What are you reading?

[Zavulon]

I think the last Safehold book was 5 years ago.
An unfortunate trend with sci-fi and fantasy authors is starting a series and not finishing. Weber, George RR Martin, Patrick Rothfuss, Robert Jordan (although dying is a valid excuse in his case lol).

Talking about George RR Martin, his "Tuf Voyaging" series is pretty nice, ironical and logically complete, but his "Song of Ice and Fire", is pure overvalued commercial work, and I'm not sure it should be finished at all. Say nothing about TV-adaptation, that totally ruined the work.

 

[g5000]

westerns are pretty rare now I read all of Louis La Moure ( cant spell his last name) books long ago, I really like sci fi but mostly for the action not the science. Ringo put out a series on a new kind of zombie like plague that devastates the world, Black Tide Rising is series name.

Snow Crash does not get deep into science. It's one of the most original books I've ever read.

If you like Black Tide Rising, you might like The White Plague by Frank Herbert.

 

[JBG]

I just finished reading A Conservative History of the American Left by Daniel J. Flynn. Daniel Flynn convincingly draws a more or less straight line between the Utopian colonies of post colonial New England to the climate change panic of the 21st century. The book explains that utopianism is often attractive, particularly to people who want to believe it and want to believe in it. Perhaps four words, from the description of the belief in the New Deal, sum it up best: "Action, not outcomes, mattered."
But I digress. The book starts with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock: "\

The Pilgrims, like America's secular communists of the nineteenth century, hoped to build a city upon a hill. And like other sectarian groups that later found refuge in America, the Pilgrims attempted to build their utopia upon communist principles****Under communism, which reigned in Plymouth colony from 1620 to 1623, Pilgrim bellies and investor wallets starved, Historians look back and ascribe myriad causes for these lean years. But the man whom the Plymouth colonists elected as their governor more than thirty times emphasized the role communism played in the colony's early woes. In Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford wrote:

"For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense."

The author makes the case that the more things change, the more things stay the same. The New Harmony commune in Indiana collapsed in ruins in the 1820's and 1830's. Some similar colonies fared marginally better, some worse. Some became sexual playgrounds for their leaders. Certain exploits, including those of the famous researching Alfred Kinsey, are unprintable.
The author traverses the 1960's and the self-immolation of a prosperous, promising era on college campuses. Shades of what is happening now.
In the early 2000's, the "climate change" hysteria has taken over:

Hysteria over global warming combined the worst of the primitive and the modern. Global warming emerged as the Armageddon for people who ridicule people who believe in Armageddon. The disturbing omens that primitives divined from mysterious eclipses, crippling droughts, and foreboding skies, urban sophisticates saw in ever-so-slight changes in the weather-save they had the nerve to call their auguries science. From the climate-controlled, indoor world where man presses a button to make it hot or cold, breezy or not, man hubristically imagined himself the master of the outdoor weather, too. Not the sun, not volcanoes, not the wind currents, but man was exclusively responsible for global warming a theory more heavily steeped in narcissism than pre-Copernican notions of a geocentric universe. And if gluttonous man could destroy the world, enlightened man could save it. Global warming allowed true believers to cast enemies as evil destroyers and themselves as noble redeemers.
Mankind stood on the brink of the end times. Sacrifices to the gods-offerings of recycled cans, forbearance from flushing the toilet, holocausts of SUVs-might appease Mother Nature. Failure to make the proper oblations certainly would unleash her righteous wrath.

Quoting Al Gore:

“Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem…Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis."

…. (T)he solutions curiously antedated, and are endorsed independent of, the problem. Public restrictions on use of private property, state punishment of large corporations, international bodies dictating national laws, and other long-standing dreams of the Left somehow reemerged as curatives to environmental woes. Alas, if the problem disappeared, the true believers would urge enactment of these suspect solutions as enthusiastically as ever.

A Conservative History of the American Left is clearly a tour d'force and worth the read (though it is a slog because so much information is new and unfamiliar). Then why am I giving it a "four?" The author does indulge in some demonization of the Left. While I am no fan of FDR, he comes close to calling him a Communist. Like many books of this genre, for example The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives' War on Fun by Noah Rothman, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson and others, the books do not concede any redeeming value to other beliefs. Put simply, they are strident.

I personally am not a conservative, though I am open to their ideas. This book doesn't help inch me to the right.

 

[Montrovant]

Talking about George RR Martin, his "Tuf Voyaging" series is pretty nice, ironical and logically complete, but his "Song of Ice and Fire", is pure overvalued commercial work, and I'm not sure it should be finished at all. Say nothing about TV-adaptation, that totally ruined the work.

I don’t care if something’s commercial or not, only if it’s well written and engaging. A Song of Ice and Fire is both IMO…what we have of it.

 

[Zavulon]

I don’t care if something’s commercial or not, only if it’s well written and engaging. A Song of Ice and Fire is both IMO…what we have of it.

As for me, it's "good", but merely "ordinary good" not "exellent" or "extraordinary".
There are no new ideas (or, at least, I didn't find them), and ideas is something what we are usually looking for in books.

 

[Skull]

Never read Orwell's 1984, but saw the later movie version with John Hurt & Richard Burton. Now I will read the book. Here is a pdf version for those who wish to dip into it:

https://files.libcom.org/files/1984.pdf

 

[Zavulon]

Never read Orwell's 1984, but saw the later movie version with John Hurt & Richard Burton. Now I will read the book. Here is a pdf version for those who wish to dip into it:

https://files.libcom.org/files/1984.pdf

Good book about a British version of totalitarism. Some good predictions about the modern world.

 

[Zavulon]

Just started "The Call of Cthulchu" by Lovecraft.

I was told that this work is useful for bettter understanding of American sense of fear (and it's difference from Romano-Germanic fear).

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Nice book. As for me - too many "observations" and "feeling" and almost no actions. Very educative. Learned something about American fears. Are you actually afraid of small towns and other racial groups (and mixed races)?