What are you reading at the moment?

[Lawrence65]

The Moonlit Mind: A Tale of Suspense ~ Dean Knootz


Thank you for the gift baby.

Welcome Love...

Bag of Bones - Stephen King

Thanks to the love of my life

 

[trysail]

On the last day of January, 1630, 'Lieutenant-General' Pietersz was taken out to be 'broken from under upwards, and the body put upon a Wheel.'

Breaking on a wheel, as it was generally known, was the most painful and barbaric method of execution practiced in the Dutch Republic and was, in effect, a form of crucifixation. In Pietersz's case the condemned man, stripped to a pair of linen drawers, would have been led out to a scaffold on which had been assembled a huge cart wheel— still fitted with an axle— a bench, some ropes, and a thick iron bar. He would have been lashed, spread-eagled, to the bench and positioned so that the executioner had easy access to his limbs. Taking up the heavy bar, and with great concentration, this man would have proceeded to smash the bones in the prisoner's arms and legs, starting with the fingers and the toes and working slowly inward. The aim was to completely pulverize each limb, so that when Pietersz was lifted from the bench onto the wheel, his upper arms were broken in so many places that they could be twisted and bent to follow the circumference of the wheel, while his legs were wrenched backward from the thighs, forced right around the outer rim, and tied off with the heels touching the back of the head. The latter operation was difficult to complete without allowing the broken femurs to protrude, but a skilled executioner took pride not only in ensuring that his victim remained fully conscious throughout the operation, but also in crushing his bones so thoroughly that the skin remained intact. As a further refinement, it was common for the condemned man's ribs to be stoved in with several further blows, so that every breath became an agony.

Once the grisly operation had been concluded, Pietersz's wheel would have been hoisted upright and the axle thrust deep into the ground close by the scaffold so that the Stone-Cutter's final moments could be witnessed by the assembled crowd. Death— generally as the result of internal bleeding— might take hours; in a place such as Batavia, the dying man's pain and distress would have been exacerbated by the cloying heat and the swarms of flies and mosquitoes that would have filled his eyes and mouth. The strongest men sometimes survived into a second day, and Pietersz, a brawny army veteran, may not have lapsed into unconsciousness until the early hours of February 1630.


​

-Mike Dash
Batavia's Graveyard
New York, N.Y. 2002.




This is a riveting account of history's bloodiest (and possibly least known) mutiny. I have only encountered one such sickening and horrifyingly graphic account of being "broken on the wheel" before— that being the 1707 execution of the Livonian nobleman and patriot Johann Reinhold von Patkul at the hands of Sweden's Charles XII detailed in Robert Massie's Peter The Great. I have never forgotten Massie's horrific description from the day I read it.

 

[Handley_Page]

"The Warlock Enraged". Christopher Stasheff.

 

[avrgblkgrl]

"A Change in Altitude" by Anita Shreve

 

[TheOlderGuy]

The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Incognito by David Eagleman

 

[trysail]

The government's interest in the arts or culture was entirely fictitious, just another bid for control. For all the bright talk there was a reflex of pessimism when it came to action. No one wanted to have children in Singapore, not many people even wanted to get married. The city-state kept evolving, but because the rule was "conform or leave," Singaporeans remained in a condition of arrested development, all the while being reminded that they were lucky to be governed by inspired leadership— in effect, the Lee [ Kwan Yew ] family.

Lee was a social leveler, but like all levelers he had elevated himself, introduced contradictions, and created a society in which there were privileges for the few, monotony for the many. Lee and his planners were full of great ideas. The trouble was— and it seemed to me a fault of most repressive, power-hungry people— they didn't know where to stop...

***​

In my Bangalore hotel I had found a discarded copy of Dream Catcher, by Margaret Salinger, a memoir of her experience growing up in the J. D. Salinger household. It was a humane and insightful account of a volatile man whose moods dominated the family. He was not lovable, vulnerable Holden Caulfield, but paranoiac and self-important, with an easily ruffled disposition. Margaret convincingly made the case for the Salinger household having all the traits of a cult and J. D. himself the severe attributes of a cult leader.

In the course of the book, Margaret mentions her father's interest in Raj Yoga and Sri Ramakrishna, who was Vivekananda's guru. She quotes from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna:

A man may live in a mountain cave, smear his body with ashes, observe fasts and practice austere discipline, but if his mind dwells on worldly objects, on "woman and gold," I say, "Shame on him!" Woman and gold are the most fearsome enemies of the enlightened way, and woman rather more than gold, since it is woman that creates the need for gold. For woman one man becomes the slave of another, and so loses his freedom. Then he cannot act as he likes.

"The only thing worth reading" was J. D. Salinger's judgement on this bit of pompous misogyny...

​

-Paul Theroux
Ghost Train To The Eastern Star: On The Tracks of The Great Railway Bazaar
New York, N.Y. 2008.



I'd known of Paul Theroux for decades but had somehow never managed to read anything by him until I read The Happy Isles of Oceania a couple of years ago. I enjoyed that book, thus when I saw "Ghost Train" on the library shelf, I picked it up. In this book, Theroux attempts to retrace the journey that formed the subject of the book that made him ( The Great Railway Bazaar ).

He paints a grim picture of much of Eastern Europe, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkmenistan, India, Myanmar, Cambodia and Russia. The few kind words he seems to have are restricted to Turkey, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan.

Theroux is a bit of an enigma. He clearly has misanthropic tendencies and may be just one more in a long line of confused, anarchistic phonies. For the most part, only the young can travel the way Theroux does in this book; the vast majority of the West's middle-aged need the creature comforts to which they've become accustomed. Attempting to sleep in a overcrowded compartment filled with drunk Russians or reeking train platforms filled with squatters is not their idea of a "good time."

 

[trysail]

The military sweep through southern Maryland is ongoing and intense. Searches of towns and homes have turned up nothing and it is clear that the time has come to scour more daunting terrain for Booth and Herold. A combined force of seven hundred Illinois cavalry, six hundred members of the Twenty-second Colored Troops, and one hundred men from the Sixteenth New York Cavalry Regiment now enters the wilderness of Maryland's vast swamps.

"No human being inhabits this malarious extent" is how one journalist describes this region. "Even a hunted murderer would shrink from hiding there. Serpents and slimy lizards are the only living denizens.... Here the soldiers prepare to seek for the President's assassins, and no search of the kind has ever been so thorough and patient."

The method of searching the swamps is simple yet arduous. First, the troops assemble on the edge of bogs with names like Allen's Creek, Scrub Swamp, and Atchall's Swamp, standing at loose attention in the shade of a thick forest of beech, dogwood, and gum trees. Then they form two lines and march straight forward, from one side to the other. As absurd as it seems to the soldiers, marching headlong into cold mucky water, there is no other way of locating Booth and Herold. Incredibly, eighty-seven of these brave men will drown in the painstaking weeklong search for the killers.


​

-Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard
Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever
New York, N.Y. 2011.



Someone gave me a copy of this book; I wouldn't have picked it up otherwise. It's a shame that trees had to die so that Messrs. O'Reilly and Dugard could regurgitate something ( with virtually nothing to add and in lousy prose, to boot ) that has been the subject of 3,976 previous books. Don't waste your time on this.

 

[Thistlethorn]

A short story collection entitled: Steampunk, edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer

I'm almost done with it. Overall, it was very enjoyable. Especially the stories that dealt the golem mythology (Steampunk Kabbalahism, who knew?). My least favorite story involved sodomizing morlocks. I just find it odd that somebody read The Time Machine and thought "I know, let's sodomize the morlocks."

 

[myrionomos]

On the last day of January, 1630, 'Lieutenant-General' Pietersz was taken out to be 'broken from under upwards, and the body put upon a Wheel.'

Breaking on a wheel, as it was generally known, was the most painful and barbaric method of execution practiced in the Dutch Republic and was, in effect, a form of crucifixation. In Pietersz's case the condemned man, stripped to a pair of linen drawers, would have been led out to a scaffold on which had been assembled a huge cart wheel— still fitted with an axle— a bench, some ropes, and a thick iron bar. He would have been lashed, spread-eagled, to the bench and positioned so that the executioner had easy access to his limbs. Taking up the heavy bar, and with great concentration, this man would have proceeded to smash the bones in the prisoner's arms and legs, starting with the fingers and the toes and working slowly inward. The aim was to completely pulverize each limb, so that when Pietersz was lifted from the bench onto the wheel, his upper arms were broken in so many places that they could be twisted and bent to follow the circumference of the wheel, while his legs were wrenched backward from the thighs, forced right around the outer rim, and tied off with the heels touching the back of the head. The latter operation was difficult to complete without allowing the broken femurs to protrude, but a skilled executioner took pride not only in ensuring that his victim remained fully conscious throughout the operation, but also in crushing his bones so thoroughly that the skin remained intact. As a further refinement, it was common for the condemned man's ribs to be stoved in with several further blows, so that every breath became an agony.

Once the grisly operation had been concluded, Pietersz's wheel would have been hoisted upright and the axle thrust deep into the ground close by the scaffold so that the Stone-Cutter's final moments could be witnessed by the assembled crowd. Death— generally as the result of internal bleeding— might take hours; in a place such as Batavia, the dying man's pain and distress would have been exacerbated by the cloying heat and the swarms of flies and mosquitoes that would have filled his eyes and mouth. The strongest men sometimes survived into a second day, and Pietersz, a brawny army veteran, may not have lapsed into unconsciousness until the early hours of February 1630.


​

-Mike Dash
Batavia's Graveyard
New York, N.Y. 2002.




This is a riveting account of history's bloodiest (and possibly least known) mutiny. I have only encountered one such sickening and horrifyingly graphic account of being "broken on the wheel" before— that being the 1707 execution of the Livonian nobleman and patriot Johann Reinhold von Patkul at the hands of Sweden's Charles XII detailed in Robert Massie's Peter The Great. I have never forgotten Massie's horrific description from the day I read it.

You might like "Batavia," by Peter FitzSimons, Heinmann/Random House 2011. it's a good read - lightweight but accurate history dealing with the whole journey, the mutiny and its aftermath.

 

[trysail]

His costumed make-believe was played against a backdrop of blood and terror. Pugachev's imperial decrees, proclaiming that the nobility must be killed, unleashed a frenzy of hatred. Peasants killed landlords, their families, and their hated overseers. Serfs, who had always been considered resigned, submissive to God, the tsar, and the master, now flung themselves into orgies of cruelty. Noblemen were dragged from their hiding places, flayed, burned alive, hacked to pieces, or hanged from trees. Children were mutilated and slaughtered in front of their parents. Wives were spared only long enough to be raped in front of their husbands; then they had their throats cut or were thrown into carts and carried off as prizes. Before long Pugachev's camp was filled with captured widows and daughters, who were distributed as booty among the rebels. Villagers who persisted in recognizing "the usurper, Catherine" were hanged in rows, nearby ravines were filled with bodies. Desperate townspeople, not knowing what their interrogators wished to hear, gave stock answers when asked whom they considered their lawful sovereign: "Whomever you represent," they replied.

​

-Robert K. Massie
Catherine The Great: Portrait of A Woman
New York, N.Y. 2011.



Bob Massie is a national treasure. I got hooked on him by reading Nicholas and Alexandra in 1979 and have gone on to read everything he's written since. I have yet to be disappointed.

His books are meticulously researched and written in polished prose. I was particularly enthralled by Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War (1991) as I have a lifelong interest in naval history. If you asked today's average citizen what were the causes of World War I, you'd most likely elicit a blank stare. Before I read Dreadnought, if you'd told me one of the proximate causes of the "War To End All Wars" was a sovereign's withered arm, I'd have looked at you as if you were a lunatic.

The subject of this biography is someone that virtually every student of history is aware of but knows little about. Catherine truly was extraordinary— courageous, decisive, and a formidable person. Those with but a cursory acquaintance are most likely aware of her notoriety for numerous sexual liasons; there was a lot more to her than that. Along with England's Elizabeth I, Catherine has to rank as one of history's most amazing women.

http://www.bloomberg.com/image/i3k5QTBMtLC8.jpg​

 

[MagicaPractica]

Just finished Third Grave Dead Ahead by Darynda Jones. Loved it! Liked the premise and writing on the first two but this was just better than the other. She's definitely evolving.

 

[PossibleSlut]

Medicine and Science In Sports and Exercise.

 

[SamScribble]

Re-reading John Fowls' The French Lieutenant's Woman - many years after I read it the first time. And, yeah, it still works.

 

[Neonurotic]

"Pineapple Grenade" by Tim Dorsey

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Just read an obscure memoir of the Civil War. Its one of the best Civil War books I've ever read, cuz it treats all the ordinary, mundane stuff every other book ignores. The writer strives to present the war from the peasants perspective, and does it well. Some of the anecdotal material is priceless.

After Appomattox the writer walks home, 3 days on the road he stops at a house to appeal for a meal. The mistress parks him on the porch and goes inside to rustle up bacon, eggs, biscuits, etc. Along comes General Lee with an entourage, and stops at the house. Lee's staff forces the writer to leave immediately, and the boy moves on down the road w/o eating.

The woman then appears at the door and listens to Lee's appeal for food. She bades the men to wait on the porch, and asks about the boy (writer). The men boast of how they ran him off. The woman then makes it clear to General Lee that he aint eatin nuthin till he finds the boy and brings him back. Men mount up and fetch the boy. The woman lectures Lee: IF HE'S GOOD ENOUGH TO DO YOUR FIGHTING, HE'S GOOD ENOUGH TO EAT WITH YOU.

 

[AnnaHouseWife]

I love a good book, and I'd like to know what the rest of you are reading. So please tell me, what are you reading at the moment?

To kick off, I'm reading:

• Shots from the Front, the British Soldier 1914 - 1918 by Richard Holmes
• Darkling by Yasmine Galenorn (supernatural fantasy / romance)
• The Student's Guide to VHDL by Peter Ashenden (a programming language for programmable logic chips rather than computers)

50 Shades of Grey to see what all the hype is about. Has anyone else read it?

 

[trysail]

...And throughout the 1980s and 1990s, terrorists had learned two dangerous lessons from America's weak response to previous attacks— on our embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, in Somalia, on the World Trade Center in 1993, on the military training facilities in Riyadh and at the Khobar Towers housing complex, on our embassies in East Africa, and on the U.S.S. Cole. First, terrorists came to believe they could strike with impunity, that the U.S. response was likely to be inconsequential. Second, they learned that if they did attack U.S. assets or personnel, we might well change our policy or withdraw...


...But in 1993 the Iraq Intelligence Service (IIS) attempted to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush...


​

-Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney
In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir
New York, N.Y. 2011.




It was worth reading if, for no other reason, to learn about the man's background, life and thinking. I borrowed the book from the library; I'm up to my eyeballs in books and wouldn't buy this one.

 

[PennLady]

Just finished The Hunger Games trilogy last week and now am reading M for Magic by Neil Gaiman.

 

[bubbatxman]

Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis

I was disappointed with Liar's Power. I didn't feel like it told me anything I already knew or expected, and I really expected more from Michael Lewis. Maybe I was just 15 years too late reading it.

I read more about trends in society. I will read fiction occasionally. I read the 7th Harry Potter book a while back and I'm about to read the first two Hunger Games, even though I've seen the move.

Prior fiction reads have been Tom Clancy, Tom Wofe (Bonfire of the Vanities), Jurrasic Park, and some novels like The Firm, The Client (can't remember the author), Liar's Poker (Michael Lewis).

Non-Fiction. That Used to Be Us. The World is Flat. (both Thomas Friedman) Freakanomics (which somewhat changed my views on abortion).

I was thinking about biographies, Ulysses Grant, Steve Jobs, maybe. Maybe Ross Perot.


BubbaTxMan

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Jim Corbett: the Man-Eating Leopard of Radraprayag

 

[sweet_lusciousdesire]

Goddess of Vengence

Jackie Collins

 

[bubbatxman]

Hunger Games

Finished two of them in two nights. Monday was The Hunger Games, Tuesday was Catching Fire. Weekend will be the Mockingjay.

They were about a 6 hour read per book, about 400 pages each. Started around 8-9 pm, finished late, about 2-3am.

 

[PossibleSlut]

Medical - Surgical Nursing, Sharon L. Lewis...studying...

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

LET THE GREAT AXE FALL by Robert Blecker.

A Harvard law perfesser and certified Usual Suspect makes his case in favor of executions. His thesis is: WE KILL THE WRONG PEOPLE.

Blecker reports all the abuse he got from his liberal masters cuz he believes some crime is so heinous the killer needs to die. But even Usual Suspects make distinctions: Every Usual Suspect is okay with the idea of executing Hitler for murdering 6 million Jews, yet almost no Usual Suspect is okay with the idea of executing Stalin for murdering millions more Jews.

 

[PennLady]

Finished two of them in two nights. Monday was The Hunger Games, Tuesday was Catching Fire. Weekend will be the Mockingjay.

They were about a 6 hour read per book, about 400 pages each. Started around 8-9 pm, finished late, about 2-3am.

I'm a fast reader, and I honestly think reading something on my Kindle, as I did the THG Trilogy, gets me reading a bit faster. I can't say how long it took me per book, as I was just kind of carrying it around with me and reading when I had the chance. But I read THG in one day, CF and part of MJ in one and then finished MJ, but it might have taken me a little extra to finish MJ.

Now I'm reading The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. Not sure what's next. Perhaps Life Itself by Roger Ebert, or a few paranormal romances a friend sent me. Not sure what I'm in the mood for.