What have you been reading lately?

[3.14159]

Cat's cradle was about an eccentric military research scientist who gets told US Marines are sick of wading through mud, please invent something so he does.
Ice 9, the perfect ice crystal.
It's so perfect it doesn't melt and whats more it spreads to every drop of water it comes in contact with, freezing it instantly. blah blah blah.
The cats cradle is a game played by the beautiful tahitian(?) princess...as the world freezes over.

my favorite

Breakfast of champions.
... The world is choking on some strange gas, the world's population is plummeting, , the buildings are crumbling, the planet is dying...etc...etc

It turns out "the gas" isn't a gas, it's trillions upon trillions of miniture chinese people who have shrunk themselves so small they got blown awae in the wind and choked nearly every body death.
(The rational was sound enough, smaller people require smaller resources and take up much less room).

I don't remember how it ends... and I'm too lazy to reread it

[Tannin]

[blackmissionary]

I liked the sparseness, perhaps even the quietness of Slaughterhouse 5 .

I found my quickfire review of it from another forum's books thread. The impression still holds true.

[3.14159]

[stui magpie]

I've been reading graphic novels on the tablet What they used to call "Comics"

I was a massive comic book fan as a kid, DC comics were my 1st preference, followed distantly by Marvel in the superhero caper. Disney comics were a complimentary thing, loved them. Still have a few big plastic storage containers full of old comics from the 60's thru to the late 70's. However, I digress.

A mate a while back told me how you could download comics and read them on the tablet, so over the holidays, I looked into it. I was partially inspired by references to the various "Crisis" series that I've head mentioned on Big Bang Theory. (If you don't know that it's a TV show, stop reading now)

So I did a bit of googling and wikiing and found the series I was interested in. A series called "Crisis on infinite earths" and the sequels. Series started in the late 80's, was several years in the gestation and was a DC/ Marvel crossover . Sold.

So I downloaded that, along with a bunch of other related stuff and am now working my way through the Ultimate Crisis series written in the late 2000's.

Things have changed since when I was a kid, the violence is a hell of a lot more graphic than it was in the early 70's.

But damn, I'm enjoying it. Nearly 50 years old and I'm reading superman comics. LOL.

[HAL]

Oops. Too much data.

[Pies4shaw]

Garry Disher's Bitter Wash Road.

This is "crime fiction", I suppose (investigation of homicides in a remote - but not too remote - part of South Australia) but it is one of the finest novels I have ever read. Disher's writing here is absolutely compelling and breathtakingly beautiful - he apparently grew up on a farm in South Australia and he writes as if he knows the places and people like the back of his hand. I simply couldn't put it down.

Upon finishing this, I read 3 of his earlier novels, including another fabulous recent one (set on the Mornington Peninsula) called Whispering Death. My wife has all of them and has been telling me to read his novels for about 20 years. She was absolutely right about that. I am on a mission to get through them all.

If Disher was, eg, English or American, I expect he would be very famous by now.

[stui magpie]

I just finished reading the book Moneyball on the tablet. I downloaded a few things onto it rather than take actual books on holiday.

Very interesting read and gives a far more detailed insight into how it actually works than the movie did.

Kingswood was right when he said that most times a player is referred to by media or fans as a moneyball type, they are wrong and don't actally get it.

[watt price tully]

Crime Fiction.

[stui magpie]

Just finished of Dan Brown's latest novel. He's the bloke who wrote the Davinci code. His latest one is called Inferno and it's a really good read.

Has a lot of the same historic symbolism, this time mainly around Dante's 3 part book of which Inferno is one part.

One of the more interesting bits about the book though, is the notion of population control. The premise is a very smart bloke has done the maths and realises that at the rate population is increasing, Earth will not be able to sustain it and all hell will break loose. So he creates a weapon to "thin the herd"

I'll leave the rest of the plot to anyone who's interested to read it, but the premise was certainly interesting, so I did some googling. One article I read said that if every single person on the planet became vegetarian, there was enough arable land on the planet to support a population of 10 billion. A lot less if people had western dietary habits.

Now when you consider the population of the earth has gone from 3 billion in 1960 to 7 billion now, the premise gets very real.

It actually creates one of the better moral vs practical arguments about providing aid to poor countries and keeping people alive when they would have died. Are we, by acting morally, actually acting against the best interests of the planet? We basically need to slow down or even reverse some of the global population growth, is providing aid and medicine to places acting counter to that?

I'm tempted to start a separate thread on that question but it has the potential to get very pear shaped.

[HAL]

Impressive.

[David]

[think positive]

[Tannin]

Lots! I think it's the weather. I've abandoned the computer and been sitting outside reading at all times of day and night. And sometimes painting the window frames, but mostly reading.

Right now I'm just starting the third and final volume of Norwich's classic Byzantium, a necessarily dense and unavoidably kaleidoscopic history of one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen. For 1100 years the Byzantines - originally the Eastern Roman Empire - ruled half of the known world; stood firm while barbarian invaders from the east burned down the decaying Western empire centred on Rome; flourished while western Europe endured the dark ages; preserved and perfected many of the arts and sciences; conquered vast lands from near Russia through most of eastern Europe to large parts of western Asia and the Levant, even including longstanding holdings in Italy, Sicily, and North Africa; and finally withstood and turned back the massive Muslim jihad, keeping Western Europe safe for 500 years.

We westerners tend to forget Byzantium, forget that it endured far longer than the western empire in Rome, and did not finally fall until the 15th Century. Most of us could at least name the dozen most famous Roman emperors, drag up memories of a major battle or two, vaguely recall how the Republic became the Empire and eventually decayed. Very few of us could do that with the longer-lived and more recent eastern empire.

Mind you, for all their magnificent art and culture, and their extraordinarily complex and subtle theology - the worldwide Orthodox Church, second in size only to Catholicism, is almost entirely Byzantine in its origins and doctrines - they were a rough and brutal lot, perhaps even more so than the Romans and their various barbaric conquerers.

With 1200 years to pack into just three volumes, one is left feeling rather breathless, rather overwhelmed by the ceaseless flow of emperors and pretenders, Patriarchs and generals, wars and plagues and earthquakes. I've read it once before five or ten years ago, but remember very little (which is not like me). Reading it again, I think I'll still battle to recall much more than overall impressions in (say) a year's time. The vast sweep of such a history is very hard to absorb. Nevertheless, it's worthwhile reading and perhaps by the end of it I will be a little less ignorant for a little while.

[stui magpie]