Book Recommendations?

I've finally gotten into Don Quixote after all this time! I had to get about 25% into the book first though. It seemed that first 25% was just Don Quixote and Sancho going around doing ridiculous things and it really didn't intrigue or interest me that much, but then other people started getting involved and I've been finding those people pretty interesting as well as their interactions with Don Quixote and Sancho, so now I'm reading it much more regularly than I was!

I've also recently started the introduction of a translation of Interior Castle by Teresa de Avila. There is an online class I'm thinking of taking with the Center for Action and Contemplation that uses the book.

MannishBoy wrote:
SpyNavy wrote:

The latest Dean Koontz serial is pretty good. If you don't like Dean Koontz you won't like this most likely. It's on Kindle Unlimited and follows a character named Nameless. The serial form is nice as you can knock out a solid contained story in an hour or so. It's getting published under Amazon Original Stories. On a professional side, couple of very good Leadership books, Turn the Ship Around and Leadership is Language.

Talking about the Nameless series of novellas? Those are free for Prime, so you don't even have to have KU.

You are correct sir. I mixed the two. I'm reading it through the Prime benefit.

If you just want to turn off your brain and veg out, and don't mind the occasional eyeroll, the Artemis Fowl series isn't bad. They're young adult fiction, and absolutely ridiculous in many ways, but if you disengage your brain, they move along pretty good.

About as fluffy as books get, no real substance, but they'll keep you occupied for an afternoon without making you want to climb the walls. Well, if you can swallow the central conceit of a 12-year-old, criminally inclined supergenius, anyway. My eyes did get a fair bit of exercise.

beanman101283 wrote:

I heard about Harrow the Ninth earlier this week. Loved the cover so much I immediately put the first book on hold at our library. Looking forward to checking them out.

I had been hearing buzz for the last year or so about Gideon the Ninth and finally read it last month.

It took until about halfway through the book for it to click with me. I enjoyed the second half much more, but I had a difficult time remembering who was part of which house pretty much throughout.

Zwickle wrote:
beanman101283 wrote:

I heard about Harrow the Ninth earlier this week. Loved the cover so much I immediately put the first book on hold at our library. Looking forward to checking them out.

I had been hearing buzz for the last year or so about Gideon the Ninth and finally read it last month.

It took until about halfway through the book for it to click with me. I enjoyed the second half much more, but I had a difficult time remembering who was part of which house pretty much throughout.

I had the same issue reading it on Kindle - I couldn't refer back to the Dramatis Personae at the start without losing my place (I assume there's a bookmark feature that I don't know how to use that would have helped).

The audiobook fixes the issue by the narrator (Moira Quirk) giving each house a real vocal personality that I didn't really get as strongly from the text: Second House is Uptight and Military, Third House are Posh Wankers, Fourth House is teenage and French, Fifth House is Kindly and Welsh, Sixth House is Blunt and from Yorkshire, Seventh House is Frail, Eighth House is Creepy, and Ninth House is Gideon and Harrow. That helped me a lot.

I finished reading The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, by David McCullough. It follows several Americans over the course of the 19th century as they travel to Paris to study medicine and art, or write, or act as diplomats. There were a lot of interesting characters and stories, and I learned a bit about French history I'd never heard of before. Pretty easy to read, and ended up being more interesting than I maybe expected (even though I'm a huge fan of David McCullough's books).

Now I'm reading Count Zero, William Gibson's followup to Neuromancer. I'm enjoying the multiple perspectives and stories, compared to Neuromancer's mostly singular focus on one character and plot. I'm not sure yet how it ties into Neuromancer's world, but a quarter of the way in it stands tall on its own.

firesloth wrote:
ComfortZone wrote:

I finally got around to reading Contact by Carl Sagan after Sean Sands recommended it on a recent podcast. What a wonderful life affirming book that is.

It was on sale at amazon recently for $2...probably easy to get at the library, though.

Still is on sale, and I just bought it, so thank you. I've been reading it to my kids, which is a bit of a reach for their age level, but they like it so far.

bekkilyn wrote:

I've finally gotten into Don Quixote after all this time! I had to get about 25% into the book first though. It seemed that first 25% was just Don Quixote and Sancho going around doing ridiculous things and it really didn't intrigue or interest me that much, but then other people started getting involved and I've been finding those people pretty interesting as well as their interactions with Don Quixote and Sancho, so now I'm reading it much more regularly than I was!

I'm a Shakespeare director, so I went completely down the Cardenio rabbit-hole.

bekkilyn wrote:

I've also recently started the introduction of a translation of Interior Castle by Teresa de Avila. There is an online class I'm thinking of taking with the Center for Action and Contemplation that uses the book.

That sounds very cool!

Natus wrote:
bekkilyn wrote:

I've finally gotten into Don Quixote after all this time! I had to get about 25% into the book first though. It seemed that first 25% was just Don Quixote and Sancho going around doing ridiculous things and it really didn't intrigue or interest me that much, but then other people started getting involved and I've been finding those people pretty interesting as well as their interactions with Don Quixote and Sancho, so now I'm reading it much more regularly than I was!

I'm a Shakespeare director, so I went completely down the Cardenio rabbit-hole. ;)

Yes! It was when Cardenio was introduced that the book really started kicking in for me!

bekkilyn wrote:

I've also recently started the introduction of a translation of Interior Castle by Teresa de Avila. There is an online class I'm thinking of taking with the Center for Action and Contemplation that uses the book.

That sounds very cool!

I did go ahead and sign up for the class! I've read a ways into the book now and am currently in the chapter describing the second mansion of the soul!

Been a while since I posted in here so I have a few. Some I may have posted before but I don't think so.

-The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther by Jeffrey Haas. Very interesting true story about the murder and subequent court cases surrounding this atrocious event, written by the Panthers' lawyer.

-Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean (the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University.) Book is about modern Libertarians like Charles Koch, the ways in which they are actively enacting their agenda as we speak, and how it all ties back to the anti-governemnt sentiments of Post-bellum Southern Ruling-Class elites like John C. Calhoun. Extremly good, and frightening, book.

-How Trump Stole 2020 by Greg Palast. Deals primarily with voter suppression. This is the guy who brought the lawsuit against Brian Kemp in Georgia. And won. He has been hired by Stacey Abrams.

-Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior. Sarah specializes in authoritarian regimes and how they operate. She sounded the alarm bells about trump back in 2016 and has called his every move long before he made it. She exhaustively details his ties with the Russian mafia. All of the newly un-redacted information we're receiving in the last few days from Comey's investigation she wrote about in 2017.

That brings me to:
The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin. Gotta admit, I'm having a hard time forcing myself to read this one. It isn't that it's bad, exactly. The premise is interesting. Her writing is unique and good, as usual. It's just that...
Spoilering not for plot reasons but to protect any New Yorkers in the thread:

Spoiler:

I would rather spend a month at the International Conference of Militant Vegans while wearing a shirt that says "I love eating meat" than spend a single minute listening to a New Yorker spout off about how unique and special their city is. It isn't. You never hear that stuff out of people from London. Or Rome. Or Venice. Or Chicago. It's always and only New Yorkers who behave this way. This must be what American Exceptionalism sounds like to people not from here, I'd imagine.

So yeah, it's a bit hard to get through.

I'm putting that down for a bit and just picked up Reaganland by Rick Perlstein, which just came out today. About the Southern Strategy and whatnot.

Is that spoiler in your voice, or an excerpt from the book? It's not clear at all. No context.

r0,

Just reading those synopsis makes my palms sweat and my anus pucker. You’ve got some intestinal fortitude! I’ve read a couple of books in the same vein. I’m not a believer of ignorance is bliss, but sometimes knowing the truth makes me insane.

Which one of those books would you recommend the highest?

Robear wrote:

Is that spoiler in your voice, or an excerpt from the book? It's not clear at all. No context.

That's my feelings about the book currently, sorry that wasn't clear. The book is about people being avatars essentially for the boroughs of NYC.

RawkGWJ wrote:

Which one of those books would you recommend the highest?

Haha

Palast's book I believe is super important, but it's also the easiest to just sum up. Check your voter registration. Frequently. If you have a highly changeable signature, consider voting in person. Do not accept a provisional ballot. Especially if you have a common name.

If I had to choose one, it would probably be Democracy in Chains. These people are going to great lengths to stay in the shadows, disguising their actions through dark money donations and think tanks. They are working to change laws so everything they do is legal, and in that way they are far more nefarious than the cartoon villain we all see every day.

Looks like Overdrive (which some people know as Libby...which is actually one of their app names) has bought RB Digital. RB Digital was a competing platform for checking out audiobooks and magazines.

(RB stood for Recorded Books. And the service was previously called One Click Digital. And their site and app was awful under both names.)

As of the last day or two, my library merged the content into just the Overdrive catalog. So if you use Overdrive/Libby, you might want to check content if they were missing stuff you were interested in your library's subscribed books. Our library seemed to have moved most if not all of the stuff that was in RB Digital into Overdrive.

There's some good and bad with this. Overdrive has better content, but is more in demand so you wait longer. Maybe that was due to how bad the RB Digital website and app were.

I have started reading The Three Musketeers. It was a little hard to get into at the beginning, but now I'm really enjoying it. I'll have to watch various movies afterwards to see how they compare to the source. Like, how many Musketeers movies had a tennis scene in them?

Quintin_Stone wrote:

I have started reading The Three Musketeers. It was a little hard to get into at the beginning, but now I'm really enjoying it. I'll have to watch various movies afterwards to see how they compare to the source. Like, how many Musketeers movies had a tennis scene in them?

The ones with Michael York and Richard Chamberlain have it in the first movie (The Three Musketeers - the second movie is titled The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge. Together, they are a pretty faithful adaptation of the book. This is both good and bad, but you should watch them if you like the book.

Of the other Three Musketeers movies I have seen, they are all trash. You would probably like them though.

tboon wrote:

Of the other Three Musketeers movies I have seen, they are all trash. You would probably like them though.

I LOLed

Reading KJ Parker’s “Two of Swords” and really loving it. Fantastic dialog, tons of plot twists (almost to the level of Dumas, actually), very interesting world-building, and deep characters. There’s a lot of obscuration of plot elements, which then come back around when you least expect them. (For those who may not know, KJ Parker is the pseudonym Tom Holt uses when writing “regular” fantasy, as opposed to his name-brand comic stuff.)

I'm two thirds of the way through Count Zero now, and I'm hooked. Gibson does a great job organically revealing how the three plot threads tie together, as well as slowly showing how it relates to Neuromancer beyond just the shared setting. And so far, it's a lot easier to follow than Neuromancer was at times. I might grab Mona Lisa Overdrive right away to complete the trilogy.

beanman101283 wrote:

I'm two thirds of the way through Count Zero now, and I'm hooked. Gibson does a great job organically revealing how the three plot threads tie together, as well as slowly showing how it relates to Neuromancer beyond just the shared setting. And so far, it's a lot easier to follow than Neuromancer was at times. I might grab Mona Lisa Overdrive right away to complete the trilogy.

You'll also want to pick up Burning chrome which is a few short stories set in the Sprawl environment.

It includes Johnny Mnemonic which is one of my all time favorites.

tboon wrote:

Of the other Three Musketeers movies I have seen, they are all trash. You would probably like them though.

IMAGE(https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/316/708/ca1.jpg)

ranalin wrote:
beanman101283 wrote:

I'm two thirds of the way through Count Zero now, and I'm hooked. Gibson does a great job organically revealing how the three plot threads tie together, as well as slowly showing how it relates to Neuromancer beyond just the shared setting. And so far, it's a lot easier to follow than Neuromancer was at times. I might grab Mona Lisa Overdrive right away to complete the trilogy.

You'll also want to pick up Burning chrome which is a few short stories set in the Sprawl environment.

It includes Johnny Mnemonic which is one of my all time favorites.

Thanks, I'll add that to the list!

If you also enjoy fantasy Steven Brust’s The Phoenix Guards is a fun read that the author describes as “a blatant rip-off of The Three Musketeers”. It is set in the world of Vlad Taltos, but works as a standalone read.

My copy of Phoenix Guards just arrived today

The Black Count was a fascinating nonfiction book about Dumas’s father...the son of a Haitian slave. Well worth a read!

I'm zipping right through the Alex Verus books by Benedict Jacka. I read the first 4 in about 10 days which is really fast for me. They aren't long but they're not novellas either. There's a wait list for book 5 so I grabbed the audio book with no wait. I hope the reader is good.

Thank you to whomever recommended the series!

Zwickle wrote:

I'm zipping right through the Alex Verus books by Benedict Jacka. I read the first 4 in about 10 days which is really fast for me. They aren't long but they're not novellas either. There's a wait list for book 5 so I grabbed the audio book with no wait. I hope the reader is good.

Thank you to whomever recommended the series!

The narrator I seem to remember is good.

Let's see...here is what I'm currently reading on my Kindle app:

Don Quixote by Cervantes - about halfway through now and still enjoying it!

Constantine the Great by John B. Firth

Essentialism by Greg McKeown

Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore

Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila

I am determined not to read any more fiction until Don Quixote is complete lest I get distracted!

Quintin_Stone wrote:

I have started reading The Three Musketeers. It was a little hard to get into at the beginning, but now I'm really enjoying it. I'll have to watch various movies afterwards to see how they compare to the source. Like, how many Musketeers movies had a tennis scene in them?

I've never watched a single one of the movies, but loved the book! And when you're done with the book, there are a bunch of others in the series that finally end with The Man in the Iron Mask.

Count of Monte Cristo is still my favorite Dumas though!

The Three Musketeers movie versions really depend on what you want. Sword fights? Faithfulness to the story? Excellent portrayal of villains? Each of them has its appeal if you allow for the period in which they were filmed.