What are you reading now?

[D-Dogg]

I'm smart, but I didn't read 1984 when I was 11.

 

[Pariah]

I'm smart, but I didn't read 1984 when I was 11.

What a maroon.

 

[D-Dogg]

What a maroon.

What's up doc?

 

[Gaddabout]

Just picked up Confessions of a Reformission Rev by Mark Driscoll. This guy's pretty funny for someone who's been to seminary. I'm not real comfortable with his jock-speak, though.

 

[Heucrazy]

In the past 9 days I have read "Golden Buddha" and "Sacred Stone" by Clive Cussler, "Velocity" by Dean Koontz and I am well into "Intensity" by Koontz as well.

The one good thing about traveling for work is how much time you have to read at night and on planes.

 

[AZZenny]

Just finished The Volunteer, a new memoir by a former Mossad officer -- a veteran from 1988-2001, not someone who was thrown out after six months on the job. It's non-sensationalistic, more nuts and bolts of how things are done and why -- nicely written; an enjoyable read.

What I think a lot of people will find interesting and disturbing are his descriptions of how the CIA and FBI simply hate each other, even trying to sabotauge one another,at least in the years pre-9/11. This guy was the Mossad liaison to the CIA and FBI for two years in the mid 1990's, so he was up close. Lots of odd tidbits -- I had no idea the FBI was heavily populated by Mormon agents.

 

[D-Dogg]

Man, I forgot 1984 was such a damn depressing book.

 

[Heucrazy]

Man, I forgot 1984 was such a damn depressing book.

A Brave New World is even worse.

Don't ever read those two books after breaking up with your girlfriend or losing your dog. It would probably put you over the edge.

 

[abomb]

A Brave New World is even worse.

Don't ever read those two books after breaking up with your girlfriend or losing your dog. It would probably put you over the edge.

Maybe Owen Wilson read them.

 

[D-Dogg]

A Brave New World is even worse.

Don't ever read those two books after breaking up with your girlfriend or losing your dog. It would probably put you over the edge.

I love A Brave New World. I've always felt that I liked that book better than 1984, and upon re-read, I am right. I wonder how many others feel that way? I think most people prefer 1984.

 

[Heucrazy]

I love A Brave New World. I've always felt that I liked that book better than 1984, and upon re-read, I am right. I wonder how many others feel that way? I think most people prefer 1984.

I prefer A Brave New World to 1984 as well.

 

[Shane]

Just finsished Marine SNiper. I just started the 2nd book Called Silent Warrior. Carlos Hathcock II was a true war hero IMO. First one was great and 2nd is good so far too.

 

[dogpoo32]

I read one book a year, I need to read more, and every year it is a James Rollins book. The only reason is because I love archaeology and action. His books are simple enough that I can view it as an Indiana Jones movie. Conveniently, he writes one book a year. This year, I will read two books because I am reading his book Sandstorm befor I read Black Order.

Are there any other authors that blend archaeology, science fiction and history as well? If so, I am interested!

 

[the donald]

i am not sure what anyone likes, but i suggest checking out the forgotten realms, it is a fantasy series. also eragon and eldest(the inheritance trilogy) it is a very good book(s), along the lines of harry potter, and anne mccaffrey.

 

[outoftheashes]

I read one book a year, I need to read more, and every year it is a James Rollins book. The only reason is because I love archaeology and action. His books are simple enough that I can view it as an Indiana Jones movie. Conveniently, he writes one book a year. This year, I will read two books because I am reading his book Sandstorm befor I read Black Order.

Are there any other authors that blend archaeology, science fiction and history as well? If so, I am interested!

I don't know of an author that specifically deals with those, however,if you haven't read 'Timeline' by Michael Crichton, I think you might like it. It fits the parameters you listed. Movie sucked though.

 

[Pariah]

I'm reading "The Ruins" based on the many recommendations in this thread. Pretty good so far (I'm about 100 pages in); it's a nice, easy read.

 

[Assface]

I bought "Thud" by Terry Pratchett over the weekend and finished it already. Great book, couldn't put it down.

 

[Phlegyas]

Originally said by the donald

i am not sure what anyone likes, but i suggest checking out the forgotten realms, it is a fantasy series.

Agreed. Anything by R. A. Salvatore in that series is gold. Granted, I haven't read parts 2 and 3 of "The Sellswords" or parts 2 and 3 of the "Hunter's Blades" trilogy, but those are probably good, too. But yeah, the Drizzt stuff and The Cleric Quintet are both good.

I liked the "Realms of Mystery" anthology, but it isn't nearly on the same level as the Drizzt stuff.

Warning: those who adore the Baldur's Gate game series, do NOT get the novelizations. The first two are some of the worst books I've ever read, and the third one ain't great either. Just stick with the games.

****

I really liked Brave New World. I think much of it is prophetic, much more so than 1984. The dark humor in it is great.

 

[D-Dogg]

I really liked Brave New World. I think much of it is prophetic, much more so than 1984. The dark humor in it is great.

I think you nailed it here. I see us going in that direction as a society rather than the 1984 direction, if you wanted to talk about what book would be more likely to happen.

The "feelies," the soma, the sexual atmosphere, the caste system, the worldwide birth control, the creation of humans, etc.

Here's a neat couple of paragraphs from wiki.

Social Critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of 1984 and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1986 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

Journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has himself published multiple articles on Huxley and a full-length book on Orwell, notes the difference between the two texts in the introduction to his 1999 article "Why Americans Are Not Taught History":

We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression "You're history" as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons towards a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell's was a house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley… rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend.

In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught.

 

[dodie53]

the bourne legacy

 

[Southpaw]

"Fog Facts" by Larry Beinhart.

http://www.amazon.com/Fog-Facts-Searching-Truth-Nation/dp/1560257679

actually snagged it for $1.62 + shipping. on Amazon.

 

[Pariah]

"No Country for Old Men," Cormac McCarthy

Seven years after Cities of the Plain brought his acclaimed Border Trilogy to a close, McCarthy returns with a mesmerizing modern-day western. In 1980 southwest Texas, Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles across several dead men, a bunch of heroin and $2.4 million in cash. The bulk of the novel is a gripping man-on-the-run sequence relayed in terse, masterful prose as Moss, who's taken the money, tries to evade Wells, an ex–Special Forces agent employed by a powerful cartel, and Chigurh, an icy psychopathic murderer armed with a cattle gun and a dangerous philosophy of justice. Also concerned about Moss's whereabouts is Sheriff Bell, an aging lawman struggling with his sense that there's a new breed of man (embodied in Chigurh) whose destructive power he simply cannot match. In a series of thoughtful first-person passages interspersed throughout, Sheriff Bell laments the changing world, wrestles with an uncomfortable memory from his service in WWII and—a soft ray of light in a book so steeped in bloodshed—rejoices in the great good fortune of his marriage. While the action of the novel thrills, it's the sensitivity and wisdom of Sheriff Bell that makes the book a profound meditation on the battle between good and evil and the roles choice and chance play in the shaping of a life.

 

[D-Dogg]

Reading:

Atlas Shrugged

 

[Bada0Bing]

Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

This one was interesting...not what I thought it was going to be.

I'm about a third of the way thru this. It's much different than I was expecting too.

 

[Brian in Mesa]

Separation of Power by Vince Flynn.