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Author Topic: Rate the last book you read.  (Read 194223 times)

The Deer Hunter

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1800 on: November 29, 2017, 03:39:22 AM »


Enjoyable but pretty uneventful i found but i was most likely skewed from the tv adaptation.

DarkeningHumour

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1801 on: November 29, 2017, 03:48:36 AM »
What isn't plausible is that the South is somehow created as having the moral high ground AND is a diverse cause as my impression is Sarat Chestnut, the main character, is Black. Sorry, both of these are bridges too far for me. If there is a second civil war, the "South" side will be a revanchist and racist side, just like they were in the first civil war.

Agreed.
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oldkid

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1802 on: November 29, 2017, 06:01:53 PM »

Enjoyable but pretty uneventful i found but i was most likely skewed from the tv adaptation.

I read it in the 80s, where I found it to be brilliant, but it was one of the first explorations of the idea, "What if the Nazis won?"  After reading a lot of Dick's works, I realize that paranoia and Big Brother were his main themes, and that is what he was probably exploring, more than the result of fascism.
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The Deer Hunter

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1803 on: December 08, 2017, 12:25:28 AM »


Great read. One of my favourites now. Rosario Dawson does a great job narrating the audiobook too.

This has movie adaptation written all over it. Apparently Lord and Miller are poised to do it which sounds awesome.

smirnoff

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1804 on: January 19, 2018, 11:13:11 PM »
Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse: Book 1) - James S. A. Corey

A friend who does some effects work for the tv series recommended this to me. I had never heard of it, but it didn't take long to be totally sold. As a sci-fi world it's got many things I like. A quite distant future, a history of how humanity got there, neat tech with lots of details, and a general size to the story that captures some of that largeness of space.

Corey has good comedic timing as a writer and the book was just plain fun to read. Sometimes it reads like a noir novel, other times it's a space adventure. The writing is also pleasingly technical when it comes to spaceship travel and feeling like what's happening is all according to the laws of phsyics. A lot of drama is created simply through characters hitting the ceiling of their physical limitations.I'll definitely carry on with the series. Has anyone else already been through it?
« Last Edit: January 19, 2018, 11:17:13 PM by smirnoff »

oldkid

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1805 on: January 20, 2018, 12:45:32 AM »
Faces at the Bottom of the Well by Derrick Bell

I love the SNL skit on the weekend after Trump's election.  A bunch of white liberals slowly realize that their candidate is going to lose and they moan in despair as they realize that their vision of a post-racist America was just an illusion.  In the meantime, Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock knew what the outcome would be because they had a better idea what the heart of the country looked like.

Derrick Bell understood the heart of the nation from 1995, and this book is his effort to work out his realization that since the country was built on racism, you cannot have the nation without racism.  It is something to live with or to run away from, but the deeply cynical conclusion is it will never disappear.

For such a depressing conclusion, it is entertainingly written, with a plethora of fictional premises, from a conversation with a character from Langston Hughes, to the story of a civil rights leader who wants to marry a white woman to the final chapter which tells a compelling science fiction story.

The premise of the story is this: Aliens finally land on the earth, but they make a proposal no one ever expected.  They would leave peacefully, they said threateningly, if only the US would sell them every last African American to the invaders for a huge amount of gold, bringing the US out of their current economic depression.  The question is, what would the leaders of the US choose: their pocketbook or their soul?

Bell isn't a professional writer, he is a professor of law and he writes fiction like a professor of law.  But it is still entertaining, albeit a bit stiff.  I both enjoyed and despaired over reading this book.  I certainly won't forget it.

4/5
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Jeff Schroeck

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1806 on: January 23, 2018, 07:57:30 AM »
Jason Fagone - The Woman Who Smashed Codes

This was my last book of 2017 and was an awesome book to finish a year with. It's about the woman who, along with her husband, basically started codebreaking in the early 20th century. It's a fun story by a great writer, and a lot of the information is relatively new, having only been declassified in the last decade or so, and even that material has been mostly ignored in favor of her husband who got the majority of the credit. Or whatever credit was left after J. Edgar Hoover took his share.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32025298-the-woman-who-smashed-codes

saltine

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1807 on: January 23, 2018, 04:13:45 PM »
Just bought this one on your rec. Thanks, Jeff.
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DarkeningHumour

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1808 on: January 23, 2018, 04:21:43 PM »
I read a book a week. How is it you all make me feel like I am dragging along?
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saltine

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #1809 on: January 23, 2018, 04:35:59 PM »
Behind your back we call you Pokey.   :)
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