What have you read recently? 2009 -2020

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Sarah in SC said:
Finished up The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. Written in 1949, it details the journey of three friends to post-WWII Africa. I didn't get it. It was annoying from start to finish, a sort of dreamy, whiny, emotional affair. I've heard it is one of the top travel books of all time and that it is some sort of great statement on the human condition, but my summation is: meh.
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Then you likely would not like the movie, although in it Debra Winger has one of the hottest sex scenes in any movie that I have viewed. This book also has a very good description of what it is like to have typhoid fever.

Ha
 
Actually, Ha, one thing it did do for me is make me double check that Typhoid is on the list of vaccines I plan to get for Peru. And maybe it will grow on me, like Cormac McCarthy's The Road. But right now it just seemed hopeless and annoying. Like most of the literature I studied in school.
 
HFWR said:
Which is why I never actually read any of that stuff... :cool:
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I know, you had a girl read it for you and write your papers. :cool:
Damn musicians.
 

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I recently read Ann Packer's " Swim back to me ". It is short stories and while I like Ann Packer these were just okay .A step up from reading cereal boxes but not a can't put down.
 
Just finished "Shanghai Girls"by Lisa See . It was a good read but it left you hanging so I bought the sequel "Dreams of Joy " but haven't started it yet .
 
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Just finished Trackers by South African writer Deon Meyer.........three independent but interrelated segments, featuring characters from his previous books, that merge for the finale.

Good read.
 
I'm reading "Marjorie Morningstar", a Herman Wouk novel from the mid-50s. It is really a coming of age story about Marjorie, who is when the book begins in 1933 is 17. Wouk makes such careful descriptions of the social scene, and the inner landscape of his characters, that the reader gets to experience a very different time. As a small example, people lived in Greenwich Village to save money on rent!

This book came out in 1955, and I can remember that my mother and many of the other women in the neighborhood were reading it. It may have been a Book of the Month CLub selection.

For my taste, it is not quite up to his books about WW2, but it is nevertheless very good. I will read all his books over time. He is a very careful writer. Incidentally, he is still alive and I believe now lives in Palm Springs.

Ha
 
For those of you who haven't seen the separate thread someone started on the topic I just finished The Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers, by Ellen Schultz. I won't repeat my rants here other than to say this is a fascinating and horrifying look at how corporate managers and consultants intentionally plundered well funded pension plans to the benefit of share holders and executives and spun the whole cynical enterprise to blame the very employes they robbed. Excellent read.
 
Stayed up very late to finish Tana French's "The Likeness." A little slow getting started but obviously for me, turned into "can't put it down" mystery by halfway through.
 
Just finished "The Midwife of Venice" by Roberta Rich. It's a historical novel, and her first. It was an entertaining yarn, though I thought there was a little too much description of the sights and smells of 16th century Italy, and I thought it improbable that the conte was so naive about his brothers' plan to do away with his son and heir.

To quote one reviewer: "So begins a lively tale involving love, blackmail, family, murder, plague, intercultural compassion, dramatic last-minute rescues and some very creative disguises. There is a lot going on, and the brisk pacing ensures ever-changing action."

Apparently the book will be available in the US through Simon & Schuster in December 2011 or February 2012.

Roberta Rich
 
The sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, an excellent Vernor Vinge novel, The Children of the Sky came out two days ago and I am reading it on my iPad. Will I be able to resist pressing the Buy (i.e. spend $13) button when I get to the end of the sample? It seems unlikely...
 
WORM

Worm: The First Digital World War, by Mark Bowden, (journalist author of Blackhawk Down) is a pretty good read for the geeks among us. It follows the actions of a volunteer group of network gurus who have been fighting the Conficker Worm to a halt over the past three years. The book would probably be better as a condensed magazine article but for those among us who enjoy learning the details of these sorts of things it is pretty interesting. I knew generally about Conficker but I didn't realize the sophistication of its design nor the extent of its botnet (7+ million hosts). I also didn't realize the extent of the threat the conficker botnet presents. It is sort of a Sword of Damocles hanging over the Internet. Its masters have never let it drop and may never do so - but they probably could despite the best efforts of this geeky band of digital warriors.
 
donheff said:
Its masters have never let it drop and may never do so - but they probably could despite the best efforts of this geeky band of digital warriors.
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I had never heard of Conficker. Most recent references I found on the Web are just attempts to sell security software. The following article, Headless Conficker worm lives in computers January 26, 2011 by Glenn Chapman seems to be saying that the worm can no longer be put to harmful use (but it's not clear to me):
A Conficker Working Group report available online on Tuesday said the alliance has prevented the people who released the worm from using it to command computers as an army of machines referred to as a "botnet."
"Nearly every person interviewed for this report said this aspect of the effort has been successful," the group said in a summary of its findings.
The group considered its biggest failure as "the inability to remediate infected computers and eliminate the threat of the botnet."
Headless Conficker worm lives in computers
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GregLee said:
I had never heard of Conficker. Most recent references I found on the Web are just attempts to sell security software. The following article, Headless Conficker worm lives in computers January 26, 2011 by Glenn Chapman seems to be saying that the worm can no longer be put to harmful use (but it's not clear to me):
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The book makes clear that it has actually been put to use (for a trivial spam incedent). It may also be being "rented out" for small scale hidden criminal activities. The good guys are constantly vigilant to block any possible attempt by the bot masters to contact and direct the zombies but the effort is heroic and would likely fail if the bad guys really wanted to use this net for serious damage (that damage wouldn't be to the infected PCs, it would be to the target they attack or the entire Internet). Calling it "headless" simply reflects the fact that the "head" seems to be content to let if lie dormant. Scary book.
 
I just finished "Dreams of Joy " by Lisa See . It is the sequel to "Shanghai Girls " . It covers the history of China as lived by two young women from the mid thirties to the fifties . Great books ! I highly recommend them especially to the women . I'm not usually a history fan but experiencing it through their eyes was amazing .
 
Just finished Terrorists in Love by Ken Ballen. Disturbing and yet hopeful insight into what motivates jihadis.
 
Just finished The Night Circus (thanks, Don).

I see this as Harry Potter for Grownups, and I'm sure it will be made into a movie. It got a little slow in the middle, but otherwise was quite enjoyable. The author jumps around in time a lot; it was a bit annoying and I didn't see any reason for it. Each chapter is labeled with the date, and you often have to check back to see when something happened.

8/10.
 
Just finished Lisa Randall's, Knocking at Heaven's Door, a layman's intro to the Large Hadron Collider with a tour of particle physics and cosmology. It is a pretty good physics book with almost no math. Hawking's Grand Design and Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos are a bit better in my opinion. But if you like this stuff, Randall is a pretty good writer and it is nice to find a brilliant woman among this crowd.

Also finished Baldacci's latest - Zero Day. A standard Baldacci thriller. It is a light weight, entertaining mystery featuring an ex-Army Ranger, now CID Agent/superman. The denouement requires a bit of suspension of disbelief but still a good read if you like Baldacci.
 
TromboneAl said:
In the Woods (9780143113492): Tana French: Books

This was entertaining, but the comments on the Amazon site are exactly right: then ending is no good, and the main mystery of the book is never resolved.

5/10
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I've read the Tana French series backwards, starting with the most recent. I wonder if the resolution in the first one will be clearer to me as I read it (I've just taken it out of the library) as the series builds on itself with different narrators who refer to the previous events and narrators.

Thanks for posting this about Into the Woods.
 
I thoroughly enjoyed Reamde, Neil Stephenson's latest novel. Reamde is a virus and a corrupted spelling of readme, as in readme.txt files that come with software. The readme virus has been set loose in an online game sort of like World of Warcraft but optimized for players to actually get money out. The virus encrypted all of your documents and sends offers to unencrypt them for a modest fee to be left in gold coins at a specific location in the game world. The wrong guy's files get held hostage and the game is on. Reamde is quite a thriller, with teams of players and multiple levels of play, just like the game at it's center. This is not complex or challenging like some of Stephenson's other work but it is a great "beach read" style page turner.
 
I just read The Caine Mutiny. I remember seeing the movie with Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg in the 50s.

It's been a long time, but I think the book is much better. I believe that Herman Wouk is not just a good writer, but a great writer.

Ha
 
haha said:
I just read The Caine Mutiny. I remember seeing the movie with Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg in the 50s.

It's been a long time, but I think the book is much better. I believe that Herman Wouk is not just a good writer, but a great writer.

Ha
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+1
 
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