What are you reading? Topic

Posted by bronxcheer on 4/3/2018 4:15:00 PM (view original):
Re-reading the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser

Volume 1--Flashman

Is that the one where the Flashman fights Gorilla Grodd?

4/21/2018 1:18 PM
I tried reading Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

I had to give it up somewhere around halfway through .... it reminded me in ways of some of the early 'Baseball Abstracts' from Bill James ... there is a whole bunch of interesting data in the book but there are also a whole bunch of opinion and theories that are presented as facts. It eventually got too frustrating (it is always a bad sign when you find yourself shouting things back at the author in your head) so I just quit it.

I'm now finishing up Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr By Nancy Isenberg This is certainly a different read on history than most folks have. There is an extraordinary amount of everything always being the fault of someone else and never the fault of Mr. Burr himself. This has been another slog of a read and I probably wish I'd spent the time on something else.

Next up is Skin in the Game by Taleb ... I got it much sooner than I thought I would from the library :-)
4/21/2018 1:49 PM
I finally read, make that conquered (feels like I climbed a 1370 page mountain) Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869). I had it on my shelf for a decade, and it took several false starts to get through it (always got hung up around the first 50-75 pages -- too many characters introduced right off the bat that I couldn’t keep track of). The peace parts were brilliant, the characters vivid and memorable, and the death scenes (there were many) all beautifully done, even for the minor characters. The war sections were not as enjoyable as they contained many essayistic passages (on military maneuvers, Napoleon and Tsar Alexander, religion, philosophy, Russian and world history, etc.) that left me a bit cold and wishing old Leo would get back to the domestic drama side of the book. It's undoubtedly a great novel, deserving of its reputation. A couple of years ago I read Anna Karenina, which Tolstoy wrote after this one, and while I wouldn't call it better I'd say it's more streamlined and readable.
5/8/2018 1:21 PM (edited)
Posted by italyprof on 4/21/2018 1:18:00 PM (view original):
Posted by bronxcheer on 4/3/2018 4:15:00 PM (view original):
Re-reading the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser

Volume 1--Flashman

Is that the one where the Flashman fights Gorilla Grodd?

Harry Flashman is the anti-hero. Coward,scoundrel, Selfish,dishonest libertine, womanizer,craven, despicable. perpetually randy, yet always comes off as a hero in Victorian England
5/8/2018 1:35 PM
I'm on Volume 4-- Flashman at the Charge. (Light Brigade)
5/8/2018 1:38 PM
Congrats Crazy on finishing War and Peace, I'm not sure I could do that these days. I'm just not sure I can focus that long on fiction .....

As for me, since my last update I finished 'Skin in the Game' by Taleb, '**** Deus a brief history of tomorrow' by Yuval Harari, 'How will you measure your life' by Clayton Christensen, and am 20% or so done with Chernow's 'Alexander Hamilton'

I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm not much on biographies these days as I'm finding Chernow's book to feel like another slog much as the recent Aaron Burr biography I read was. I'll keep plugging away though and see what happens.

When I was younger I was an inveterate reader but as my life circumstances changed I'd stopped reading books several years ago, (Mostly I read magazines / newspapers in their various forms as well as various websites over the last several years) A few months ago I made the decision / conscious choice to go back to reading books regularly. It is interesting, though not surprising, to see how much my interests have changed now that I've made that
choice. It is enjoyable to go back to the rhythm of reading books, if nothing else it makes me feel younger
5/8/2018 9:58 PM
combalt, thanks for the comment. I think it was about 7-8 years ago that my wife asked me for the title of the last book I'd read, and I struggled mightily to come up with it. At that time I made a similar "decision / conscious choice" to read more books. I wouldn't say reading books makes me feel younger, exactly, just more mentally alive. And it's an especially relaxing activity at the end of the day, right before going to sleep.
5/8/2018 11:59 PM
two years before the mast

5/9/2018 5:12 AM
I'm still sticking with Russia, but moving into the 20th century!

The Day Will Pass Away: The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard: 1935-1936 (English translation 2016) by Ivan Chistyakov. Diary of an educated, cultured Muscovite who ticks off the wrong people in the Communist Party and winds up, to his horror, sent to work as a guard in a Siberian gulag. Some real spurts of grim poetry here in the Samuel Beckett style ("You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.") but suffers from a lack of context and narrative arc. Makes me want to read Solzhenitsyn.
5/14/2018 1:23 PM
yeah buddy

a book i'd like to read is James Ellroy's Uday 9 Qusay

http://www.jamesellroy.net/appearances/in-a-lonely-place/
5/14/2018 2:00 PM (edited)
I read my first ever Herman Melville story tonight, "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" (1856). Darkly funny and bizarre, a little Kafkaesque, even. I'd always assumed Melville would be a chore to read so I preferred not to, but this was surprisingly good.
5/14/2018 11:32 PM
bring on the fish
5/15/2018 12:44 AM
Posted by bagchucker on 5/15/2018 12:44:00 AM (view original):
bring on the fish
Great line!
5/15/2018 11:50 AM
5/30/2018 6:31 PM
Len Deighton FUNERAL IN BERLIN chapter (like anyone uses this word anymore) 36

made me LOL
6/6/2018 6:14 AM
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