What are you reading now?

[Brian in Mesa]

Rain Storm by Barry Eisler.

 

[justAndy]

John Twelve Hawks - "The Traveller", "Dark River", and 1/2 way through "Golden City".
Fantasy/Sci Fi with very real "Panopticon", "Total Surveillance" background - very topical - and resistance to the total control of Scientific Tyranny/Technocracy.

 

[dodie53]

Halo 6 - cole protocol

 

[Bada0Bing]

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Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, July 2008: How could no one have written this book before? These days we spend almost as much time driving as we do eating (in fact, we do a lot of our eating while driving), but I can't remember the last time I saw a book on all the time we spend stuck in our cars. It's a topic of nearly universal interest, though: everybody has a strategy for beating the traffic. Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) has plenty of advice for those shortcut schemers (Vanderbilt may well convince you to become, as he has, a dreaded "Late Merger"), but more than that it's the sort of wide-ranging contrarian compendium that makes a familiar subject new. I'm not the first or last to call Traffic the Freakonomics of cars, but it's true that it fits right in with the school of smart and popular recent books by Leavitt, Gladwell, Surowiecki, Ariely, and others that use the latest in economic, sociological, psychological, and in this case civil engineering research to make us rethink a topic we live with every day. Want to know how much city traffic is just people looking for parking? (It's a lot.) Or why street signs don't work (but congestion pricing does), why new cars crash more than old cars, and why Saturdays now have the worst traffic of the week? Read Traffic, or better yet, listen to the audio book on your endless commute. --Tom Nissley

Nothing earth-shattering, but I enjoy oddball books like this.

 

[Pariah]

"Everything Changes," by Jonathon Tropper

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The arrival of a long-lost absent father forces a Manhattan man to come to terms with an ongoing romantic triangle in Tropper's latest, a funny, sensitive and occasionally over-the-top comic novel that revolves around the calamitous life of 32-year-old Zack King. King's a horrible job as a corporate drone for a supply company is balanced by his impending marriage to Hope, his gorgeous, successful fiancée. But chaos comes with the arrival of his wacky divorced father, Norm, who left Zack and his two brothers after his wife used graphic pictures of his infidelity as the backdrop for the family Christmas cards. Norm makes himself an unwelcome guest as Zack tries to deal with a potentially devastating health problem and a job crisis that makes him realize how much he hates his life. But the real problem is Zack's growing attraction to Tamara, the beautiful, recently widowed single mother who was married to Zack's friend Rael until a car accident took Rael's life and left Zack alive during an ill-fated road trip to Atlantic City. Viagra-popping Norm becomes increasingly cartoonish as the novel unfolds, and the triangle material is boilerplate, but pithy observations on love, marriage and corporate life give the book a graceful charm. Tropper continues to display a fine feel for romantic comedy in this enjoyable follow-up to The Book of Joe.

 

[Louis]

Freakonomics.

Interesting book. Some good information and trivial stuff that adds to my repertoire of useless info. I didn't know the lower level sumo guys had to wash the hard to reach places of the upper echelon.

 

[justAndy]

Author: Charles Stross - British sci-fi

 

[DemsMyBoys]

"The Politician" the new book on John Edwards. "She" isn't even mentioned until halfway through the book. It's a bit of a yawn, actually.

 

[Tyler]

Pat Tillman (he Graduated Life With Honors And No Regrets) By Rich Wolfe

Interesting read, he had a bunch of people tell their Pat stories through their eyes. If you get the chance pick it up.

 

[Louis]

Just wrapped up Krugman's Return of Depression Economics and I am now starting Superfreakonomics.

Next up Game Change (if it arrives at the local bookshop). I am told to imagine reading US Weekly about politicians. Probably full of "gotcha" moments.

 

[Pariah]

The Hour I First Believed

Wally Lamb

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Wally Lamb's two previous novels, She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, struck a chord with readers. They responded to the intensely introspective nature of the books, and to their lively narrative styles and biting humor. One critic called Wally Lamb a "modern-day Dostoyevsky," whose characters struggle not only with their respective pasts, but with a "mocking, sadistic God" in whom they don't believe but to whom they turn, nevertheless, in times of trouble (New York Times).
In his new novel, The Hour I First Believed, Lamb travels well beyond his earlier work and embodies in his fiction myth, psychology, family history stretching back many generations, and the questions of faith that lie at the heart of everyday life. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, at once a meditation on the human condition and an unflinching yet compassionate evocation of character.
When forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm in Three Rivers. But the effects of chaos are not so easily put right, and further tragedy ensues.
While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers a cache of old diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in an upstairs bedroom of his family's house. The colorful and intriguing story they recount spans five generations of Quirk family ancestors, from the Civil War era to Caelum's own troubled childhood. Piece by piece, Caelum reconstructs the lives of the women and men whose legacy he bears. Unimaginable secrets emerge; long-buried fear, anger, guilt, and grief rise to the surface.
As Caelum grapples with unexpected and confounding revelations from the past, he also struggles to fashion a future out of the ashes of tragedy. His personal quest for meaning and faith becomes a mythic journey that is at the same time quintessentially contemporary—and American.
The Hour I First Believed is a profound and heart-rending work of fiction. Wally Lamb proves himself a virtuoso storyteller, assembling a variety of voices and an ensemble of characters rich enough to evoke all of humanity.

 

[Louis]

Just bought The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba to follow up Game Change.

Discarded motor parts, PVC pipe, and an old bicycle wheel may be junk to most people, but in the inspired hands of William Kamkwamba, they are instruments of opportunity. Growing up amid famine and poverty in rural Malawi, wind was one of the few abundant resources available, and the inventive fourteen-year-old saw its energy as a way to power his dreams. "With a windmill, we'd finally release ourselves from the troubles of darkness and hunger," he realized. "A windmill meant more than just power, it was freedom." Despite the biting jeers of village skeptics, young William devoted himself to borrowed textbooks and salvage yards in pursuit of a device that could produce an "electric wind." The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is an inspiring story of an indomitable will that refused to bend to doubt or circumstance. When the world seemed to be against him, William Kamkwamba set out to change it. --</I>Dave Callanan</I>

 

[Mulli]

Just got a book called American Buffalo. Good read. It is about the plight of the American Buffalo.

Did you know Bison and Buffalo are the same thing?

 

[Shane]

Did you know Bison and Buffalo are the same thing?

 

[Louis]

Just picked up Stones for Schools (follow up to Three Cups of Tea), Enough, and a long way gone. I put the book descriptions in spoilers because some of them are long. Can't wait to get to these books.

Spoiler

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jay Mathews Greg Mortenson's first book, "Three Cups of Tea," was a gravity-defying wide-screen wilderness adventure. It began with the author's failed attempt to climb the world's second-highest mountain. It included a daring rescue, bonding with an alien tribe in a tiny cliffside village and his establishment of several dozen schools in Taliban territory despite being kidnapped and threatened with death. That book, which came out in 2006, was a publishing-industry cliffhanger, too. Mortenson hated the subtitle Penguin insisted on: "One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism One School at a Time." It sold nicely in hardcover, enough to merit a paperback edition and to persuade the publisher to insert Mortenson's preferred subtitle: "One Man's Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time." Mortenson was a nobody, the son of an American missionary in Africa. He had been a medic in the U.S. Army and gotten degrees in nursing and chemistry from the University of South Dakota. He had not even written the book. His co-author, journalist David Oliver Relin, had constructed the story with Mortensen in the third person. But the hero was tall, good-looking, dynamite on the lecture circuit and outrageously persistent. The paperback swept college campuses, picked up worldwide interest and surpassed sales of 3.4 million copies. There is no way its sequel, "Stones Into Schools," can repeat that marketing miracle. It is, for one thing, not as well written as "Three Cups of Tea." Relin has moved on to other projects. Mortenson is listed as the sole author, giving credit to two writers, Mike Bryan and Kevin Fedarko, in the acknowledgements. If the first book was inspirational, the second sometimes reads like an infomercial. Mortenson recounts in detail all the good that has been done because of the notoriety and generosity inspired by the first book, and how much more money he needs to keep his remote schools going. Instead of Pamir Range terrors, we have scary bouts of exhaustion after too many speeches and dinners in Pennsylvania. Still, few new books are as well-timed as "Stones Into Schools." Mortenson is the author of the most popular recent account of a part of the world at the center of American foreign policy. His views will influence how voters react to President Obama's efforts in Afghanistan. However distasteful he finds the word "terrorism," Mortenson makes no secret of his disgust with the Taliban. The heroes of this book are 14 riders, loaded with AK-47s, their horses "short legged and shaggy and iridescent with sweat," who came across the Irshad Pass to Pakistan in 1999 and begged Mortensen to build a school in their remote part of Afghanistan. The school was built, and at the end of that struggle the author saw their triumph as a path to peace for all. "They had raised a beacon of hope that called out not only to the Kirghiz themselves, but also to every village and town in Afghanistan where children yearn for education, and where fathers and mothers dream of building a school whose doors will open not only to their sons but also to their daughters," Mortenson writes, "including -- and perhaps especially -- those places that are surrounded by a ring of men with Kalashnikovs who help to sustain the grotesque lie that flinging battery acid into the face of a girl who longs to study arithmetic is somehow in keeping with the teachings of the Koran." After some initial reluctance, he embraces the U.S. military as part of the effort to bring education to children so unimaginably far from civilization. Soldiers provide personal donations and transportation of materials for some of his projects. But Mortenson puts most of his faith in the Afghans themselves, particularly those who persuaded him to build more schools. He says they can crush the Taliban and overcome the country's old cultural biases against educating girls. Mortenson may be unrealistic, but the past decade of his life has been one improbability after another. It is unfair to expect him to lose hope now. He wants the United States to stay and help his friends save their country. He's on a roll, and he doesn't see why he can't carry everyone with him. [email protected]
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Spoiler

“Thurow and Kilman are journalists who have covered famines in Africa, agricultural policy in the corridors of Washington and Brussels, and food commodities markets in Chicago. Yet their book is more than just a rough first draft of history. While grounded in colourful, entertaining reportage, Enough also displays a depth of thought and research more commonly found in academic studies. Well-chosen anecdotes bring the issues to life. Nothing could illustrate the shortcomings of US food aid policy, in which Washington sells American farmers' output in Africa rather than sending money to buy local food, better than a dialogue between an Ethiopian farmer and a US executive at a food aid meeting in Addis Ababa. The farmer asks the executive enthusiastically: ‘Can you help our farmers sell their beans in America?’ He receives an unexpected answer: ‘Actually, we represent American bean growers.’

Spoiler

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare. Beah's harrowing journey transforms him overnight from a child enthralled by American hip-hop music and dance to an internal refugee bereft of family, wandering from village to village in a country grown deeply divided by the indiscriminate atrocities of unruly, sociopathic rebel and army forces. Beah then finds himself in the army—in a drug-filled life of casual mass slaughter that lasts until he is 15, when he's brought to a rehabilitation center sponsored by UNICEF and partnering NGOs. The process marks out Beah as a gifted spokesman for the center's work after his "repatriation" to civilian life in the capital, where he lives with his family and a distant uncle. When the war finally engulfs the capital, it sends 17-year-old Beah fleeing again, this time to the U.S., where he now lives. (Beah graduated from Oberlin College in 2004.) Told in clear, accessible language by a young writer with a gifted literary voice, this memoir seems destined to become a classic firsthand account of war and the ongoing plight of child soldiers in conflicts worldwide. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

 

[DemsMyBoys]

Did you know Bison and Buffalo are the same thing?

I actually had to stop my car a month ago for two of them. Whatever they're called. They came in off the desert, crossed in front of me and wandered into a nearby park where they ate grass for a couple of hours.

Speaking of grass...

Am reading "The Lives of John Lennon" by Albert Goldman

 

[AZ Native]

Started " The Innocent" , by Harlan Coben

 

[BullheadCardFan]

Just finished reading "Money to burn" by James Grippando. Very good, fast pace and fast read.

 

[Mike Olbinski]

Recently read:

"The Art of Racing in the Rain" - 5 out of 5 on the Mike O rating scale

"The Lovely Bones" - 4 out of 5


Now reading book four of the Wheel of Time: Shadow Rising.

Have enjoyed the Wheel of Time books immensely...other than their considerable length...feels like it takes an eternity to read them!

 

[Louis]

Lovely Bones was an excellent read, I agree.

A Long Way Gone was fantastic as well. Very compelling. One of the best written books I've read in awhile. It's the author's "memoirs" which means some of the story is embellished, but to read what an adolescent boy goes through as his country is falling into terrible violence is moving and fascinating. I'd give it a 4/5.

I thought I'd put my ranking for Game Change as well. I'd give it a 3.5/5. It rehashes a lot of what we already knew about the Clinton/Obama campaigns. But the look into the world of Edwards/McCain/Palin was eye popping stuff (but also the least amount of time is dedicated to it).

 

[earthsci]

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It

Arthur Herman

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Amazon.com Review
"I am a Scotsman," Sir Walter Scott famously wrote, "therefore I had to fight my way into the world." So did any number of his compatriots over a period of just a few centuries, leaving their native country and traveling to every continent, carving out livelihoods and bringing ideas of freedom, self-reliance, moral discipline, and technological mastery with them, among other key assumptions of what historian Arthur Herman calls the "Scottish mentality."

It is only natural, Herman suggests, that a country that once ranked among Europe's poorest, if most literate, would prize the ideal of progress, measured "by how far we have come from where we once were." Forged in the Scottish Enlightenment, that ideal would inform the political theories of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume, and other Scottish thinkers who viewed "man as a product of history," and whose collective enterprise involved "nothing less than a massive reordering of human knowledge" (yielding, among other things, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, first published in Edinburgh in 1768, and the Declaration of Independence, published in Philadelphia just a few years later). On a more immediately practical front, but no less bound to that notion of progress, Scotland also fielded inventors, warriors, administrators, and diplomats such as Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, Simon MacTavish, and Charles James Napier, who created empires and great fortunes, extending Scotland's reach into every corner of the world.

Herman examines the lives and work of these and many more eminent Scots, capably defending his thesis and arguing, with both skill and good cheer, that the Scots "have by and large made the world a better place rather than a worse place."


From Publishers Weekly
Focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries, Herman (coordinator of the Western Heritage Program at the Smithsonian and an assistant professor of history at George Mason University) has written a successful exploration of Scotland's disproportionately large impact on the modern world's intellectual and industrial development. When Scotland ratified the 1707 Act of Union, it was an economic backwater. Union gave Scotland access to England's global marketplace, triggering an economic and cultural boom "transform[ing] Scotland... into a modern society, and open[ing] up a cultural and social revolution." Herman credits Scotland's sudden transformation to its system of education, especially its leading universities at Edinburgh and Glasgow. The 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment, embodied by such brilliant thinkers as Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and David Hume, paved the way for Scottish and, Herman argues, global modernity. Hutcheson, the father of the Scottish Enlightenment, championed political liberty and the right of popular rebellion against tyranny. Smith, in his monumental Wealth of Nations, advocated liberty in the sphere of commerce and the global economy. Hume developed philosophical concepts that directly influenced James Madison and thus the U.S. Constitution. Herman elucidates at length the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment and their worldwide impact. In 19th-century Britain, the Scottish Enlightenment, as popularized by Dugald Stewart, became the basis of classical liberalism. At the University of Glasgow, James Watt perfected the crucial technology of the Industrial Revolution: the steam engine. The "democratic" Scottish system of education found a home in the developing U.S. This is a worthwhile book for the general reader, although much of the material has been covered better elsewhere, most recently in T.M. Devine's magisterial The Scottish Nation: A History, 1700-2000 and Duncan A. Bruce's delightful The Mark of the Scots. (Nov.)Forecast: Clearly modeling this title on Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization, Crown may be hoping for comparable sales but probably won't achieve them.

 

[CaptTurbo]

Wolf at sea. Story of the CSS Alabama Confederate Raider.

Excellent.

 

[Louis]

Just bought Tears in the Darkness, The Forgotten 500, and True Compass.

I cannot wait to finish my current book so I can tear into Tears in the Darkness and The Forgotten 500.

 

[FischerKing]

Geez - I started this thread nearly 7 years ago and it's still going. Yay to me - woot!

I'm currently reading "Raised with Christ" by Adrian Warnock. Very good so far.

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shawn

 

[Pariah]

"Up County" by Nelson DeMille.

I think I'm over DeMille. all his characters are way too smart alecy all the time.