Quake3World

werldhed wrote: Hoping to find The Restaurant or King's Dark Tower series soon.

If you start with the Dark Tower, make sure you have all 8 books on hand; once you start there is no stopping
I'm currently reading Eon by Greg Bear, and have the other parts of the Thistledown series as well. Good stuff! I also managed to track down hardcover copies of Bear's Forge of God and Anvil of Stars, which are pretty hard to find.

Found a 1897 copy of Sartor Resartus and a 1940 edition of 'A Programme for Progress'.

I found the combination ironic so I picked them up.

Outliers

Successful people are a product of luck and opportunity (and above average intelligence). Good read. Won't change your life (you're too old) but if you have kids it will give some insights.

Just got Culture of Narcissism by Lasch with some xmas gift cards. Whenever I get time to actually read something, it should be worthwhile.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Just finished 'House Solar', Alastair Reynolds' latest. Unfortunately not as good as I had hoped, but entertaining none the less.

I just ordered 'Anathem' by Neal Stephenson and 'Saturn's Children' by Charles Stross, so I guess they are up next.

Daemon, good book.
Rick (of feedburner and now google fame) Klau's review says it all, pretty much
http://tins.rklau.com/2007/04/daemon.html

sorry, but referencing and comparing it to the Matrix like that more or less automatically disqualifies it in my view

k, I see the fanboyism there, too but mind that a lot of people were pretty much blown away by the first movie, Grudgey. Myself included.

Disqualifies it from what?

from being lofty enough to greet Grudgey's eyebrows, would be my guess.

The guy who wrote Daemon gave a talk last year, summary here. mp3 of talk.

ok, maybe it's unfair to judge a book based on the movie taste of a reviewer, but come on, the Matrix has to be one of the most overrated movies ever

it's not exactly bad, but it's not really that good either

I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell - Tucker Max.

So far so funny.

I read NightWatch. I think it's highly overrated.

BUMP

Thought I'd see how everyone's reading lists have come along in the last year...
Since I last posted the books I can remember (off the top of my head) having read:

• 'Salem's Lot - Stephen King.. pretty good vampire book, but it didn't really add much to the Stoker myth. Enjoyable, anyway.
• Dark Tower series - Stephen King... epic and rad. King has some troubles keeping his mythos in order, especially in the middle books, and LOTS of extraneous prose, but still some great ideas wrapped up in a great story.
• Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder... Pure, useless shit.
• Pride and Prejudice & Mansfield Park - Jane Austen... I admit I read Austen, just to see what the fuss was about. It turns out her stuff is really good. P&P was a bit uninspired, but it was witty and well written. Mansfield Park was fantastic though. Now I must eat some testosterone to regrow my testicles.
• The Court of the Air - Stephen Hunt... I stopped halfway through this one. Some great ideas, but he has no skill in making them into a story. Too obtuse, overtly (and not insightfully) political, and he suffers from the "must invent new word for everything" disease. It sucked.
• A Tale of Two Cities - Dickens... I had never read this before. I was hugely impressed. A really, really fantastic book.

The Lost Symbol - just got it for my Birthday

My reading tends to come in waves, and I've been in a bit of a downswing lately.

Aside from some studying, I've partially read two books:

The World Without Us - So far some really good research and a lot of interesting details picked out about what would happen to certain cities/areas if people disappeared. really interesting, and worth the read.

Why Evolution Is True - I just noticed this in the bookstore and decided to pick it up for some reason. More of preaching to the choir obviously, but there are a lot of details about the biology of certain animals (a lot on whales and humans) that I found very interesting. This is the only real reason I pick up books like this anymore: to learn things I didn't know before. And I'm hardly ever disappointed in that regard.

I'm about 3/4 of the way through both of them.

Sometimes I wonder if I should go to school for evolutionary biology. I'm such a nerd. =\

been reading the Hitchhiker series

90% through with Blackwater ... good book.
well researched, not opinionated, and super interesting if you like finding out about all the scary shit that went on largely ignored by the news.

On The Origin of Species, 1st edition

in my queue: The Selfish Gene and Raising Freethinkers

Just Finished..

The contortionists handbook.

http://www.amazon.ca/Contortionists-Han ... 1931561486

Fucking great book Story about an identity thief/genius/drug addict. I highly recommend it.



Right now I'm reading:

" The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time "
http://www.amazon.com/Curious-Incident- ... 1400032717

Pretty cool so far.. written from the point of view of an autistic kid. Weird.. But I really like it.

Ah, the book thread

Storm of Steel - Ernst Junger
The most brutally honest book on war i've ever read. Very interesting, in several ways. Will probably reread a couple of times.

Guns, Germs & Steel
Trying for the second time, last time i got halfway and put it down... got a little too dry and sciency for me. Bought it for my sister and she thought it was the shit, so now i feel obliged to reread it as well.

Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie - Hunter S. Thompson
One of those books you can pick up, open anywhere, read a bit and laugh.

I just got finished re-reading Animal Farm. I forgot how depressing that book was...