What Are You Reading?

[Space_Cadet]

Am currently reading:

A Childhood is the unforgettable memoir of Harry Crews' earliest years, a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales, and circumstances that shaped him--and destined him to be a storyteller. Crews was born in the middle of the Great Depression, in a one-room sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road in rural South Georgia. If Bacon County was a place of grinding poverty, poor soil, and blood feuds, it was also a deeply mystical place, where snakes talked, birds could possess a small boy by spitting in his mouth, and faith healers and conjure women kept ghosts and devils at bay.At once shocking and elegiac, heartrending and comical, A Childhood not only recalls the transforming events of Crews's youth but conveys his growing sense of self in a world "in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives."

Very much reminds me of a great documentary I had saw about the South, called "Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus". If you can find it, I highly recommend it. If you want, or anyone else wants, I can upload it.

 

[JWCowboy]

Finished Streets of Laredo and am on McMurtry's recent novel about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, The Last Kind Words Saloon.

I read Lonsome Dove about 20 years ago, I need to read Streets of Laredo. I didn't know he had this recent novel you speak of about Earp/Holliday, but that intrigues me. I'm going to look it up and put it on the list.

Also, my wife and I recently read an article about McMurtry's bookstore and it's on our bucket list of places to visit.

 

[JWCowboy]

Last year I got rid of most of my premium cable channels since I rarely watched anything on them and have generally cut my TV viewing time to a minimum of baseball and Turner Classic Movies. According to Apple, I have read every week for more than two years. I probably read close to 100 books last year. In the past two years, I have worked my way through all of the Michael Connelly Bosch and Mickey Haller books, all of the Daniel Silva Gabriel Allon books and much nonfiction. Among the best nonfiction books I have read over the past few months are:

• The Splendid and the Vile - I have read many Churchill bios and histories, but Erik Larson did a magnificent job mining the memoirs of Churchill's inner circle to present a vivid portrait of Churchill between May 1939 and the summer of 1940
• Lights Out - Very good history of General Electric over the past 30 years and how their financial engineering and lack of knowledge about key businesses they got themselves into destroyed the company
• Spearhead - a look at tank warfare during WW II through the eyes of an American and a German tanker. Both kept journals, they fought each other tank against tank in Cologne and both lived into their 90's so the author was able to arrange a meeting in the early 2000's. A great book about an aspect of war I was not very familiar with
• Ivan's war - A history of WW II through the eyes of typical Russian infantryman. Does for Russians what Steven Ambrose did for American infantry
• Zahav - A World of Israeli Cooking. I have eaten Israeli food all my life but never cooked much of it until recently. The author, Michael Solomanov runs four restaurants in the US and his food is fantastic. Native Israeli, French trained chef and gives proper due to the entirely of Jewish diaspora cooking, which in modern Israel is mostly food from across the Arab world with hints of Eastern Europe...Yum
• The Accidental Superpower and Disunited Nations. Two books by geographer turned geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan. The Accidental Superpower in particular, written in 2014 sounds like the roadmap for Trump's foreign policy. Zeihan's focus on looking at power through geography, economics and demographics is fascinating
• Meditations - Marcus Aurelius, Roman Classic on being a stoic person
• The Spy and The Traitor - Amazing, true life story about how MI-6 turned a KGB Colonel and how the CIA, in a fit of pique, let the cat out of the bag
• Reset - Thriller about an alien force attempting to take over the world. Mix Artificial Intelligence with biological warfare.

Ok, time to end the book report and go to work

Thanks for those recommendations, very commendable on how you've killed your television viewing and turned to books. I also loved Larson's The Splendid and the Vile

I'm interested in the book on the history of GE and the one on WWII tank warfare and will be looking them up.

 

[JWCowboy]

I just started Wizard and Glass on audio, book 4 in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.

I've read the first two in the Dark Tower series, and one of these days eventually I will get to the rest of them.

 

[JWCowboy]

Very much reminds me of a great documentary I had saw about the South, called "Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus". If you can find it, I highly recommend it. If you want, or anyone else wants, I can upload it.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'm going to look it up.

 

[JWCowboy]

Just finished Be The Bridge: Pursuing God's Heart for Racial Reconciliation by Latasha Morrison. My wife and I went through a small group with our church which used it as the curriculum. In light of all the recent events of racial unrest, it was excellent and timely. Next up for me along the lines of the same subject is James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree

 

[Benzadmiral]

I read Lonsome Dove about 20 years ago, I need to read Streets of Laredo. I didn't know he had this recent novel you speak of about Earp/Holliday, but that intrigues me. I'm going to look it up and put it on the list.

Also, my wife and I recently read an article about McMurtry's bookstore and it's on our bucket list of places to visit.

I wasn't too charged up about Last Kind Words now that I've finished it. It's got fun moments, and reads something like Robert Parker's Westerns, but I was not . . . enthused.

Turns out I've been to McMurtry's two bookstores! In 2014 I was driving back from a road trip visit to Palo Duro Canyon near Amarillo -- the canyon McMurtry has written about, where our real-life Comanches went to winter quarters -- and took a side jaunt to Archer City.

1) Don't go in warm weather. The diner on the main street did not have A/C, just fans, and was stuffy and hot -- in May. The same was true of LM's bookstores. I've never been known to leave a bookstore in less than an hour, but both were intolerable, and in 20 minutes I fled with relief back to my car. Maybe they've caught up with the 20th century by now, but I don't know.

2) That said, the town looks very much the way it did in The Last Picture Show, with the single traffic light hanging on the cable at the town's major intersection, and the movie theatre building (repurposed as something else now) nearby.

 

[shoelessjoe]

Presently, I am pecking away at a book that in all likelihood, I’ll still be pecking away at a couple years down the road

THE LAST BEST PLACE: A Montana Anthology

 

[Bklynboy]

Thanks for those recommendations, very commendable on how you've killed your television viewing and turned to books. I also loved Larson's The Splendid and the Vile

I'm interested in the book on the history of GE and the one on WWII tank warfare and will be looking them up.

I was all set to buy Lights Out after reading an excerpt in the Wall Street Journal in June. When it was published on July 14, I went to Amazon to buy it and found that it was available for free on Amazon Prime. It may still be

 

[JWCowboy]

I was all set to buy Lights Out after reading an excerpt in the Wall Street Journal in June. When it was published on July 14, I went to Amazon to buy it and found that it was available for free on Amazon Prime. It may still be

Thanks,

Also I'm going to look into the one about Israeli cooking as a possible gift to my wife. She's an amazing cook, which is of course great for me as I'm an amazing eater and dishwasher.

You're profile/avatar implies you are from Brooklyn, ever visit the wonderful culinary bookstore called "Kitchen Arts and Letters" on the upper east side of Manhattan? It's one of her favorite bookstores and must visit places when we're in NYC.

 

[Owen Bawn]

Pierre Hadot's 'The Inner Citadel.' He looks at Marcus Aurelius' 'Meditations' as spiritual exercises and traces Marcus' ideas of self examination through the subsequent history of spiritual exercises in the West.

 

[Cannata]

All the Devils Are Here by Louise Penny

 

[Benzadmiral]

Olive Kittredge, the first novel (or collection of long short stories) about the Maine character, by Elizabeth Strout.

Strout is a very good writer. She plays fair and does not demonize men and exalt women, but portrays them as they are, good and bad both. But her main character Olive is damned unlikable. She's vivid, I admit, very much like people we've all known . . . people we don't want to invite into our homes and wouldn't want to be married to. A lead character doesn't have to be ultra-likable -- see George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman, for instance -- but if you don't like spending time in the character's world, the book can be a hard slog.

Fortunately Olive is not in every scene and is not the focus of each story.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Just finished a new collaboration by Larry Niven and Matthew Harrington called The Goliath Stone. I'm a big Niven fan, but his later works are sometimes a little hard to get through. This one is quite spare and fast-moving. It features an ultra-competent, ultra-intelligent lead character even harder to believe in than others he's done, so it's not a good book to introduce SF to someone new to the genre.

On p. 195, though, the lead character speculates that yellow hair and pink skin are Neanderthal traits, and that the Neanderthals "were nocturnal cannibals. If you cross that with farsighted hunters that chase down mammoths in packs, you get a creature more aggressive than anything else you can see without a microscope." The character imagines that the first Americans who came over from Asia 40,000 years ago were pure Cro-Magnons fleeing the crossbreeds, which worked for a while, and which might go far to explain why humans traditionally are averse to half-breeds. . . .

 

[djm2]

I just finished A Gentleman in Moscow. This is a wonderfully written book.

 

[coolcanuc]

The Splendid and the Vile

The Splendid and the Vile - Erik Larson

On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons (30,000 of...

eriklarsonbooks.com

I am having a hard time putting it down.

 

[trentr]

The Pilgrim's Progress
I very much enjoy old classics written about life. Sort of "self help" bools before self help was a thing LOL.

Also, I read real books. I need the feel, the smell, just the general experience. Anyone else that does not get the same experience from a digital read as a real book? To each his own. Just wondered if I was the only one.

 

[_MementoMori_]

Jesus Among Secular Gods, by Ravi Zacharias.

 

[The Knize]

I just finished A Gentleman in Moscow. This is a wonderfully written book.

Absolutely. This may be my favorite book of the past five years or so. Maybe longer.

I am reading the latest in the Hunger Games series, Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Excellent, so far.

 

[Owen Bawn]

Jesus Among Secular Gods, by Ravi Zacharias.

Since he took ill late last spring I've been working my way through Ravi Zacharias' entire corpus of writings. So far I've read 7-8 books; I'm currently reading 'Jesus Among Other Gods.' Such an attractive and inviting mind. His voice is missed.