What Are You Reading?

[mjr]

Right now, I'm thumbing through a book on chess strategy. I'm not any good at chess, but I usually like to play.

[Ceir]

I'm into my yearly re-read(ish) of Lord of the Rings. I try to dive into the books around Bilbo and Frodo's canonical birthday, and even though I rarely actually go through the whole trilogy, it's literary comfort food. I can pick up any volume, read a chapter or four, and still be entertained.

[Ironclad Alibi]

Even lawn mowers can fly.

[dalesys]

"We often learn at the end of an episode of MythBusters, everyday objects can, in fact, be made lethal if Jamie builds a gun to shoot them." --Adam Savage

Well, there's always the cover for the Pascal-B a-bomb test at ~150,000 mph.

[Jay 2K Winger]

"If you apply enough power, *anything* will fly." - Rocket Science

"We often learn at the end of an episode of MythBusters, everyday objects can, in fact, be made lethal if Jamie builds a gun to shoot them." --Adam Savage

[Nunavut Pants]

Umm, that's actually my point. The book talks about engines, and the myriad difficulties designing and building them.

No engine == no power == no flying.

[dalesys]

... it seems like a minor miracle that so many planes actually did fly at the time!

"If you apply enough power, *anything* will fly." - Rocket Science

[Nunavut Pants]

"The Secret Horsepower War." It's an account of aero engine development on the Western Front of the Second World War, written by a former Formula 1 powertrain engineer.

It's a good book if you like the subject matter, but it could use a thorough editing. There are numerous places where the author starts a sentence with one thought and finishes it with another; places where he says that "person X said Y" and then supplies a quote of them saying Z, uses terms which he doesn't define, and so on.

The good parts are the material that it covers. He uses many primary sources (as in, TONS of them!) and has lots of nifty diagrams and photos. You get to read what the people who were actually designing and working on these engines had to say about them at the time, and see the often-barely-contained chaos of the general development environment.

I used to have (as I think many of us do!) the image that X aircraft came with Y engine and it made Z horsepower, which made it better than the L aircraft with engine M making N horsepower. But the picture revealed in this book is more of a one-handed juggler trying to keep 17 balls in the air at the same time, while trying to keep up a conversation in Swahili. The difficulties they faced were extraordinary, and it seems like a minor miracle that so many planes actually did fly at the time!

[Ironclad Alibi]

I am now reading Silhouette in Scarlet by Elizabeth Peters.

One perfect red rose, a one-way ticket to Stockholm, and a cryptic "message" consisting of two Latin words intrigue art historian Vicky Bliss—as they were precisely intended to do. Beautiful, brilliant and, as always, dangerously inquisitive, Vicky recognizes the handiwork of her former lover, the daring jewel thief John Smythe. So she takes the bait, eagerly following Smythe's lead in the hope of finding a lost treasure. But the trail begins at a priceless fifth century chalice which will place Vicky at the mercy of a gang of ruthless criminals who have their eyes on an even more valuable prize. And the hunt threatens to turn deadly on a remote island, where a captive Vicky Bliss must lead an excavation into the distant past—and where digging too deep for the truth could dig her own grave.

[smfrazier]

Rereading Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub

[Ghel]

I set aside the book I was reading and read Leviathan Wakes, the first book in the Expanse series. It was very good. Suspenseful. It's not exactly "hard" sci-fi, but it tries to explain the realities of exploring the solar system from the crew's perspective. It's got action, intrigue, and bit of horror thrown in as well.

I thought it would be cool to watch the first episode of the tv series based on the books, but I stopped after the first episode. They made some changes that maybe they thought would humanize the characters, but served no purpose in the story.

I recommend reading the books over watching the tv series.

[Pixelated]

Rereading Neutron Star by Larry Niven.

[Ghel]

I got through 2 of the Garrett books before setting them aside due to the misogyny of the main character (and, presumably, the author).

On another recommendation from my fiancé, I'm reading Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self by Donald L. Nathanson. It's a dense psychological text that's trying to explain a system for describing emotions from both a biological and psychological perspective. I keep wanting to argue with the author. His explanations seem overly simplistic. OTOH, I'm still on the first chapter, so maybe some of the things that are annoying me with their over-simplicity are explained better in later chapters.

It strikes me that I've been having an antagonistic relationship with the authors I've been reading lately. I guess I'm one of those people now.

[Ghel]

I recently finished reading a pretty meh book called The Bug Wars by Robert Aspirin.

Next up, on recommendation of my fiancé, I'm reading the first in the Garrett P.I. series, Sweet Silver Blues, by Glen Cook. I'm enjoying it so far, and my fiancé has quite a few of the books, so I'm probably going to keep reading the series until I get through it all. It's a hard-boiled detective story set in a fantasy world.

[Ironclad Alibi]

I don't have Asimov's Foundation prequels or sequels ... what did you think of them? And what did you think of the trilogy written by Benford, Bear and Brin? I didn't even know they existed.

For those not familiar, Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy is a set of three novels published in the early 1950s. They are a classic of science fiction.

Foundation (1951) is a collection of four stories, originally published between 1942 and 1944, plus an introductory section written for the book in 1949.
Foundation and Empire (1952) is made up of two stories, originally published in 1945.
Second Foundation (1953) is made up of two stories, originally published in 1945.

The two prequels are: Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1993)
The two sequels are: Foundation's Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986).

I think the prequels give a good explanation of how the Foundations came into being, and the political and social issues that led to their formation.

I do not think the sequels are as good as the other novels. They are good stories in and of themselves, but did not explore the fate of the empire far enough into the future.

I have not read the trilogy written by Benford, Bear and Brin.

Discussions (and spoilers) of these novels are in the Wikipedia article linked above.