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Whatcha readin now? (book, books, reading, read) (5 Viewers)

Captain Fantastic said:
About to sound hopelessly self-promotional, but since you mentioned trilogies, I'll post this for the whole team...  :whistle:

Hostile Takeover (Volume One of the Hostile Takeover Thrillogy) is currently on promotion on Amazon. Kindle edition available FREE this weekend (Sat 5/22 - Sun 5/23).

The book is currently ranked #1 in Amazon's "Suspense" category (nothing like offering something free to increase downloads), but it will likely drop back to the ranks of anonymity soon.  :bag:

The series is composed of thrillers (obviously) which are standalone stories but tied together with a few recurring characters and an underlying thread related to the bad guys. Some of our FBG readers have taken the dip and reported favorable results (THANKS, GUYS!!).  :thanks:

All this to say, if you have a Kindle, feel free to download for zero dollars just in case you ever want to read it someday.  :popcorn:

Self-promotional commercial over. In books being read (the point of the thread), I'm in the middle of "Billion Dollar Loser" - story of the founder of WeWork and that spectacular flameout. About halfway through. Interesting. Shades of Wolf of Wall Street but not quite as compelling (significantly lower quantity of hookers and blow in this one). Still, seems worth the time thus far.
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Unfortunately I missed this post when it was a freebie. However, I just contributed $4.99 to the FBG author cause and will read it soon. 

I have a friend who's an author. He gave me his first book to read and it didn't work for me because as I read all I could hear was his voice in my head like he was reading it aloud to me. I couldn't finish it (I didn't tell him).

 
facook said:
Started this last night....I had downloaded it right after you published I believe.  Certainly can't say it starts slow!  :D   I had tried to get our local library to purchase it for a little greater publicity for you, but they wanted more reviews.  I'm going to try again.  
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Thanks, @facook. Much appreciated. Hope the book proves worth your effort!  :popcorn:

 
Joe Mammy said:
Unfortunately I missed this post when it was a freebie. However, I just contributed $4.99 to the FBG author cause and will read it soon. 

I have a friend who's an author. He gave me his first book to read and it didn't work for me because as I read all I could hear was his voice in my head like he was reading it aloud to me. I couldn't finish it (I didn't tell him).
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Thanks, @Joe Mammy!  If it helps the reading experience, my voice is like a cross between Patrick Stewart and James Earl Jones. Or perhaps my voice sounds absolutely nothing like them but that would be a cool voice to hear in your head while you read the book so knock yourself out.  :D

 
Captain Fantastic said:
Thanks, @Joe Mammy!  If it helps the reading experience, my voice is like a cross between Patrick Stewart and James Earl Jones. Or perhaps my voice sounds absolutely nothing like them but that would be a cool voice to hear in your head while you read the book so knock yourself out.  :D
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I started it last night and reading it right now. I’m 28% in and haven’t killed myself yet.

Very impressed! Loving it!

 
Don Quixote said:
Started Louise Erdrich’s new release, The Night Watchman. I was recently saying in another thread that she deserves a spot in the conversation of the greatest living American authors. It is a novel about Native American dispossession in the 1950s, based on her grandfather’s experience.  Up to her usual standards so far.   
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Erdrich finally got her Pulitzer for this one. Yes!

 
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Don Quixote said:
I just ordered Pale Fire to keep going with Nabokov.
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Pale Fire was outstanding. Amazing for a book to still feel that original 60 years after it was published. It is published in notes-style (think of something like Infinite Jest).  It is told in the form of 999-line form poem by one character, with a foreword, line-by-line notes/commentary, and index by another character (that mostly have little to do with the poem itself and are just a descent into that character's megalomaniac mind). I'm not one to re-read books that frequently, but that is one that I'm going to have to back to and read again now that I have the full picture (as the commentator would regularly go off on some seemingly irrelevant tangent, and I now get it, or at least partially do).

Started Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour this weekend. About halfway through; pretty solid so far. It was released earlier this year and getting good buzz (debut novel for the author). Satirical novel about a black man trying to make his way working in sales at a start-up company (at which he is the only black employee).

 
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Finished a few recently

"Why We Lost" by Daniel Bolger- retired General writes about what happened/went wrong in Afghanistan and Iraq from both the military and civilian areas. Good in depth view of both wars. Lays blame at the lack of humility of the senior military leadership as well as considerable blame on multiple administrations. Lots of people made mistakes. Won't name names to not turn this into some political thread. I thought he swung hard in doling out blame, but felt he held back somewhat. No reason to back up this feeling, just a gut feeling after reading it. All in all, well written. Would recommend. 

"Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles"- this one was pretty interesting. Covered financial bubbles dating back to the 1700s. Interesting discussion of the "bubble triangle" involving marketability, credit, and speculation. Also interesting was the different types of bubbles and their consequences- some were devastating to the society in which they occurred (and even spread to others if big enough) while others actually could be argued to be beneficial. Not too long of a read either. 

Two others: "Confidence Game" was pretty good detailing hedge fund manager Bill Ackman's fight vs MBIA and the insurance business in the early to mid 2000s. Culminated with the the 07-08 GFC. Gives an interesting look at a contrarian in Ackman and his personality. The last one was "The Acquirers Multiple." Short read, but packed a lot of investment tidbits in there. Made a pretty decent argument that investing in fair companies at wonderful prices beats investing in wonderful companies at fair prices. Opened my eyes to thinking more contrarian and against the grain. Probably could've been written better, but it got the message across.

 
Finished Billion Dollar Loser a couple weeks ago. The story of the spectacular rise/fall of WeWork and its founder Adam Neumann. Certainly interesting in terms of looking at the uber-crazy (pun intended) era of over-funded pre-profit "unicorns" of Wall Street.

The book itself was good-not-great. It's the sort of thing Michael Lewis would write about but do it much better (no offense intended to the author). The challenge with the book was that it very much feels like a set of journalistic essays rather than a single-book narrative, which is not surprising because that's basically how the book came into being.

For instance, The Wolf of Wall Street was compelling because it was written from the first person point of view (by the guy whom the story was about) so it held a nice, linear "here's what happened, when/why/how, and here's where I ended up" flow. And the book was partially business but much more so human craziness.

Billion Dollar Loser takes snippets from various parties and alludes to the human craziness, but it's not exactly linear and probably tries to cover too many bases (totally understandable given the scope of the story). It's one of those "okay" books where, upon turning the final page, I felt informed but not moved. But definitely worth your time if you like reading about business successes/failures from a not-all-business point of view.

Started A Gentleman in Moscow the other day (back to fiction! yes!). About a third of the way through. Enjoying it so far. Feels cozy thus far. Interested to see if it develops intrigue or thrills.

Side note - Just noticed that Dean Koontz is doing a "Season 2" of his Nameless series. The first book is now on my Kindle.

I think this is SUCH a fascinating (and anticipated) development for authors. Basically telling a series of linked stories and selling them one at a time - akin to the serialized novel so popular in the time of Dickens with Stephen King attempting to reignite it with The Green Mile years ago (anyone else buy those installments one-at-a-time like I did?).

Anyway, I'm a sucker and kind of like buying "books" that have less than a hundred pages and paying $1.99 for it. They're short and readable in one sitting. And I'll confess to enjoying Koontz's Nameless series (who knew it was just "Season One" of the series?). Good stuff.

 
Currently reading Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles. I read Miller's "Circe" a few years ago -- which was a re-imagining of Homer's The Odyssey, told from the viewpoint of Circe -- which I thought was great and liked Miller's writing.  The Song of Achilles is an earlier novel from her, a re-imagining of The Iliad, retelling the story from the viewpoint of Achilles' "friend", Patroclus (friend in quotes because Miller's telling has them a bit more than friends).

Some of the negative reviews on Amazon seem a bit critical because they were not expecting the love story piece (I'm not sure how because the novel is referred to as a part love story in everything that I've read about it -- maybe they just did not realize it would involve two males). But it is another pretty solid one from Miller if that aspect is not a turn off.

 
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Over a recent vacation, I read the first few chapters of several non-fiction books seeing if one would hook me.  I really enjoyed The Code Breakers by Walter Isaacson.  (I've admittedly shied away from biographies over 500 pages - 100% of the ones I've read to date the authors spent more time proving how much research they did, rather than crafting a narrative. )

Anyway, the writing is crisp, the story flows along and is interesting along the whole book.  

The book follows the story of Jennifer Doudna on how she got interested in genes, RNA, CRISPR and gene editing and explains things in an easy to understand way.  Really good read. 

 
Dipped into a couple of books that I think were gifted to me at some point that I've had sitting on the bookshelf for years... One was Jeff Shaara's A Blaze of Glory, a novel based on the Battle of Shiloh. Shaara was also the author of Gods and Generals. It was okay, but I do think I prefer the approach of Foote and McPherson in recounting battles as opposed to the novelization of it.

Another one was Don Alberts' The Battle of Glorieta: Union Victory in the West. A lot of detail about a battle that I knew little about. My wife is from New Mexico and checking out the battlefield has been on my list -- maybe next time that I'm out there. I thought the book was maybe a bit too academic (something in between the two books may be a bit more to my liking).  The author is certainly a proponent of the importance of the battle, referring to it as the "Gettysburg of the West" -- you could make an analogy to it in some aspects (such as the Western most advance of the Confederacy, similar to Gettysburg being the most northern advance), but really no comparison in terms of scale of the participants.

With those done, I'm going back to my unofficial year of Nabokov. Started Pnin last night. Also ordered Ada, or Ardor and Speak, Memory for when I finish that.  It has been awhile since I've had a run on one fiction author quite like the one that I'm on with Nabokov, as I usually spread out (the last was maybe when I through a bunch of Fitzgerald or Hemingway stuff over a decade ago).

 
steelerfan1 said:
hi facook, 

if the first 1 was just ok to you, you may not want to continue on. even though I loved the series, but they do get a bit repetitive at times.

as far as enjoyment factor goes, I'd rank it along the lines of the longmire series by craig Johnson, cork o'connor  series by William kent Krueger, the walt fleming series by ridley pearson and the joe picket series by cj box.
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Really like the Cork O'Connor series

 
Thanks all for the recommendations. The Hostile Takeover series is a recent one I enjoyed. I usually have a handful of books going.

I just finished Iron Prince by O'Conner & Chmilenko. While I think the target market is more younger readers, I really enjoyed the book. If you like scifi/fantasy ugly duckling type stories like Divergent, you might like this as well. Be aware. The authors are kinda wordy. Not at the Ayn Rand level, but I don't think I would have missed anything if it was shorter.

A slower read I'm on right now is, Metabolical by Dr Lustig. While the focus is on metabolic disease and, especially, the role of sugar. The detailed information he presents is really impressive and I'm alternately angry at the government and the food industry. I'm reading this to help with my own health, but see how parents and parents to be might find this even more useful as what they do impacts their children's health later in life in ways they may not realize now. Lustig seems a little arrogant, but if the affect of diet on overall health interests you. I'd recommend it.

 
Just finished A Gentleman in Moscow. Due to my schedule the past few weeks, I had to grab it in snippets where I could -- which is NOT how this type of book should be read -- so it took me a while to finish it, but thoroughly enjoyed it nonetheless.

Be advised that this is not a page turner when it comes to action or thrills, but the writing is stylistically superb. The reading experience is akin to sinking into a comfy leather chair with a glass of good whiskey (or, in honor of this book, perhaps vodka). In other words, the book is comfortable and thoroughly a pleasure to read.

Bonus points for being educational -- a fiction story with sprinklings of Russian history in the 1920s-1950s time period in which it takes place. And a few unexpected twists.

Of course, my tastes normally run more toward thrills than languid reading so I probably won't rush out to read all the other books by Amor Towles right away, but this particular novel is worth the time invested. I shall now return to the trash I normally read and enjoy.  :bag:

 
Captain Fantastic said:
Just finished A Gentleman in Moscow. Due to my schedule the past few weeks, I had to grab it in snippets where I could -- which is NOT how this type of book should be read -- so it took me a while to finish it, but thoroughly enjoyed it nonetheless.

Be advised that this is not a page turner when it comes to action or thrills, but the writing is stylistically superb. The reading experience is akin to sinking into a comfy leather chair with a glass of good whiskey (or, in honor of this book, perhaps vodka). In other words, the book is comfortable and thoroughly a pleasure to read.

Bonus points for being educational -- a fiction story with sprinklings of Russian history in the 1920s-1950s time period in which it takes place. And a few unexpected twists.

Of course, my tastes normally run more toward thrills than languid reading so I probably won't rush out to read all the other books by Amor Towles right away, but this particular novel is worth the time invested. I shall now return to the trash I normally read and enjoy.  :bag:
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I thought Gentleman in Moscow was great. I did enjoy Towles' writing. I've been meaning to pick up his Rules of Civility, but I haven't gotten to that one yet.  I think my tastes are more languid than thrills though. :lol:

 
Don Quixote said:
With those done, I'm going back to my unofficial year of Nabokov. Started Pnin last night. Also ordered Ada, or Ardor and Speak, Memory for when I finish that.  It has been awhile since I've had a run on one fiction author quite like the one that I'm on with Nabokov, as I usually spread out (the last was maybe when I through a bunch of Fitzgerald or Hemingway stuff over a decade ago).
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These three were all great. Speak, Memory one of the best written memoirs that I've ever read.  There are people with more exciting lives (he spends a lot of time talking about chasing butterflies, which I don't think would fly with most memoirs), but Nabokov can make just about anything sound interesting.  I just love his linguistic stylings; take these opening lines from Speak, Memory: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour)."

Pnin was entertaining, and may be the most accessible of the Nabokov novels that I've read.  Ada had a lot going on in it --  Nabokov's longest novel, but it hits basically every theme that he seems to have ever written about.  I have a few more Nabokov that I'm planning to binge, but taking a break for now.

Started Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet last night. Historical novel about the life and death of Shakespeare's son, Hamnet.  It made a lot of best of 2020 book lists.

 
Don Quixote said:
Dipped into a couple of books that I think were gifted to me at some point that I've had sitting on the bookshelf for years... One was Jeff Shaara's A Blaze of Glory, a novel based on the Battle of Shiloh. Shaara was also the author of Gods and Generals. It was okay, but I do think I prefer the approach of Foote and McPherson in recounting battles as opposed to the novelization of it.

Another one was Don Alberts' The Battle of Glorieta: Union Victory in the West. A lot of detail about a battle that I knew little about. My wife is from New Mexico and checking out the battlefield has been on my list -- maybe next time that I'm out there. I thought the book was maybe a bit too academic (something in between the two books may be a bit more to my liking).  The author is certainly a proponent of the importance of the battle, referring to it as the "Gettysburg of the West" -- you could make an analogy to it in some aspects (such as the Western most advance of the Confederacy, similar to Gettysburg being the most northern advance), but really no comparison in terms of scale of the participants.

With those done, I'm going back to my unofficial year of Nabokov. Started Pnin last night. Also ordered Ada, or Ardor and Speak, Memory for when I finish that.  It has been awhile since I've had a run on one fiction author quite like the one that I'm on with Nabokov, as I usually spread out (the last was maybe when I through a bunch of Fitzgerald or Hemingway stuff over a decade ago).
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I was under the impression that Picacho Peak was the furthest west a civil war battle took place. That is in Arizona.

 
KarmaPolice said:
I get it - super easy, convenient, and usually cheaper.    Just doesn't feel right for whatever reason.  
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I was this guy for years. I have finally admitted that the e readers are the way to go. I fought it for a long time but I now love it. I still read some paper books but I much prefer the ereader now. Especially as I get older and need more light to read.

 
I just finished The Emerald Mile. I LOVED this book. It was the perfect mixture of history,physics, and story telling for me. I may be biased as the Grand Canyon is my favorite place.

Also finished The Hollow Places which was ok. I really liked the idea but I was not a big fan of the writing style. Still not a bad time waster.

 
prosopis said:
I was under the impression that Picacho Peak was the furthest west a civil war battle took place. That is in Arizona.
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That was furthest west battle. I referred to Glorieta as most western advance, as that was the Confederacy’s biggest attempt to establish a stronghold out west, with over a 1,000 combatants on both sides. Picacho Peak was a much smaller battle.

 
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prosopis said:
I was this guy for years. I have finally admitted that the e readers are the way to go. I fought it for a long time but I now love it. I still read some paper books but I much prefer the ereader now. Especially as I get older and need more light to read.
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I'm thinking of reverting back to real books.  I switched to a Kindle about 5 (10?) years ago because I was tired of hauling big books with me on my frequent travels.  But I barely get any reading done any more.  I read when I go to bed, and with the Kindle, I have the lights off, and just laying there I fall asleep in about 5 minutes.  Takes me forever to get through a book any more.

 
shuke said:
I'm thinking of reverting back to real books.  I switched to a Kindle about 5 (10?) years ago because I was tired of hauling big books with me on my frequent travels.  But I barely get any reading done any more.  I read when I go to bed, and with the Kindle, I have the lights off, and just laying there I fall asleep in about 5 minutes.  Takes me forever to get through a book any more.
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I have a Kindle Paperwhite, but I've mostly gone back to real books too, particularly during the pandemic. I spend all day in front of a screen now, and Kindle feels more of the same. Real book gives me some non-screen time.

 
Don Quixote said:
I've mostly gone back to real books too, particularly during the pandemic. I spend all day in front of a screen now
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This.  Real books are the way to go.  Having a great library system in the immediate area helps as well.  Yet...

I'm reminded of the Dr. Rick commercials in this thread anytime I see someone is reading "The Battle of _____" or similar books.  Who else reads books about submarines?  My dad. 😄 18 second mark

 
Recently added to my ebook library the first five books of the Wheel of Time series as they were only $4.99 each. Maybe I'll get to them in 20 years given my unread library size.

 
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Fired up The Eye of the World.  Hopefully will keep at it- a year or two ago I got through 150 pages or so and remember liking it.  Having the series start in Nov on Amazon might help put a fire under my ###.  

 
KarmaPolice said:
Fired up The Eye of the World.  Hopefully will keep at it- a year or two ago I got through 150 pages or so and remember liking it.  Having the series start in Nov on Amazon might help put a fire under my ###.  
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Just started Memory of Light (#14)

Might do New Spring for the first time and then Eye of the World again right before the series comes out. 

 
Cemetery Road by Greg Iles.  Not many do modern Southern gothic like Iles.  Lotta dread, lotta angst.  

 
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I started the new King book Billy Summers. So far so good. I am loving the set up and can't wait to see where it goes. I have hopes of a certain direction but we will see. I love the first few chapters of a book I know nothing about. I purposely avoided any news about this book and it's paying off..

 
I started the Eye of the World yesterday.   Didn't get far, but does anybody know - do the new printings of the book have an additional opening?    I had the old version with the characters on horse before and I didn't remember any of this opening following Egwene around.  Now I have the light blue mass paperback. 

 
... and I get constant reminders of just how slow I read now.   Not sure I got through 20-25pgs in the 45min I read at the park.  :bag:

 
KarmaPolice said:
I started the Eye of the World yesterday.   Didn't get far, but does anybody know - do the new printings of the book have an additional opening?    I had the old version with the characters on horse before and I didn't remember any of this opening following Egwene around.  Now I have the light blue mass paperback. 
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I was listening to a chapter by chapter Wheel of Time podcast yesterday, and they started right in with the Dragonmount prologue too, so I'm not sure where this intro with Egwene came from.  

 
Finished “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir. If you liked The Martian, I highly recommend it. Plenty of humorous one-liners mixed with sci-fi tech.

 
Read Clancy's Without Remorse while at the beach. Perfect easy beach book page-turner. 

Been thumbing through Kerouac's Big Sur hoping for another Dharma Bums. Didn't realize how self-reflective and self-aware this one was going to be. Lots of direct references of his previous books, their reception and the changes in his life with the newfound fame. Could almost feel the pressure in the prose that he might have been feeling while writing this to live up to the previous works. Still love it, even if it does read a little choppy.

 
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