Pile 'o books

Non-Fiction, just read, being read, going to get read...


The Politically Incorrect Guide to The Founding Fathers - Brion McClanahan

Stalingrad - Antony Beevor (second time around)

The Culture Of Fear - Barry Glassner (ten years down the road and it now seems to have been prescient)

John Zogby - The Way We'll Be - The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream

The Most Powerful Idea in the World; A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention - Willian Rosen

Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust - Lyn Smith

Partial Differential Equations: Modeling, Analysis, Computation - Mattheij a.o.

The Enchanted Castle by Edith Nisbet.

Started reading this to my grandchildren on one of their stop overs.
They fell asleep and I could not put the bloody thing down.

An incredible children's book written in the early 1900's.
It's good to keep the boy inside of you alive.

JG Ballard The Kindness of Women.

The divisive symmetry of the far right on RHP. Oh wait, that's the book I'm writing.

Full of Money by Bill James

Originally posted by DrKF
JG Ballard The Kindness of Women.

Wow! If you're a Ballard fan, this is an absolute must read. Now annoyed with myself that I didn't read it long before now.

Recently read:

The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon
by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan

A Discourse on Inequality
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography
by Francis Whelan

Home Cheese Making: Recipes For 75 Homemade Cheeses
by Ricki Carroll

Currently reading:
The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. LeGuin

The Millennium trilogy by the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson

Avenger (2003) by Frederick Forsyth

My Sister, My Love (2008) by Joyce Carol Oates

Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

East Of Eden by John Steinbeck

The Gathering Storm by Winston Churchill

Originally posted by lolof
The Millennium trilogy by the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson

Avenger (2003) by Frederick Forsyth

My Sister, My Love (2008) by Joyce Carol Oates

I read that trilogy as well. I usually avoid the "must read" books of the season but these were good fun. Lisbeth Salandar, a one of a kind character.

Originally posted by DrKF
Wow! If you're a Ballard fan, this is an absolute must read. Now annoyed with myself that I didn't read it long before now.

What put you off?

Originally posted by badmoon
I read that trilogy as well. I usually avoid the "must read" books of the season but these were good fun. Lisbeth Salandar, a one of a kind character.

Yes, I agree - I tried to avoid these books too, for a long time. After reading the first one I wasn't all that impressed but the other two... and the films! What a pity the writer never even experienced the edition of the novels, he died before that.

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
What put you off?

Nothing except other books - it got put to the bottom of a pile, then recycled in to my bookcase and was forgotten about. (I think I was reading an interview with Will Self on Ballard when he mentioned it, and I thought 'don't I have that?'. Devoured it in two days.)

I loved the oblique glimpse (maybe) at Ballard's life and the events that fed in to his fiction, but - more than that - I liked the subversion of autobiography (like the details that differed so much from Empire and the bits, like how his wife died, that I knew to be 'untrue'😉.

In the pile just now:

John Gray Black Mass (reread)

Iain Sinclair London Orbital

Malthus An essay on the principle of population (must be a reread, I'd have thought, but have no real memory of it.)