What book are you reading?

[Beskar]

Oh no, you can't blame me for Xenocide. That's where the series begins its steep, sudden, and irreversible dive. I tell my friends the same thing about Ender's Game that I do about The Physiognomy

I won't read it then. I didn't get around to starting yet anyway.

I did read: The Map by T.S. Learner. Admittedly, it wasn't that good in my opinion and the ending was very lacklustre. (if you sign up to his newsletter, you get the extended ending which ties it up.. no thanks.)

[Togakure]

Against All Things Ending by Stephen R. Donaldson, third book in the final quartet of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever and White Gold Wielder.

[Beskar]

Sorry Lemur, I ended up reading some of Xenocide. I think I am near the end but I agree, it reminds me of Starwars Expanded Universe in the badway.

And it just ended... that is a disappointing ending.

[Beskar]

Now that you have read the Enders Game, how does the book compare to the movie?

BTW, I loved Enders Game but didn't like Speaker for the Dead at all. So much so that Xenocide sits on my shelf unread.

Sorry Gregoshi, I must have over looked your post.

The Movie and the Book are both for different audiences. Would have been nice to have the 'Hive Queen' authored in the movie instead of the ending it had and having a longer length would have would prevent the feeling of 'lots of montages', even more so in comparison to what happened in the book.

Don't read Xenocide.

[naut]

What I'm reading: Equoid, but Charlie Stross. The best $1.99 I spent this week. (And he even forced the publisher to release it without DRM. How can I not reward that kind of behavior?)

Cross-dimensional unicorns with a desire to kill? Is that the same setting as the Concrete Jungle?

[a completely inoffensive name]

I gave up 3/4th through Speaker of the Dead when I was 12.

[Lemur]

Is [Equoid] the same setting as the Concrete Jungle?

Yep, it's the Bob Howard/Laundry series, which I strongly recommend to anyone who digs reading.

[Montmorency]

My average reading rate for books for pleasure (including days for which I read nothing from a book or long reading) is probably 5 pages or less. In other words, I don't read very much at all. So, I've decided to set a goal for myself: to read 4000 pages from books or long readings for pleasure over the next half-year - an average of about 20-to-25 pages per day.

Here's a proposed list of titles, alongside their page-counts (including nothing that is on the Internet and/or is a "short" reading, nor any fiction):

Non-Reality of Free Will - 225
Free Will Guide - 185
Evol Psych & Prop Attitudes - 70
The Measure of Mind - 250
Intro Phil Mind - 290
Cogito, Descartes & Thinking - 110
The Elm and the Expert - 120
Personal Identity - 120
The Unconscious - 115
Belief About the Self - 180
Self-Consciousness - 200
Epistemology of Decision - 90
Seeing Red, Study in Consc - 140
Verbal Minds - 105
Cognitive Integration - 195
Contradictions, Neurosci and Religion - 175
The Evolving Brain - 85
How Likely Extraterrestrial Life - 110
Pre-state Societies - 90
Logic Short Course - 105
Logical Properties - 55
Philosophy of Language - 150
Fixing Drugs - 155
The Sceptical Challenge - 125
Love, Freedom, & Evil - 180
No ancient Wisdom, no followers - 140
Unintended Cons Renewable Energy - 70
Prosopagnosia - 80
Adolescent Brain Dev - 80
Alexithymia - 50
Understanding Econ Growth - 105

You'll notice that many of these readings are fairly short; that's an accommodation to the shallowness of my interest and attention span. I feel as though a couple more hours a day of concerted reading should be manageable without impinging on my daily tasks. I feel up to it by now, though it might pale in comparison to the 5000+ pages of mixed non-fiction-fiction I read in a three-week period during my 15th summer, my apex in this regard. But hey, at least I'm improving, and have grown enough in confidence to rise to such an undertaking. I'll report back in half a year on my level of success. If it works out, perhaps I'll make up another Half-Year Plan, and push my limit toward a 30-to-35-page per-day average.



Which will it be?

[a completely inoffensive name]

I am finally about to finish reading Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and I want to take a break from LOTR at least for a bit before getting into Return of the King. I think I will start working on Pox: An American History by Michael Willrich.

[Gregoshi]

I am finally about to finish reading Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and I want to take a break from LOTR at least for a bit before getting into Return of the King.

Don't forget to read The Two Towers before Return of the King or you'll miss the key part where Aragorn falls off the cliff, into a river and nearly drowns...oh wait, never mind.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Don't forget to read The Two Towers before Return of the King or you'll miss the key part where Aragorn falls off the cliff, into a river and nearly drowns...oh wait, never mind.

haha, oh shoot I guess I was either not thinking or jumping the gun. but yes, I brought The Two Towers​ with me for winter break.

[Lemur]

Swords and Dark Magic, because a longtime friend is the editor, and he asked me to buy a copy, and I am a spineless sucker.

[Beskar]

I did read Prince of Thorns.

It is a dark medieval style setting. I am actually interested in reading the sequels as it apparently gets better in many ways, though there are some changes.

The main character who you read through the world from in many ways is evil and ruthless. As being a quite moral person myself, you would automatically guess "How am I able to relate to this character?", I dislike those fantasy games or stories where the evil choice is pretty much be a 'hithead, however, the main character is a cruel and calculated evil, you can understand why he acts in certain ways, you can see how his tormented past affected him, you can understand and sometimes even agree to the way he acts. In many ways, it is Evil fighting Evil and in some ways, the character you follow is the 'lesser evil' so you want him to win, and in many ways, you want him to unite the Broken Empire.

The author is a video game player, there are many instances where you can point and say 'That idea was featured in Dragon Age', 'I am sure that is a plot from Fallout'. As a gamer, it was slightly jarring as I recognised these things, but on another note, it does make you re-think the entire series at moments, as you start thinking of certain aspects as 'If this was the Fallout universe, than 1+2+3 can be explained in these ways..'

So the book wants me to read more, the preview of the first chapter of the next book makes me curious as to what will occur as well.

[Beskar]

Finished the sequel, King of Thorns this morning.

It has roughly three main time periods running through the thread of the story. One is the current day, a group of around a thousand trying to fight off an army of roughly twenty thousand strong army of the 'Prince of Arrow' (with a King Arthurian destiny). One is four-years ago, starting three months after the end of the first book with a 'moment lost' during this period. The last one is the 'moment lost'.

It works on the premise that something utterly unspeakable occurred, and a magician called Luthar put the memory of the incident in the box. Fragments of this memory have escaped but he does not know what it is going on, he can only assume something bad and the reader is put through a few journeys along the way, such as a mini-plot-line making me think "It wasn't like that in the first book, it cannot be right.." Luckily, it turned out it wasn't and my memory was correct, I should have held upon my gut instinct as that was closest to the mark to how the ordeal turned out.

The ending was is a big Deux Ex Machina, and it was pretty much expected with a 20-to-1 odds and knowledge of a sequel, but the suspense was enough to make you think "How on earth will he do it..." and the life-saving grace was just at the very end, so you don't feel too robbed, but with the ending events, it makes you wonder how A+B+C occured, since they are not covered in the backstory.

[HopAlongBunny]

Starting Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Era http://www.amazon.ca/Solar-Dance-Gen.../dp/0307398595
It was referenced in a radio program I heard; sounded interesting ... we shall see :) How far wrong can I go with WW1 and Vincent Van Gogh?

[naut]

The Long Walk, Stephen King. Had to check this one out after seeing Battle Royale, and Koushun Takami pay his respects to it (and King).

[Monsel]

A Song of Ice and Fire. Love it so muccch!

[Montmorency]

"Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts."

Please recommend books that jive with this quote.

[HopAlongBunny]

A History of the Modern Middle East; William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton; Westview Press, 5th ed. (2012)

Unfortunately, as a survey it talks about a huge number of things (people, events, wars...etc) each of which could fill a separate book. Still, a lot of stuff I never knew before.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Taking a break from LotR because it got to be too tiring to continue and I didn't want that when I am about to start the chapter on the battle for Minas Tirith.

So I decided to get a book I wanted to get for a while, What Money Can't Buy: The moral limits of markets by Michael Sandel. I have been a fan of him since I watched the Justice youtube series a few years ago, I even read the follow up book of the same name. So far it has been a good read, featuring many, many examples which highlight the type of values which he is trying to assert are valuable and more effective than applying market principles to every aspect of our social lives.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Finished What Money Can't Buy a while ago. Last night I just finished Lord of the Rings and I read through the appendixes as well. Now I am incredibly sad it's over.

[Gregoshi]

Last night I just finished Lord of the Rings and I read through the appendixes as well. Now I am incredibly sad it's over.

I get that way too each time I finish reading them.

I finished Gettysburg The First Day recently. I'm currently reading Gallipoli The Fatal Shore. Since I'm in Australia now and the "ANZAC legend" was born at Gallipoli, I thought I'd better learn about the campaign.

[HopAlongBunny]

If you liked Lord of the Rings and found it did not quite "fill you up", try the Silmarillion.
Creation legend and how it all came to Sauron :)

[Spoonska]

I've been reading The Martian by Andy Weir. I absolutely love this book. It takes place in the not so distant future where we have a functioning Mars program. On the third man led trip to Mars some stuff goes down, and it results with one guy being stuck there. The problem is the next mission to Mars isn't for another four years and he only has enough supplies to last about one.

It's told through the juxtaposition of his log entries and the NASA crew back on Earth. NASA figures it out that he's still alive and is in a race to save him. It's witty, very suspenseful and isn't too far fetched as far as science is concerned. It's kinda like Cast-Away meets Robinson Crusoe.

I'm only half way through the book, and I can't put it down. I doubt anything is going to happen that will change my opinion, but this is one of the best books I've read in a long time.

[Gregoshi]

If you liked Lord of the Rings and found it did not quite "fill you up", try the Silmarillion.
Creation legend and how it all came to Sauron :)

I'm reading The Silmarillion to begin yet another full journey through Middle-earth. This time I'm reading them in historical order rather than the order they were published (The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion) like I usually do.

[HopAlongBunny]

That used to be my annual ritual for a long time: The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings.
I don't even know if I have the attention span to do that anymore

[ReluctantSamurai]

The Orion Mystery by Robert Bauval and Adrain Gilbert.

I'm a Pyramidiot from waaay back...I have about five or six good books on the subject dating from the early seventies. I'm not a subscriber to many of the crazy theories floating around about the Pyramid complex at Giza, and Bauval tends to wander a bit in presenting his theory, but it seems obvious to me that the meridian locations of the Giza Pyramids and those at Saqqara and Dashour are not simply random places to build pyramids. While I do not agree with all of Bauval's proposal, I think he's spot on that there was some kind of "master blueprint" for the locations of the seven major pyramids built during the Fourth Dynasty. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

An even better read is Engineering the Pyramids by Richard Parry. An engineer by trade, he completely debunks (to me, anyway) the idea that the Pyramid builders dragged the approximately 2.3 million blocks of stone that went into Khufu's pyramid, weighing an average 2.5 tonnes each, by sled from the quarries along the Nile to the building site. If the builders were intelligent and skilled enough to raise a structure that, as an engineering feat, wouldn't be equaled until the 20th century, they were smart enough to figure out how to move those blocks quicker and more efficiently.

They did. They rolled them

[Fragony]

Blackbook of Communision, there are a lott of things I didn't know. Good read. Also stands proudly with Mein Kampf as it's publication was tried to banned on Dutch universities. Uncomfortable truthsin the book I guess. Communismbad how dare you the nerve

[Hax]

to banned on Dutch universities.

citation required.

[Fragony]

citation required.

It is the Uva ffs, maagdenhuis? Do you think Nijmegen is called Havanna aan de Maas for no reason. Both are soaked. Non-communist views aren't exactly apreciated there.