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What are you reading at the moment?

I'm reading a review copy of Fast Girls, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. There's a blog tour for the book all month, and my blog is a stop on Monday the 23rd. Come check it out!
 
sr71plt said:
I think I do too. She's upped the ante. She's started to read minor (really minor!) Charles Dickens tomes.

Of course I think the game slightly unfair--because I also write books, and she doesn't.
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So, what does the winner get? :D

DorlaMoorehouse said:
I'm reading a review copy of Fast Girls, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. There's a blog tour for the book all month, and my blog is a stop on Monday the 23rd. Come check it out!
Click to expand...

I'm kind of naive. What's a blog tour? :confused:
 
The Belgariad and Mallorean again, with Belgarath the Sorcerer on the bathroom counter as well -- probably for about the dozenth time.

Think I'll hit Amazon and grab the collected versions of Sparhawk's tale later today. Been longer since I read those, and I kind of like these thick two volume paperbacks for the Eddings series'. Fewer trips to the bookshelf, plus they have that pleasant weight of a hardcover.
 
"Pride and Predjudice" for the first time, a book about giftedness, and I'm always re-reading Janet Evanovich's first twelve novels. Right now it's "Hero at Large" which is a title I don't understand but whatever, darn good book.
 
driphoney said:
So, what does the winner get? :D



I'm kind of naive. What's a blog tour? :confused:
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It's like a book tour, but instead of going to book stores, you go to blogs. Your tour is a month long, and you set up a schedule for the month where once a day, the designated blogger posts something substantive on their blog about your book - a review, and interview, etc.
 
Of chocolate and porcine aviation.

A friend in the USA Amazoned (new verb) me a childrens book to give to her much younger cousin on her birthday. I decided to read it although aimed at eight to 12 year olds, it's the best childrens book I have read in years, a bit non PC but very funny for both younger and older kids.

It's called the Adventures of Nanny Piggins( A flying chocolate fuelled pig of course) and is by a new author called RA Spratt.

One of the recommendations on the Dust cover is from Madelaine Allbright the former US Secretary of State and it led me to wonder how on earth a first time author managed to get such a heavyweight recommendation - but the book deserves it.
 

... More than a hundred Connecticut Rangers, some of the best soldiers in the army, had left on the mission before dawn, led by one of the best field officers in the army, a strapping Connecticut farmer and veteran of Bunker Hill, Colonel Thomas Knowlton. (It was Knowlton at Bunker Hill who, with Colonel John Stark, had famously held the rail fence in the face of the oncoming British lines, and Knowlton who, during the siege of Boston, had led the night attack on Charlestown that so upset the British officer's production of the Burgoyne farce The Blockade at Faneuil Hall.)...

... Knowlton's encircling move [ at the Battle of Harlem Heights ] ran into trouble when some of his men opened fire too soon, attacking the enemy's flank, instead of getting behind and cutting off their retreat. The fighting grew fierce. Within minutes Knowlton and Major Leitch both fell, mortally wounded...
​


-David McCollough
1776
New York, New York 2005.



I never tire of periodically reading about the miracle of George Washington's ragtag amateur soldiers and their improbable triumph over the world's foremost military power. As many know, Flexner's "Indispensable Man" ( Washington ) had a checkered military record but he always managed ( sometimes narrowly ) to avoid a fatal military disaster and nevertheless kept the Continental Army together— in the end, merely outlasting the British was sufficient to determine the outcome.

McCullough is predictably wonderful. I've read every book he's ever written. With the research for this book already compiled in the course of writing John Adams, it was a comparatively simple ( for someone possessed of McCullough's talents ) matter to produce one more highly readable account of that pivotal year.

 
Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. I never read it before and picked it up to go with travels through Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
 
Mike Mullane's "Riding Rockets".

Well worth reading if you are at all interested in NASA.

Cat
 
The Stand - Uncut. I have read it probably 10 or 15 times over the years. I still love it!
 
The Best of the Best, 18 Short stories by America's leading Authors.
S. King, JC Oates,Tabatha King, etc.

Maybe I can become less loquacious?
 
'A Time To Kill' ~ John Grisham.

It's proving to be an interesting book. However, I've seen part of the movie.
So of course, I can't picture the characters as they're described.
All I can see is Matthew McConaughey. :rolleyes: :D
 
Maxwell's Game, by M.J. Trow.
His remarks on History, the English Language, School-kids and Teaching under the Government are hysterical.


And Amazon delivered the new Terry Pratchett this morning; it's a Tiffany Aching story.
 
Living Dead in Dallas

by Charlaine Harris

A Sookie Stackhouse mystery for Light Halloween fun reading
 
"I shall wear Midnight" by Terry Pratchett.

It's another 'Tiffany Aching' and very funny.
 
"Bonk" by Mary Roach. Superlative, non-fiction book about many of the weird and fascinating aspects of sex. She's a gifted and funny writer.
 
JackLuis said:
The Best of the Best, 18 Short stories by America's leading Authors.
S. King, JC Oates,Tabatha King, etc.

Maybe I can become less loquacious?
Click to expand...

Tabitha King is a barnacle encrusted on Stevie's hull.
 
I read multiple books at a time so the present pile includes a biography of William S. Halsted, the surgeon who lowered the lethality of breast cancer back about 1900; a biography of ancestor Gaius Octavious, Emperor Augustus; an autobiography of a WW2 Marine; and some botany books. I'm training myself to be a botanist.
 

Part of George Washington's difficulty rose from his own origins and upbringing in a very special American place called the Northern Neck of Virginia. It was a huge tract of five million acres between the Potomac and the Rappahannock rivers, so large that it spanned three degrees of longitude from the Chesapeake Bay to the mountains of western Virginia. In 1649, the Northern Neck was created by England's Charles II as a reward to some of his most faithful royalist supporters. One of them, Thomas Lord Culpepper, bought out the rest and passed the land by inheritance to the Fairfax family, an interesting and eccentric clan who combined Cavalier manners with Roundhead principles in the English Civil War. After much litigation, a British court ruled in 1745 that the entire Northern Neck belonged to one man, Thomas Fairfax, sixth Baron Fairfax ( 1693-1781 ). He liked it so well that he moved there from England and built a rural retreat called Greenway Court in the Shenandoah country at the western end of his domain.

The family interests were managed by Lord Fairfax's cousin Colonel William Fairfax, who built a great house at Belvoir next to Mount Vernon. The gentry of the Northern Neck bacame agents of the Fairfaxes and great landholders in their own right. These families of Carters, Lees, Marshalls, Custises, Washingtons, and Fairfaxes intermarried, as George Washington's older stepbrother Lawrence married Colonel Fairfax's daughter Anne Fairfax Washington. They looked after one another, and when young George Washington lost his father, Lord Fairfax and Colonel Fairfax took a fostering interest in the young man. They became his mentors, and their houses were his schools. They were quick to recognize his promise and watched over his development, not always with an approving eye.

From these men George Washington learned the creed he followed all his life. It valued self-government, discipline, virtue, reason, and restraint. Historians have called it a stoic philosophy, but it was far removed from the ancient Stoicism of the slave Epictetus, who sought a renunciation of the world, or the emperor Marcus Aurelieus, who wished to be in the world but not of it. The philosophy that Washington learned among the ruling families of the Northern Neck was a modern idea. It was a philosophy of moral striving through virtuous action and right conduct, by powerful men who believed their duty was to lead others in a changing world. Most of all, it was a way of combining power with responsibility, and liberty with discipline.

Much of this creed was about honor; not "primal honor," not the honor of the duel, not a hair-trigger revenge against an insult, or a pride of aggressive masculinity. This was honor as an emblem of virtue. These gentlemen of the Northern Neck lived for honor in that sense. The only fear George Washington ever acknowledged in his life was a fear that his actions would "reflect eternal dishonour upon me."

A major part of this code of honor was an idea of courage. The men around young George Washington assumed that a gentleman would act with physical courage in the face of danger, pain, suffering, and death. They gave equal weight to moral courage in adversity, prosperity, trial, and temptation. For them, a vital part of leadership was the ability to persist in what one believed to be the right way. This form of courage was an idea of moral stamina, which Washington held all his life. Stamina in turn was about strength and endurance both as a moral and physical idea.

These men of the Northern Neck believed that people were not born to these qualities but learned them by discipline and exercise. Washington himself was a sickly child, and he suffered much from illness. He was taught to strengthen himself by equestrian exercise and spent much of his life outdoors on the back of a horse. Whenever he had the time, he went hunting three times a week. Even in his last years, he walked several miles every night to keep fit. By exercise Washington acquired extraordinary stamina and strength. The painter Charles Willson Peale remembered a moment at Mount Vernon in 1772 when he and other men were pitching a heavy iron bar; a popular sport in the Chesapeake. Washington appeared and, "without taking off his coat, held out his hand for the missile, and hurled it into the air, striking the ground far, very far beyond out utmost efforts." Washington said, "When you beat my pitch, young gentlemen, I'll try again."

Even as commander-in-chief, Washington joined his men in games of strength and skill, always developing his stamina in a disciplined way. In times of great stress he could keep going when others failed. His brother officer John Armstrong wrote that he "maintains full possession of himself, is indefatigable by day and night."

This modern creed of the Fairfaxes and Washingtons was linked to an idea of liberty. Washington thought of liberty in the Stoic way, as independence from what he called "involuntary passion." He was a man of strong passions, which he struggled to keep in check. For him the worst slavery was to be in bondage to unbridled passion and not in "full possession of himself."

George Washington also thought of liberty as a condition of autonomy from external domination, but not as we do today. He believed that only a gentleman of independent means could be truly free. This way of thinking was widely shared by the gentry of the Northern Neck, and it made liberty into a system of stratification. Gentlemen of honor and independence such as the Fairfaxes and Washingtons had great liberty; small freeholders had not so much of it. Tenants had little liberty, servants less, and slaves none at all. This was a hierarchical world where liberty and slavery coexisted— to us a contradiction because we do not share the assumption of inequality upon which it rested...
​


-David Hackett Fischer
Washington's Crossing
New York, New York 2004.



Fischer's book recounts the dramatic tale of the Continental Army's desperate crossing of the Delaware River on the night of Christmas Eve, 1776 at a point when prospects for the five month old nation were at their lowest ebb. The Continental Army had been soundly thrashed by the British on Long Island and Manhattan before its headlong retreat across New Jersey and flight into Pennsylvania.

A betting man would have given odds that the Colonists would be satisfied to either lick their wounds or melt away. Instead, amidst miserable conditions ( two Americans would literally freeze to death during the march to Trenton ), in the dark of night, in the face of a horrible nor'easter, they re-crossed the river and shocked the world. To paraphrase Churchill's comment on The Battle of Britain, it wasn't the beginning of the end but it was the end of the beginning.


 
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