What have you read recently? 2009 -2020

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Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder. Rather depressing and detailed account of the suffering of Eastern Europe at the hands of Hitler and Stalin. Puts what Americans have lived through here in perspective.
 
Alex, by Pierre Lemaitre, is an excellent French police procedural. Number two in a trilogy featuring Paris Police Commandant Camille Verhoeven (only two have been translated so far), this is a dark and compelling hunt for a serial killer. Full of twists and turns, it kept me up till the wee hours. The final chapters are a fascinating look at a French police interrogation - quite a different process than we see over here.
 
Finding this book made my day... Won't be interesting to most, unless they are involved in "prepping" or have been in the Boy Scouts.
It's a Gutenberg download... EPUB or .txt version, with great pictures and a fantastic information source for every thing from Astronomy to Zoology... with first Aid and Swimming in between.
The 1911 original Boy Scout Handbook.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29558
 
donheff said:
Alex, by Pierre Lemaitre, is an excellent French police procedural. Number two in a trilogy featuring Paris Police Commandant Camille Verhoeven (only two have been translated so far), this is a dark and compelling hunt for a serial killer. Full of twists and turns, it kept me up till the wee hours. The final chapters are a fascinating look at a French police interrogation - quite a different process than we see over here.
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Do you know what the first one is in the trilogy Don? I could not seem to find it on Amazon.

Having watch some Maigret on Netflix I'm up for French mysteries. (Netflix link: Netflix - Unlimited TV Shows & Movies Online)
 
Almost finished with America's Obsessives The Compulsive Energy that Built a Nation. (Joshua Kendall)
Compares the lives of famous Americans ~Jefferson, Jobs, HJ Heinz, Melvil Dewey, Lindberg, Kinsey, Ted Williams, Estee lauder etc all who seem to have had obsessive compulsive disorders (OCD) and were very successful in their fields. They were driven.

I recommend it.
 
Reading The Secret Garden with my nine year old and listening to the Audiobook of Bryson's At Home. Love Bill Bryson!
 
Just finished a really marvelous nonfiction work, Tim Bonyhady's Good Living Street: Portrait of a Patron Family, Vienna 1900. It's about elite life in Vienna prior to the Anschluss, and the women who posed for Klimt and supported the Seccession artists. I'm interested in Klimt and thought this a much better book than the more heralded The Lady in Gold.
 
I am midway through The F. Scott Fitzgerald Collection. It's excellent, that guy really knew how to write a sentence.

My eyes popped when I saw Amazon is selling the Kindle edition for $0.99 (you read that right).

It contains two novels and two collections of short stories: Flappers and Philosophers, Tales of the Jazz Age, The Beautiful and Damned, This Side of Paradise.
 
This doesn't qualify as something I've read, but while I was running around doing errands today, I was listening to a podcast of a local PBS talk program I love but piled up while on my glide path.

It was an interview with an author, Mary Stewart, who wrote a book called The Earth Moved. It's about earthworms. Believe it or not, it sounded fascinating and she was entertaining in talking about their characteristics, behavior, and benefits. I bet it would be interesting to gardeners, landscapers, and so on. I thought I knew something about earthworms, and I always feel sad when I unwittingly squish one at my home. But there is a lot more to learn.

It also made me remember a thing about the musician John Hartford, who popped up in another thread (the steel guitar one). When I was in junior high, I got a copy of his first album, which was packaged as an LP with a foldout cover having the liner notes, which were handwritten things he did, little snippets of prose, poetry, and some drawings. I liked them all, but one that never left me was this:

The simple worm has five pairs of hearts
Stuffed inside his wormy parts
He falls in love quite easily
And ten times as hard as you and me.​
 
Quiet: The Power of Introverts by Susan Cain. In my opinion everyone in business should read this book. It would make managers (especially those uber-extroverted types) much better at what they do and help avoid having so many employees RE. :LOL:
 
Given the 50th anniversary this week, I am reading Lamar Waldron's The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination. It is well written, but I guess I am in a bad mood because I find it to be disappointing. Inattention to details bothers me, and also much of it is taken from another book in particular. It cost $12.99 and it is worth about, oh, $0.25 IMO.:)
 
I read two very interesting books about cities. "The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving," by Leigh Gallagher, and "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Survive America, One Step at a Time," by Jeff Speck. As is often the case, I was set off on this jag by an ER.org thread, in this case one from haha. End of the Suburbs is a fascinating look at the demographic and other trends that may end, or at least transform, today's suburbs while favoring city centers. Spoiler alert, the book does not actually predict the end of the suburbs but does predict some major changes and a possible resurgence for the traditional, close in train stop suburbs. I found Walkable City even more compelling, especially since it addresses the factors that can make or break center cities from NYC and DC to Main Street in Middletown. It is full of fascinating obersvations and factoids, many of which seem counter-intuitive and had escaped me despite the fact that I have lived in walkable places for all but a couple of my 65 years. These are both highly recommended for anyone interested in the future of cities.
 
HappyOutsourced said:
That is so cute!
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Yes. He used to write for the Smothers Brothers. Along with Steve Martin (another banjo guy), amongst others.

He wrote a song called "Six O'Clock Train and A Girl With Green Eyes", a title that fascinates me, like some turn of the century painting.
 
Willers said:
Quiet: The Power of Introverts by Susan Cain. In my opinion everyone in business should read this book. It would make managers (especially those uber-extroverted types) much better at what they do and help avoid having so many employees RE. :LOL:
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This must be quite a popular book because I'm now number 103 in the waiting list at our library. The library system has 20 of these circulating.
 
Her Privates We-a book about WW1 trench warfare written in 1930, from the British POV. Sounds incredibly horrible.

Ha
 
haha said:
Her Privates We-a book about WW1 trench warfare written in 1930, from the British POV. Sounds incredibly horrible.

Ha
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I enjoy early 20th century history and had never read "All Quiet on the Western Front" until a few months ago. I think I read somewhere that in 3 days the British lost more men in I believe it was the Battle of Somme than the US did in both WW's and maybe even the Civil War. Yes, war is fascinatingly brutal; spoken from someone who did not serve in the military….
 
I just finished The Cancer Chronicles (2013) by George Johnson. The author is a science writer, hence writes about the latest in cancer research as seen by a layman.

The book opens with the author examining 150-million year old fossilized dinosaur bones that bore evidence of bone cancer, or more exactly metastasized bone tumors that started elsewhere. The book then describes what researchers are doing and the slow progress that has been made, and a couple of personal cancer stories. One was that of his wife, and the other of his brother. One had the treatment resulting in a good ending despite the odds of a Stage IV cancer, while the other's cancer kept recurring despite all medical efforts.

The reader will be interested to learn how cisplatin, a compound of platinum that has been known since 1845, was incidentally discovered to have tumor-killing effects, just like the discovery of penicillin. Or he will learn that mammals have more risks of cancer than reptiles or fish, who have more than amphibians. And humans have the highest rates of all animals. Why? Nobody knows.

It is sobering to see that there are so much more that we do not know about cancer than we do know. The book describes how environmental effects such as radiation from the bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and from the nuclear plant in Chernobyl did not have as much impact as originally feared. The toxic industrial waste in Love Canal which made the national news in the late 70s turned out the same way.
 
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By beloved has been reading "Pandora's Star" to me and we just got done. Now we're into "Judas Unchained". Really freakin' cool sci fi. I know that most of the folks here would dig it.

Critics have compared the engrossing space operas of Peter F. Hamilton to the classic sagas of such SF giants as Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert. But Hamilton's bestselling fiction-powered by a fearless imagination and world-class storytelling skills-has also earned him comparison to Tolstoy and Dickens. Hugely ambitious, wildly entertaining, philosophically stimulating: the novels of Peter F. Hamilton will change the way you think about science fiction. Now, with Pandora's Star, he begins a new multivolume adventure, one that promises to be his most mind-blowing yet.
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sengsational said:
By beloved has been reading "Pandora's Star" to me and we just got done. Now we're into "Judas Unchained". Really freakin' cool sci fi. I know that most of the folks here would dig it.
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Thanks. I had not heard of Hamilton. I was able to download a book from the library containing two: A Mindstar Rising and Quantum Murder. I will give those a try. Others are available in hardback.
 
The Power of [-]Nonsense[/-] Now - Eckhart Tolle

I came close to throwing this piece or rubbish away before I got to the end of the introduction and never got past the end of the first chapter before it was tossed in the box to go to the Salvation Army. Utter garbage. Straw Men and other logical fallacies, internal contradictions, non-credible assertions and so on. My time would have been better spent watching the grass grow.

How this became a multi-million seller is utterly beyond me.
 
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen

The author elects to take up the story of how Charles Darwin developed his theory of how species can and do change over time after Darwin's return to England from his famous voyage on the Beagle. This goes a long way towards meeting the author's goal of keeping the book short as it clocks in at a very readable 250 pages. Readers learn that Darwin developed his theory early on, but then waited for more than 15 years before he eventually published On the Origin of Species. He was indeed reluctant to publish his theory in part because he knew it would be highly controversial.

I really enjoyed this book. I liked the author's writing style and and I think the subject matter is incredibly relevant still today. Readers will get a concise explanation of the theory of evolution (not Darwin's term) as well as some great information on the life of one of the most significant "discoverers" of our time. Got it from the library but will keep my eyes open for a used copy to buy.
 
I just finished "Chasing Gideon," a book by Karen Houppert about how the defense of indigent people since the 1963 landmark Gideon v. Wainwright case has eroded over time, mainly due to the underfunded and overworked public defender offices in many states and localities. Good book.

And I have just started reading "Fighting for Common Ground," by former U.S. Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). I am only about 25 pages in but it is a good read so far.
 
If you like the Scandinavians who are all the rage lately you will like Land of Dreams, by Vidar Sundstol, a Norwegian writer. It involves an investigation of the murder of a young Norwegian visitor to northern Minnesota along the banks of Lake Superior. Lots of history of the area and good character development. This book is the first of a trilogy.
 
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