What are you reading?

[Mustang]

"Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism" by Michelle Goldberg"

Kingdom Coming The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg Reviews Discussion Bookclubs Lists

 

[Zoom-boing]

The Maze Runner by James Dashner. InThe Hunger Games genre.

 

[boedicca]

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H Pink


http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0087GJ8KM/?tag=usmb-20

 

[Montrovant]

Mountain of Black Glass, the third book of the Otherland series by Tad Williams.

Not bad, but not nearly as good as his Green Angel Tower books.

 

[Mustang]

"The Martian" by Andy Weir


The Martian

 

[SmedlyButler]

"The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzwell

I'm late getting to this one but it is just as relevant, or more so, that when it was published in 2005. You don't have to believe his sci-fi-y matrix-like premise to get a lot of fascinating details on the state and nature of technological progress. Just one tid-bit gives you an idea of his approach - he went to MIT to study computers with Marvin Minskey and describes how since then (1965) and the room sized computer they had access to, with about one meg of memory, cost per unit of computing power has decreased by a billion-fold. The NYT said on the books release;

"In "The Singularity Is Near," the inventor and prognosticator Ray Kurzweil postulates that we are fast approaching a time when humankind melds with technology to produce mind-boggling advances in intelligence. We will be able to play quidditch as Harry Potter does. We will control the aging process. We will be smarter by a factor of trillions. We will be so smart that we understand what Ray Kurzweil is talking about.
Qubits, foglets, gigaflops, haptic interfaces, probabilistic fractals: Mr. Kurzweil is not writing science for sissies. He is envisioning precise details about how and when the Singularity - a fusion of symbiotic advances in genetics, robotics and nanotechnology that creates "a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability" - will be upon us."

As well as a futurist Kurwell is a first rate inventer. He was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner,the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer Kurzweil K250 capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

 

[Mustang]

"Three Early Stories" by J. D. Salinger

The three stories were originally published in magazines, two in 1940 and one in 1944. They've just been reprinted/published in a very small book (69 pp) in May of this year.


Three Early Stories

 

[Mustang]

"Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers" by Brooke Allen


Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers

 

[Solutrean_Hypothesis]

Dance with Dragons, I don't even know why. It's soo stupid.
I ...I'm just addicted to tortuously long, childish bullshit I guess.


Still, part of me likes it.

 

[Montrovant]

Dance with Dragons, I don't even know why. It's soo stupid.
I ...I'm just addicted to tortuously long, childish bullshit I guess.


Still, part of me likes it.

Childish?
I can understand thinking Martin's work is bad, but childish?

 

[iamwhatiseem]

"The Martian" by Andy Weir


The Martian

Awesome book. One of the best I read this year. I'll be surprised if it doesn't make it to the silver screen.

 

[iamwhatiseem]

Pure brain candy. 2nd in the series.
Little on the juvenile side, but otherwise a very imaginative story.

 

[midcan5]

Brilliant book for the times and for a perspective on Islam. 'The History of Civilizations,' by Fernand Braudel

Finishing, excellent, should be required reading for all people everywhere - 'The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark' Carl Sagan

Also recommended all brilliant. Top five will change you.

'The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy' Albert O. Hirschman
'Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal' Kim Phillips-Fein
'The Unconscious Civilization' John Ralston Saul
'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' by John Ralston Saul
'The Unconscious Civilization'by John Ralston Saul

'Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming' Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. M. Conway
'The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin' Corey Robin
'The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives' Sasha Abramsky
'The Betrayal of the American Dream Hardcover' Donald L. Barlett, James B. Steele
'The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America' George Packer
'To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise' Bethany Moreton

 

[Mustang]

Brilliant book for the times and for a perspective on Islam. 'The History of Civilizations,' by Fernand Braudel

Finishing, excellent, should be required reading for all people everywhere - 'The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark' Carl Sagan

Also recommended all brilliant. Top five will change you.

'The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy' Albert O. Hirschman
'Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal' Kim Phillips-Fein
'The Unconscious Civilization' John Ralston Saul
'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' by John Ralston Saul
'The Unconscious Civilization'by John Ralston Saul

'Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming' Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. M. Conway
'The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin' Corey Robin
'The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives' Sasha Abramsky
'The Betrayal of the American Dream Hardcover' Donald L. Barlett, James B. Steele
'The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America' George Packer
'To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise' Bethany Moreton

I can attest to Sagan's book being well worth the read since I read it a couple of years ago. Occasionally, he could have used a better editor to get him to shorten some of his sentences, but aside from that it was pretty fascinating and sometimes disturbing (but in an enlightening kind of way).


The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

 

[Mustang]

"Recapitulation" by Wallace Stegner

Recapitulation

 

[Mustang]

"No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State" by Glenn Greenwald

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

I read two previous books (both very good) by Greenwald long before he became famous for his connection to Edward Snowden. I read "How Would a Patriot Act" in 2011 and "With Liberty and Justice for Some" early in 2012. I highly recommend the second one since it lays the criminal justice system bare and exposes how there's two forms of justice in this country. One comes down hard on average folks, and one goes easy (VERY easy) on well-connected people when they're either affluent, or powerful (as people are who serve in the gov't), or both. It's only 144 pages, so it's not a long read at all.

At any rate, I started this book a couple of days ago, and so far it's mostly about how Snowden came into contact with Greenwald and others and the whole process of getting the first article published in the Guardian about widespread NSA spying on all Americans. At this point, I've just reached the part of the book where Greenwald is besieged to do numerous interviews regarding the first story breaking. Right now, the book is pretty much a straight forward recitation of the whole process which reads almost like an inside baseball kind of book. Frankly, Greenwald doesn't come off looking all that great in my opinion since he frittered around for a few months after his unknown contact (Snowden) tried to get him to put some encryption software on his computer in order to continue contact, and Greenwald never really managed to get around to doing it. But at least he was honest about the whole thing instead of trying to make himself look like some kind of a hero.

 

[Mustang]

"World Made by Hand" by James Howard Kunstler


World Made by Hand

 

[Mustang]

"Merchants of Doubt" by Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway


Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

 

[Mustang]

"We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves" by Karen Joy Fowler

The book has already been awarded the PEN/Falkner Award and was a nominee for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. The book is currently on the short list for the Man Booker Prize.


We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

 

[Mustang]

"Strange Bodies: A Novel" by Marcel Theroux


Strange Bodies: A Novel

This is the second book I've read by this author. The first one was "Far North" which was a very stark dystopian future novel set in Siberia where a large number of Americans had settled years before the world suffered some kind of cataclysm.

Below is an excerpt from Goodreads.com that explains the premise of the story. While the plot sounds like something out of a mass marketed pulp fiction book where you would expect to find a lot of characters out of some kind of B-movie central casting call, as of page 77, it reads better than it sounds. I should also mention that it's written in the form of a series of letters and journal excerpts from more than one person, including the patient and the doctor who is treating the patient.

In a locked ward of a notorious psychiatric hospital sits a man who insists that he is Dr. Nicholas Slopen, failed husband and impoverished Samuel Johnson scholar. Slopen has been dead for months, yet nothing can make this man change his story. What begins as a tale of apparent forgery involving unknown letters by the great Dr. Johnson grows to encompass a conspiracy between a Silicon Valley mogul and his Russian allies to exploit the darkest secret of Soviet technology: the Malevin Procedure.

With echoes of Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K. Dick, Marcel Theroux’s Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to be truly human.