I have this one down on my list of books to read. Don't know if it will be my next one, but I will read it this year! So many good books and I have been out of the reading game for so long! Thank you Amazon and their Kindle product.
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Spoilers What Book Are You Reading?
- Thread starter Huntn
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I have this one down on my list of books to read. Don't know if it will be my next one, but I will read it this year! So many good books and I have been out of the reading game for so long! Thank you Amazon and their Kindle product.
having also read 1984 just a month ago for the first time i'm a little split about the book. I think the well deserved reputation might actually affect the impact the book has while reading it.
Also i feel that the development that in most countries election campaigning is becoming more person focused and partys themselves becoming weaker the "party" aspect of the book might be more difficult to relate to for younger generations
in the late 1950 untill the 1980 having the correct party membership card was a "requirement" for many jobs here in Austria. Today that is different.
Perhaps my expectations were too high. From the reading aspect i enjoyed Animal Farm much more
I think it's brilliant fit for school reading though.
Recommendation for those also reading in german:
Ann Cotten - Verbannt! , a surreal banishment of a newscaster on to a tropical island on which she takes along a knife, a grind stone and a encyclopedia. All completly written in spenserian stanza filled up with countless allusions. An absolute language rollercoaster. Stumbled over it in the book store, read 2 stanzas and didn't let go untill it was payed for and put it into my bag.
Also i feel that the development that in most countries election campaigning is becoming more person focused and partys themselves becoming weaker the "party" aspect of the book might be more difficult to relate to for younger generations
in the late 1950 untill the 1980 having the correct party membership card was a "requirement" for many jobs here in Austria. Today that is different.
Perhaps my expectations were too high. From the reading aspect i enjoyed Animal Farm much more
I think it's brilliant fit for school reading though.
Recommendation for those also reading in german:
Ann Cotten - Verbannt! , a surreal banishment of a newscaster on to a tropical island on which she takes along a knife, a grind stone and a encyclopedia. All completly written in spenserian stanza filled up with countless allusions. An absolute language rollercoaster. Stumbled over it in the book store, read 2 stanzas and didn't let go untill it was payed for and put it into my bag.
Well, some books suffer under the weight of their own reputation, but, if you leave them for some years and return to them later, then you will often see why they were given that reputation in the first place.
I'm a slow reader (as in the amount of time I devote to reading) and so far so good. Now I liked the first season of the show so my opinion may not be helpful to you. The show seems to be more focused on the sex than the book is, at least as far as I've gotten.
I'm a pretty rapid reader, - indeed, depending on the subject matter, I can speed read - and could not imagine a world without books.
Books were my first venue for adventure. I cherished them growing up. I remember a impressionable time travel book from about 3rd grade where one of the characters was caught in a Dino stampede and all that was left was a bloody smear.
Regarding speed reading, I remember thinking that would be cool and even took a course on it in college, but I discovered it was not good for me and retention, and for pleasure reading, never! When I get hold of a good book, I slow down to digest and cherish every moment. It runs like a movie in my head.
Books were my first venue for adventure. I cherished them growing up. I remember a impressionable time travel book from about 3rd grade where one of the characters was caught in a Dino stampede and all that was left was a bloody smear.
Regarding speed reading, I remember thinking that would be cool and even took a course on it in college, but I discovered it was not good for me and retention, and for pleasure reading, never! When I get hold of a good book, I slow down to digest and cherish every moment. It runs like a movie in my head.
Well, speed reading was something I just developed on my on when I was ten; I didn't even know it had a special name.
Anyway, I was in hospital for a week with appendix and related stuff, and when asked whether I wanted to be placed in a ward with other children or preferred to have a room of my own, had - to the stupefaction of the staff - quite firmly requested a room of my own - (and was supported by my mother).
That meant privacy. And, from family and other visitors I simply requested books. For that week, I read endlessly, voraciously, and increasingly impatiently.
It wasn't for quite some time that I realised I read an awful lot faster than most children - or, indeed, adults. Actually, adults, to my annoyance, initially were completely disbelieving at how rapidly I could read (and absorb and retain what I read).
And I have retained this ever since.
Now, there are some things - anything philosophical - I do not read rapidly, but fiction, and fact, yes. For the most part, I read them swiftly.
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Well, I'm an avid reader, and I couldn't imagine myself wanting to live in a world without books.
Actually, most days, I will read books. My teens were spent - not quite entirely, but almost - reading.
Picking my way through The Mayor Of Casterbridge. I read Tess Of The d'Urbervilles late last year, and while it gutted me* I really do love the way Hardy turns a phrase.
Chapter 47 of Tess opens with a super description of the steam engineer; Read it if you love English lit. @Scepticalscribe you've probably already seen it.
*But I still binge watched all three versions and bought the Criterion release of Polanski's version, although the BBC adaptation was excellent also. The only one that was horrendously lame was the A&E one.
Chapter 47 of Tess opens with a super description of the steam engineer; Read it if you love English lit. @Scepticalscribe you've probably already seen it.
*But I still binge watched all three versions and bought the Criterion release of Polanski's version, although the BBC adaptation was excellent also. The only one that was horrendously lame was the A&E one.
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Picking my way through The Mayor Of Casterbridge. I read Tess Of The d'Urbervilles late last year, and while it gutted me* I really do love the way Hardy turns a phrase.
Chapter 47 of Tess opens with a super description of the steam engineer; Read it if you love English lit. @Scepticalscribe you've probably already seen it.
*But I still binge watched all three versions and bought the Criterion release of Polanski's version, although the BBC adaptation was excellent also. The only one that was horrendously lame was the A&E one.
Impressive stuff.
For now, leafing through some cartoons by Gary Larsen, before settling into something else.
Did you read the book first, or see the show?
Sometimes, the book fills in missing details for the shows.
I've read the "Mistborn Trilogy", "Shadow of Self" and "The Alloy of Law" by Brandon Sanderson. I have just started "The Bonds of Morning" also by Brandon Sanderson. I like reading Fantasy and Horror Books (Though for some strange reason I can't stand watching horror movies). Brandon Sanderson develops his characters pretty good and does have a good sense of humor in his writings. The characters are so life like that you'll root for them, cry with them, and all the other emotional aspects that you'll forget that you're reading a book. I would love to see a movies series of the Mistborn Trilogy, but it will probably never happen. The next best thing would be a TV Series like Game of Thrones. The thing I think drives producers and Hollywood off is that Sanderson gets into Theology a little deep, but for the Mistborn series I think he has to. It's likes Mythology, what good would it be without Gods and Goddesses? Anyways, if anyone wants to get away from the traditional J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin (I just realize Martin's idol probably was Tolkien for he copied the name style) work then Brandon Sanderson is an author you might want to look at. I do have to say reading is better than watching TV and Movies, but don't get me wrong I do like them also. It's the imagination that you can do when reading a book. I read all of Game of Thrones books before the HBO series came out and I have to say while the TV series is good it can't compare to the books.
Delighted you enjoyed it.
It is a series that I think is excellent, and yes, agreed, the characters are superb, and the magic system entirely original and internally consistent with the plot and society. Moreover, Sanderson (unlike a lot of male writers - though there have been huge strides & massive improvements in that area) writes his female characters very well.
"Bands of Mourning" is next up in that series.
Agree re the books of GoT - I thought them excellent as well.
I finally finished studying my book on the Sicilian Dragon chess opening. It took me slightly more than a month of non-exclusive reading. I admit that it was hard, and at times I was on the verge of giving up. Gladly I persevered, and this book proved extremely useful in my on the board games. I won a game at a tournament last Saturday thanks to one "trick" explained in Levy's book (which caused a bad blunder by my stronger opponent).
It's definitely time to study more tactics, so I will finish the "Tactics from Scratch" book (I am halfway through) and I will get a few more books on the topic as it is clearly a weak point of mine, so I am going full immersion on chess tactics.
It's definitely time to study more tactics, so I will finish the "Tactics from Scratch" book (I am halfway through) and I will get a few more books on the topic as it is clearly a weak point of mine, so I am going full immersion on chess tactics.
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I just started reading this. I don't usually read this type of book but I went to a talk by the author and I really liked it so I figured I would try it.
Reading a biography of Woodrow Wilson, the one by John Milton Cooper Jr. It runs over 700 pages so I elected to get it as an ebook. When I want to lift weights I'll do it in the kitchen flipping pancakes in a cast iron skillet...
The book is fascinating. Wilson is one of the presidents I only learned much of anything about in those sanitized history texts in middle school.
The book is fascinating. Wilson is one of the presidents I only learned much of anything about in those sanitized history texts in middle school.
Is it any good - or, rather, I should say, is it worth reading, or, is there an interesting argument it makes or perspective it offers?
I chose John Cooper’s offering primarily because it’s the latest major biography of Woodrow Wilson to come out (2009) after one that had been published almost twenty years earlier. With the passage of time there are often more attics in which yet more letters and diaries have been found
...not to mention commentary by industrious historians who’ve been cross-checking other diaries of contemporaries to tease out what those writers and the subject of a biography really thought or said privately. In Wilson’s era, the movers and shakers as well as ordinary people were apt to keep diaries, write and keep letters.Aside from that I picked Cooper’s book because it seems to have been considered quite even handed, although a few reviewers signaled that Cooper, even if meticulous in presenting what is known of Wilson now, may have glossed over some of Wilson’s flaws. My own feeling is that one gets a sense of whether a biography of a particular president is objective or not only after reading several of the ones considered “definitive”. Even then, as I’m no historian, I am usually happy to come away knowing more about the guy than I knew from grade school or assorted overviews one runs into (on occasions like the run-up to presidential elections, for instance last year, when the WaPo offered a podcast series).
More than a few of the Wilson biographies I glanced at in the library noted his racism. More dwelt on his stubbornness, particularly about not stepping down after the stroke that put the last 18 months of his second term largely into a White House bedroom, behind the closed door of which his second wife was said to have steered the ship of state from time to time. Clearly she didn’t blow up the world but there were one or two apparently untoward diplomatic incidents. It was a time before the 25th amendment. Wilson’s physician and wife essentially covered up his incapacity, which was intermittent, so there were or may have been times when no one was actually running the place.
Since Wilson was a Democrat, there are those who’d think his monumental domestic legislation achievements were flaws in and of themselves, since they included “the Federal Reserve, the income tax, the Federal Trade Commission, the first child labor law, the first federal aid to farmers, and the first law mandating an eight-hour workday for industrial workers, as well as the appointment of Brandeis to the Supreme Court” to quote from the prologue (widely available as a free sample of the book).
Much more comment along those lines and I’ll have politicized the books thread here, which is not my intent. Anyway as it’s Presidents Day weekend in the states, I ended up happy to find Cooper's Wilson bio in the iBooks Store. Our 28th prez is interesting in having been an academic who landed in the White House for two terms, no mean feat in a country that has always been more than a little suspicious of “ivory tower types”. He's the only of our Presidents so far to have been buried in Washington DC, and at that in a tomb inside the National Cathedral. I'm fond of both ambiguity and paradox, and that struck me as having the flavors of both at once, especially since Wilson once remarked, while pondering our entry to World War I, "War isn't declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely." He was a strict believer in separation of church from state, and yet every year on his birth anniversary, a military honor guard lays a wreath tagged "The President" in front of his tomb inside that cathedral...
I chose John Cooper’s offering primarily because it’s the latest major biography of Woodrow Wilson to come out (2009) after one that had been published almost twenty years earlier. With the passage of time there are often more attics in which yet more letters and diaries have been found
Aside from that I picked Cooper’s book because it seems to have been considered quite even handed, although a few reviewers signaled that Cooper, even if meticulous in presenting what is known of Wilson now, may have glossed over some of Wilson’s flaws. My own feeling is that one gets a sense of whether a biography of a particular president is objective or not only after reading several of the ones considered “definitive”. Even then, as I’m no historian, I am usually happy to come away knowing more about the guy than I knew from grade school or assorted overviews one runs into (on occasions like the run-up to presidential elections, for instance last year, when the WaPo offered a podcast series).
More than a few of the Wilson biographies I glanced at in the library noted his racism. More dwelt on his stubbornness, particularly about not stepping down after the stroke that put the last 18 months of his second term largely into a White House bedroom, behind the closed door of which his second wife was said to have steered the ship of state from time to time. Clearly she didn’t blow up the world but there were one or two apparently untoward diplomatic incidents. It was a time before the 25th amendment. Wilson’s physician and wife essentially covered up his incapacity, which was intermittent, so there were or may have been times when no one was actually running the place.
Since Wilson was a Democrat, there are those who’d think his monumental domestic legislation achievements were flaws in and of themselves, since they included “the Federal Reserve, the income tax, the Federal Trade Commission, the first child labor law, the first federal aid to farmers, and the first law mandating an eight-hour workday for industrial workers, as well as the appointment of Brandeis to the Supreme Court” to quote from the prologue (widely available as a free sample of the book).
Much more comment along those lines and I’ll have politicized the books thread here, which is not my intent. Anyway as it’s Presidents Day weekend in the states, I ended up happy to find Cooper's Wilson bio in the iBooks Store. Our 28th prez is interesting in having been an academic who landed in the White House for two terms, no mean feat in a country that has always been more than a little suspicious of “ivory tower types”. He's the only of our Presidents so far to have been buried in Washington DC, and at that in a tomb inside the National Cathedral. I'm fond of both ambiguity and paradox, and that struck me as having the flavors of both at once, especially since Wilson once remarked, while pondering our entry to World War I, "War isn't declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely." He was a strict believer in separation of church from state, and yet every year on his birth anniversary, a military honor guard lays a wreath tagged "The President" in front of his tomb inside that cathedral...
What you don't read much about him is his anti-black sentiments.
I chose John Cooper’s offering primarily because it’s the latest major biography of Woodrow Wilson to come out (2009) after one that had been published almost twenty years earlier. With the passage of time there are often more attics in which yet more letters and diaries have been found
Aside from that I picked Cooper’s book because it seems to have been considered quite even handed, although a few reviewers signaled that Cooper, even if meticulous in presenting what is known of Wilson now, may have glossed over some of Wilson’s flaws. My own feeling is that one gets a sense of whether a biography of a particular president is objective or not only after reading several of the ones considered “definitive”. Even then, as I’m no historian, I am usually happy to come away knowing more about the guy than I knew from grade school or assorted overviews one runs into (on occasions like the run-up to presidential elections, for instance last year, when the WaPo offered a podcast series).
More than a few of the Wilson biographies I glanced at in the library noted his racism. More dwelt on his stubbornness, particularly about not stepping down after the stroke that put the last 18 months of his second term largely into a White House bedroom, behind the closed door of which his second wife was said to have steered the ship of state from time to time. Clearly she didn’t blow up the world but there were one or two apparently untoward diplomatic incidents. It was a time before the 25th amendment. Wilson’s physician and wife essentially covered up his incapacity, which was intermittent, so there were or may have been times when no one was actually running the place.
Since Wilson was a Democrat, there are those who’d think his monumental domestic legislation achievements were flaws in and of themselves, since they included “the Federal Reserve, the income tax, the Federal Trade Commission, the first child labor law, the first federal aid to farmers, and the first law mandating an eight-hour workday for industrial workers, as well as the appointment of Brandeis to the Supreme Court” to quote from the prologue (widely available as a free sample of the book).
Much more comment along those lines and I’ll have politicized the books thread here, which is not my intent. Anyway as it’s Presidents Day weekend in the states, I ended up happy to find Cooper's Wilson bio in the iBooks Store. Our 28th prez is interesting in having been an academic who landed in the White House for two terms, no mean feat in a country that has always been more than a little suspicious of “ivory tower types”. He's the only of our Presidents so far to have been buried in Washington DC, and at that in a tomb inside the National Cathedral. I'm fond of both ambiguity and paradox, and that struck me as having the flavors of both at once, especially since Wilson once remarked, while pondering our entry to World War I, "War isn't declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely." He was a strict believer in separation of church from state, and yet every year on his birth anniversary, a military honor guard lays a wreath tagged "The President" in front of his tomb inside that cathedral...
Great post and thank you for it.
In general, if I am reading about someone whose story I don't know all that well, I will sometimes read two biographies (which would have received very good - or excellent - reviews but which will often take different perspectives) more or less simultaneously.
Fascinating.
On the topic of Wilson's incapacity, several decades later, during his last period in office as Prime Minister in the early to mid 1950s, Winston Churchill managed to give the (entirely erroneous) impression that he was still in charge despite having been laid low by a stroke and rendered very much hors de combat as a consequence. But it was a more deferential time, with a less inquisitive press and - perhaps - a slightly more trusting population.
In turn I must ask if you recommend this one. There are so many books on WWI and so many recent ones because of the ongoing centenary.
I have found myself backing into reading about the first World War itself, having begun by reading Juliet Nicholson's The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age, on the two years after the guns fell silent, then also Nicholson's The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm...
...then finally was nudged by a friend saying "yes well, but.." perhaps less in reference to those books than to my fondness for Downton Abbey, who knows... meanwhile he'd read some review -- in the Weekly Standard, I think-- of a book on the run-up to the war's outbreak with a somewhat different focus on causes, and so encouraged me to take up David Fromkin's tome Europe's Last Summer. I confess it's only now coming up near top of my list. It is a tome, too, and it's not even "about the war" per se.
Meanwhile as noted earlier I backtracked over the weekend and picked up that Woodrow Wilson biography. I must think I'll live to be 200 years old.