What book is everyone reading at the moment?

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"The Civil War and the American System: America's Battle with Britain, 1860-1876" by W. Allen Salisbury (1978)

Think Britain gave up after the Revolutionary War? Think again. They've never stopped trying to reclaim their colony and this was never more vicious than in the Civil War with their puppet Confederacy intending to deindustrialise the North to serve as food producers for their slave operations. A lot of period literature to chew on.

Cpl Ferro
 
CplFerro said:
"The Civil War and the American System: America's Battle with Britain, 1860-1876" by W. Allen Salisbury (1978)

Think Britain gave up after the Revolutionary War? Think again. They've never stopped trying to reclaim their colony and this was never more vicious than in the Civil War with their puppet Confederacy intending to deindustrialise the North to serve as food producers for their slave operations. A lot of period literature to chew on.

Cpl Ferro
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The States has had a fascination with Britain assuming the Brits have been behind everything. Remember the War of 1812? That was supposed to be the 2nd War of Independence even though Britain was involved with a fight for existence against Napoleon and the U.S. was the aggressor.
 
fitzgibbon said:
The States has had a fascination with Britain assuming the Brits have been behind everything. Remember the War of 1812? That was supposed to be the 2nd War of Independence even though Britain was involved with a fight for existence against Napoleon and the U.S. was the aggressor.
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Dear fitzgibbon,

According to Salisbury, the United States Whig faction had every intent of building up America to the point where invasion of Britain was possible, to liberate the world from the British Empire and spread humanist republicanism in its wake.

Cpl Ferro
 
Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales and Stories
- Edited by: Eric S. Rabkin

Since it is an anthology, it has a lot of different authors but I'm just gonna name a few:

-Ovid
-J.R.R. Tolkien
-Bruno Schulz
-Julio Cortázar
-H.G Wells
 
Da matematikken ble til ("When mathematics was born")

I haven't felt ready to start a new fiction book after I started working again, but that might change soon.
 
The Bible.

I'm listening to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (read by Dawkins and his wife). I read the book about two months ago so it's really interesting to hear it in Dawkins voice (and Lalla Ward's, whom I remember seeing as Ophelia in Hamlet and the second Romana on Doctor Who almost thirty years ago).
 
Just finished Charles Stross' The Glasshouse. Stross continues to impress me.
The Atrocity Archive managed to mix spy-thriller, computer hacking, and Cthulu mythos into one wild ride, and this one goes even further.

In the very far future, hackers no longer attack computers, they hack people directly. Editing memory, implanting goals, etc.
Very clever.
 
two not-so-good rock and roll books, and one good one

When the British say they "quite like" something, they mean they kind of, sort of, like something.

So, I quite liked the late Warren Zevon, and I quite like Andy Summers. They don't interest me that much.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, about Zevon, is too much about all the famous people he knew and how drunk and sexy he was--it's too breathless, gee-whiz, what-a-genius, how sad. Superficial and boring.

Andy Summers' One Train Later is composed almost entirely of sentences like: "With strange chemistry and fragile nexus, we raised the flimsy sail of chance--and still we haven't sunk." He needs an editor.

at least Searching for the Sound, by Phil Lesh, is well-written and interesting, and actually about music, and not show-biz. That's my problem with 9 out of 10 books ostensibly about music: they're not.
 
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Further to my post about "Mud, Blood, and popycock"

I am now reading Robert Graves' "Goodby to all that"

His experiences as an officer seem to tally more with the stereotypes.

the battle of Loos, (IIRC), where the gas companies didn't heve the right spanners to open the gas bottles, so having to run along the comunication trenches nbegging for adjustable spanners.

"It's a dead calm sir, we can't release the gas"
"I don't care, the gas shall be released on time"

It got blown back to the British trenches. I wouldn't want to be manually opening canisters of poision gas, and hoping for a wind to blow it in the right direction (away from me).

Seems pretty horrific, and a cock-up too.
 
The Lies of Locke Lamora

In fact I've only a chapter or three left, so I'm going to go back to it shortly.
 
"An Introduction to Philosophical Logic" by A.C. Grayling.

Why, I don't know... it's flagellation-of-the-brain-alicious!
 
Just finished Robert Pirsig's classic "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" - all I can say is wow. So much crammed into one book, and so interestingly... incredible. Highly recommended!

Just started the follow up - "Lila: An Inquiry into Morals" which after 2 chapters seems to be more of the same which is good news :)
 
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