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Spoilers What Book Are You Reading?

Scepticalscribe said:
Let me know what you think of this; I am pretty partial to the writing of John Scalzi.
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Will do. Redshirts was my first exposure to Scalzi. (How have I missed him all these years?) Wasn't quite sure what to think after that one, but Starter Villain sold me on his wit and humor - his writing reminds me of the Ig Nobel Prize - "first makes you laugh, then makes you think."
 
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9781681378725


Just started this Italian novel in translation. I've heard it described with "the aches of growing older and becoming uncool, perfection always out of reach". Just the kind of ennui-laden novel I'm in the mood for.
 
Reading the book reviews in the week-end edition of the FT invariably has me logging onto my library account and placing an order - a reservation order - on some of the books that have been reviewed, sound interesting, and have just been published.

However, I have just reached my limit of 12 books on reserve......
 
I’m currently reading Neale Donald Walsch’s book ‘Conversations with God’. I’m very familiar with Eastern philosophy but have never been a Christian, and so some elements of the book are only superficially familiar to me. Nevertheless themes such as good and evil, prayer, the Biblical creation story, and so on are to a certain extent pervasive within our culture and so of interest.

All of these things are addressed by the book, which takes the form of a dialogue between the author, who poses a variety of questions, and God, who writes answers back into the author’s legal pad using the authors own hand. It is thus a form of automatic writing.

The actual philosophy espoused in the book is that the universe when it was at one, decided it would try and experience itself and therefore subdivided itself and thus caused free will to be. It takes it from there, but basically any being is an aspect of God looking to express itself. Fascinating stuff.
 
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Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her​


Fun read about who wrote, and how the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys (and the like) books were created, starting as serialized stories, and the relationships between the planners of the books and the "real writers". Very fun and interesting!
 
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Fans of Philip Pullman (especially of the brilliant His Dark Materials series) might like to know that the latest book (The Rose Field, the final work of the second trilogy in The Book Of Dust series, the sequel to the His Dark Materials series) has just been published.
 
Scepticalscribe said:
Moneyland - Oliver Bullough; a profoundly unsettling, superbly researched and deeply thought-provoking read.
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Thanks for posting your back-dust-cover blurb. My library has the book so I'm going to have a look...plus I liked Butler to the World (I've mischievously recommended it to one of my financial advisors).

Reading the library catalog's description of Moneyland reminded me of a similar book:
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

Plutocrats by Chrystia Freeland | Penguin Random House Canada

"Studded with numbers and economic data . . . [Plutocrats] is as complete a work of economic journalism as one could hope for. More surgeon than writer, Freeland has dissected the dynamics of power in this globalized, gilded age and plopped the viscera before us. It's not a pretty sight. This is...
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

Yes, it was written by that Chrystia Freeland before she became a politician.
 
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KaliYoni said:
Thanks for posting your back-dust-cover blurb. My library has the book so I'm going to have a look...plus I liked Butler to the World (I've mischievously recommended it to one of my financial advisors).

Reading the library catalog's description of Moneyland reminded me of a similar book:
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

Plutocrats by Chrystia Freeland | Penguin Random House Canada

"Studded with numbers and economic data . . . [Plutocrats] is as complete a work of economic journalism as one could hope for. More surgeon than writer, Freeland has dissected the dynamics of power in this globalized, gilded age and plopped the viscera before us. It's not a pretty sight. This is...
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

Yes, it was written by that Chrystia Freeland before she became a politician.
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Ah, thank you for that; it looks exceedingly interesting - must check to see whether my library has a copy, and, if so, whether I can place a reservation on it.

This is a subject matter, a topic, I deem imperative for us to inform ourselves about.
 
KaliYoni said:
Thanks for posting your back-dust-cover blurb. My library has the book so I'm going to have a look...plus I liked Butler to the World (I've mischievously recommended it to one of my financial advisors).

Reading the library catalog's description of Moneyland reminded me of a similar book:
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

Plutocrats by Chrystia Freeland | Penguin Random House Canada

"Studded with numbers and economic data . . . [Plutocrats] is as complete a work of economic journalism as one could hope for. More surgeon than writer, Freeland has dissected the dynamics of power in this globalized, gilded age and plopped the viscera before us. It's not a pretty sight. This is...
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

Yes, it was written by that Chrystia Freeland before she became a politician.
Click to expand...
The other (positive) thing worth noting about Oliver Bullough's book (Moneyland) is that, for such an unsettling and disturbing topic, he writes with an easy, and exceedingly accessible prose style.

I am not so sure that I could handle a turgid tome on this topic, it is disturbing enough without having to wade through an inaccessible and trying prose style.
 
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Scepticalscribe said:
The other (positive) thing worth noting about Oliver Bullough's book (Moneyland) is that, for such an unsettling and disturbing topic, he writes with an easy, and exceedingly accessible prose style.

I am not so sure that I could handle a turgid tome on this topic, it is disturbing enough without having to wade through an inaccessible and trying prose style.
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Yes, that's a reason why I think books about economics and the social sciences are often better when written by journalists, not academics, because people who buy the book actually read it rather than just carrying it around in public as a status symbol or to signal orthodoxy by having it prominently displayed on a bookshelf in the background of a Zoom interview (that's right, I'm pointing at you, Thomas Piketty name droppers! How many of you got more than twenty pages into the 700 pages of dry academic exposition with 100 graphs and 20 data tables?).
 
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KaliYoni said:
Yes, that's a reason why I think books about economics and the social sciences are often better when written by journalists, not academics, because people who buy the book actually read it rather than just carrying it around in public as a status symbol or to signal orthodoxy by having it prominently displayed on a bookshelf in the background of a Zoom interview (that's right, I'm pointing at you, Thomas Piketty name droppers! How many of you got more than twenty pages into the 700 pages of dry academic exposition with 100 graphs and 20 data tables?).
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Concur completely re Thomas Piketty; for a guy with such interesting ideas, his prose style is truly brutally bad.

Actually, I suffered, as I made my tortuous way through that book.
 
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