What have you read recently? 2009 -2020

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I just finished "The NYPD Tapes" by Graham Rayman. It's a book about NYPD whistleblower Adrian Schoolcraft, who secretly recorded and exposed NYPD police misconduct related to its overreliance on COMSTAT, a statistical device originally created to aid the NYPD in using its resources but over time became a tool for implementing quotas and underreporting and under-investigating more serious crimes to make overall crime figures look better than they really were.


Schoolcraft, this generation's version of Frank Serpico, went through hell for a few years including a 6-day stay, against his will, in the psych ward of a local hospital due to the strongarmed tactics of the NYPD.
 
Split Second. Near Future Science Fiction Thriller by Douglas E. Richards. I have read a few of his books, and really like them.
 
I'm about a third into Lonesome Dove right now. Really enjoying it.
 
Just Finishing:
All The Light We Cannot See
A Pulitzer Prize winner by Anthony Doerr
Definitely a good story of the war in Paris, Germany and Brittany.
2014
 
The Big Rich.

All about Texas Oil $ and those guys over the last 100 years or so that made and lost more than the combined total of all of our assets @ VG. (HL Hunt, once the richest guy in USA, brought his lunch to work each day in a brown paper bag. He also had 3 different families at the same time and only he knew it.)
 
Just finished two weeks vacation and read 4 books while on the beach.

One was Eye of The Red Tsar - Sam Eastland.

A decent detective story set in Stalinist Russia involving the fate of the Romanovs. Enjoyed it enough to have the second book, The Red Coffin, already picked up from the library.
 
I am reading "The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin" by H.W. Brands. I don't think I've ever read such a thorough biography. Ben Franklin is fascinating. He retired from printing in his early 40s. Then he did even more for his community and his colonies and for science.
 
I just finished "The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo," by comedienne Amy Schumer. Pretty good read, I learned some things about her I didn't before, especially about her upbringing. I always thought of her like a junior version of Chelsea Handler.
 
EastWest Gal said:
I am reading "The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin" by H.W. Brands. I don't think I've ever read such a thorough biography. Ben Franklin is fascinating. He retired from printing in his early 40s. Then he did even more for his community and his colonies and for science.
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LOVE Benjamin Franklin- have read several books about him but not that one- will pick it up
 
harley said:
I read that back when I was approaching teenager-hood, same time I was reading Heinlein's novels. It helped make me the irascible, anti-authoritarian, libertarian a-hole that I am. Good stuff.
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I think I read just about everything Heinlein wrote when I was a kid too. Most of it when I was around 10-12. Have you gone back and re-read some of them? There were a number of things my young self missed.

After he came back to writing following health issues, he put out a small number of books in the final years of his life that I read in university. Some of the items in those books made me look back at some of the earlier works. There were a number of positive portrayals of incest and pedophilia - one example is The Door Into Summer. It leaves me feeling conflicted about his works.
 
Read Ann Cleeves The Crow Trap (Amazon: https://smile.amazon.com/Crow-Trap-Vera-Stanhope/dp/0330518704/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1489160127&sr=8-2&keywords=the+crow+trap )

This is the first book in the Vera Stanhope series. It was used for as the basis for one BBC show shown on PBS. It's interesting because the show was quite a deviation from the book. In the book Vera does not appear until over 1/3 of the book. There are 3 women at the cottage in the hills and in the TV series there was only one naturalist there. Those 3 women are characterized in detail and are central characters. So if you saw the show, this will be an interesting departure.
 
kcowan said:
Just Finishing:
All The Light We Cannot See
A Pulitzer Prize winner by Anthony Doerr
Definitely a good story of the war in Paris, Germany and Brittany.
2014
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This is on my read list. Not sure if I read about it here or somewhere else.

Reading right now "It's Not the End of the Earth, But You Can See it from Here" by Roger Welsch. Pretty funny.
 
Version Control, by Dexter Palmer is very good, although it drags in places.
From Amazon:
"Version Control is about a possible near future, but it’s also about the way we live now. It’s about smart phones and self-driving cars and what we believe about the people we meet on the Internet. It’s about a couple, Rebecca and Philip, who have experienced a tragedy, and about how they help—and fail to help—each other through it. Emotionally powerful and stunningly visionary, Version Control will alter the way you see your future and your present."

The novel involves an interesting take on time travel but mostly it is about millennials and their relationship to technology and life.
 
Girls Like Us Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller.
 
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Interesting book by a philosopher/naturalist. He believes studying the octopus (and cuttlefish) are about as close as we can come to encountering truly alien minds. I enjoyed it quite a bit. My library had it, no need to purchase.

Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? What does it mean that evolution built minds not once but at least twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?
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I, (vaguely), recall reading a book, or perhaps a short story, eons ago, wherein a particularly gifted squid had been trained to operate a spacecraft. The cockpit area was an aquarium, and there were 'regular' squid to keep the 'pilot' company.

I've also heard that octopuses/octopi are at least as smart as dogs.......(trouble is, when they fetch a ball it's always wet when they bring it back).
 
I prefer not to read books that talk about how smart food is. It twinges my conscience.
 
I just finished Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series, including the last one that was written by someone else after his death. The translation on the last one wasn't as good as the first three, but it was a good read.
 
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