Anybody read a good book lately?

[SD]

Anyone read Carl Jung's Red Book?

[General_Failure]

I do a lot of reading on my tablet these days, but I haven't been able to get books for it easily. The thing is set up to work with Barnes & Noble's online deal, but they don't accept paypal, so I've been reading a lot of pirated and public domain books, none that have been very interesting.

So I finally got around to looking up how to remove Amazon's DRM from their Kindle books and bought a couple. First up is Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. I'm only a couple chapters in, but I'm enjoying it.

[Zanshin]

My wife has a Nook and I read on my Droid X. You can find just about any book you want in torrents. Do a search on BTjunkie.com....you'll find thousands and thousands of books.

[Diomedes]

I just read Everything We Had, "by" Al Santoli.  I use quotes there because it is actually not written by Santoli:  the book is a collection of oral histories from 33 different Vietnam Veterans about their service in that conflict.  I'm not a Vietnam buff or anything, it just kind of landed in my pile and I read it.

Holy crap, the U.S. had no business in Vietnam. 

Vietnam.  Iraq.  Afghanistan. 

We have got to stop invading and nation-building.  The waste of money and humanity is staggering.

It's worth a read, and goes pretty quick because of all the different vignettes and perspectives.  Some very moving stuff in there.

[Rome]

We didn't belong in Iraq or Vietnam, I agree.

Afghanistan is another matter.  Those iceholes harbored the bastiches who directly attacked us and therefore should have reaped total farging catastrophe from us.

Should we have been there for 10 years?  No.  Obviously not.  Bush and his gang of thugs royally farged up a relatively simple mission and Obama has continued on with that clusterfarg despite promising to end it.

[Geowhizzer]

I just read Everything We Had, "by" Al Santoli.  I use quotes there because it is actually not written by Santoli:  the book is a collection of oral histories from 33 different Vietnam Veterans about their service in that conflict.  I'm not a Vietnam buff or anything, it just kind of landed in my pile and I read it.

Holy crap, the U.S. had no business in Vietnam. 

Vietnam.  Iraq.  Afghanistan. 

We have got to stop invading and nation-building.  The waste of money and humanity is staggering.

It's worth a read, and goes pretty quick because of all the different vignettes and perspectives.  Some very moving stuff in there.

My politics have become almost a nihilistic resignation, but with all the posturing about balancing the budget and cutting spending, this seems to be the common sense approach.

Stop invading nations for the purposes of regime change or "promoting democracy."  We've been longer "rebuilding" Iraq that we did Japan, and we freakin' nuked them for goodness sake.

Stop trying to police the world, reduce our military to a defensive force, with the ability to ratchet it back up in case of emergency.  Right now, the biggest bullies of the world appear to be us, and that causes more problems than it causes.

Take some of that infrastructure money and invest it on our own damn crumbling roads, bridges, and economy.

[MMH]

Agree.

[Diomedes]

Afghanistan is another matter....
Should we have been there for 10 years?  No.  Obviously not.  Bush and his gang of thugs royally farged up a relatively simple mission and Obama has continued on with that clusterfarg despite promising to end it.

It most certainly did not have to be an invasion.  A f'n land war in Afghanistan, for Christsake.  Who the hell thinks that is a good idea?  An occupying force, yay America!  Fighting the people we had been arming against a former enemy and then abandonded when it became inconvenient for us to keep helping them...

Awful.


One of the principal things I took away from that book was how much was wasted...an amazing amount of young, smart, energetic life was snuffed out for nothing....and not just the people who died.  The ones who did the killing, the ones who were stuck in the middle of all that...so many of them were wasted by what they did and saw..imagine what all those people could have been.   On all sides.

F'n pointless.

[hbionic]

I just finished 'Dark Market' by Misha Glenny...the same chap that authored 'McMafia' which good 'ol rusty recommended.

McMafia had  a lot of information on a lot of elements regarding the black market and crime rose after the soviet union collapse. It touched on the drug trade, from South America to Africa to Asia, human trafficking and the like. It was well written.

Dark Market was more an anecdote about carding, skimming, hacking, and cracking, it's players, and sites such as carderplanet, cardermarket, and darkmarket. It touches on the role of law enforcement and vulnerabilities, laws, and future cybercrime.

A relatively easy read, it was good to have a perspective about that subject. Personally, I didn't know how it worked, and still don't, but at least I'm more familiar with the stuff that goes on. Just a tad. But the most interesting thing I found was that as I read this book, never at one point did I feel like I was reading about criminals, even though they were responsible for syphoning hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars from institutions and individuals alike. It got to the point where I was almost pulling for them not to get caught.

Weird.

[Rome]

This might be the best learning resource I've ever come across:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/

Basically there's 2,000 free courses offered online by MIT.   Very cool.

[rjs246]

This might be the best learning resource I've ever come across:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/

Basically there's 2,000 free courses offered online by MIT.   Very cool.

That is farging amazing. Something in the back of my brain tells me that I knew this was out there, but to have a link and actually be able to see the vast amount of free education just there for the taking from one of the country's finest institutions is pretty farging cool.

[PhillyPhanInDC]

I've been reading "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption". It's god damned amazing. A story about a guy who is in the Olympics prior to the war breaking out, becomes a member of a bomber crew in the Pacific, and survives a crash while on a rescue mission. He's lost at sea for 47 days, lands on an island occupied by the Japanese and gets tortured, starved, and brutalized for two and a half years all over Japan. It's all based on a true story, and is an awesome read.

[rjs246]

I just finished Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace. It's a bunch of essays that he wrote for various publications over the years. Lots and lots of people don't like the way Wallace writes (he also has legions of fans who think he's a genius) and I can understand why. He uses footnotes to explore related thoughts, provide context and cite sources and it makes for a very disjointed reading experience. I also think it makes for a reading experience that closely mimics the way we think, or at least, the way I think. One thought will lead to other, related, thoughts which themselves become part of the conversation or story or chain of thought or whatever.

His writing can be difficult to navigate and the thread of the story he's telling can be hard to keep hold of because of his extensive use of long-winded footnotes but I seriously enjoyed his writing. He's exceptionally funny and intelligent and I'm considering picking up Infinite Jest now, despite the fact that I've made fun of lots of people for reading it.

[SD]

I've been reading "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption". It's god damned amazing. A story about a guy who is in the Olympics prior to the war breaking out, becomes a member of a bomber crew in the Pacific, and survives a crash while on a rescue mission. He's lost at sea for 47 days, lands on an island occupied by the Japanese and gets tortured, starved, and brutalized for two and a half years all over Japan. It's all based on a true story, and is an awesome read.

I bought this for my step Mom for her birthday. She loved it. Might have to borrow it from her

[Rome]

I picked a random lit course from the MIT site and read a series of commencement speeches, one of which was by Steve Jobs to Stanford in 2005.

Seriously eerie in his foreshadowing of his own demise but incredibly inspiring just the same.  I actually went to work with a slightly more positive outlook after reading it.