Read any good books?

Started by Future Canadian, Feb 11 06 11:21

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kitten

#45
Feb 14 06 09:56
^^  This reminds me of the writings of and about Edgar Cayce.  He was a strange and fascinating individual.
Thousands of years ago cats were worshipped.  They have not forgotten.

TehBorken

#46
Feb 14 06 10:21
Anyone here like the Bolo series by Keith Laumer? How about stuff by Vince Flynn?
The real trouble with reality is that there's no background music.

kitten

#47
Feb 14 06 10:38
I haven't read the Bolo series (yet!), but I enjoyed his Retief series.
Thousands of years ago cats were worshipped.  They have not forgotten.

weird al

#48
Feb 14 06 09:39
I'd like to take this opportunity to  plug Norah Vincent (not so much Norah Vincent per se as her book, Self-made Man), the soi-disant dyke who became a drag king  so she could live as a man among men and record her impressions of men and women through the eyes of a man.

 This book is so fascinating, insightful, compassionate and funny that I'm tempted to spoil it for you by retelling the whole thing. But I won't, except to say that she joins a blue collar men's bowling league, does a retreat at a monastery (where there's a suspicion that she's a gay guy), hangs around a strip joint, and gets into dating a variety of women (not from said strip joint).

 Vincent is brilliant, and a damn good writer. There isn't an awkward syllable or a boring paragraph in the whole book. Here's a link:  [A href="vny!://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=50036"]vny!://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=50036[/A]

Future Canadian

#49
Feb 15 06 11:37
I read an excerpt from this in Radar magazine (great mag btw). What a great piece. As a guy you don't realize how much posturing and alpha male behaviour we are just used to and tune it out. It was great to have her perspective. It really made my hatred for salesman grow even deeper.
...religion has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in the early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle ecplipses with such care that in time they were able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others

weird al

#50
Feb 15 06 11:46
She's got a lot of great stuff out there. Get a load of her Memorial Day address:

 [A href="vny!://www.letstalksense.com/articles/vincent230503.htm"]vny!://www.letstalksense.com/articles/vincent230503.htm[/A]

Future Canadian

#51
Feb 15 06 11:49
Jeez...What a speech. I can't add anything to that.
...religion has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in the early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle ecplipses with such care that in time they were able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others

TehBorken

#52
Feb 16 06 05:08
I'm reading something very good and very funny right now, titled "Of Rice And Men". Copied synopsis from Random House:

Spreading democracy takes more than cutting-edge military hardware.Winning the hearts and minds of a troubled nation is a special mission we give to bewildered young soldiers who can't speak the native language, don't know the customs, can't tell friends from enemies,and–in this wonderfully outrageous Iraq-era novel about Vietnam–wonder why they have to risk their lives spraying peanut plants, inoculating pigs, and hauling miracle rice seed for Ho Chi Minh.

Brash,eye-opening, and surprisingly comic, Of Rice and Men displays the same irreverent spirit as the black-comedy classics Catch-22 and MASH–as it chronicles the American Army's little known "Civil Affairs" soldiers who courageously roam hostile war zones, not to kill or to destroy, but to build, to feed, and to heal. Unprepared, uncertain, and naive, they
find it impossible to make the skeptical population fall in love with them.

But it's thrilling to watch them try.

Among the unforgettable characters: Guy Lopaca, an inept Army-trained interpreter who can barely say "I can't speak Vietnamese" in Vietnamese, but has no trouble chatting with stray dogs and water buffalo. Guy's friends include "Virgin Mary" Crocker, a pragmatic nurse earning a fortune spending nights with homesick soldiers; Paul Gianelli, a heroic builderof medical clinics who doesn't want to be remembered badly, so he never goes home; and Tyler DeMudge, whose cure for every problem is a chilly martini, a patch of shade, and the theory that every bad event in life is "good training" for enduring it again.

Pricelessly funny,disarming, thought-provoking, as fresh as the morning headlines, and bursting with humor, affection, and pride, Of Rice and Men is a sincere tribute to those young men and women, thrust into our hearts-and-minds wars, who try to do absolute good in a hopeless situation.

The real trouble with reality is that there's no background music.

kitten

#53
Feb 16 06 12:14
Who is the author of this book?  It sounds terrific.
Thousands of years ago cats were worshipped.  They have not forgotten.

TehBorken

#54
Feb 16 06 12:20
Who is the author of this book?  It sounds terrific

Doh! I can't believe I didn't include his name. It's by Richard Galli. Funnier than hell.
The real trouble with reality is that there's no background music.

Tor Johnston

#55
Feb 16 06 12:42
I'm starting "Freakonomics". Pretty good read so far.

TehBorken

#56
Feb 17 06 08:54
I just finished the "Of Rice And Men" book, and it was excellent. Highly Recommended!
The real trouble with reality is that there's no background music.

Witch

#57
Feb 17 06 09:16
"Four Books Occult Knowledge" by Eliphas Levi, probably the most pompous, bombastic, and boring bunch of crap I've ever read. Not recommended.

"Lion of Ireland" by Morgan Llewellyn. The story of Brian Boru, First High King of Ireland. An excellent telling of the life of this extraordinary man. If you like historical drama, I highly recommend it.

primefactor

#58
Feb 19 06 10:57
Just re-read the Narnia books with my kids. Some of them are great, others just okay. I didn't want to pollute the story for my kids by telling them that it's secretly a Christian thing. To me it's always been just a fun story. I haven't been able to read the last two Harry Potter books, because the author went totally nuts and I guess no one is allowed to edit her and it's gotten flabby. I tried! I read about a third of the second-to-most-recent, and couldn't maintain enough give-a-crap to finish! I haven't seen any of the movies, so it's not that I just decided to go that route.

My favorite kids' books are the Moomin books by Tove Jansson. Absolutely brilliant.  For my own reading, I have come to read non-fiction almost exclusively, not because of some snooty-pants "I Am an Intellectual" reason, but because it is one of the ways I have come to deal with my aging-Reagan-80s-goth-girl angst about my mortality. I feel panicky about stuffing as much into my head as possibly before I croak. But sometimes I wish there were two of me, and the other one just sat in bed and ate chocolate and read novels all day.

weird al

#59
Feb 19 06 12:28
I have a hard time reading fiction anymore. Not because I think I'm an intellectual, but because I know the stuff didn't happen. But there's some really entertaining non-fiction out there. And a lot of it's stranger than fiction. Here's one

  [TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=780 border=0][TBODY][TR vAlign=top][TD class=white vAlign=top][/TD][!-- MAIN CONTENT COLUMN --][TD vAlign=top][img height=89 alt="Search Catalog" hspace=0 src="vny!://www.randomhouse.com/randomhouse/art/search_header_bookinfo.gif" width=576 align=left border=0][BR clear=all][!-- CATALOG CONTENT TABLE --][TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=576 border=0][TBODY][TR][TD vAlign=top][SPAN class=cat_title]Adventure Capitalist
The Ultimate Road Trip[/SPAN]
[SPAN class=cat_author]Written by [A href="vny!://www.randomhouse.com/randomhouse/authors/results.pperl?authorid=25976"]Jim Rogers[/A][/SPAN]
[SPAN class=cat_info]Business & Economics; Travel | Random House Trade Paperbacks | Trade Paperback | December 2004 | $14.95 | 0-8129-6726-7[/SPAN]

[SPAN class=cat_text][TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 align=left border=0][TBODY][TR][TD bgColor=#000000][img height=150 alt=9780812967265 hspace=1 src="vny!://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/catalog_cover.pperl?9780812967265" align=left vspace=1 border=0][/TD][TD bgColor=#ffffff rowSpan=3][img height=165 hspace=0 src="vny!://www.randomhouse.com/randomhouse/art/shim.gif" width=7 align=left][/TD][/TR][TR][TD bgColor=#ffffff][img height=1 hspace=0 src="vny!://www.randomhouse.com/randomhouse/art/shim.gif" width=1 align=left][/TD][/TR][TR][TD align=middle bgColor=#006666][A onclick="window.DOH!('auto_pic_size.pperl?pic_url=%2fcatalog%2fcovers_450%2f9780812967265.jpg', '450_cover', 'height=450,width=400,resizable=yes,scrollbars=no');return false;" href="vny!://www.randomhouse.com/randomhouse/catalog/auto_pic_size.pperl?pic_url=%2fcatalog%2fcovers_450%2f9780812967265.jpg"][img height=14 alt=enlarge src="vny!://www.randomhouse.com/randomhouse/catalog/art/enlargeview.gif" width=80 border=0][/A][/TD][/TR][/TBODY][/TABLE][A name=desc][/A]ABOUT THIS BOOK

Drive . . . and grow rich!

The bestselling author of Investment Biker is back from the ultimate road trip: a three-year drive around the world that would ultimately set the Guinness record for the longest continuous car journey. In Adventure Capitalist, legendary investor Jim Rogers, dubbed "the Indiana Jones of finance" by Time magazine, proves that the best way to profit from the global situation is to see the world mile by mile. "While I have never patronized a prostitute," he writes, "I know that one can learn more about a country from speaking to the madam of a brothel or a black marketeer than from meeting a foreign minister."

Behind the wheel of a sunburst-yellow, custom-built convertible Mercedes, Rogers and his fiancée, Paige Parker, began their "Millennium Adventure" on January 1, 1999, from Iceland. They traveled through 116 countries, including many where most have rarely ventured, such as Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Angola, Sudan, Congo, Colombia, and East Timor. They drove through war zones, deserts, jungles, epidemics, and blizzards. They had many narrow escapes.

They camped with nomads and camels in the western Sahara. They ate silkworms, iguanas, snakes, termites, guinea pigs, porcupines, crocodiles, and grasshoppers.

Best of all, they saw the real world from the ground up—the only vantage point from which it can be truly understood—economically, politically, and socially.

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