What have you read recently? 2009 -2020

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Cattusbabe said:
I am currently enjoying " In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honore

Carl Honore In Praise of Slowness

I am trying to strike a balance between taking time to smell the flowers and feeling that I have to fill every moment because time is too precious to waste.
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I literally take time to smell the flowers. I walk down the street, stopping to cup and sniff many of the flowers. Once you start behavig this way, you find that there are more people than you might imagine who do the same.

Ha
 
Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden. Great award winning book about two young Ontario Cree who go to fight in WWI.
 
haha said:
He doesn't seem to use farfetched plot devices which usually turn me off of crime novels.

Ha
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I agree with you there. And I like his plain and concise way of writing. I have some problems with some of his new slang words. There´s no useful dictionary for them:(.
 
vicente solano said:
I have some problems with some of his new slang words. There´s no useful dictionary for them:(.
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If you can't get them from context, you can usually figure it out from what you find if you just google the term. Or use Urban Dictionary. Here is what they have to say about tweakers- a term that I only learned a year or so ago.

Urban Dictionary: tweaker

You still will have to use context to help you a bit, but there is plenty of drug culture in Spain so you likely are familiar with most of that. I'd enjoy an exchange of urban.english street/drug culture terms with similar from Spain. Interesting drug culture stuff (though 20 years old) in the Almodovar movie Átame. Plus you get to see la mujer mas mujer Victoria Abril doing it naked and enthusiastically with her captor Ricky.

Ha
 
A ways back I mentioned Larry Swedroe's The Only Guide to a Winning Bond Strategy. In spite of the overblown title after reading almost all of it I think that is a very good book, though it likely will not supply all you might like to know about the world of fixed income investments.

He explains negative skew and kurtosis with respect to high yield bonds and emerging market fixed income. I wish he had used some diagrams in this section, but this sort of thing can easily be found on the web. He also does a good job showing how MBS and CMO(s) have some perhaps subtle but nevertheless important negative characteristics. Definitely a no bs book.

Ha
 
haha said:
A ways back I mentioned Larry Swedroe's The Only Guide to a Winning Bond Strategy. In spite of the overblown title after reading almost all of it I think that is a very good book, though it likely will not supply all you might like to know about the world of fixed income investments.

He explains negative skew and kurtosis with respect to high yield bonds and emerging market fixed income. I wish he had used some diagrams in this section, but this sort of thing can easily be found on the web. He also does good job showing how MBS and CMBS have some perhaps subtle but nevertheless important negative characteristics. Definitely a no bs book.

Ha
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This was one of the first books I chose to read on my Kindle when I bought it last spring, and I really enjoyed Larry Swedroe's explanation of concepts related to bonds. I only wish I had read it earlier! It could have saved me a lot of confusion wading through other, less easily understood articles on bonds that left me feeling a little at sea. Larry's explanations are (as usual) pretty clear and straightforward.

I agree that he doesn't discuss everything, and he could have gone into some topics in greater depth, but overall the book is really helpful.
 
haha said:
A ways back I mentioned Larry Swedroe's The Only Guide to a Winning Bond Strategy. In spite of the overblown title after reading almost all of it I think that is a very good book, though it likely will not supply all you might like to know about the world of fixed income investments....
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I own this book too. I agree with your comment on the title. When I complained about it on the Boglehead site Larry responded that the publisher drives that sort of thing. I think many authors are just pleased to have a published book. Most don't get to call all the shots.

Pretty good treatment of bonds but lacks some data that would give one a better picture of historical trends (like maybe a graph on real returns for different maturities versus time). I think he wanted to keep things reasonably simple and get at the basic mechanisms as bond analysis can be quite complicated. You probably won't be able to go out and buy individual TIPS or Treasurys and do all the bond calculations. But you might just make the right decision for yourself on bond safety aspects, duration, etc. so that your fund purchase decisions are smart.
 
haha; said:
I'd enjoy an exchange of urban.english street/drug culture terms with similar from Spain. Interesting drug culture stuff (though 20 years old) in the Almodovar movie Átame. Plus you get to see la mujer mas mujer Victoria Abril doing it naked and enthusiastically with her captor Ricky.

Ha
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ad

I´d oblige you with pleasure if I had that street drug Spanish slang:). I think I´m better at it in English. I regret to say that I´m not partial to Almodovar. I´ll have Amenabar any day.:)
 
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harley said:
I'm still number 11 out of 15 in our library system. We must have really slow readers in my county!

I've been reading the Doc Ford series by Randy Wayne White. Good ole gov't assassin turned Florida marine biologist thriller stuff. Fun to read, doesn't strain credulity too much, and I've learned a fair amount about southwest Florida in the process. I'm about halfway through the last book Dead Silence, so I'll have to find something else now. But definitely fun summer reading.
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I am a huge Randy Wayne White fan (something else we have in common). He's fantastic. Other faves in the Florida genre are Tim Dorsey and SV Date. I began my immersion into Florida fiction with the beloved late John D. MacDonald and I think RWW is truly his heir-apparent. I have every single one of JDM's books, all of Dorsey's, and all of RWW.

Have you read Ted Bell's work--very similar in concept and truly awesome. Start with Hawke.

Also a surprise find was Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton. A real page turner and way different than his other work.
 
I am enjoying reading the Swallows_and_Amazons children's series, by Arthur Ransome. Funny that I never heard of it when I was a child.

Considering that the books were written by a male author in the 1930s, it is pleasantly surprising to see that the leading characters (Nancy and Titty) are girls. They are at least as active and resourceful as the boy characters.

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Milton, the girl's name is really "Titty"? Ahem. Well now.

I did get a recommendation for a series to try on those middle school age boys who hate to read, speaking of children's books. It is the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz. I was going to get a few for my nephews at Christmas.
 
Yes, Titty is correct. That was the nickname of Mavis Altounyan, on whom the character was based.

Nancy's real name is Ruth; but she doesn't use it because she is a pirate, and everyone knows that pirates are supposed to be ruthless. :D
 
I love re-reading high quality children's books from that era and earlier. I guess it is a guilty pleasure. I am currently re-reading one, myself, a lesser known book in the Oz series. The Road to Oz was written by L. Frank Baum around 1909 and is one of many sequels to the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

I love the innocence of the time - - it begins with Dorothy just taking off on walk with a complete stranger, the Shaggy Man, who came along as she was playing in front of her home. The book continues with their many adventures after getting lost and finally ending up in Oz. Can you imagine such a book these days, when children are warned that all strangers are evil molesters? It must have been such a different world back then.

Anyway, I loved this book when I was a child and have not read it since. It is fun to discover that I still like it over half a century later.
 
W2R, I have picked up a few from childhood as well, including Island of the Blue Dolphins and the Black Stallion series. Still timeless classics. I never read the Oz books, just saw the movie. Will have to check that out.
 
W2R said:
I loved this book when I was a child and have not read it since. It is fun to discover that I still like it over half a century later.
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That's great! It suggests that you have retained at least part of the innocence and imagination that you had as a child; to my mind, that is definitely a plus.
 
I just read "Dark Summit," by Nick Heil, an attempt to capture what happened in the 2006 climbing Everest season when about 11 people died,a couple of them distressed alpinists allegedly ignored by ascending climbers. I read all of the Everest chronicles I find. There is something fascinating about these stories. They are like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You know what is going to happen and so does everyone involved but they seem incapable of doing anything about it. A major controversy in this case is whether people did enough to save David Sharp a British climber who froze to death near 28,000 feet on the Northeast ridge. This guy was of the macho, independent school who believed it important to take on the mountain alone. He purchased a cut rate package that got him to advanced base camp after which he was on his own summiting the peak. He set out slowly and too late, without oxygen and didn't make it down. After spending a night exposed on the ridge he was seen by climbers ascending the next day almost comatose, unable to move and so frozen his limbs couldn't be straightened out. They, and about 40 others left him to die, which he promptly did. For those of you who haven't read these stories, understand that no climber who can't help with his own rescue has ever been brought down from the heights this guy was at. I'm not sure what the controversy is. A second guy who died that season sounds like a complete idiot as does his guide and the outfit that let him sign on. Think about this for a second. You are an Everest outfitter and some nutty German tells you he wants to sign on. He mentions as an aside that he had a brain tumor removed a few years back and now his eyesight starts to fail in low pressure. He figures he may be blind at the summit but what the heck, he still wants to give it a go. So, sign the nut job up, enroll to be his guide? Heck yes, sounds like a hoot,doesn't it. Well, he was right. He went blind and is still up there. If you find stuff like this vaguely fascinating, "Dark Summit" is a good read. Of course, if you haven't read, "Into thin Air," rush out get that one first.
 
Just finished Born To Run by Christopher McDougall. Really enjoyed it. If you have ever been a runner it is a must read. If not but enjoy a little history, anthropology, physiology, or reading about interesting characters (think Tarahumara Indians or ultra-marathoners) you will love this book. Couldn't put it down.
 
I am just finishing "The Friday Night Knitting Club " . Very light reading and then I have " The Big Short " loaded in my ereader . I was going to wait to get it at the library but it is taking forever so I bought it and then will share it with my Sister via Barnes & Noble lend me feature .
 
For my birthday DH got me "Earth Abides" by George R. Stewart. It's post-apocalyptic fiction, but of an intellectual and interesting sort. The second half reminds me somewhat of "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe -- in both books, the main characters live through a complete change of their traditional lives and must deal with the new society that evolves. It's interesting, and not zombie fiction, as so much modern post-apocalyptic stuff is.

I'm also going to recommend His Dark Materials trilogy, but Phillip Pullman. The books have been made into a motion picture so are getting quite a bit of publicity, but they're amazing books. It's important to read them in order: The Golden Compass, the Subtle Knife, and the Amber Spyglass. We loaned them to a family member and finally went out and bought the trilogy again, just to have it at the house, it's so good.

I'm also looking for some fiction that's along the lines of Tom Clancy (especially The Hunt for Red October and some of his better fiction) or Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash -- looking for an exciting, believable plot, interesting, compelling characters, intelligent writing, and a restrained use of violence. No gore, and nothing involving or exploiting children. Any suggestions?
 
Today I finished "The Big Short " . Really good book . It was hard at first to keep track of all the players but I did it and it was interesting to see how it all played out .
 
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