What are you fuckers reading?
- Thread starter Fata Morgana
- Start date
- Status
Rightguide
Prof Triggernometry
- Joined
- Feb 7, 2017
- Posts
- 56,394
My latest reads
I really enjoy the Inspector Banks novels. One the interesting things about these books is his love of music. If not familiar with the bands, singers (operatic and popular) and orchestral pieces I'll look them up on youtube.
Had an uncle who fought in this. He did not like to talk about it much.
And currently reading Baldacci's End Game. I enjoy the Robie series. If only there really existed people like this.
Read several of Baldacci's works. I'd recommend Guadalcanal Remembered, H. C. L. Merillat, Guadalcanal Diary, Robert Lecky. Further, William Manchester's Goodbye Darkness, and American Caesar.
trysail
Catch Me Who Can
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2005
- Posts
- 25,593
" 'Corruption is too often the consequence of great prosperity and for the last twenty-two years we have been visited with the temptation of that state, as no people ever were before.' [said John Quincy Adams] An all too prosperous America had become an embodiment of material self-indulgence. Through the agency of parties, politics had become a vehicle of corrupt self-interest. 'That some relaxation from the virtues of our earlier age has followed cannot be denied, and party spirit the most infectious of all corruptions of a free people has undoubtedly tainted the political morality of almost all the public men now the leaders of the Union.' [Adams again] There is 'little to choose between them. To purify and refine their characters, the trial of adversity must come, as I have no doubt it will, and that will sift the wheat from the chaff and restore many of the principles of Republican virtue, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.'...
...The next year, in Baltimore for the Articles of Confederation debates, Adams recorded a striking difference between 'the Manners of Maryland' and the culture of New England. Maryland's agrarian society has 'but few Merchants. They are chiefly Planters and Farmers.' Most important, 'the lands are cultivated, and all Sorts of Trades are exercised by Negroes...which has occasioned the Planters and Farmers to assume the Title of Gentlemen, and they hold their Negroes and...all labouring People and Tradesmen, in such Contempt, that they think themselves a distinct order of Beings. Hence they never will suffer their Sons to labour or learn any Trade, but they bring them up in Idleness or what is worse in Horse Racing, Cock fighting, and Card Playing.' The South's slave owners, he concluded, consider themselves 'a distinct order of Beings,' superior to those who value the Puritan work ethic...Northerners were not and could never be, in Southern eyes, 'gentlemen.' A gentleman did not work for a living...
...'Any people anywhere,' Lincoln proposed to the House, 'being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.'...
...With the responsibility of governing in a crisis, Lincoln and Seward had decided that the government had no obligation to provide justice to slaves. They were property. The Constitution protected property. It did not protect slaves as human beings. The founding document provided a legal rather than a moral blueprint, and the Declaration's clain that 'all men are created equal' was not an absolute. For Lincoln and most white Americans, it depended on one's definition of 'equal'...
...The post-assassination Lincoln took on a greatly amplified importance to much of the American public, probably the president most deeply reviled in his lifetime and most highly regarded after his death. The image of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator has contributed to both. It has flattened out our history, especially the history of slavery in American, and allowed many Americans to take refuge under the vast Lincoln umbrella: the Great Emancipator freed the slaves. He did not. He was as much a follower as a leader; a cautious politician who, when he did emancipate the slaves in the Confederacy, in fact freed no slaves at all: they were still slaves under Confederate rule...
-Fred Kaplan
Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, and the Civil War
New York, N.Y. 2017.
I didn't realize just how much of a racist Lincoln was. He had no desire to free the slaves, did not believe a mixed race society possible and was a strong advocate of forcible expulsion/colonization of blacks to Africa or South America.
Kaplan has written an interesting book that's worth reading.
about__aveage
Experienced
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2017
- Posts
- 46
E
Exescort
Guest
ryan8558
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jan 19, 2011
- Posts
- 10,170
That looks interesting. I'll have to read that.
Completed reading this one. It's not the usual stories from the pilots' points of view but of the politics going on at Fighter Command.
Also, finished one I hadn't read since junior high. You can see this may have influenced both the Star Trek and Alien universes.
about to start the next in the Expanse series.
Rightguide
Prof Triggernometry
- Joined
- Feb 7, 2017
- Posts
- 56,394
Notes On Democracy, Mencken
trysail
Catch Me Who Can
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2005
- Posts
- 25,593
Completed reading this one. It's not the usual stories from the pilots' points of view but of the politics going on at Fighter Command.
I recently discovered Korda through pure chance of stumbling upon his biography of T. E. Lawrence at the library. As a result of that, I'll now read anything the man writes.
His biography of R.E. Lee is next on my list.
trysail
Catch Me Who Can
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2005
- Posts
- 25,593
You're in for a treat.
ryan8558
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jan 19, 2011
- Posts
- 10,170
the Lee bio is in my queue as well. will have to add the Lawrence bio. thanks for that bit of info.
Radiohead
You look so tired-unhappy
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2005
- Posts
- 9,779
Dont pretend you'll remember it, but she is readable.
pink
No title
- Joined
- Nov 7, 2005
- Posts
- 58,092
cjh
orgone accumulator
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2004
- Posts
- 32,630
A brilliant book. A sometimes hard read.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/...h-on-sing-unburied-sing-jesmyn-ward.html?_r=0
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/...h-on-sing-unburied-sing-jesmyn-ward.html?_r=0
cjh
orgone accumulator
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2004
- Posts
- 32,630
This one is great as an audiobook. There are so many characters in the book and the audiobook uses that to its advantage by employing a host of narrators: Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Don Cheadle,.... The list goes on and on: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/lincolninthebardo
It's like long-form radio drama.
trysail
Catch Me Who Can
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2005
- Posts
- 25,593
"...Barely half the inhabitants [of Japan in 1946] had a roof over their heads. One in five had tuberculosis. On all sides in the capital were ruined buildings, broken water mains and sewage drains, shattered schools. There was no public transportation: all the buses were destroyed; the trolley lines and their cars had been obliterated. There were the daily degradations and humiliations of the American occupation; there was a pervasive lack of work and its kin: a want of money and widespread beggary and destitution. There was also, or so it seemed, a collapse of society's moral fiber, with gang warfare, prostitution, thievery, and black marketeering pasted onto a national sense of remorse, guilt, resentment, and a deeply felt, unfocused, and chance-directed bitterness.
Yet, for all that, as 1946 got shakily under way, something curious happened: the Japanese people began to ready themselves, though they knew it not, to rise up and display a mettle quite unimagineable in its scope, heft, and range. And the Pacific Ocean was the theater in which this display was to be most vigorously mounted.
In those first few months after the surrender, the country was gripped by a spasm of self-repair, of make-do and mending, of precipitous institutional about-faces and adaptations. Factories that had weeks before been making war materials switched their production lines to start making items needed not by generals and admirals, but by the bone-tired civilians and by the ragged menfolk returning from the battlefields. So bomb casings became charcoal burners, sitting neatly upright on their tail fins and helping households get through that first bitter winter. Large-caliber brass shell cases were modified as rice containers, while tea caddies were fashioned from their smaller shiny cousins. A searchlight mirror maker turned out flat glass panes to repair thousands of Tokyo windows; and for country dwellers, a fighter plane engine piston maker turned his factory to building water pumps. A piston ring fabricator named Soichiro Honda took small engines used during the war as radio generators and strapped them onto the frames of Tokyo's bicycles...
...In a series of secret U.S. Navy experiments that were begun in the early 1960s, a flotilla of antique warships was used to drag sensitive magnetometers back and forth across those Pacific ridge summits that had been found off the Oregon coast. Scientists then analyzed the recordings, and carefully noted the traces of magnetism that had been detected in the rocks below. What they found quite astonished them, as the submarine rocks displayed, with an elegant and instantly understandable symmetry, the record of the already know phenomenon of the earth's magnetic field reversal.
Every fifty thousand years or so, and for no certain reason, the direction of magnetism of the planet abruptly changes: compasses that point to the north suddenly point to the south, to put it simply..."
-Simon Winchester
Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers
New York, N.Y. 2015.
Simon Winchester has written a bunch of engrossing and best-selling books. The man is brilliant and a bit of a polymath. This isn't his best work, by any means, but it's entertaining and worth a read.
Radiohead
You look so tired-unhappy
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2005
- Posts
- 9,779
Tough it out, it should have really been an Odd Thomas novel
squirtn4crtn
Virgin
- Joined
- Aug 29, 2014
- Posts
- 27
Recent reading
I have'nt take enough time to enjoy anything lately,however the last memorable piece of classic lit(my fav)was Goetthes(hope i spelled correctly)Fauste.Has been on my bucket list 'o books for the last 25 years or so,but finally came across it in a donated stack of other bucket list books i opened it and clung to every vivid line in the book.It is one of those gems that tends to leave you with lines you never really forget,in fact the type that tend to somehow shape our future personality,profound is perhaps the term.Anyhow,the fact that it is written in an earlier time period dialect makes little difference as I feel it is more like lovely,descript poetry!
I have'nt take enough time to enjoy anything lately,however the last memorable piece of classic lit(my fav)was Goetthes(hope i spelled correctly)Fauste.Has been on my bucket list 'o books for the last 25 years or so,but finally came across it in a donated stack of other bucket list books i opened it and clung to every vivid line in the book.It is one of those gems that tends to leave you with lines you never really forget,in fact the type that tend to somehow shape our future personality,profound is perhaps the term.Anyhow,the fact that it is written in an earlier time period dialect makes little difference as I feel it is more like lovely,descript poetry!
pink
No title
- Joined
- Nov 7, 2005
- Posts
- 58,092
I didn't like the Dean Koontz book. Boring.
I'm now into chapter 5 of Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen. I think I've read it before, years ago but it's really good.
Last edited:
Radiohead
You look so tired-unhappy
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2005
- Posts
- 9,779
If you didnt like Odd Thomas, you wouldnt. I'm not surprised... I was just in a place where it was the only book I had at the time
- Status
