voluptuary_manque
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Prosek: The Complete Angler: in the footsteps of Izaak Walton
What are you reading at the moment?
- Thread starter EesomeBeastie
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HeyAll
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In terms of Lit, I'm currently making my way through this story. Roommates or More?
http://www.literotica.com/s/roommates-or-more
Phenomenal writing, and I especially love the quirky and witty dialogue. This author has also written a fantasy story called A Star Is Born- Naked. That's also a really fun dialogue. Some of the dialogue scenes were so well written, I had to read it twice before I could continue with the story just to fully appreciate it.
http://www.literotica.com/s/roommates-or-more
Phenomenal writing, and I especially love the quirky and witty dialogue. This author has also written a fantasy story called A Star Is Born- Naked. That's also a really fun dialogue. Some of the dialogue scenes were so well written, I had to read it twice before I could continue with the story just to fully appreciate it.
trysail
Catch Me Who Can
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- Nov 8, 2005
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...The holy city itself, stripped of the radiance of the Potala and the Jokhang Temple, appeared to the invaders as decrepit, medieval in aspect. In the streets hungry dogs lay abandoned as children in rags smoked wild rhubarb and tobacco. In the shops were bundles of scented soaps that had been on the shelves for decades. The people bathed once a year. They had prayer wheels but no wheeled transport. They called guns "fire arrows." They took it as a given that the world was flat. They allowed women to marry more than one man, and men to embrace in matrimony any number of women. Refusing to kill an insect or harm a blade of grass, they enforced the most ruthless of sanctions, the gouging of eyes, the severance of limbs for petty theft. In religious services, they played music with trumpets carved from human thighbones, and drank offerings from chalices made of human skulls...
...The chances of emerging unscathed were slim. Indeed, in 1914, the chances of any British boy aged thirteen through twenty-four surviving the war were one in three. Schools, on average, lost five years' worth of students. The student body at Eton numbered 1,100; in the war, 1,157 Old Etonians would perish. Wellington, a school of only 500, would sacrifice 699. Uppingham would lose 447, Winchester 500, Harrow 600, Marlborough 733, and Charterhouse 686. The Public Schools Club of London lost over 800 members, forcing it to close for lack of numbers. Of the thousands of public school boys who entered the war, one in five would perish. The lucky ones served on staff positions behind the line. Of those young officers who fought in the trenches, half would die...
...Anker's reservations are several. First, there is the matter of clothing and equipment. Mallory and Irvine had primitive crampons, but they could not use them at high elevations as the leather straps impaired their circulation and increased the risk of frostbite. On his summit climb Anker found crampons essential; he never removed them, even on the rock face of the Second Step...
-Wade Davis
Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
New York, N.Y. 2011.
Americans, by and large, remain absolutely and utterly oblivious to the unbelievable bloodletting that occurred in World War I.
The average U.S. citizen has no idea how many French, British, German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Austrian, Russian, Italian, South African, Ottoman, Belgian, Colonial and other troops were slaughtered in the insanity.
French deaths were 1,357,000 (with 4.3 million wounded). The death toll for the British Empire was 908,371 (with 2.0 million wounded). Russian deaths were 1,700,000 with 5 million wounded.
For comparison's sake, U.S. battle deaths in World War II were 292,100 with 371,822 wounded.
Wade Davis' book is going to appeal to anyone with an interest in climbing, the history of the Himalayan region and the Age of Exploration. It is thoroughly researched and well-written— though (obviously) far-ranging. It is possible to question the wisdom of the attempt to conjoin a survey of Britain's experience in World War I with a history of Everest. At 573 pages plus an annotated bibliography, it's not a book for an afternoon's diversion.
topace
Lit's Resident Eagle
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I'm currently reading more fan fiction, though I'm about to start reading one of lovecraft68's stories, "At the feet of My Mother". I'm also reading "Measuring My Cum" - great series though the full blown sex doesn't occur until chapter 10 or so (IMHO it's not incest until dick enters pussy).
Yeah, I'm stuck in one genre, but it's one I enjoy reading. Occasionally, I'll read a Mature or Celebrity story, so I'm not totally nuts for the one category.
Yeah, I'm stuck in one genre, but it's one I enjoy reading. Occasionally, I'll read a Mature or Celebrity story, so I'm not totally nuts for the one category.
Anomandaris
Really Experienced
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Re-reading the Forgotten Realms Drizzt series on ebook format.
trysail
Catch Me Who Can
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- Nov 8, 2005
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more...
...In just the decade before Curzon became viceroy, the British acquired new territories equivalent to fifty times the size of Great Britain. The overseas empire, a quarter of the land surface of the world, six times the size of the Roman Empire at its height, was nearly a hundred times larger than the home islands. Victoria, as sovereign, ruled one in four human beings, altogether some 500 million people, and her navy commanded the sea. What the British did not rule, they influenced to the point of domination. The world measured time and longitude from Greenwich, British telegraph wires and cables encircled and entwined the planet. English stamps bore only the queen's profile, as no other national identification was deemed necessary. "In the Empire," wrote Curzon, "we have found not merely the key to glory and wealth, but the call to duty, and the means of service to mankind."
...The British public schools, some with ancient traditions, like Eton, Harrow, and Winchester, others born of the nineteenth century, reached their apogee in the decades before the war. The schools existed to create a cadre for the empire, civil servants to man the distant outposts, officers to lead the armies, politicians to determine the fate of millions of dark-faced subjects of the crown. Education was valued, with more than half of classroom work devoted to the classics, but for the most part the atmosphere in the schools was fiercely anti-intellectual. Their real purpose was to infuse students with a certain ethos, a blind obedience to those of higher rank, a reflexive inclination to dominate inferiors, and, above all, the cultivated air of superiority so essential to the stability of the empire.
Boys from the highest levels of wealth and society entered the lower forms of schools like Winchester and were immediately stripped of their identity. Dressed in uniforms, deprived of personal possessions, billeted in open dormitories, they lived a spartan existence of cold baths, miserable food, and intense physical activity. Exposed to the caprice of older students, who were empowered as prefects to discipline on a whim, and subject to the wrath of cloistered masters who enjoyed the proper use of the cane, young boys learned to conform in a thousand ways, suppressing emotions behind a thick skin of wit and repartee. What counted most was not academic excellence but character, which was measured in grit, toughness, loyalty, stoicism, uniformity, and, most important, success on the playing fields. One could be neither too smart nor too slow. Crying was not an option. What went on behind closed doors was never mentioned...
-Wade Davis
Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
New York, N.Y. 2011.
There are fewer and fewer around who truly comprehend and understand the extent of the one-time dominance of the British Empire. Sterling (at a fixed exchange rate of £1.00=$4.60) was THE world's reserve currency.
...In just the decade before Curzon became viceroy, the British acquired new territories equivalent to fifty times the size of Great Britain. The overseas empire, a quarter of the land surface of the world, six times the size of the Roman Empire at its height, was nearly a hundred times larger than the home islands. Victoria, as sovereign, ruled one in four human beings, altogether some 500 million people, and her navy commanded the sea. What the British did not rule, they influenced to the point of domination. The world measured time and longitude from Greenwich, British telegraph wires and cables encircled and entwined the planet. English stamps bore only the queen's profile, as no other national identification was deemed necessary. "In the Empire," wrote Curzon, "we have found not merely the key to glory and wealth, but the call to duty, and the means of service to mankind."
...The British public schools, some with ancient traditions, like Eton, Harrow, and Winchester, others born of the nineteenth century, reached their apogee in the decades before the war. The schools existed to create a cadre for the empire, civil servants to man the distant outposts, officers to lead the armies, politicians to determine the fate of millions of dark-faced subjects of the crown. Education was valued, with more than half of classroom work devoted to the classics, but for the most part the atmosphere in the schools was fiercely anti-intellectual. Their real purpose was to infuse students with a certain ethos, a blind obedience to those of higher rank, a reflexive inclination to dominate inferiors, and, above all, the cultivated air of superiority so essential to the stability of the empire.
Boys from the highest levels of wealth and society entered the lower forms of schools like Winchester and were immediately stripped of their identity. Dressed in uniforms, deprived of personal possessions, billeted in open dormitories, they lived a spartan existence of cold baths, miserable food, and intense physical activity. Exposed to the caprice of older students, who were empowered as prefects to discipline on a whim, and subject to the wrath of cloistered masters who enjoyed the proper use of the cane, young boys learned to conform in a thousand ways, suppressing emotions behind a thick skin of wit and repartee. What counted most was not academic excellence but character, which was measured in grit, toughness, loyalty, stoicism, uniformity, and, most important, success on the playing fields. One could be neither too smart nor too slow. Crying was not an option. What went on behind closed doors was never mentioned...
-Wade Davis
Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
New York, N.Y. 2011.
There are fewer and fewer around who truly comprehend and understand the extent of the one-time dominance of the British Empire. Sterling (at a fixed exchange rate of £1.00=$4.60) was THE world's reserve currency.
Hubs_in_hose
Literotica Guru
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I am reading "The Spy Who Loved Me" - Ian Fleming. I am reading each of the Bond books by Fleming, in order, while I wait for the next movie.
voluptuary_manque
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Pratchett's Unseen Academicals, again.
nicecthulhu
Really Experienced
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"The Astonishing General, The Life and Legacy of Sir Isaac Brock" by Wesley B. Turner. I've read better biographies, but it's fairly informative and chock full of information including a few speeches made around 1812 and an inventory of Brock's estate including books from that period.
trysail
Catch Me Who Can
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...Three days later, he delivered the treatise on coinage that he had conceived before the war, chastising the minting practices that had sent the currrency into free fall.
"The worst mistake," he charged, "which is absolutely unbearable," is for the government to mint new coins— of inferior intrinsic worth, though pretending to equal value— while the old coins are allowed to remain in circulation. "The later coinage, always inferior in value to the earlier coinage, ... constantly depressed the market value of the previous coinage, and drove it out." **
Copernicus compared the infusion of inferior coinage to the sowing of bad seed by a stingy farmer. The government, like the farmer, would reap exactly what it sowed, he said, since its practices damaged the currency as surely as blight ruined grain.
"Such grave evils, then, beset Prussian money and, because of it, the whole country," he continued, "Its calamities and decline benefit only the goldsmiths, who take the value of the money into their own hands."
...Mint no new money in the interim, he further counseled, and above all set strict limits for the number of marks to be struck from a single pound of fine silver...
_______________
** Copernicus's realization that bad money drives good money out of circulation often goes by the name Gresham's Law, in honor of Sir Thomas Gresham (c. 1519-1579), a financial adviser to English royalty who made the same wise observation. The concept was also put forward by medieval philosopher Nicole Oresme and mentioned by the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes in his comedy The Frogs.
-Dava Sobel
A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos
New York, N.Y. 2011.
I'd previously read Dava Sobel's Longitude and Galileo's Daughter and enjoyed both. There's a certain elegant logic to the author's decision to write a biography of Copernicus on the heels of a work on Galileo.
From the passage above, it will be seen that Copernicus' talents were not limited to astronomy. He was, in fact, a bit of a polymath.
It's no particular surprise that Copernicus was well-educated and well-traveled. One can't help but wonder what drove his interest and willingness to make what are clearly voluminous and tedious astronomical observations. After all, it is obvious to anyone who looks that the sun circles the earth.
Tio_Narratore
Studies
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- Dec 2, 2008
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Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery (I know, I'm a bit behind in my reading...)
litfan10
owner of slave_
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I loved the Crystal Shard Trilogy. Wonderful stuff. Salvatore is a great writer.
sr71plt
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Ah, that sounds intriguing.
BONNIEBREA
Really Really Experienced
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- Jul 27, 2010
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"The Passage of Power". It's the fourth volume in Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson.
Caro wanted to write a work about politics in 20th century America, and settled on Johnson as his subject because he held every federal elected office - representative, senator (and senate majority leader for 6 years), vice president, and president. He was probably the most accomplished legislator in American history. He made the senate during his 6 years as majority leader a real focus of power, as it had not been before that.
As majority leader his desk on the senate floor was front and center, and when it came to roll call votes on bills he would be at that desk and it was almost as if he were conducting an orchestra. On some occasions he knew the vote had to be taken quickly to get the result he wanted and would signal to the sergeant-at-arms calling the roll to hurry up. At other times he knew the roll call had to be read slowly to allow the senators with the votes he needed to get to the chamber, or senators who were still mulling his arm-twisting and coming around to the right vote time to think, and he slowed the roll call down to a snail's pace.
While JFK had a lot of successes in foreign affairs, his domestic agenda (principlly a tax cut bill and a civil rights bill) went nowhere. But after JFK was assassinated and Johnson became president he was able to get those bills through - working around southern conservative democratic senators who could keep the bills locked up in their committees or kill them off through the filibuster.
The book is fascinating (assuming you like politics and history), not just about power, but how LBJ's childhood shaped the adult he became and affected his search for the presidency. By 1960 he'd concluded that he would never be elected president - he was too much a southern conservative politician, who, in order to stay in office, had had to vote against civil rights legislation often (even though personally he was ardently for civil rights). So he knew that in an open convention he'd likely never be nominated for president, and if nominated would likely never win an election. So, by 1960 he actively lobbied to be JFK's vice president (and Kennedy - in a move that shocked most of the party - added him to the ticket, realizing he was unlikely to win without Texas and few other southern states). But Johnson lobbied so hard because he actually calculated that there had been X number of presidents and X number of them had died in office, and so there was an X percentage chance, in spite of JFK's youth, that he might died in office, and that would be LBJ's only viable road to the presidency.
Really engrossing. You couldn't write believable fiction this good.
Caro wanted to write a work about politics in 20th century America, and settled on Johnson as his subject because he held every federal elected office - representative, senator (and senate majority leader for 6 years), vice president, and president. He was probably the most accomplished legislator in American history. He made the senate during his 6 years as majority leader a real focus of power, as it had not been before that.
As majority leader his desk on the senate floor was front and center, and when it came to roll call votes on bills he would be at that desk and it was almost as if he were conducting an orchestra. On some occasions he knew the vote had to be taken quickly to get the result he wanted and would signal to the sergeant-at-arms calling the roll to hurry up. At other times he knew the roll call had to be read slowly to allow the senators with the votes he needed to get to the chamber, or senators who were still mulling his arm-twisting and coming around to the right vote time to think, and he slowed the roll call down to a snail's pace.
While JFK had a lot of successes in foreign affairs, his domestic agenda (principlly a tax cut bill and a civil rights bill) went nowhere. But after JFK was assassinated and Johnson became president he was able to get those bills through - working around southern conservative democratic senators who could keep the bills locked up in their committees or kill them off through the filibuster.
The book is fascinating (assuming you like politics and history), not just about power, but how LBJ's childhood shaped the adult he became and affected his search for the presidency. By 1960 he'd concluded that he would never be elected president - he was too much a southern conservative politician, who, in order to stay in office, had had to vote against civil rights legislation often (even though personally he was ardently for civil rights). So he knew that in an open convention he'd likely never be nominated for president, and if nominated would likely never win an election. So, by 1960 he actively lobbied to be JFK's vice president (and Kennedy - in a move that shocked most of the party - added him to the ticket, realizing he was unlikely to win without Texas and few other southern states). But Johnson lobbied so hard because he actually calculated that there had been X number of presidents and X number of them had died in office, and so there was an X percentage chance, in spite of JFK's youth, that he might died in office, and that would be LBJ's only viable road to the presidency.
Really engrossing. You couldn't write believable fiction this good.
desertslave
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Donna Leon's Death at La Fenice: A Commissario Brunetti Mystery
I'm not a regular mystery reader, I get disappointed that I figure them out too soon with so many authors, but I read a later one of Leon's books and was delighted. So much so that I decided to read all of them in order. This is the first in the series.
The writing is wonderful...very painterly in descriptions of Venice beyond a tourist's eye, good characterizations and dialog, and a very wry sense of humor. Fun stuff!
I'm not a regular mystery reader, I get disappointed that I figure them out too soon with so many authors, but I read a later one of Leon's books and was delighted. So much so that I decided to read all of them in order. This is the first in the series.
The writing is wonderful...very painterly in descriptions of Venice beyond a tourist's eye, good characterizations and dialog, and a very wry sense of humor. Fun stuff!
sr71plt
Literotica Guru
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- Jul 18, 2006
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Great book. Recommended that to someone just a couple of days ago.
Thefamiliar
Really Experienced
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- Mar 20, 2012
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The icelandic sagas.
More specifically the Lexdaela sagas, 9th century, norwegian kings.
Better than any soap opera.
More specifically the Lexdaela sagas, 9th century, norwegian kings.
Better than any soap opera.
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