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DaddyDanny said:
So, recently I finished Brave New World. Generally I prefer to read paper books, but in this case I had electronic version for my iPad. I regret that I did not read this great book before, it was amazing. In fact, this book seemed terrible to me, because the described by the author can become reality. The people of this society are happy, but seem stupid.

Anyway, now I'm more interested in novels of Aldous Huxley.
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Sorry, I know this is :off:, but read your post then happened to glance at your avatar.

Onwards, Schraderbräu. Forever loyal. :rock:
 
DaddyDanny said:
Anyway, now I'm more interested in novels of Aldous Huxley.
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An interesting coincidence, I read a book by Aldous' father, Thomas, on yeast :) A few years back I did a search for free kindle books on brewing topics and downloaded one called Yeast. It's very short. Anyway, the authors' name was Huxley and it turns out to be the father.

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It has been a while since I read Split Second by Douglas E Richards, but I have been thinking about it a lot lately. It is a really good book with a completely new take on the time travel paradox.
 
bwarbiany said:
Well, the next on the list is Island... Brave New World was his dystopian version; Island was his utopian version.
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Tell us how it goes. Sometimes utopian lit ends up being just as dystopian as its antithetical cousin. And sometimes that's the point...

He also had a follow-up to Brave New World called Brave New World Revisited, which was included in my most recent copy of the book (gave it away a couple months ago). I don't recall all that well what it was about, or even if it was fiction - like a continuation of the story or the world of BNW - or non fiction - like an analysis of the book ten years after writing it, but I remember thinking it was worth reading at the time.

Lots of other good dystopian literature out there. 1984 and Animal Farm by Orwell of course, but also The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood), We (Yevgeny Zamyatin), Walden Two (B.F. Skinner - interesting conceptually but written with all the charm you'd expect from a scientist. It's also hard to tell if this one is supposed to be dystopian or utopian - the reader is expected to decide for himself), and plenty of others I probably haven't heard of. I'll also give a shout out for Alexander Solzhenitsyn (special mention to The Gulag Archipelago), Ryszard Kapuscinski (I can vouch for The Soccer War, Shah of Shahs, and The Emperor. Imperium is alright, but not to the level of those three), and Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat (maybe other books as well - this is the only one of his I know) whose writing on real-world dictatorships is a good companion to dystopian literature.
 
FatDragon said:
Tell us how it goes. Sometimes utopian lit ends up being just as dystopian as its antithetical cousin. And sometimes that's the point...
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I meant the next on the list for @DaddyDanny is Island. I've read it.

And I agree. It purported to be his utopian version, but I found it to not exactly be what I would call utopia.
 
reading "mote in god's eye" by niven/pournelle, hadn't read it since I was a teenager.

now it really starts to feel creepy as the "moties" could so easily be us.
 
... but WOW, this one you guys HAVE to read. Finished this late last night (read in in a few evenings). I saw mentions of this meltdown in the news occasionally, but didn't pay attention. I've been involved in several medical startups and this story felt very, very familiar.

5 stars. Get it!

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
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I’ve been reading the Chet Gecko series with my 3rd grader. She really likes it (especially when I do the voices) but I think a lot of the humor goes right over the head of someone who has no idea who Phillip Marlowe is.
 
Eclectic IPA by Dick Cantwell. Not an easy read. Cantwell likes to use every word in his vocabulary. Other than that, some interesting material.
 
bwarbiany said:
I recently found a book by Hugh Howey called "Wool" that I devoured so quickly the I ended up buying the rest of the trilogy, "Shift" and "Dust"... Good stuff.
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I'm about a third of the way through Wool now and am thinking that Hugh Howey must have been seriously traumatized by an IT guy at some point...
 
bleme said:
I'm about a third of the way through Wool now and am thinking that Hugh Howey must have been seriously traumatized by an IT guy at some point...
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Haha. But it's a different story in the 2nd book, where (IIRC) the portal to someplace cool was through an IT server. I have the 3rd book still in my reading queue.
 
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, again. First time reading him, outside an article - "So You Want To Be A Chef" - since his passing. It's been hard for my wife and I, but I find myself reading the opening lines and smiling, because his voice was so singular, so buzzing with true life, it's an instant re-awakening as it has always been. The little bits, the small, ridiculous comedies that come from the life, a very warming thing and I find myself saying thank you, as much as I still grieve whatever brought Anthony to his dark end. This is what he gave, among a myriad other things - his inimitable words.
 
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I'm halfway through The Cuckoo's Egg. Been meaning to read it for a long time. I was a little hackerish back in the days of modems and dialup bulletin boards, so it's a trip down memory lane. Lots of talk about those old mainframe OS's too. I'll be some others here will have flashbacks. It's been a quick, easy read so far.

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Eddie Chapman was an English crook and career criminal who, at great personal risk and peril, convinced the Nazis that he was spying for them when he really was a double agent. In the end, he was treated horribly by the British and his story was 'classified' until recently - for no good reason other than to punish him for being lower class and a criminal. A page turner, very exciting.
 
passedpawn said:
I'm halfway through The Cuckoo's Egg. Been meaning to read it for a long time. I was a little hackerish back in the days of modems and dialup bulletin boards, so it's a trip down memory lane. Lots of talk about those old mainframe OS's too. I'll be some others here will have flashbacks. It's been a quick, easy read so far.

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It looks like the sort of thing I would enjoy. I didn't get my first computer until 1991, I was 7 years old, (most expensive and best thing my parents ever bought me), but I enjoy anything computer history related. I read this book a couple years ago, and although it's nonfiction it's a good read.
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I finished "Far From the Madding Crowd" and I really enjoyed it. At first the formal writing style was irritating me a little, but I realized that was how things were written then, and there is a sort of beauty to Victorian age literature. I read "Through the Looking Glass" after that, and have since started "Orphan Train", which I think was mentioned by someone in this thread. So far it was been a page turner.

No clue what to read next.
 
I was reading Atlas Shrugged, but by the end of the book, I stopped having interest in any of the terrible, two dimensional characters enough to finish it. The last couple hundred pages was a slog and I was wondering what I was punishing myself for.

So now I'm reading The Lost Tales, Book One. Much more intriguing.
 
shoengine said:
I was reading Atlas Shrugged, but by the end of the book, I stopped having interest in any of the terrible, two dimensional characters enough to finish it. The last couple hundred pages was a slog and I was wondering what I was punishing myself for.
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Oddly enough, I usually find the opposite with Atlas.

The characters are, of course, terrible two dimensional caricatures of political ideologies, and frankly I don't know why people speak highly of Ayn Rand as a novelist. The point of the books is the philosophy, NOT the writing talent. I mean, who devotes like 30 pages to a monologue? So yeah, the characters are not particularly interesting, but the story moves towards the end.

I mention my take to people who are considering the book, and I usually tell them something along the lines of "the first 600+ pages or so are pretty slow, and tough to get through; but the pace picks up a lot from there".

I could easily understand losing interest halfway through, but usually if you make it to the 3/4 point, the storyline/pace has improved enough to make people want to finish.
 
Thoughts on books/series for an 11 year old? He just completed the entire Harry Potter series, if you want to base his "reading level" on that for comparison...

We're debating letting him start the Hunger Games series, but I'm not sure if that's too advanced/violent. Reviews on "The Secret Series" are pretty good, but understanding the reading level it's targeted at gives a wide range of age ranges that liked the series, so I don't know what to think.
 
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My 11 year old read the Twilight series and loved it.

When I was in 6th grade, I loved the Flinx and Pip series by Alan Dean Foster.
I think the Bazil Broketail series by Christopher Rowley is a similar level.


My kid's school has a program to encourage reading. To make sure the kids are actually reading and understanding the books, they take a short 10 question test on the computer and have to get at least 70%. It ticks me off that most of the books from my childhood aren't on the AR Bookfinder list/don't have tests available.
 
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bwarbiany said:
Oddly enough, I usually find the opposite with Atlas.

The characters are, of course, terrible two dimensional caricatures of political ideologies, and frankly I don't know why people speak highly of Ayn Rand as a novelist. The point of the books is the philosophy, NOT the writing talent. I mean, who devotes like 30 pages to a monologue? So yeah, the characters are not particularly interesting, but the story moves towards the end.

I mention my take to people who are considering the book, and I usually tell them something along the lines of "the first 600+ pages or so are pretty slow, and tough to get through; but the pace picks up a lot from there".

I could easily understand losing interest halfway through, but usually if you make it to the 3/4 point, the storyline/pace has improved enough to make people want to finish.
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In defense of Ms. Rand's writing (not that she needs it), she was born and educated through college in Czarist and Bolshevik Russia. She came here in 1922, IIRC, not speaking a word of English. So it's no wonder her phrasing and word choices sometimes seem, well, odd.
 
The Perfectionists, by Simon Winchester.

How precision engineers created the modern world. Full of quirky and eccentric people who really lived and did amazing things. Starts with steam engines and cannons, ends with gravity wave detectors and trying to understand time itself.

Did you know that the beer engine and the flush toilet were invented by the same fellow? Joseph Bramah. No, not Thomas Crapper, he was a manufacturer, not an inventer. Also the fountain pen and hydraulic press.

A fascinating story of how we got where we are, and where we may be going.
 
ancientmariner52 said:
In defense of Ms. Rand's writing (not that she needs it), she was born and educated through college in Czarist and Bolshevik Russia. She came here in 1922, IIRC, not speaking a word of English. So it's no wonder her phrasing and word choices sometimes seem, well, odd.
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The caricatures got on my nerves. The philosophy was heavy-handed, lacking almost any nuance even from the beginning. You basically knew what the direction from the first few chapters, and the results well before the end (which admittedly may have been her intention, I really don't know).
 
In opposition to bwarbiany's thoughts, I enjoyed the early narrative much more than the latter parts after the plot is explained and certain locations are revealed. It was quick moving (at times) and fairly exciting, but that was of course before the philosophical sections. I'm not denigrating the book, or Ayn Rand. In fact to write something like this she had to be a brilliant person. It was just not for me. I think she could have told this story and fleshed out the philosophy in 600 pages. Twice that much was filler, and the pages upon pages of studious descriptions of the main characters' bodies and the incessant love triangles got tiresome.
 
shoengine said:
The caricatures got on my nerves. The philosophy was heavy-handed, lacking almost any nuance even from the beginning. You basically knew what the direction from the first few chapters, and the results well before the end (which admittedly may have been her intention, I really don't know).

In opposition to bwarbiany's thoughts, I enjoyed the early narrative much more than the latter parts after the plot is explained and certain locations are revealed. It was quick moving (at times) and fairly exciting, but that was of course before the philosophical sections. I'm not denigrating the book, or Ayn Rand. In fact to write something like this she had to be a brilliant person. It was just not for me. I think she could have told this story and fleshed out the philosophy in 600 pages. Twice that much was filler, and the pages upon pages of studious descriptions of the main characters' bodies and the incessant love triangles got tiresome.
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I agree, she could have covered the same ground in half the time. But look at anything else written by a Russian. They do like to stretch things out.
 
bwarbiany said:
Oddly enough, I usually find the opposite with Atlas.

The characters are, of course, terrible two dimensional caricatures of political ideologies, and frankly I don't know why people speak highly of Ayn Rand as a novelist. The point of the books is the philosophy, NOT the writing talent. I mean, who devotes like 30 pages to a monologue? So yeah, the characters are not particularly interesting, but the story moves towards the end.

I mention my take to people who are considering the book, and I usually tell them something along the lines of "the first 600+ pages or so are pretty slow, and tough to get through; but the pace picks up a lot from there".

I could easily understand losing interest halfway through, but usually if you make it to the 3/4 point, the storyline/pace has improved enough to make people want to finish.
Click to expand...

Atlas Shrugged is one of those books a lot of people talk about, and I really can't figure out how it got so popular in the first place. I read every single one of the 1400+ pages, and I really had to force myself to get through the first half, and the second half was only marginally better. The book is as you said, completely philosophical, and has only the skeleton of a plot. To be completely honest, I only finished it because I wanted to be able to say, "I read Atlas Shrugged", so there it is.

If it's any help, I've read the Hunger Games and I wouldn't be worried about my 10 year old daughter reading them, it's pretty PG with a dash of PG-13 at a few moments.
 
bwarbiany said:
Thoughts on books/series for an 11 year old? He just completed the entire Harry Potter series, if you want to base his "reading level" on that for comparison...

We're debating letting him start the Hunger Games series, but I'm not sure if that's too advanced/violent. Reviews on "The Secret Series" are pretty good, but understanding the reading level it's targeted at gives a wide range of age ranges that liked the series, so I don't know what to think.
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Just a thought.... Have you considered Robert Heinlein's juvenile science fiction? Some of the science is dated, but the stories and characters stand up very well. They were written in the late forties to early sixties, and had to satisfy a very blue-nosed Scribner's children's editor. I can't imagine anything in them being offensive these days. As far as I know they are all still in print. I discovered Red Planet in my junior high school library about 1964. I've been an avid reader of most anything ever since.
 
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ancientmariner52 said:
In defense of Ms. Rand's writing (not that she needs it), she was born and educated through college in Czarist and Bolshevik Russia. She came here in 1922, IIRC, not speaking a word of English. So it's no wonder her phrasing and word choices sometimes seem, well, odd.
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I don't have a problem with her phrasing and word choices. I have a problem with her wooden, two-dimensional characters. As @shoengine says, they're more caricatures than anything else. The heroes are perfectly heroic, and the villains are perfectly villainous. From a literary perspective, it's utter rubbish. And I say that as a libertarian who often defends the book!

Oh, and her apparent rape fetish is a bit creepy.

estricklin said:
To be completely honest, I only finished it because I wanted to be able to say, "I read Atlas Shrugged", so there it is.
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Yeah, I was the same way with "War and Peace". I got about 2/3 of the way through it, and realized that I didn't care at all about any of the characters. I literally didn't care whether they lived or died, whether their pointless noble marriages worked or failed, etc. But I finished it, just to be able to say I had.
 
estricklin said:
If it's any help, I've read the Hunger Games and I wouldn't be worried about my 10 year old daughter reading them, it's pretty PG with a dash of PG-13 at a few moments.
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Thanks. That is helpful.

ancientmariner52 said:
Just a thought.... Have you considered Robert Heinlein's juvenile science fiction? Some of the science is dated, but the stories and characters stand up very well. They were written in the late forties to early sixties, and had to satisfy a very blue-nosed Scribner's children's editor. I can't imagine anything in them being offensive these days. As far as I know they are all still in print. I discovered Red Planet in my junior high school library about 1964. I've been an avid reader of most anything ever since.
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That's a good thought... I am a huge Heinlein fan and I was asking myself at what point "Starship Troopers" might be appropriate, but figured it would take a number more years before he was able to appreciate the philosophy rather than just fighting bugs... I've never read his juvenile stuff though.

------------------

As an aside, I just started him on The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald. I *loved* those books when I was a kid. Has anyone else read them?
 
bwarbiany said:
I don't have a problem with her phrasing and word choices. I have a problem with her wooden, two-dimensional characters. As @shoengine says, they're more caricatures than anything else. The heroes are perfectly heroic, and the villains are perfectly villainous. From a literary perspective, it's utter rubbish. And I say that as a libertarian who often defends the book!

Oh, and her apparent rape fetish is a bit creepy.



Yeah, I was the same way with "War and Peace". I got about 2/3 of the way through it, and realized that I didn't care at all about any of the characters. I literally didn't care whether they lived or died, whether their pointless noble marriages worked or failed, etc. But I finished it, just to be able to say I had.
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I'm paraphrasing a book reviewer here: 'When I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, I was sorry I never got to meet Ayn Rand. After reading her biography, I wanted to dig her up and drive a stake through her heart to make SURE!' She was an awful person, with some appalling behavior. That doesn't negate the value of some of her ideas. Others are quite demented. Each of us has to evaluate for ourselves. Which is kinda the key message of all of her books. Judge, and expect to be judged.
 
bwarbiany said:
Thanks. That is helpful.



That's a good thought... I am a huge Heinlein fan and I was asking myself at what point "Starship Troopers" might be appropriate, but figured it would take a number more years before he was able to appreciate the philosophy rather than just fighting bugs... I've never read his juvenile stuff though.
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All I've read is The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. What is a good one to pick up by him?
 

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