What Are You Reading

[Diamondback]

A Packaging Science text book. Yes, I am studying the science of boxes. Oh the joy.

Oh, OUCH! At least my Global Business class let me focus more on the methods of getting containers (specifically, the big intermodal Conexes) from place to place, instead of sweating the small stuff inside the Conex.

Thank God I left my Business major behind years ago! My sympathies...

Right now, my read of choice is a swarm of Web printouts about the various ship designs built for the U.S. Maritime Commission during WWII... there's just something about a battered, rusty old tramp freighter...

 

[DavidVillaJr]

I really enjoy threads like these, I always discover new books to adventure through.

Currently I am re-re-reading Gavin Menzies' "1421 The Year China Discovered America".

From the back cover:

On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China. Its mission was "to proceed all teh way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas" and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony.

When it returned in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in China's long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. Also concealed was how the Chinese colonized America before the Europeans and transplanted in America and other countries the principal economic crops that have fed and clothed the world.

Unveiling incontrovertible evidence of these astonishing voyages, 1421 rewrites our understanding of history. Our knowledge of world exploration as it has been commonly accepted for centuries must now be reconceived due to this landmark work of historical investigation.


Me again - It is a really engaging and fascinating read. It gets you thinking about history, and offers some compelling evidence for his thesis.

Highly recommended:eusa_clap


website: http://www.1421.tv

 

[AlanC]

Commodore Hornblower, by C.S. Forester

 

[Jay]

I'm onto The Rum Diary again. It's by Hunter S. Thompson, but it was written when he was 22 almost in the style of Hemingway. I finished it in 3 days, my friend in 2 and I think I'll read it again by time summer is over.

Back Description:
Begun in 1959 by a then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. Exuberant and mad, youthful and energetic, The Rum Diary is an outrageous, drunken romp in the spirit of Thompson's bestselling Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels.

 

[berrybuzz]

I'm about 5 chapters into The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger.

I wouldn't likely read a novel about a women's fashion magazine. While browsing through the bookstore, I picked this one up and just read a few paragraphs and was immediately engaged by the style and wit.

Same here! that's too funny. I remembered there was a movie (which I haven't seen) and so I picked up the book and started to read and had to buy it!

I'm also about halfway through Thank You for Smoking...book is in my car so I don't have the author's name right on hand.

 

[AlanC]

I'm also about halfway through Thank You for Smoking...book is in my car so I don't have the author's name right on hand.

Christopher Buckley, William F. Buckley's son.

 

[Baron Kurtz]

Where my high-school education failed . . .

. . . the adult in me picks up the slack.

Approaching page 700 of Bleak House. As expected it's an amazing overview of London life circa 1850 and a powerful indictment of the justice system - which, sadly, hasn't changed much though it is a little better these days. And as expected it contains all the best (the ebullient, flamboyant, comic male characters approaching middle age) and all the worst - the faultless females and blameless poor - of Dickens's characterisation.

All in all a very satisfying read, though quite daunting to begin with.

bk

 

[Kimberly]

I am currently reading Angela's Ashes. I have never read it before because I heard what a depressing book it was and didn't think I could bear it. It is an excellent book but I have had to put it down a couple of times because some parts are so sad. I highly recommend it though.

 

[Kimberly]

Same here! that's too funny. I remembered there was a movie (which I haven't seen) and so I picked up the book and started to read and had to buy it!

I'm also about halfway through Thank You for Smoking...book is in my car so I don't have the author's name right on hand.

I loved the Devil Wears Prada. Another good series of books if you like humor are the Advertures of a Shopaholic books. They are so funny that I actually laugh out loud. lol . I think the reason I love them so much is because she rationalizes her purchases the same way I do.

 

[LadyStardust]

. . . the adult in me picks up the slack.

Approaching page 700 of Bleak House. As expected it's an amazing overview of London life circa 1850 and a powerful indictment of the justice system - which, sadly, hasn't changed much though it is a little better these days. And as expected it contains all the best (the ebullient, flamboyant, comic male characters approaching middle age) and all the worst - the faultless females and blameless poor - of Dickens's characterisation.

All in all a very satisfying read, though quite daunting to begin with.

bk

I'm looking to line that one up after I get through with my own rather frightening undertaking, as I've heard nothing but raves about the mini-series adapted from it, and I want to get through the novel first so I can make a proper critique. My own task--no,it really is quite a pleasure, is George Eliot's Middlemarch. Oh, she has the most beautiful vocabulary I think I've ever encountered, and the scenes she weaves! It's a joy to go to.

 

[Harp]

Eliot's Daniel Deronda is worth a look.

 

[berrybuzz]

I loved the Devil Wears Prada. Another good series of books if you like humor are the Advertures of a Shopaholic books. They are so funny that I actually laugh out loud. lol . I think the reason I love them so much is because she rationalizes her purchases the same way I do.

I've read her non-shopaholic book. Don't recall the name but I liked it (Undomesticated Goddess or something like that)
I would've read the shopaholic series but I could never figure out which book was the first book, but then I didn't take much time on the matter (I hate series that aren't clearly labeled as to their order).

 

[AlanC]

My wife loves the Shopaholic books.

 

[Barry]

I'm onto The Rum Diary again.

I read that a couple of years ago and I really enjoyed it. Like you, I read it quickly. It was hard to put down.

I usually don't keep up with new movie releases but it looks like it's in production....

Barry

 

[Kimberly]

I've read her non-shopaholic book. Don't recall the name but I liked it (Undomesticated Goddess or something like that)
I would've read the shopaholic series but I could never figure out which book was the first book, but then I didn't take much time on the matter (I hate series that aren't clearly labeled as to their order).

It goes like this

1. Confessions of a Shopaholic
2. Shopaholic Takes Manhattan
3. Shopaholic Ties the Knot
4. Shopaholic and Sister
6. Shopaholic and Baby (I have not reat this yet). I am too cheap to buy it in hardcover

 

[Diamondback]

For some reason, right now I'm back to a childhood favorite of my own that ultimately inspired a college research-paper and an infiltration of Boeing Wichita to crash the B-52 50th Anniversary party, Dale Brown's Flight of the Old Dog.

 

[Harp]

Found a battered copy of Wuthering Heights this week.

 

[Lancealot]

I'm half way through The Rule Of Four. Kind of a cross between The DaVinci Code and The Name Of The Rose.

 

[Orgetorix]

I'm working through Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan, about the Paris Peace Conference that produced the Treaty of Versailles.

The Big Four in Paris--British PM David Lloyd-George, Italian PM Vittorio Orlando, French PM Georges Clemenceau, and US president Woodrow Wilson.

 

[carebear]

I'm working through Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan, about the Paris Peace Conference that produced the Treaty of Versailles.

(riffing on beer commercial)

...AND World War Two. Can your Peace Conference do that?

Clemenceau looks like they put a walrus in a suit for the photo.