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What are you reading Chapter 4
- Thread starter slobake
- Start date
Humans placed on a colony world where they’re supposed to be left in stasis learning their individual professions in VR till age 30 but get hatched at age 15. Shenanigans ensue. It’s pretty good.
A history of America
...Settlers, outlaws, and the criminal treatment of the Native American.
...Settlers, outlaws, and the criminal treatment of the Native American.
Not my current reading exactly, but I was depressed to come across this:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-ta...un-has-become-less-common-federal-data-shows/
Only 17% of 13-year-olds and 19% of 17-year-olds report that they read for pleasure almost every day. That's down from 35% and 31%, respectively, when they started collecting the data back in 1984, and the lowest ever.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-ta...un-has-become-less-common-federal-data-shows/
Only 17% of 13-year-olds and 19% of 17-year-olds report that they read for pleasure almost every day. That's down from 35% and 31%, respectively, when they started collecting the data back in 1984, and the lowest ever.
Forgot about this thread . . . currently reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
This arrived today. I've been through this book probably a dozen times, but it's actually the first printed copy I've owned. I think this edition was released on Nov 6th.
On my list, for sure! Read that book probably 6 times or so. LOVE Tolkien and LOTR.
All kidding aside, I think of this as one of the best books we own.
The writing is So perfect within the context of the times written about that if you didn’t know you were reading Satire, you might buy it, hook line and sinker!
As startling as Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste was, I feel the need to retreat into something familiar and fun.
The writing is So perfect within the context of the times written about that if you didn’t know you were reading Satire, you might buy it, hook line and sinker!
As startling as Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste was, I feel the need to retreat into something familiar and fun.
)THE THICK SKULL OF THE FORTUNATE
I
ONCE a number of Icelandic peasantry found a very thick skull in the cemetery where the poet Egil was buried. Its great thickness made them feel certain it was the skull of a great man, doubtless of Egil himself. To be doubly sure they put it on a wall and hit it hard blows with a hammer. It got white where the blows fell but did not break, and they were convinced that it was in truth the skull of the poet, and worthy of every honour. In Ireland we have much kinship with the Icelanders, or 'Danes' as we call them and all other dwellers in the Scandinavian countries. In some of our mountainous and barren places, and in our seaboard villages, we still test each other in much the same way the Icelanders tested the head of Egil. We may have acquired the custom from those ancient Danish pirates, whose descendants the people of Rosses tell me still remember every field and hillock in Ireland which once belonged to their forebears, and are able to describe Rosses itself as well as any native. There is one seaboard district known as Roughley, where the men are never known to shave or trim their wild red beards, and where there is a fight ever on foot. I have seen them at a boat-race fall foul of each other, and after much loud Gaelic, strike each other with oars. The first boat had gone aground, and by dint of hitting out with the long oars kept the second boat from passing, only to give the victory to the third. One day the Sligo people say a man from Roughley was tried in Sligo for breaking a skull in a row, and made the defence not unknown in Ireland, that some heads are so thin you cannot be responsible for them. Having turned with a look of passionate contempt towards the solicitor who was prosecuting, and cried, 'that little fellow's skull if ye were to hit it would go like an egg-shell,' he beamed upon the judge, and said in a wheedling voice, 'but a man might wallop away at your lordship's for a fortnight.'
II
I wrote all this years ago, out of what were even then old memories. I was in Roughley the other day, and found it much like other desolate places. I may have been thinking of Moughorow, a much wilder place, for the memories of one's childhood are brittle things to lean upon.
1902.
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As usual, jumping between 2 or 3 books, depending on my mood at the moment...
- Shelby Foote's 3 volume The Civil War; A Narrative. I'm about 1/4 into vol.2; Gen. Joe Hooker has just let Robert E. Lee kick his butt all over Chancellorsville with an army 1/4 the size of his, and U.S. Grant is getting into position, ready to lay siege to Vicksburg. If you're all about military strategy and the minutiae of Civil War armies... this ain't your book. It's more about the people involved, and what went on around the battles, before and after. But, there's enough about the battles (and some decent little maps) to whet your appetite for that kind of thing...
- John W. Campbell's The Black Star Passes. Sci-Fi from it's Golden Age; In 3 connected stories, 3 bored young genius's fill their spare time by inventing magnetic propulsion; space travel; saving the "good guys" in a planetary war on Venus; and, finally, inventing everything necessary to defeat alien invaders from a planet that's orbiting a dead (neutron?) star that just happens to be passing by. What will they do for fun tomorrow? Who knows...?
- Dean Koontz's Lightning. A decent, supposedly "Nazi" time traveler tries to save a young American girl from the fate that seems determined to make her life really miserable. All while trying to stop the Third Reich from conquering the world at the same time. It's a good book, but... trying to keep all the time travel "rules" straight (time travel is a complicated mess in the 1940s) must have given poor Dean one Hell of a headache...
- Shelby Foote's 3 volume The Civil War; A Narrative. I'm about 1/4 into vol.2; Gen. Joe Hooker has just let Robert E. Lee kick his butt all over Chancellorsville with an army 1/4 the size of his, and U.S. Grant is getting into position, ready to lay siege to Vicksburg. If you're all about military strategy and the minutiae of Civil War armies... this ain't your book. It's more about the people involved, and what went on around the battles, before and after. But, there's enough about the battles (and some decent little maps) to whet your appetite for that kind of thing...
- John W. Campbell's The Black Star Passes. Sci-Fi from it's Golden Age; In 3 connected stories, 3 bored young genius's fill their spare time by inventing magnetic propulsion; space travel; saving the "good guys" in a planetary war on Venus; and, finally, inventing everything necessary to defeat alien invaders from a planet that's orbiting a dead (neutron?) star that just happens to be passing by. What will they do for fun tomorrow? Who knows...?
- Dean Koontz's Lightning. A decent, supposedly "Nazi" time traveler tries to save a young American girl from the fate that seems determined to make her life really miserable. All while trying to stop the Third Reich from conquering the world at the same time. It's a good book, but... trying to keep all the time travel "rules" straight (time travel is a complicated mess in the 1940s) must have given poor Dean one Hell of a headache...
I'm reading Shelby Foote's vol.1 now. I started it last year but I put it down about 1/4(prolly less) through. It's a big book, as you know. I started from page 1 again. His "SHILO" was a great read.As usual, jumping between 2 or 3 books, depending on my mood at the moment...
- Shelby Foote's 3 volume The Civil War; A Narrative. I'm about 1/4 into vol.2; Gen. Joe Hooker has just let Robert E. Lee kick his butt all over Chancellorsville with an army 1/4 the size of his, and U.S. Grant is getting into position, ready to lay siege to Vicksburg. If you're all about military strategy and the minutiae of Civil War armies... this ain't your book. It's more about the people involved, and what went on around the battles, before and after. But, there's enough about the battles (and some decent little maps) to whet your appetite for that kind of thing...
- John W. Campbell's The Black Star Passes. Sci-Fi from it's Golden Age; In 3 connected stories, 3 bored young genius's fill their spare time by inventing magnetic propulsion; space travel; saving the "good guys" in a planetary war on Venus; and, finally, inventing everything necessary to defeat alien invaders from a planet that's orbiting a dead (neutron?) star that just happens to be passing by. What will they do for fun tomorrow? Who knows...?
- Dean Koontz's Lightning. A decent, supposedly "Nazi" time traveler tries to save a young American girl from the fate that seems determined to make her life really miserable. All while trying to stop the Third Reich from conquering the world at the same time. It's a good book, but... trying to keep all the time travel "rules" straight (time travel is a complicated mess in the 1940s) must have given poor Dean one Hell of a headache...
Also for Sci-fi, I read half of a Ray Bradbury collection of short stories. They were fun.
As the title indicates, a jaunty romp through timeless stories about the roots of cyber-security, and the personalities and motivations involved, the end of the Cold War, and the pivot toward Offensive use of the internet
She is a Dogged reporter, writing a story for the common man that will scare the
out of you!!
She is a Dogged reporter, writing a story for the common man that will scare the
out of you!!
