What have you read recently? 2009 -2020

[Free To Canoe]

I just finished Charles Kuralt's America. He retired from CBS in 1994 and then wrote this book. He moved around the US spending a month at each place. He chose the best places to live in the US for that month and then made a book out of the experience. Since he writes and researches well, it is a good insight into some of the better ER places (for that month). He died two years later. I think he knew he was sick when he retired.

[zinger1457]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MBAustin I finally got around to reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Thought the book was excellent, but decided that I never want to see the movie. There are a couple of scenes that I just wouldn't want to watch.

If you have time check out the other two books in the trilogy series, I thought they were all very good. I also liked the movie, there were a couple scenes that will get your attention but not too bad, Rooney Mara was excellent as Lisbeth.

[EastWest Gal]

Quote:

Originally Posted by zinger1457 If you have time check out the other two books in the trilogy series, I thought they were all very good. I also liked the movie, there were a couple scenes that will get your attention but not too bad, Rooney Mara was excellent as Lisbeth.

Just finishing a tour of Alaska and Western Canada. I re-read the trilogy on my Kindle during the trip. I agree. The rest of the trilogy is a good read as well. I skipped the overly violent parts the second time around though.


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[Meadbh]

Quote:

Originally Posted by zinger1457 If you have time check out the other two books in the trilogy series, I thought they were all very good. I also liked the movie, there were a couple scenes that will get your attention but not too bad, Rooney Mara was excellent as Lisbeth.

I read all three books and then watched the Swedish movies. Nobody does dark Swedish stories like the Swedes!

[Moemg]

I just read " Creation Of Eve " a historical fiction. It is really not my usual type of book but I joined a book club and this was their choice . Very hard to get into but once I did it was okay . The good thing is the book club is making me read outside my comfort zone .That is also the bad thing about a book club.

[Lsbcal]

Just finished Paris: The Novel - by Edward Rutherfurd. You can see in this link that there are a lot of 5 star reviews and I would give it 5 stars.

This is a great way to learn about the history of France. Good if you are going to travel there and good if you are just curious about what makes France tick and what is behind the French mindset. It covers history in historical fiction style bouncing between recent history (1800's to 1968) and very long ago (1200's to 1600's).

One issue for a reader will be getting caught up in a character's drama only to find that all the details of later life will not be completely revealed as we move through to other periods of history. At 800 pages the author had to make certain compromises in telling individual stories in favor of the whole. I think Rutherford made it work.

I came to this after reading New York also by Rutherford (mentioned above in a previous post).

[Marita40]

Just finished William Cope Moyers' Broken, about his addiction and recovery. I was interested in it mainly because of local color--a lot is set in St. Paul where there is a huge population in recovery who frequent coffee shops close to me. Moyers lives not far from me, too. Sure makes you think, "there but for the grace of God go I" in terms of the awfulness of addiction!

[martyp]

Just read "The Retirement Maze: What you should know before and after you retire" by Rob Pascale, Louis Primavera, and Rip Roach.

They interviewed 1500 people who were retired or about to retire. They are marketing researchers and did some fairly impressive data analysis to identify what factors go into a successful transition to retirement.

[Meadbh]

The Orenda by Joseph Boyden. This is an award winning historical novel about the interaction between the Huron, the Iroquois and the Jesuits in what is now Ontario in the 17th century. It is narrated by the three principal characters, all of whom are well developed. There are several gruesome torture scenes but also many scenes of gentleness and caring. This story has not been told in the written word before. I found it compelling and thought provoking.

[Jaded salami]

The Signal & The Noise by Nate Silver. Silver is the guy who started the fivethirtyeight.com site that correctly predicted all 50 states electoral votes in the 2012 presidential election. It covered the art and science of prediction, it was fascinating.

[donheff]

10% Happier, by Dan Harris (ABC News and Nightline host) is an interesting introduction to meditation. Harris, a pretty neurotic worrier, bumped into Buddhism while covering religious topics for ABC. A lifelong skeptic he became intrigued with meditation which has a lot of science supporting it's benefits. The title is his description of the benefits he experienced which he adopted to defuse the skepticism his friends and co-workers expressed whenever he raved about meditation or Buddism. The book is even more interesting for its exploration of the upper reaches of network news from the perspective of a young rising star.

[Sarah in SC]

Don thanks for that recommendation. I've been reading on Buddhism a lot more lately, and I think that sounds like a good one. I've been slowly working through No Time to Lose, by Pema Chodron, which is a translation of sorts of the Way of the Bodhisattva. I really know very little about the subject, but it is quite compelling.

I've just started the Rational Optimist, will let y'all know how it turns out. I suspect it will be a lot like Abundance, the one with the nifty foil cover and good stories about innovation overcoming what seems like disastrous problems.

Just finished Tyranny of Experts by William Easterly. It is an eye opener about international development, and why the billions of dollars spent on foreign aid doesn't really seem to affect global poverty as much as we think it should. I got it after reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which is a harder-hitting and more exposé type book about the World Bank and other players in the development "industry". Interesting reading, that's for sure.

[steelyman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sarah in SC Don thanks for that recommendation. I've been reading on Buddhism a lot more lately, and I think that sounds like a good one. I've been slowly working through No Time to Lose, by Pema Chodron, which is a translation of sorts of the Way of the Bodhisattva. I really know very little about the subject, but it is quite compelling.

Pema Chodron is very good. We don't have good centers around here so I take advantage of zencast.org

[Sarah in SC]

Thanks, Steely. I've been given a couple of books by Thich Nhat Hanh as well. I really enjoyed those. I'll check out your podcast resource as well.

[donheff]

Glen Greenwald's "No Place to Hide" is worth reading by anyone interested in Edward Snowden's leaks about The NSA's massive surveillance efforts. For those who parrot the ubiquitous mantra "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about," skip the rest of the book and read chapter 4 - The Harm of Surveillance.

[fidler4]

Just read "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China." (Kindle Version $3.67) It was a 5 star read.

"The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author

An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history."

[fidler4]

I just downloaded several free books from Amazon.com for my IPAD. I went to the Kindle Books page and clicked on the 4 Stars and Above button. Then I sorted by Low Price to High Price and found multiple pages of $0.00 books to download. Many of them were Book or Volume #1 of a series but still worth a read. This should keep me going for a while.

[Meadbh]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fidler4 Just read "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China." (Kindle Version $3.67) It was a 5 star read.

I read this book when it was first published in the early 1990s. I could not put it down. It is essential reading for an understanding of China's 20th century history.

[unno2002]

After my retirement, I've found I really like "post apocalypse world" (PAW) fiction. There's a LOT of it out there on the web, some of it really good.

I just re-read "Lights Out", by David Crawford. An electromagnetic pulse "fries" most electronics, shutting down the grid, computers (including in cars, trucks, aircraft, etc.), radios… It centers around characters in a small/remote college town deal with the shutdown of modern infrastructure, and deal with those who are not as "polite" as they are.

As of this post it is online at:

http://www.shtfinfo.com/shtffiles/bo...20HalfFast.pdf

[REWahoo]

Thanks for the link.