Favorite books / What are you reading?

Jay Null said:
I like your description and will locate a copy when funds become available. :D
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Hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

He has a website up about the book. Very basic & doesn't do it justice, but if you read his FAQ, you'll see how he thinks & writes (though he obviously used a ghost writer too, but didn't try to hide that fact).

http://makingakilling.co.uk/
 
Jay Null said:
Have you by chance read Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, SuAside?

Neat lil' lament on the failings of the UN, the international community, and of a Canadian general (and author of this text).
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I have. I had to... I'm belgian, so it strikes close to home. We lost 10 PaCos and pulled out.

Fucking politicians and retarded RoE lead to this. They should've escalted straight away (let's see you have an uprising with Leopard tanks on the street corner, bitches!).

While my comment is simplistic, it's largely true.
 
SuAside said:
Jay Null said:
Have you by chance read Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, SuAside?

Neat lil' lament on the failings of the UN, the international community, and of a Canadian general (and author of this text).
Click to expand...
I have. I had to... I'm belgian, so it strikes close to home. We lost 10 PaCos and pulled out.

Fucking politicians and retarded RoE lead to this. They should've escalted straight away (let's see you have an uprising with Leopard tanks on the street corner, bitches!).

While my comment is simplistic, it's largely true.
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Then we (you, I, and Rom') are of the same opinion, more or less.
 
Jay Null said:
(You made a bad choice, Wolf! :D First 30 or so are . . . eh, but then, back in the "real world . . ." it lifts up)
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Yeah, I may give it another chance one day. I could definitely see myself re-reading The Gunslinger, so maybe when I finish that one again.

These Mark Twain shorts stories I'm reading are great. I'll give more info later...
 
Reading Plans en Relief - Villes Fortes des Anciens Pays-Bas Français au XVIIIe S.

Sounds like boring shit, but it's a book about old 3D maps of entire cities and villages, used by the military to have a perfect idea of their surroundings. It's crazy shit. Thousands of papercraft houses, cathedrals, churches, trees, streets, ... The pictures in the book look just as if one had taken an aerial picture of the real city. The detail is just WOW! Apparently these "dioramas" are exhibited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille and I'm so going this Summer if this is still the case, 'cause it's an old book.

I feel like making papercraft houses and cities whenever I look through the book. I should have studied architecture.
 
Okay, so Mark Twain...I can't recommend this story highly enough...but there's a problem.

It's the last novel he was working on, and it existed in three unfinished forms when he died. Afterward, a guy named Paine had legal control of Twain's papers (and wouldn't show them to anyone). This guy finished one of the stories by altering it significantly. He went so far as to add an entirely new character and almost wholly remove an existing character along with a quarter of the entire text. Paine didn't do a bad job, actually, but his work is clearly not faithful to Twain. This version is called The Mysterious Stranger.

Since then, scholars have merged the three original texts into a much more faithful form. The full title of this version is No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger: Being an Ancient Tale Found in a Jug and Freely Translated from the Jug.
 
I finally got around to reading my copy of the windup girl.

I really like the plot, tech, and setting. I dont like many of the characters.

two things I dont like about the book:
1. My favorite character got killed
2. Due to the way the author describes sex in the book, I think the author had few girl friends/ sex before he married his wife or he lived a sheltered religious life.

He seems to be someone who either watches too much kink porn/hentai or is just clueless.
 
Jay Null said:
My problem with The Stand is what Stephen King is known best for: Paranormal horror. The moment it became a tale of people being drawn together via dreams, it started to feel like a retread of his other works. That, and Gas Man (the firebug) I found uninteresting.
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I like the dream stuff and the whole "taking a stand" thing, but I agree about the firebug (if I remember correctly), and King just didn't wrap the story up satisfyingly.

Actually I don't really know what I'm talking about, it was like 100 years or so ago I read it.
 
Started reading "Chickenhawk". It's about a Warrant Officer helicopter pilot being sent to Vietnam.
 
I read for the first time the short story "I have no mouth and I must scream".

It was so very enjoyable, I loved it from beginning to end. Is it wrong to sympathise with the super computer? I liked him more than any other character.
 
An old and torn volume of 'The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes', by, of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I hope complete means complete and not 'a somewhat complete assortment of stories'. So far, I've been enjoying myself. They are rather basic books, though the writing is good enough, but I fear that after a few stories this will turn into what I dread when watching TV series, which is the [case] of the week. Hopefully there is some sort of overarching story line.

Otherwise, I've finished Moby Dick a while a go, if I didn't already mention it. A bit of a disappointment really... I love the characters and pretty much everything, apart from the writers constant habit to go off and write another eulogy on a different part of a whale, or a different kind of whale, or whaling, or something else related to whales and whaling. No wonder they put it up in the biology section some odd years ago.
 
If your Holmes book looks like a Encyclopedia when you open it, with double column per page, thats the right one. Looks fantastic, don't read enough to grab it yet though.

My reccomendation is

SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam

This book does not try to excite you like many "true accounts" of war, but the breakdown of how things were done by these special operatives at times made my spine tingle.

For instance, in vietnam jungles, contact was made at close range. A 6 man special forces unit could strike with the ferocity of a much larger force quicker than the enemy could realize what was really happening.

Upon contact the first 2 guys in a column would empty CAR-15s loaded with tracers on full auto, and run to the rear of the column. During this, the next 2 guys are throwing grenades; same thing back of the column. Next 2 guys behind them empty 2 more tracer mags, while the last 2 are setting claymores. Then its high tail it out of there. This all happens in about 8 seconds. It is thought entire platoons were decimated using this, however due to the nature of spec ops in a jungle no one has real evidence. Radio would be intercepted about NVA engaging a large force, when it was just 6 or 8 guys. gangster.

Oh and anything by Jack London, The Sea Wolf is one of my favourite books ever.

Currently reading Sharpe by Bernard Cornwell. The same dread, a new "case" with every different book
 
SuAside said:
Started reading "Chickenhawk". It's about a Warrant Officer helicopter pilot being sent to Vietnam.
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I liked Easy Target better (It is about Scout Pilots).

I had to read several dozen paperback memiors by vietnam vets (in addition to all the battle histories and books on equipment during one of my graduate courses. I still have most of them as reference materials if I can be of help.

WPD
 
mobucks said:
SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam

This book does not try to excite you like many "true accounts" of war, but the breakdown of how things were done by these special operatives at times made my spine tingle.

Oh and anything by Jack London, The Sea Wolf is one of my favourite books ever.
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I agree, any book by John Plaster is well worth reading.

As for Jack London, have you read "The Iron Heal"?
 
Thomas Bernhard - Old Masters

692.books.web.bernhard.jpg
 
mobucks said:
My reccomendation is

SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam
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I'll look into it. Sounds interesting, but your tracer account seems unrealistic. When firing full mags of tracers, you will cause extreme fouling to your gun in a very short time. Not saying it's impossible, just that it's really discouraged (max of 1 tracer per 3 rounds is the common standard for most nations). But remember Vietnam was the era were the AR15 was vilified for unreliability (albeit largely due to shit ammo and wrong info about cleaning), so it seems odd if they were full magazines worth of tracers. I'll need to read the book to confirm, I guess.

WillisPDunlevey said:
I liked Easy Target better (It is about Scout Pilots).

I had to read several dozen paperback memiors by vietnam vets (in addition to all the battle histories and books on equipment during one of my graduate courses. I still have most of them as reference materials if I can be of help.

WPD
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I'm trying to read at least one account per decisive war in modern history. I've read the historical books in the past, but now want eye witness accounts. I've done most, but am still missing Korea & Afghanistan.
Your favorites for Vietnam are fine too though, since the view from a helicopter is no doubt very different from the view of the average G.I. down in the sticks.
 
mobucks said:
SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam

This book does not try to excite you like many "true accounts" of war, but the breakdown of how things were done by these special operatives at times made my spine tingle.
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Right on, I read this one years ago. As far as true accounts go, Marcinko's Rogue Warrior was a guilty pleasure.
 
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