Tend to read history books. Was going from SFA to NJ in college with girlfriend. Drive stops were antique markets. Picked up a score picture from WW1. Dad walks out. Comes back with post card from grandad. It was a third of picture I got, the middle, but black and white. It is going to younger brother soon. He is only one with Scottish last name that name of father.
I’m chewing my way through The Dark Forest, the second book of the Three Body Problem series. The writing feels clunkier than the first one (maybe it’s just the dialogue) and I suppose that could be from using a different translator, but regardless I still find myself enjoying it. Mostly.
And very soon a major motion picture. Finished the book a couple of months ago.
I read Ender’s Game. I read it before my stroke (70 times, in fact); I read it again after my stroke. 7 weeks, but I finished it. 5 stars!
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Recently finished The Ghost by Robert Harris. Just like The Thing in the Snow it had a lousy ending. Really pointless book. So, I’m currently re-re-re(x a million)-reading The Dharma Bums by Kerouac as a sort of cleanser between books. My next read will be Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry.
I thought only the third book had a different translator? Is that wrong?
Either way, I found the second book more approachable than the first and the third more approachable than either–though I listened to the first book on Audible and the reader made me want to die. So that probably had something to do with it.
Have heard great things about Old God’s Time.
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That was always my favorite of the Kerouac books. “You can’t fall off a mountain!”
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According to Wikipedia the first and third had the same translator - Ken Liu. Dark Forest had a guy named Joel Martinson.
I have about 50 pages left and it’s gone id a completely different direction than I assumed it would. So I’ll probably try and finish it once I’m done with work and look at starting the third one after tonight’s game.
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Yeah, that second book goes in very interesting directions. I read most the second half of it on a plane and was pleasantly surprised. Hope you are similarly gratified.
That one sticks with me too for some reason. The other one is “everything is alright forever and forever and forever”
Edited to add that it’s one of my favorite Kerouac books. The only one that trumps (sorry) it for me is Desolation Angels.
I read Big Sur and was depressed for weeks afterwards.
To quote the great Jim Ross, “business certainly picked up” down the stretch. I thought it did a great job of bringing everything together over those final 50-100 pages.
Death’s End started a bit slow but I’m already about 1/3 of the way through and it feels like it’s going to be a breakneck pace the rest of the way.
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Death’s End kind of fucked me up in the end. But I sure read it fast. I hope you enjoy it.
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I got about 75% of the way through Death’s End and remarked to my wife that it wasn’t nearly as good as the first two books and that I wasn’t sure I wanted to finish it. And almost immediately after, the author started pulling threads together–I polished off the rest of the book in a single sitting and it ended up being the best book I read that year.
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Devil in the Grove is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Thurgood Marshall and the early civil rights struggles by the NAACP. The book covers the entire
period, other cases, and Marshall’s achievements but focuses on a specific bogus rape case in Lake County Florida. I recommend it highly.
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I absolutely second this. Fantastic book.
Just finished it a minute ago. That was fantastic. Thanks for the recommendation, which I now wholeheartedly second to everyone else.
I’m reading it now, about halfway through. I really like it so far.
I had recently finished, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca, which was excellent. Highly recommended amazing tale of the failed Narvaez Expedition and the struggle for survival as de Vaca and three other survivors journeyed across Texas and into Mexico.
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Cool, I’ll check that one out.
I read “Delta-V” by Daniel Suarez a few days ago and quite enjoyed it. It’s near-future sci-fi about asteroid mining, and one of the things I loved about it was that he didn’t dismiss the laws of physics or assume some big propulsion breakthrough. Instead he leaned in and fully embraced the realities of chemical propulsion. I’m less qualified some of other aspects, but they didn’t seem outlandish (although the augmented reality pieces seemed pretty optimistic). If you like sci-fi, it’s worth a shot.