What have you read recently? 2009 -2020

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"The Majesty of the River Road" - a pictorial work on the plantations north of New Orleans on the Mississippi.

Many of these homes are still in great shape today at 180 years old.
 
Ford County by Grisham. Half a dpzen short stories. Typical Grisham. But I like it. And, The Ruined City by N. Shute. Not bad either.
 
I am reading Blood Bath, by Susan D. Mustafa, Tony Clayton, and Sue Israel. This is a book about the Baton Rouge serial killer, who killed 7-12 women, mostly in my neighborhood near LSU when I lived in Baton Rouge. Law enforcement finally caught Derrick Todd Lee and he was convicted in this case a few years ago. DNA proved beyond doubt that he was the monster who killed these women. If there was ever a good candidate for the death penalty it would be this creep.

Then, they caught a second serial killer shortly thereafter who supposedly killed another dozen or so women in the same neighborhood during the same time - - but as I recall the evidence wasn't as good and I wonder if Derrick Todd Lee may have killed them as well. The book might discuss this confusing situation too so I am looking forward to reading that part.

Before Derrick Todd Lee was caught and convicted, the situation was pretty scary. These serial killings terrorized women in the university community who lived in that Baton Rouge neighborhood on the south side of LSU, as I did, so the book has special interest for me.
 
At the moment, Digital Printing Start-up Guide by Harold Johnson and C. David Tobie about the intricacies of printing your own photos. They also point out the advantages/disadvantages of sending the print work out; one professional artist has his work printed at Costco. And they acknowledge that because the technology moves so fast the book is essentially obsolete by the time it's printed. Still, it is interesting.

Next up is The Essential Lighting Manual for Digital and Film Photographers by Chris Weston. As implied, it's about lighting and photographs.

Both are, of course, library books.

I am astonished at the photographic results I'm getting with fairly low-end gear: A Nikon P100 point 'n shoot camera, Photoshop Elements 8, and an HP D7560 Photosmart four-color printer. Results are still better than anything I've been able to do with film before.
 
Walt34 said:
At the moment, Digital Printing Start-up Guide by Harold Johnson and C. David Tobie about the intricacies of printing your own photos. They also point out the advantages/disadvantages of sending the print work out; one professional artist has his work printed at Costco.
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I don't print a lot of photos but when I decide I want a good one I will have to remember Costco.
 
I just finished "The Seasons on Henry's Farm". If you're a vegetable gardener, it will make you want to tear out the rest of your lawn to plant garlic and kale.

It's written by "Henry's" sister and is a week-by-week account of what is done on a 10 acre organic farm in Central Illinois to supply CSA share holders and farmers markets.

It's also a beautiful account of an extended family working together, shows how hard farming is and why it might be worth it to pay more for organic produce at the farmers market.

If you're a gardener, check it out!
 
Sarah in SC said:
Yes, throw out that TV and start reading--we did that over 10 years ago and are much happier for it.
Wow, okay, if you like Florida fiction, there are some great ones, but Randy Wayne White is definitely the most similar. Others are Tim Dorsey (who writes a lot like Carl Hiassen, same zany characters), SV Date, and James W. Hall.

Ted Bell really is fantastic, his newest, Warlord, comes out next week. I re-read my John D. MacDonald's every now and again, especially the Travis' series. One of my faves to re-read this time of year is Condominium, which has one of the best descriptions of a hurricane ever. An older one of his about a hurricane is Murder in the Wind. Great stuff!

I have every single one of JDMs books and a handful of scholarly work written about his life. Have you read his pamphlet Reading for Survival? It is awesome and I have a slim first edition of it. Here is a reprint that, if you like the Travis McGee series, you will appreciate.

http://education.gsu.edu/sdecker/Class/Assessment/Achievement/Reading/Reading%20For%20Survival.pdf
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ha! been there and got the T-shirt. Collected everything he wrote as well as the pamphlet, and been through the series twice.

for anyone out there who has never read John D, you have a treat waiting for you. This was a guy with an MBA from Ithaca (Cornell?), who was a deep thinking who took up writing crime fiction. Lots of insights into life, marriage, money...

the weird thing, about 20 years ago I was telling my parents about my John D obsession...and dad said the exact same thing happened to him 20 years earlier.

I believe there is some sort of Florida writers convention in John Ds florida home town every year (Siesta Key?), and they actually have a workshop on John Ds writings.

regarding TV, met a distant relative this summer who said he never watched television, but just watched movies instead, which got me thinking. For us, renting movies is a pain, and then we end up not watching 75% all the way through.

I researched this a bit and ended up buying an Mini Mac, which is optimized for torrent downloading...I would pay for this but streaming services are not available in Canada. It is fantastic, and we are now working our way through all the Merchant and Ivory films (ie Room with a View), or anything with Maggie Smith.

My intention is to actually pay DVD rental to a local independent for films we actually download and watch all the way through..so we are ok karmawise. ; - )

Also watching the old PBS Free to Choose series, by Milton Friedman.
 
Saw that the last of Wambaugh's Hollywood trilogy, Amazon.com: Hollywood Moon: A Novel (Hollywood Station) (9780316045186): Joseph Wambaugh: Books, was out in paperback and finished it off in one day. Excellent book, ending caught me by surprise. Caught me hard too, as something similar happened to a good friend.
Sarah in SC said:
I have every single one of JDMs books and a handful of scholarly work written about his life. Have you read his pamphlet Reading for Survival? It is awesome and I have a slim first edition of it. Here is a reprint that, if you like the Travis McGee series, you will appreciate.
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Thanks or the link to that. The love of reading must be inherited, I got it from my parents and both my kids are avid readers as well, and the McGee stories was Dad's favorite and I picked it from him.
 
one of the problems with some schools is that they force the kids to read dry/subtle British literature before they are ready or way way above their reading level or interest, nipping the reading habit in the bud. What they should do is encourage comic reading and then transition to appropriate and relevent reading that captures their attention.

same goes for music. All kids should be put in rock or folk bands rather than orchestra..unless thats the preference.

same goes for math. All kids should start small businesses and attach $$$ to their numbers, and learn relevant math from that.

we put kids on a track for math research....yet 95% don't understand the destructive power of credit card interest. Sometimes I wonder if this is more organized than stupidity.
 
Kroeran said:
one of the problems with some schools is that they force the kids to read dry/subtle British literature before they are ready or way way above their reading level or interest, nipping the reading habit in the bud. What they should do is encourage comic reading and then transition to appropriate and relevent reading that captures their attention.

same goes for music. All kids should be put in rock or folk bands rather than orchestra..unless thats the preference.

same goes for math. All kids should start small businesses and attach $$$ to their numbers, and learn relevant math from that.

we put kids on a track for math research....yet 95% don't understand the destructive power of credit card interest. Sometimes I wonder if this is more organized than stupidity.
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Same with art. Hand them a couple of cans of spray paint and turn them loose on the school walls. :D

Actually, I think these are excellent ideas. Focus on the reasons to learn, the joyfulness or usefulness, then worry about the skills. I think it would turn a number of our educational system problems around fairly quickly.
 
harley said:
Same with art. Hand them a couple of cans of spray paint and turn them loose on the school walls. :D

Actually, I think these are excellent ideas. Focus on the reasons to learn, the joyfulness or usefulness, then worry about the skills. I think it would turn a number of our educational system problems around fairly quickly.
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of course, we have to ask ourselves honestly, what is the purpose of education

sometimes I think a big part of it is to develop and test your capacity for putting up with authority, and BS...which are of course two essential skills for working in most organizations

the very last thing the system wants you to do is figure out how to make a living directly from the market/economy.

its all geared toward the slavery of the corporation or beaurocracy

most of the self made millionaires I have run into are nutbars who could not handle corporate life, and just stumbled on "direct capitalism" by accident, or out of naivete.
 
For September I read two Ruth Rendell books starting at the beginning of her Chief Inspector Wexford series. She's a British author and so has good command of the English language i.e. her books are well written. The first one I read was Simisola, about a missing young black woman. Has a discussion of race issues in Britain in the mid 1990's. It was a good read but the next one was better, Road Rage.

Road Rage is about environmentalists and their unhappiness with a new bypass route planned for a forested country area. Then some people are kidnapped while taking taxis. I'm not into just page-turners but this one has more then just suspense, going into the question of how much we all want and need modern conveniences. The suspense goes right up to the last few pages. I guessed some of the ending but not all.
 
I just finished "Jan's Story" by CBS newsman Barry Petersen.
Amazon.com: Jan's Story: Love lost to the long goodbye of Alzheimer's (9781933016443): Barry Petersen: Books

The love of his life was his wife, Jan Chorlton, who was also in TV journalism. After some bizarre episodes she was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease. She was only 55.

The book is written on a very personal level, absolutely heartbreaking. I saw the story on CBS Sunday morning and knew I had to read the book.
Jan's Story: Love and Early-Onset Alzheimer's - CBS Sunday Morning - CBS News
 
Digital Printing Start-Up Guide by Harald Johnson and C. David Tolbie. Although dated (2004) I found it fascinating. Dealing with photography and inkjet printers it outlines possibilities I had never considered.

I finally understand ICC color profiles and why they're important to great photographic prints. With the printer profiled, one can get great photos from a pro printer without spending $2k+ on a printer.

Some things that I didn't know existed - one company makes a wood veneer thin enough to run through inkjet and laser printers. Another makes inkjet-printable decal sheets that will adhere to ceramics and glass. Lots of possibilities with this new stuff.
 
I just finished Dynamic Asset Allocation (subtitle: Modern Portfolio Theory Updated for the Smart Investor) by James Picerno. It's about financial research since the development of Modern Portfolio Theory, which tends to show that there is some degree of predictability in market movements, and hence some rational basis for moving into and out of different asset classes or changing the proportions of each in one's portfolio. There doesn't seem to be any simple way yet that an individual investor can put this into practice, neither a mutual fund nor guidelines for DIY, and it wouldn't necessarily be advantageous to do so. Suppose an investor had a time horizon of twenty years—even if the optimal dynamic allocation were correctly determined and used for each year (or other sub-period) the returns might be lower than a buy-hold-rebalance allocation over the whole twenty years. (I haven't yet managed to wrap my brain around how that could be the case, but if even proponents of the idea say it wouldn't necessarily beat buy & hold, I think I am willing to take their word for it.)

The one thing from the book that would be possible to put to practical use is a list of asset classes (out of a total of eighteen classes studied) that had consistently low correlations to other assets, including equities, over the period 1970-2004, from a 2007 paper "Emphasizing Low-Correlated Assets: The Volatility of Correlation" by William Coaker, in the journal of Financial Planning.
"Natural Resources [commodities] have had the lowest average correlations—and the most consistently low correlations—to every asset in this study, including every category of stocks, bonds and alternatives", Coaker advises. "Hence, natural resources have provided more diversification benefit than every other asset in this study."
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So what I take away from this book is to consider adding a dash of a commodities fund to my asset allocation.
 
I read

Amazon.com: The Vanishing Man eBook: R. Austin (Richard Austin) Freeman: Gateway,

a free Kindle book, on my iPod Touch. It was good, with wonderful writing. BTW, e-readers are fantastic for reading in a tent or in front of a campfire.

I just finished

Amazon.com: Sh*t My Dad Says (9780061992704): Justin Halpern: Gateway

which my daughter gave me for my birthday. It was funny, but not quite as good as I had expected. It's also very short.

Also finished the first short story in the collection:

Amazon.com: Ford County: Stories (9780553386813): John Grisham: Gateway

I'm amazed at how well Grisham can tell a story and keep you interested. Right from the first sentence, you are hooked:
"By the time the news of Bailey's accident spread through the rural settlement of Box Hill, there were several versions of how it happened."
​
But that first story ended up being extremely annoying and unsatisfying. I hope the others are better.
 
Reading To Rule the Waves-How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, by Arthur Herman.

This is one of those rare wonderful books by an excellent author which uses a specific window to illuminate world history and the people who made it. Some of that in-one-ear-and-out-the-other history of HS and university are finally becoming clear.

Also interesting details about financing of this development, about techniques and materials for forging gunnery, and how England made different gunnery and even ship choices from those made by Spain and Portugal.

Drake and Hawkins figured out that Spain relied very heavily on its silver shipments from Peru and Mexico to pay troops and mercenaries, to buy naval gunnery from Germany and Netherlands, and other immediate strategic needs; and that to interdict this shipping would put a big hurt on the Spanish empire. Food for thought, even today. Piracy was the easy answer, and as today in other parts of the world, governments jv'd with the pirates to achieve their complementary goals.

Ha
 
REWahoo said:
I agree the book was great, but I'll stop there. The William Shatner sitcom is a total waste of airtime.
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Right. I saw a clip of it on Craig Ferguson, and I couldn't see any relationship to the book. It wasn't even slightly funny.

Also, I'd say that 60% of the humor of the book comes from the use of the swear words (e.g. "Do people your age know how to comb their f*****g hair? It looks like two squirrels climbed on their head and started f*****g!"). You can't say that on TV.

I probably would have enjoyed the book more if I hadn't had such high expectations.
 
Just finished the second "The Girl Who..." book on my Kindle. It was even better than the first. It's interesting to get a(n indirect) glimpse into urban Swedish life. There versus here: more coffee drinking, more smoking, more walking, more computer hardware envy. Well, at last in the book...
 
I think at least the coffee drinking is accurate. I never visit my Swedish friend that she doesn't give me several cups of strong coffee. Intersting factoid- Swedisn men are the world's biggest per capita consumers of snuff. Their version is called snus.

It doesn't sound as if Volvo driver should also be a dipper. :)

Ha
 
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