What are you reading?

I will plug The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson again.  It's about Churchill's first year as PM.  While mountains have been written about Churchill's life, this is a focus on this one sliver.  To me the most interesting parts are his ability to see certain strengths in people and put them in key positions, and the battle of wills between Churchill and Hitler.  Erik Larson is the author of Devil in the White City and In the Garden of the Beasts among others.  He's very readable and good at capturing personalitites.

I've read a ton on Hitler and I cannot understand why he stuck with Goerring as long as he did.  Goerring was an early Nazi with him and was a WW1 flying ace.  But there were plenty of other early party members Hitler ditched over time.  Goerring made huge errors in developing and deploying the Luftwaffe.  Had Hitler had a competent head of his air force, the Battle of Britain could have taken on a very different tone. 

Just finished The Outsider. I liked it a lot. Very good read. 

Fab, I see you’re reading All the Light We Cannot See now. Fantastic book. 

posted by justincredible

Fab, I see you’re reading All the Light We Cannot See now. Fantastic book. 

Awesome book

I am! I'll be sure to check back in when I'm done. 

posted by Fab4Runner

I am! I'll be sure to check back in when I'm done. 

😩😭 Heartbreaking and beautiful. I'm extremely jealous that there are people who can write like that. 

Just finished "Dark Matter" by Blake Crouch.

I'm always a sucker for romance novels involving quantum physics and Schroedinger's cat.  Well, this one's a little more twisted than the average Harlequin romance, but I was hooked from the first few lines of the dust jacket synopsis.  Crouch's writing style is a bit irritating (too many hard paragraph returns), but the plot line and details were really cool.  Gets even more twisted at the end.

LOVE Dark Matter. Read Recursion next.

Thanks!

Over the weekend I finished John le Carré's Little Drummer Girl. I watched the miniseries last year, loved it, and wanted to read the book. 

The book follows the show closely, which is great. A quick summary: Set in 1982, Israeli Mossad recruits a young English actress to pretend to be the lover of the brother of a Palestinian bomb maker. Over half the novel is setting up the complex play and deception to allow her to infiltrate the terror cell. It is really well done and a good spy novel. 

I'm about to start the original le Carre novel now: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. 

posted by ptown_trojans_1

Over the weekend I finished John le Carré's Little Drummer Girl. I watched the miniseries last year, loved it, and wanted to read the book. 

The book follows the show closely, which is great. A quick summary: Set in 1982, Israeli Mossad recruits a young English actress to pretend to be the lover of the brother of a Palestinian bomb maker. Over half the novel is setting up the complex play and deception to allow her to infiltrate the terror cell. It is really well done and a good spy novel. 

I'm about to start the original le Carre novel now: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. 

Excellent book. 

I'm reading Hidden Valley Road. It's a true story about this family in the 1960s and. 1970s with 12 children, 6 of whom turn out to have schizophrenia. It is not clinical, but very interesting about this family and about the history of how schizophrenia was treated. 

 "Time Is Tight", autobiography of Booker T. Jones.  About two-thirds of the way through.

Interesting structure.  He takes weird jumps forward and backward in time.  Later you see why.   Does a great job explaining his thought processes in how he perceived and related to music from a very young age.  Playing in Memphis clubs at 14, playing sessions while in high school, moving to California and buying Lana Turner's ranch at the age of 25?  Yeah, he lived a life.

My wife and I sat next to him in the green room at a blues concert a few years ago.   We nodded to each other, but I was too intimidated to speak.   I wish I had read this book before that meeting, would have had the nerve to say how much I enjoyed it.

Finished The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It was great. Classic spy fiction. I finished it in a few days. 

Also finished Patrick Hoffman's Every Man a Menace last night. Interesting novel about the interplay of various people in the trade drug and one drug shipment. Story has some good twists. 

Switching gears now after some fairly light reading and going classical with Hobbes Leviathan. 

Finished Hobbes Leviathan and then moved to another classic Uncle Tom's Cabin. I read a summary in school,  but never read the actual book. Holy shit it is good and you can understand how it fueled the anti-slavery movement in the north. Excellent writing and story telling. 

I'm now finishing my little  le Carré's kick with the Night Manager. 

Finished Morning on Horseback, Inventing Bitcoin, and This Book Will Save You Time (ultimately about bitcoin) in the last week.

After the last week, I read Mitch Landrieu's, the former mayor of New Orleans's book on taking down the Confederate monuments and his own coming to grips with the rewriting of history in the south and in his city. In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History

It was a really good quick read, I finished it in 3 days. 

Now, back to the Night Manager. I am about 20% through it. 

Starting to reread The Outpost.

Saw they are making a movie out of it and I had read it a number of years ago.

Its about a battle on Takur Ghar in Afghanistan.

Started reading 1984 again, for the 4th or 5th time.

posted by justincredible

Started reading 1984 again, for the 4th or 5th time.

It is awesome every time through. 

Been gradually grinding through a re-read of the Robert Jordan (finished by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan's death) Wheel of Time series. About 2/3 of the way through the sixth book. Of 14. Which all range from long to very long. But it's nice to actually read the whole series at once. Since I'd initially started reading it about 7-8 books into it, so it was a "binge on 7-8 books and then read each new one when it came out, using the Internet to fill in memory blanks due to being reintroduced to minor characters I last read about 2 years ago" deal. That way made it easy to miss out on subtle details and foreshadowing that I'm picking up on this time through.