Author Topic: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?  (Read 189681 times)

Offline Nathan

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #705 on: July 13, 2009, 12:27 AM »
I wanna read a post apocalyptic book next. Maybe The Stand, or Earth Abides, or something.

The Road? The Postman? The Suicide Collectors? The Book of the New Sun?
« Last Edit: July 13, 2009, 12:34 AM by Nathan »
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Offline Angry Ewok

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #706 on: July 13, 2009, 10:02 AM »
The only thing that scares me about Ulysses is the stream of conscious style - if its anything like Faulkner, I won't enjoy it.

Quote
The Postman?

Might have to check this one out - I've heard of it before.

Offline Tracy

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #707 on: July 14, 2009, 10:38 AM »
The Stand is my favorite "go to" book - I love rereading that.  Which reminds me, I haven't read it in about 5 years................. 
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Offline Angry Ewok

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #708 on: July 18, 2009, 10:21 PM »
Finished James Joyce's Dubliners. Really, really enjoyed it! Took me a while to get through A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, but breezed through the short stories with ease. Great, diverse characters in a very interesting time period (days of Irish Nationalism)...

Now I'm on Palahnuik's Diary. Chuck is really starting to bore me, all of his novels remind me of this little smiley,



I'm intrigued with the story, but all of the characters, all of them, are always woe-is-me, whiney and bitchy, and they all seemingly have the exact same thought process and dialogue. What was wonderful and original in Fight Club was sort of familiar in Choke, but now its just worn out...

I've got a few books headed my way.

Thomas Paine's Common Sense
Washington's Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge
Boone: A Biography
The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Boxed Set


Also on the shelf is Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far, and the remaining two volumes of Shelby Foote's Civil War Narrative.

« Last Edit: July 28, 2009, 09:53 AM by Angry Ewok »

Offline Phrubruh

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #709 on: July 19, 2009, 08:58 PM »
Finished Lord of the Flies and Grave Peril. Just starting Inferno.

I'm also going to read "The Black Hole War" by Leonard Susskind.



From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by James Trefil What is it about black holes, anyway? To most scientists, a black hole is something like a duck-billed platypus in the sky: weird, unusual, esoteric and not all that connected to real life. On the other hand, people just can't seem to get enough of them. Any teacher will tell you that it's a whole lot easier to get a class interested in black holes than in DNA, even though the latter will most assuredly have a real impact on their future and the former will not. Oh well, if you must learn about black holes, you could do a lot worse than to pick up this engagingly written book. Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind provides a marvelous introduction to the subject that is both readable and easy to understand. Or at least as easy as something involving the two great 20th-century advances in science -- relativity and quantum mechanics -- can possibly be. You see, until the end of the 19th century, scientists who thought about the fundamental structure of the universe had concentrated on normal-sized objects moving at normal speeds (think billiard balls). We associate this kind of science with Isaac Newton. Then, in rapid succession, the 20th century brought two revolutions. The first, which dealt with objects moving near the speed of light or having very large mass, was relativity, the brainchild of Albert Einstein. The second revolution came when people starting thinking about very small objects, such as the stuff inside the atom. The resulting theory is called quantum mechanics and was developed by a small group of young scientists in the 1920s, the most familiar probably being Werner Heisenberg of uncertainty-principle fame. One note in passing: These revolutions didn't so much replace Newton as extend his reach. Like a tree, mature sciences grow by adding new material while leaving their heartwood intact. With increasing urgency over the past 50 years, theoretical physicists have tried to tie these two great 20th-century advances together, to produce what Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg calls "The Final Theory." So far, we have not been successful. But if you can't bring the two fields together, you would at least like to know that they don't contradict each other, that they are mutually consistent. And this is where Susskind's "war to make the world safe for quantum mechanics" comes in, because for a period of almost 20 years, it looked as if there could well be a fundamental contradiction between the basic postulates underlying the two theories. At least that's what Stephen Hawking argued, and when Hawking talks, physicists listen. Remember that a black hole is an object so compact and so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. It is, in fact, a kind of one-way gate in the universe: Stuff can fall in, but nothing can come out. Because it involves both a large mass and extremely high energy, the black hole forms a kind of nexus where both relativity and quantum mechanics come into play. Thus, if there are going to be problems joining these two fields, they are likely to turn up in the behavior of black holes. In 1983, Hawking proved that, against all expectations, black holes are not eternal. In fact, over unimaginably long spans of time, they evaporate, more or less like a puddle of water on a sunny day. And that's when the "war" started, because if a black hole evaporates (and everyone agrees that it will), what happens to all the information that was carried by the stuff that fell in? That information might include things like the mass of the particles that fell in, their spin, their identity and all kinds of other properties. Hawking argued that this information was lost forever, that the black hole was truly a one-way street to oblivion. The problem is that one of the basic laws of quantum mechanics is that information cannot be lost. (I should point out that in quantum mechanics the term "information" has a technical meaning, and that losing it is more of a problem than, say, losing the shopping list you need at the supermarket.) In the case of the evaporating puddle, for example, it is theoretically possible to reconstruct the puddle by looking at the air molecules above the spot where it used to be. Hawking argued, however, that with the material that evaporated from the black hole, no such thing is possible, that the information simply disappeared. Susskind's account of his reaction to this claim and of driving home from the conference where it was first presented, distractedly scribbling equations in the frost on his windshield, beautifully describes how disturbing the idea of disappearing information was to those of us steeped in the lore of the quantum. In the end, Susskind and his colleagues were able to resolve this dilemma and, in the words of the subtitle, "make the world safe for quantum mechanics." I won't spoil the book for you by telegraphing the ending. Suffice it to say that it involves a tour through the whole arcane menagerie of modern physics -- quarks, gluons, branes, strings. And this illustrates the main problem faced by authors of this sort of book. Black hole astrophysics is about as far from everyday experience as you can get, which means that the author has to spend a lot of time bringing the reader up to speed (indeed, it takes Susskind almost 200 pages). Even when, as in this book, there is virtually no mathematics, there is an overwhelming number of strange new concepts. Consequently, I recommend digesting this book in small segments, allowing each new concept to settle in before moving on. In the end, The Black Hole Wars is as good an introduction as you're going to find to the strange world of black hole astrophysics. Add that to the chance to ride along as real scientists resolve a fundamental issue and you have the makings of a great read.
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Offline Mikey D

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #710 on: July 20, 2009, 08:51 AM »
Finished:



Started:



Next:


(Yes, I'm a Red Sox fan, but I'm also a baseball fan and Torre was one of the few Yankees that I respect.  Besides, I'm looking forward to the chapter on the Greatest Comeback of All Time (and Biggest Choke).

Common sense isn't so common

Offline Angry Ewok

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #711 on: July 20, 2009, 09:31 AM »
Now reading Confederates in the Attic...

Question for you guys - should I read Hobbit before or after I read the LOTR trilogy?

Offline BrentS

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #712 on: July 20, 2009, 10:45 AM »
Now reading Confederates in the Attic...

Question for you guys - should I read Hobbit before or after I read the LOTR trilogy?

The Hobbit is a much easier read than LOTR.  They were written with completely different audiences in mind - The Hobbit was written as a children's book.  To be honest, I don't think it really matters which one you read first.  While there are some overlapping characters but their roles are much different in both stories.  I'd say that you'll be fine reading the trilogy first but you may find that the Hobbit is too "basic" if you read it right after the trilogy.   Having said that I'd recommend reading the Hobbit first but its certainly not necessary to read it first to set up the LOTR. 


One word of caution.  When you start reading the Fellowship of the Ring.  That first chapter is brutally hard to read.  I know many people that put the book down before finishing the first chapter because it just seemed so boring or hard to read.   It was much more palatable the second time I read through it but I do remember struggling to get through it.  The story picks up much more after that first chapter :)

Offline Angry Ewok

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #713 on: July 20, 2009, 12:29 PM »
Thanks for the response, Brent!

Offline Brian

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #714 on: July 20, 2009, 12:40 PM »
One word of caution.  When you start reading the Fellowship of the Ring.  That first chapter is brutally hard to read.  I know many people that put the book down before finishing the first chapter because it just seemed so boring or hard to read.   It was much more palatable the second time I read through it but I do remember struggling to get through it.  The story picks up much more after that first chapter :)

I have just been reading the LOTR books for the first time this year, and I'm currently in the middle of ROTK (after a Harry Potter sidetrack after finishing Two Towers).  I will echo Brent's thoughts, I thought the beginning of Fellowship was tougher to plow through as well at first - but it really picked up after that.  They obviously did an amazing job adapting them all to movies, but it is surprising to see all the differences and omissions when reading the books.

Offline Angry Ewok

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #715 on: July 20, 2009, 03:37 PM »
Can't wait to get the LOTR set in the mail. I'll start with Hobbit!

Offline Matt

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #716 on: July 20, 2009, 04:17 PM »
Currently reading:



Speculative fiction, second American Civil War!   :o

(Full disclosure:  I'm only reading this because there's a video game coming out next month that's kinda-sorta based around it, that I'm really interested in.  How sad is that?)
"The good news is that all that blood is actually ketchup. The bad news, however, is that all that ketchup is actually blood."

Offline ruiner

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #717 on: July 20, 2009, 04:51 PM »
Pretty sad.

Offline Angry Ewok

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #718 on: July 20, 2009, 05:32 PM »
I'm seeing really, really bad reviews on the OSC novel, but the plot sounds cool. How is it?

Offline Matt

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Re: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now?
« Reply #719 on: July 20, 2009, 05:53 PM »
I'm seeing really, really bad reviews on the OSC novel, but the plot sounds cool. How is it?

I'm not even halfway in, but it's not that bad, so far.  (But I'm not the book junkie that a lot of you guys are.)  Short book, quick read, some cool Special Ops stuff.  Somebody blowed up the Persident!  (sic) I suspect it will get better as the Civil War II gets underway.  I guess there's a sequel that's due out this fall.

Pretty sad.

Well, it was more of a rhetorical "how sad is that," but thanks all the same.
« Last Edit: July 20, 2009, 05:54 PM by Matt »
"The good news is that all that blood is actually ketchup. The bad news, however, is that all that ketchup is actually blood."