I'm mostly reading SF, fantasy, horros and thrillers - sometimes I'm reading for fun, sometimes it's the job (translating books).
My best authors are: Roger Zelazny, Terry Goodkind, Frank Herbert, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy and I could go on for a long time, but I think that will do for now.
My book choices kinda give away my political leanings. Just for the record, I'm not a registered voter for either party. Truth be told, a lot of the information presented in both books, especially the ACLU one, are quite the eye-opener. Of course, I always find irony in how the side that constantly hammers home the need to keep our minds open and our vision clear as to how things unfold always seems to decide to close those minds and avert their vision from information that comes to light from the sources cited in these books.
The last one I finished was this:
And that is quite simply a stunning book. The amount of crap peddled to the media and the general public about the Duke lacrosse case is simply ridiculous, and I'm not just saying that as a Duke fan. School affiliation and affinity has nothing to do with how one should digest the story as presented here.
Baby May does her impressions of a Swiss roll and Bono
bastard you beat me to creating my favorite thread
I'm currently rereading The Grapes of Wrath. I've been a huge Steinbeck fan since I was teen and rereading has actually been a bit of a rebirth after years of literary haze. It's brilliant and is without a doubt my favorite book.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wiki
The Grapes of Wrath is a classic novel published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes. A celebrated Hollywood film version, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, was made in 1940; however, the endings differ greatly.
Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath at his home, 16250 Greenwood Lane, in what is now Monte Sereno, California. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agriculture industry. In a nearly hopeless situation, they set out for California's Central Valley along with thousands of other "Okies" in search of land, jobs, and dignity. The novel is meant to emphasize the need for cooperative, as opposed to individualistic, solutions to social problems brought about by the mechanization of agriculture and the Dust Bowl drought.
Atlas Shrugged for a few years was at the number one spot and is a truly incredible read, although a tad lengthy. Quotes on every page, and the characters are wonderfully strong and resilient.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature
Novel by Ayn Rand, published in 1957. The book's female protagonist, Dagny Taggart, struggles to manage a transcontinental railroad amid the pressures and restrictions of massive bureaucracy. Her antagonistic reaction to a libertarian group seeking an end to government regulation is later echoed and modified in her encounter with a utopian community, Galt's Gulch, whose members regard self-determination rather than collective responsibility as the highest ideal. The novel contains the most complete presentation of Rand's personal philosophy, known as objectivism, in fictional form
another great Ayn Rand book is We the Living, which is far more a more typical story than a philosophical journey.
Set in 1968 Prague, the novel details the circumstances of life for artists and intellectuals in Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Prague Spring and the subsequent invasion by the USSR. The story's main character is Tomas, a well-known, successful surgeon, who criticizes the Czech Communists and as a result loses his position. Other important characters (who, together with Tomas, make up the group known as Kundera's Quartet) include his wife Tereza (a photographer), his lover Sabina (a painter), and Sabina's lover Franz (a university professor).
According to Kundera, "being" is full of "unbearable lightness" because each of us has only one life to live: "Einmal ist keinmal" ("once is nonce", i.e., "what happened once might as well have never happened at all"). Therefore, each life is ultimately insignificant; every decision ultimately does not matter. Since decisions do not matter, they are "light": they do not tie us down. But at the same time, the insignificance of our decisions - our lives, or being - is unbearable. Hence, "the unbearable lightness of being". The subject matter causes some critics to label this novel as a modernist work, while others see it as a celebratory explosion of post-modernism.
The other lot on top of my list are 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Godfather of the Kremlin, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Immortality
Quality of Posts > Quantity of Posts
There is a reason I bleed red. United until I die.
Last edited by GocartMozart : 01-22-2008 at 01:57 PM.
I read some good books last summer. I enjoy reading, but don't have time during the school year. After reading dense business text books, summer is a massive relief and a chance to get to enjoy some fiction.
Here are the books I read last summer. Let me know if you've read any of them:
Headlong by Michael Frayn: Very funny book by a very funny author/playwright. If you haven't read anything by Frayn, I'd recommend this one. Also, if you ever have a chance to go see a production of Noises Off (a play of his), DO NOT pass it by. It's THE funniest play I've ever seen. A
Masquerade by Walter Satterthwaite: Another very funny book; extremely light read as well. Not the best storyline, but it makes up for it with its humor. It's one of 3 in a series (Escapade and Cavalcade). B
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse: A very enjoyable book. If you liked The Da Vinci Code, you’ll probably like this. It’s quite long, but a fairly easy read; I finished it in about a week. The only problem I had with it is that it jumps between the present and the past, which is fine, but it seems to do it at very frustrating times. As soon as you get really into the story in the present, it jumps back into the past and vice versa. B+
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon: I’m very lukewarm on this book. I went into it thinking it was a mystery/detective story but through the eyes of an autistic child. Turns out there is no real mystery to it, rather it is a faux narration of an autistic boy’s journey. This was a clever idea and was accomplished very well; I just didn’t really enjoy it. C
HP and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling: One of the better books in the series. A-
Into the Blue by Robert Goddard: Story about a woman’s disappearance and a man’s journey to solve the mystery. In the realm of a John Grisham novel. B-
I’m planning on reading the other Satterthwaite novels this summer (Escapade and Cavalcade) and also another Frayn book (Spies or Sweet Dreams).
"Collar turned up, back straight, chest stuck out, he glided into the arena as if he owned the fucking place. Any arena, but nowhere more effectively than Old Trafford. This was his stage. He loved it, the crowd loved him" -Roy Keane on Eric Cantona
I'm currently reading "A Walk In The Woods" by Bill Bryson:
Quite frankly, the book is downright hilarious. It really is a toss up between Bill Bryson and Robert Wilson (i'll post a novel by him next) as for who's my favourite author.
Quote:
If nothing else, A Walk in the Woods is proof positive that the journey is the destination. As Bryson and Katz haul their out-of-shape, middle-aged bodies over hill and dale, the reader is treated to both a very funny personal memoir and a delightful chronicle of the trail, the people who created it, and the places it passes through. Whether you plan to make a trip like this one yourself one day or only care to read about it, A Walk in the Woods is a great way to spend an afternoon. --Alix Wilber
"The Blind Man of Seville" by Robert Wilson
This is probably the best novel i've ever read. I'd recommend it to absolutely everyone, no matter what your preference in books is. I've got about 3 more of his novels to read and then i'm done with his entire collection.
"All Quiet on the Western Front" - Erich Maria Remarque
Another one of my absolute favourites. This is another must read for every war buff.
"The Guns of August" - Barbara Tuchman
Consistently some of the best writing i've ever seen. A lot of authors manage to have passages or chapters that are supremely written but Tuchman really runs the gauntlet through the entire book. A fabulous account of the events that led up to the stalemate of the First World War.
This is probably the best novel i've ever read. I'd recommend it to absolutely everyone, no matter what your preference in books is. I've got about 3 more of his novels to read and then i'm done with his entire collection.
This is excellent, thank you! I saw this in a bookstore a few years ago when I was out of the country and made a (poor) mental note to grab it when I got back. I completely forgot about it until now. This will be added to the list for next summer. Anything else you'd like to mention about it?
"Collar turned up, back straight, chest stuck out, he glided into the arena as if he owned the fucking place. Any arena, but nowhere more effectively than Old Trafford. This was his stage. He loved it, the crowd loved him" -Roy Keane on Eric Cantona
Haven't really read anything in the past month or so, but here's the last three books that I read, and I feel they should all be read by anyone and everyone here.
I wanna pick up Fergie's autobios sometime. I think my grandma's gonna give me some tom brokaw book to read or something...
Also the new John Grisham book is one I wanna read sometime..
Oh right, I'm a bit of a wrestling nerd, so I wanna pick up Chris Jericho's book and Bret Hart's book as well..
Nice recommendations and interesting reads you all are doing.
I have a backlog of books that I want to get through in the coming weeks.
Currently reading this one:
Description:
Quote:
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
For nearly a dozen years, Louis J. Freeh has been pointedly silent about the man who appointed him director of the FBI. That moratorium ends officially and loudly with the publication of Freeh's My FBI, a scorching account of his relationship with Bill Clinton and of leading the bureau at a time when, as Freeh writes, the president's "scandals . . . never ended." To understand the depth of Freeh's antipathy, consider this one anecdote: Sometime after he resigned in 2001, Freeh ran into the former White House counsel who had recommended Freeh for the job. The lawyer reported that Clinton had just complained to him that the worst advice the lawyer ever gave him was to appoint Freeh. "I wear it as a badge of honor," Freeh writes. And that's just the second chapter.
How did it come to this? A president's relationship with an FBI director should be a mixture of hands-off and hands-on. Unlike cabinet members, who serve at the pleasure of a president, directors are now given 10-year terms -- in part to avoid another 48-year reign like that of J. Edgar Hoover, and in part to provide insulation from political pressure. A potentially secret police force constitutes a great opportunity for abuse by presidents and a threat to be used against them. But even if an FBI director cannot expect to be best friends with the president, he should, as Freeh writes, "be able to go directly to the president, sit down with him and say You should know about this." In Freeh and Clinton's case, there were vital issues to discuss and collaborate on. But the problem for Freeh was that he never could get to those hands-on moments. "There was always some new investigation brewing, some new calamity bubbling just below the headlines ." By the time Freeh resigned, he had met with Clinton at most three times.
My FBI is no ordinary Washington memoir. To be sure, Freeh tells a number of engaging stories about his rise from FBI street agent -- one undercover assignment entailed parading around nude in the locker room of a local health club frequented by a prominent mobster -- to his mob-busting days as a federal prosecutor in the famed Southern District of New York. There are a few too many gratuitous bromides bestowed on colleagues and even neighbors. But these accolades serve the purpose, intended or not, of contrasting starkly with Freeh's portrait of Clinton as a man whose only moral compass is political expediency. When a judge cited Clinton in 1999 for contempt for lying in the Paula Jones case, Freeh describes it as a disgrace equal only to Richard M. Nixon's. If it had been him, Freeh writes, "I would be so devastated that I might never show my face in public again. The ex-president, however, seems to suffer no such pangs of conscience."
In retrospect, it should have been clear to both men that this was a doomed relationship. Could there be two more different people? Freeh, a former altar boy and a moralist at his core, always carried a worn prayer book in his suit jacket. But Freeh was impressed with the breadth of Clinton's questions in their first meeting, and by the time Clinton assures Freeh there will be no political interference if he takes the job, Freeh has joined the legions of the charmed. When Clinton sits down, without prompting, to write a birthday greeting to Freeh's 7-year-old son, the deal is sealed.
Freeh acknowledges making mistakes in the relationship. He lacked tact in trying to distance himself. He turned down an early dinner invitation to the White House with the Clintons and Tom Hanks; he even sent back his White House pass with a terse note, indicating he would sign in every time he came calling. "It was seemingly a declaration of open hostility on my part," he writes. But, he argues, "I was the nation's top cop," and just a few months into his tenure, Clinton was already the subject of a criminal investigation in what became known as Whitewater. "Until the matter was sorted out," Freeh writes, "I had to be accountable for every trip I made to the building where the president worked and lived."
The final stake through the relationship's heart, however, was the president's response to the June 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, an American military facility in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 Americans were killed. It is fitting that Freeh opens My FBI with Khobar Towers; there was no case he cared more deeply about or pursued more relentlessly. It became his Moby-Dick. Only hours after the bombing, Clinton dispatched the FBI to track down the perpetrators, promising the nation they would not go unpunished. Freeh personally oversaw the case, and when it soon began to appear that top Iranian government officials might be behind the attack, Freeh says the investigation stalled: "Where I found myself most stymied [was] not halfway around the world on the Arabian Peninsula but at home, a half dozen blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue." The problem, in Freeh's view, was that in May 1997 an Iranian moderate, Mohammad Khatami, had been elected president and seemed to be the United States' best hope of normalizing relationships. "The Khobar Towers investigation was not going to get in the way of that," Freeh writes.
The tale of duplicity Freeh tells is complicated, but the basic outlines are these: The Saudis, who had suspects in custody, had communicated in a limited way their findings of Iranian involvement to the FBI and the White House. To put a legal case together, however, the bureau needed access to the suspects, and Freeh was told by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, that this would happen only if the president and his top aides exerted pressure on Crown Prince Abdullah, the kingdom's de facto leader. The Saudis, however, said they were receiving U.S. signals to back off, not to bull ahead with the investigation. Clinton and his aides denied this to Freeh, but in the end, Freeh came to believe the Saudis' version.
Among the most telling incidents for Freeh was a meeting that occurred in September 1998 between the crown prince and the president at the Hay Adams hotel in Washington. Freeh was assured by Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, that Clinton had pressed Abdullah for U.S. access to the Saudi-held suspects, but others present told Freeh that Clinton barely raised the subject and sympathized with the Saudis' reluctance to cooperate. Clinton, Freeh writes, then promptly asked Abdullah for a contribution to his presidential library. (I learned through my own reporting at the time that Freeh later secretly referred Clinton's library request for grand jury investigation, but he does not reveal this here, presumably because of grand jury secrecy rules.) Frustrated, Freeh then made an extraordinary out-of-chain of command pitch to former president George H.W. Bush, who also was scheduled to visit with Abdullah. Freeh called Bush, much favored in Saudi Arabia due to the 1991 Gulf War, and asked him to make the request that Clinton wasn't making. The former president agreed, and two days later, Abdullah told Freeh that the suspects would be made available. "I have no doubt that, but for President Bush's personal intervention, we would never have gotten access," Freeh writes. Six weeks later, the information from the interviews and other evidence turned over by the Saudis showed incontrovertibly that the attack had been funded, Freeh writes, by senior Iranian officials. He adds that, after he reported these findings, Berger convened a meeting in the West Wing's Situation Room to discuss them. But instead of dealing with the evidence of Iranian complicity, Freeh writes, the meeting focused on how to deal with the press and Congress should the news leak. (A "Script A" and a "Script B" had been prepared.) No other moment in his eight years matched the disappointment of that meeting: "We had the goods on them, cold, yet the Clinton administration miserably failed to seek any redress," Freeh writes. The case limped along until the new President Bush took office. Six months later, a grand jury indicted 14 defendants, mostly the active participants in the plot, and accused the Iranian government of directing the attack -- though no Iranian officials were indicted, a fact that Freeh curiously fails to explain.
Freeh devotes a scant two chapters to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and their aftermath, explaining that enough newsprint and news hours already have been dedicated to what went wrong without his rehashing the details. This will be too little for many; critics have blasted Freeh for pursuing his Khobar Towers obsession while his FBI missed the gathering al Qaeda plot at home. Though Freeh resigned three months before Sept. 11, the plot was assembled on his watch, as was the FBI counterterrorism apparatus that failed to thwart it. But he has a few points about Sept. 11 that he is determined to make. While acknowledging "many shortcomings" of his own, Freeh blames Congress for the much-reported antiquated state of the FBI's computer system, pointing out that the bureau begged Congress for funds that were not forthcoming. He complains that from 2000-02, the bureau asked for 1,900 new employees for its counterterrorism program and got only 76.
But the heart of Freeh's complaint is that until Sept. 11, terrorism was viewed by both the Clinton and Bush administrations as a law enforcement issue -- sifting through bomb sites looking for evidence, as the FBI did with Khobar Towers -- and not as an act of war, as he now argues that it should have been. "I don't know an agent who thought that was sufficient to the cause, or anyone who believed that a criminal investigation was a reasonable alternative to military or diplomatic action," he writes. The United States had gone after Osama bin Laden with a few Tomahawk cruise missiles in 1998 in retaliation for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; the CIA had made covert attempts to get bin Laden; and the State Department had harangued his Taliban patrons. But these attempts were all lame, Freeh argues, because the United States lacked the political spine to put its full force behind the efforts. Freeh points out that the FBI had helped secure indictments against bin Laden in 1998 and 1999 and, along with the CIA, missed nabbing Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the Sept. 11 plot's mastermind, in Qatar in 1996 when he was apparently tipped off by a Qatari official. In 2000, Freeh flew to Pakistan and personally appealed to President Pervez Musharraf to pressure his Taliban allies to arrest bin Laden. "If [the U.S.] government had a different mind-set, the secretaries of state and defense would have been in Lahore with me, or instead of me," Freeh writes. This negligence, he argues, emboldened the terrorists. "The image of a lumbering giant stumbling around with a sign on its back reading 'Kick Me' was not lost on our enemies," he notes.
My FBI is ultimately a sad tale, and it's clear Freeh saw it this way, too. He had planned to resign before the end of Clinton's term but held off until the president left office because he worried that Clinton might replace him with someone who would damage the FBI. "Not only was he actively hostile toward me, he was hostile to the FBI generally," Freeh writes. "My departure might be one last opportunity for retaliation."
Reviewed by Elsa Walsh
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Right after that are the following:
1. The Chrysalids - John Wyndham [Absolutely love this book. One of my favorites along with A Brave New World and Animal Farm]
2. The World Is Flat: A Brief History Of The Twenty-First Century - Thomas L. Friedman
3. The Innocent Man - John Grisham
4. Turning Points: The Campaigns that Changed Canada 2004 and Before - Ray Argyle
Quality of Posts > Quantity of Posts
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United Zone Book Club ***SPOILERS***
United Zone Book Club ***SPOILERS*** -
01-09-2008, 10:52 PM
