What Book Are you Reading? - 2019

[donpumsey]

Thanks Hap! I'll put both of those on my list. I really love audio books. I do landscaping for a living so I can listen to them all day at work. What an amazing time that we live in, when the average blue collar worker can spend eight to ten hours a day becoming well read (or well listened I suppose.)

 

[ashdigger]

Don, I'm a self admitted Audible whore. I have a shitload of books in my library. I do quite a bit of steering wheel time going to and from assignments and good books make the miles fly.
So much so that I don't use my radio anymore, not that I'm missing anything.

 

[donpumsey]

:lol: Audible whore! That sounds about right for me as well. I should buy stock. It really does make the day go by though. And I love the feeling that I've not only gotten my work done, but engaged my mind in a way that manual labor does not usually allow.

 

[olkofri]

What would you suggest by Chesterton?

Heretics is the companion to Orthodoxy. Don't miss it. The characters he criticises are from his time, but the ideas don't really go away, do they? They just get recycled.
Father Brown is good too, and it features pipe and cigar smoking! ::

 

[brian64]

I am ten pages from being finished with Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I really like how Dostoevsky intertwines philosophical ideas and questions into his narrative. Brothers K is one of my favorite books.

dfo, same here. This is the first of his novels that I have attempted but it certainly will not be the last. I'll take your suggestion and The Brothers Karamazov will be next on my list.

Big +1.
I’ve read all of his novels twice except the Adolescent...that one only once so far but it will get a second read soon...and almost all of his shorter stories.
The Brothers Karamazov is truly a masterpiece...and I will no doubt read it again at least a third time at some point. The translations by Pevear and Volokhonsky are the ones I've read for his novels, and the consensus seems to be that they are the best. The Idiot and Demons are must reads as well, but TBK is the pinnacle of his art.

 

[scottfree]

'A Peoples History of the United States' by Howard Zinn, and 'America: The Farewell Tour' by Chris Hedges.

 

[oldgeezersmoker]

Diarmaid MacCulloch "Thomas Cromwell", a good (if a tad dense so far) read if you are a fan of Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies".

 

[dcmacbean]

Thoughts on the Kentucky Rifle in its Golden Age by Joe Kindig.

 

[oldgeezersmoker]

@dfo, very true,but I find such things as the explanations of the various family relationships, which were admittedly extraordinarily important in that era, to be tough sledding regardless of who is doing the explaining

 

[cortezattic]

The Big Picture by Sean Carroll. This treatise on poetic naturalism isn't up to his previous works on the Higgs boson, and the quest for a theory of time. Hopefully, his next book (I think it's on quantum theory) will be better.

 

[sittingbear]

+1 Orthodoxy

+1 Screwtape Letters (I thought this one was hilarious)

+++1 The Brothers Karamozov (Probably my favorite book. Definitely top 3.)
Boy, there are some folks with great literary taste on this site, in addition to good taste in tobacco!
Currently reading a couple of textbooks on St. Paul.

 

[dukdalf]

"Erebus" by Michael Palin. Highly recommendend if you're into maritime history. Well researched and very entertaining writing. Before that, "The End" by Ian Kershaw. He deals with the question why the Germans kept on fighting after June of 1944, when to almost all concerned it was pretty obvious they had lost the war.

 

[ashdigger]

dukdalf, thanks for the recommend. I just downloaded it.

 

[trouttimes]

Complete works of Sherlock Homes

 

[5star]

The Bear and the Nightingale - a novel set in Medieval Russia in the winter. Quite different than what I usually read. It's mood matches the snow and 8F temperature here outside

 

[johnbrody15]

The Odyssey -- Decided I need to familiarize or re familiarize myself with the classics. I'm doing the Cliff notes on this one because I want the breakdown of the story, characters, and themes, without all the readin' and stuff. Maybe I'll revisit the actual text to get a glimpse of the art of the actual writing.

 

[cortezattic]

The Order Of Time, a non-technical book by theorectical physicist Carlo Rovelli,

who's in the Loop Quantum Gravity camp -- as opposed to string theory.

 

[autumnfog]

A collection of Van Gogh letters.

 

[mau1]

I finished "Shake Hands with the Devil: the Failure of Humanity in Rwanda" by General Romeo Dallaire.
He was the Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda prior to and during the 1994 genocide.
A heavy read. I could only read so much at a time.

 

[diamondback]

I’m on book 12 of the military history fiction series of “Marching With Caesar” by R. W. Peake. I’m also going through the Great Lecture series on the complete history of Rome. Historical Military fiction (or factual) reading is my usual genre when sitting outside and sipping a pipe.