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What book are you reading atm??

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    #9092
    Ihatewhahabies
    Registered Users Posts: 32 ✭Ihatewhahabies


    Stick with it I loved the practical explantions of why some civilisations developed and others didn't


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    #9093
    Bob Harris
    Registered Users Posts: 3,462 ✭✭✭Bob Harris


    The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto.


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    #9094
    nigeldaniel
    Registered Users Posts: 1,333 ✭✭✭nigeldaniel


    I just started another Bill Bryson book. Notes from a Big Country.

    Dan.



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    #9095
    Thargor
    Registered Users Posts: 17,866 ✭✭✭✭Thargor


    I had a flick through To Kill a Mockingbird out of boredom the other day to see how much I remembered from school, the answer was absolutely zero, ended up tearing through the whole thing in 24 hours, great read. I moved on to Roots afterwards, there's something seriously compelling about slavery and racism in the Southern US, I don't think I've ever read a bad book on the subject...


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    #9096
    appledrop
    Registered Users Posts: 5,790 ✭✭✭appledrop


    Thargor wrote: »
    I had a flick through To Kill a Mockingbird out of boredom the other day to see how much I remembered from school, the answer was absolutely zero, ended up tearing through the whole thing in 24 hours, great read. I moved on to Roots afterwards, there's something seriously compelling about slavery and racism in the Southern US, I don't think I've ever read a bad book on the subject...

    Have you read 'The underground railroad' by Colston Whitehead. I'd recommend it.


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    #9097
    bnt
    Registered Users Posts: 12,958 ✭✭✭✭bnt


    Currently reading a book called Maybe You Should Talk To Someone by Lori Gottlieb. The author is an American therapist, and it's partly about her therapy practice and patients, but she's had a bad breakup and is getting therapy herself. The trick she's pulling off (so far, about halfway in) is balancing these parallel tracks and bouncing them off each other to make wider points about life in general, and also about what therapists actually do.

    There are some real eye-opening bits about how they are trained to read people in ways you don't expect, such as how one guy behaves on his cellphone, and at one point she actually has to text the guy in the middle of a session to get his attention. The author worked in TV before switching careers, and the book is being made in to a TV series by Eva Longoria.

    From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’.

    — Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut



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    #9098
    Thargor
    Registered Users Posts: 17,866 ✭✭✭✭Thargor


    appledrop wrote: »
    Have you read 'The underground railroad' by Colston Whitehead. I'd recommend it.
    Ive had it on the pile for a good while, Ill get around to it sometime, good reviews.

    I also have Underground Airlines to get to aswell:
    A young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshall Service in exchange for his freedom. He's got plenty of work. In this version of America, slavery continues in four states called "the Hard Four." On the trail of a runaway known as Jackdaw, Victor arrives in Indianapolis knowing that something isn't right--with the case file, with his work, and with the country itself.
    As he works to infiltrate the local cell of a abolitionist movement called the Underground Airlines, tracking Jackdaw through the back rooms of churches, empty parking garages, hotels, and medical offices, Victor believes he's hot on the trail. But his strange, increasingly uncanny pursuit is complicated by a boss who won't reveal the extraordinary stakes of Jackdaw's case, as well as by a heartbreaking young woman and her child--who may be Victor's salvation.
    Victor believes himself to be a good man doing bad work, unwilling to give up the freedom he has worked so hard to earn. But in pursuing Jackdaw, Victor discovers secrets at the core of the country's arrangement with the Hard Four, secrets the government will preserve at any cost.
    Underground Airlines is a ground-breaking novel, a wickedly imaginative thriller, and a story of an America that is more like our own than we'd like to believe.


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    #9099
    andrewshort89
    Registered Users Posts: 7 ✭andrewshort89


    Well it's not a book but it's amazing. It's called Worm: A Complete Web Serial by John C. McCrae. I am not all that into comics or the whole superhero thing but this book focuses on an adolescent girl, in a world where about 1-8000 people develop powers, develops the power to control insects. It's is some really clever writing and it's clear he was having fun as he was doing it.


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    #9100
    branie2
    Registered Users Posts: 10,292 ✭✭✭✭branie2


    The Hollow, by Agatha Christie


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    #9101
    Foweva Awone
    Registered Users Posts: 1,740 ✭✭✭Foweva Awone


    Educated, Tara Westover's memoir about growing up in a radicalised religious family, without any access to medical services or education etc - it's really excellent.


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    #9102
    gutenberg
    Registered Users Posts: 983 ✭✭✭gutenberg


    Have started The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Will post back in due course!


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    #9103
    TinCanMan
    Registered Users Posts: 309 ✭✭TinCanMan


    Dr. Sleep by Stephen King


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    #9104
    Tauriel
    Registered Users Posts: 30,340 ✭✭✭✭Tauriel


    The Apprentice by Tess Gerristen


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    #9105
    The Tetrarch
    Registered Users Posts: 2,092 ✭✭✭The Tetrarch


    Frank Skinner by Frank Skinner (2001)
    This is a re-read. It is very rude, crude, and funny.

    "Perhaps the best heckle I ever received was at a club called the Red Rose in Finsbury Park, North London. There was a blind man, a regular punter, who was in one night just as I was beginning a twenty-minute set. About two minutes in, the blind man shouted. 'Get off, you Brummie bastard. (Pause) Has he gone yet?' In the end I silenced him by trumping his 'You can't attack me because I'm disabled' card by suggesting to him that he was only against me because I was Pakistani. He looked genuinely ashamed.


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    #9106
    KWAG2019
    Closed Accounts Posts: 834 ✭✭✭KWAG2019


    Chernow’s biography of US Grant. It’s extraordinary how he scaled up his military performance to become the strategist who finally ended Lee’s domination of the war. And humanity’s bias toward the charismatic figure who looks the part is on full display. Grant’s Doctor was assumed to be the great general more often than not. A good read.


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    #9107
    Foweva Awone
    Registered Users Posts: 1,740 ✭✭✭Foweva Awone


    In My House by Alex Hourston. Not far in but enjoying it so far. It reminds me somewhat of Eleanor Oliphant - not the plot, but the main character is similarly quirky.


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    #9108
    gutenberg
    Registered Users Posts: 983 ✭✭✭gutenberg


    gutenberg wrote: »
    Have started The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Will post back in due course!

    Finished this. It was good in places, but the writing style really grated after a while. I don't really understand the hype around the book to be honest. A poster earlier in this thread mentioned that they had read a number of other Holocaust books, so this one perhaps didn't resonate as much. I'd definitely agree, as someone who has read a number of such works, such as Levi, Wiesel etc. (I am a professional historian, to be fair!).

    Have now moved on to Michelle Obama's autobiography Becoming.


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    #9109
    4Ad
    Registered Users Posts: 2,670 ✭✭✭4Ad


    Red Notice by Bill Browder..
    True story about a trader and his dealings in corrupt Russia.
    Highly recommend...


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    #9110
    Widdershins
    Registered Users Posts: 10,633 ✭✭✭✭Widdershins


    Five days of fog. A London family girl gang of hardshaws, thieves and crooks in the 1950s. One woman wants to go straight, marry her beloved, and do something good with her life. It's not as simple as that when you have a family like hers.


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    #9111
    griffin100
    Registered Users Posts: 4,769 ✭✭✭griffin100


    Midnight In Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham.

    Absolutely riveting and seriously frightening when you read how close to absolute disaster they came.


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    #9112
    eviltwin
    Registered Users Posts: 17,495 ✭✭✭✭eviltwin


    The Wych Elm by Tana French. It's the first book of hers I've read, will be the last too I suspect. The story is great but it's written like an amateur novel.


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    #9113
    appledrop
    Registered Users Posts: 5,790 ✭✭✭appledrop


    Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich. Just started it but it is such an absorbing read so far.

    The fact that it is all based on eye witness accounts. So sad what happened to them + their families.


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    #9114
    gutenberg
    Registered Users Posts: 983 ✭✭✭gutenberg


    appledrop wrote: »
    Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich. Just started it but it is such an absorbing read so far.

    The fact that it is all based on eye witness accounts. So sad what happened to them + their families.

    I read that earlier this year. Amazing book, if harrowing.


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    #9115
    Immortal Starlight
    Registered Users Posts: 2,074 ✭✭✭Immortal Starlight


    Just finished The Passage and now starting part two which is The Twelve by Justin Cronin.


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    #9116
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 0 ✭ [Deleted User]


    Immortal Starlight wrote: »
    Just finished The Passage and now starting part two which is The Twelve by Justin Cronin.

    Don't bother reading the third one, it was rubbish imo. First two were a lot better.


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    #9117
    Thargor
    Registered Users Posts: 17,866 ✭✭✭✭Thargor


    Can anyone recommend a good book about the birth of America please, say from the colonies to the 7 Year War to the end of slavery, or if that's too broad just the War of Independence? I don't want a textbook but I do want accuracy and detail. In Pharos Army by Tobias Wolfe is a good example, personal stories as well as the politics.


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    #9118
    razorblunt
    Registered Users Posts: 17,300 ✭✭✭✭razorblunt


    I just finished 1984 for then first time.
    Jesus, that was bleak. Very, very apt for today though.


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    #9119
    Tauriel
    Registered Users Posts: 30,340 ✭✭✭✭Tauriel


    appledrop wrote: »
    Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich. Just started it but it is such an absorbing read so far.

    The fact that it is all based on eye witness accounts. So sad what happened to them + their families.

    I'm just after ordering this :)


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    #9120
    bonzodog2
    Registered Users Posts: 6,210 ✭✭✭bonzodog2


    Thargor wrote: »
    Can anyone recommend a good book about the birth of America please, say from the colonies to the 7 Year War to the end of slavery, or if that's too broad just the War of Independence? I don't want a textbook but I do want accuracy and detail. In Pharos Army by Tobias Wolfe is a good example, personal stories as well as the politics.

    Not quite what you asked for, but you might like this, I'm reading it at present
    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242445.In_The_Time_Of_The_Americans


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    #9121
    bnt
    Registered Users Posts: 12,958 ✭✭✭✭bnt


    I'm reading Spike Milligan's World War II memoirs from the start, have just started book four. I read them years ago, so long ago that I remembered very little about them. I remember being a bit befuddled when an officer told him to behave like a Basenji, since I didn't know what that meant (and neither did Spike). *

    In the first three books, it's not that serious for him: after a lot of training and waiting (military), his artillery unit is sent to Algeria in 1942 and helps with the final push in the Tunisian campaign, which ended the German occupation of North Africa. In what I remember about book four (Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall), it gets a lot more dangerous and he's wounded in action and also has something of a meltdown, but also has him getting more involved in troop entertainment (as a jazz trumpeter). The War would have a lifelong effect on Spike, both personally (PTSD) and professionally.

    * the Basenji is a breed of dog that is known for not barking at all, though they are known to yodel.

    From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’.

    — Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut



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