to abide by the policies and practices adopted by a majority or two-thirds of its associates; that is, to surrender its right of independence of action upon any specific question whenever such a question may arise....Well, I am opposed to that. Of course I am. I don't see how any experienced businessman could fail to be, Why, it seems to me a crazy thing to do."

This book tells us a lot both about the Gilded Age, about common sense, and views of history.

 

[Zavulon]

Herman Kahn's "On Thermonuclear war" and "Thinking about unthinkable in the 1980s".
Nice books, both educative and entertaining.
Author try to understand and explain some strategic conception from (and for) a layman's point of view. Sometimes it oversimplificated, sometimes - simply wrong, but it worth money and time.

 

[whoisit]

My daughter sent us the audio book' The Mayflower' we plan to listen to it soon. It consists of 5 cd's.

 

[JBG]

I just finished reading Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up byAbigail Shrier. It is one of the best rebuttals to junk psychology that I have read. The book tells numerous stories about how both schools and popular culture push children to focus on “feelings” to the exclusion of accomplishment and personal growth. My own personal growth was hardly halcyon.

Nevertheless, despite these facts I agree with the book's premise. The therapy I did receive was of little use. I learned more from peers and certain teachers. I have been successful as a lawyer, husband and parent with little help from most of the professionals I had seen. This book largely confirms my own learning and experience over the years.

Unlike many children in their grades, my children have been encouraged to get wherever they can under their own power. You know, such old fashioned stuff as bicycling and walking. They are none the worse for wear. I cannot fathom either myself or my children being driven everywhere.

The book is a powerful statement in response to "medals for all" and rewarding people for just being on the earth.

 

[Harpy Eagle]

I am reading Before You Clock Out: A Retirement Readiness Guide

I am now within the 5 year window and have been reading books on retirement as a means to stay focused on the goal and to get some ideas.

And reading "The Sack of Panama"about the pirate activity during the 1600s in the Caribbean. A bit boring but not terribly so

 

[Skull]

Many pages of topical recent books:

Books - The Thinking Conservative