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I was halfway through a book of Peter S. Beagle's stories, Lila the Werewolf and The Last Unicorn, when my friend lent me State of Denial by Bob Woodward.
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Nov 17, 2006 20:22
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Faderaven posted:Just finished Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling. The second book is still good. It's not a stand alone book though; its purpose is to help set up the third book. I just finished The Protector's War back in October. What people may not like is that it doesn't really have a central enemy they defeat at the end like in the first book. There's a point in the book though where you won't want to stop. It's when the new characters meet the heroes. I want to read the third one, but I'll wait until paperback. It'll be easy, especially with classes starting for me in January. I just finished State of Denial by Bob Woodward. I never read his op-ed stuff so I guess he has been playing the sycophant to the Bush administration recently, though when I read Plan of Attack I never got that sense. As usual, he has good insight, but its always backed up with interviews with such key players in the administration and those in the military who handled Iraq. I thought at times that he'd employ a little too strong a hyperbole or criticism at the administration on an issue that's already obvious, but that doesn't really detract from the amount of evidence he puts towards it.
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Nov 27, 2006 22:15
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Delicate Creatures by J Michael Straczynski. Not a bad little fairy tale about the power of ideas over man and yet how dangerous they could be. It'll be something to pass on to youngins, along with Gaiman's Coraline.
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Dec 26, 2006 20:45
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Old Man's War by John Scalzi. I had wanted military sci-fi and it delivered, but not quite to the extent that I wanted. It was more science fiction than military and didn't quite have the feel of Starship Troopers, where Rico is talking about his platoon and its organization or the equipment they used or the battles he fought in. The mundane military stuff actually kind of drew me in as much as anything else. I guess because Scalzi has no military background, he wouldn't be terribly familiar with that kind of stuff though. It was still a quick and fun read and I'd recommend it. I'd especially recommend it if you liked Starship Troopers, but didn't like the History and Moral Philosophy lectures or if you liked the Forever War.
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May 13, 2007 20:29
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Just finished Armor by John Steakley. I guess I was expecting Starship Troopers without the History and Moral Philosophy, but I ended up with Jack Crow. It was an alright novel I guess, but that whole section of the book threw me for a giant loop and I really had trouble suspending my disbelief for that. Hey, I'm a famous space pirate! Let me live in this secret military project facility!
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Jul 14, 2007 17:55
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ErikTheRed posted:Neuromancer by William Gibson. It was a great read, as I'm sure most of you know. That ending still has me scratching my head a bit though. Has me wanting to read some more cyberpunk now though. Read Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. A good piece of noir/cyberpunk. As good a story as we'll get in this age where elves and sorcery seem to rule. The second novel, Broken Angels is also a good read, although it's more of a military sci-fi/cyberpunk (which is my dream novel), than a noir story, which I'm kind of glad it switched tracks. Morgan wrote a good mystery with Altered Carbon, I'd hate to see what might have happened if he tried to follow up with another mystery.
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Jul 27, 2007 22:17
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Pompous Rhombus posted:Tai-Pan by James Clavel. I picked it up at my guesthouse because it was one of 2-3 decent books out of a few hundred. I read Shogun earlier this year and liked it, so figured it'd be worth a shot. Once again, he did a really good job of showing the differences between the way the two cultures think and act. As with Shogun, a very detailed plot with lots of things going on. What's really cool is when you read Noble House or Gai-jin and you see people talk about the legend of Dirk Struan and the different ideas people had, especially regarding the relationsship between Tess, Culum, and Dirk. And how the legend changes over time.
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Aug 30, 2007 19:50
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Understanding Terror Networks by Marc Sageman. He wants to apply social science method to understanding why and how individuals become terrorists, by utilzing empirical analysis and the like. He does the social network analysis piece of it well and writes a decent qualitative analysis. He does't really list his empirical data or analysis that well and he doesn't really develop hypotheses or models and test his data against it. All in all, it was fairly insightful, but it didn't really deliver as a social science product, relying too much on qualitative instead of quantitative.
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Jan 29, 2008 22:06
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I just finished Ender's Game a couple of days ago and it was fantastic look at the the military mind and at times a damning indictment of military leadership and mindsets. At times it brought to mind themes brought up in Metal Gear Solid 3 about the devaluing of soldiers as humans, the presence of deception in getting soldiers to do what they need and even the necessity of not only dehumanizing enemies but removing the concepts of bloodshed in order to get the most horrific acts done. I can see why the military would put it on their leadership course reading lists, but I wonder what lessons they draw from it?
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May 12, 2008 15:13
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LooseChanj posted:Mein Kampf, Somwhat related, I just finished Hitler: A Pathology of Evil which seeks to be a psychoanalysis of Hitler and attempted to explain how he arrived at the mindset that he did and how a human being could organize the extermination of an entire section of population. It delves a lot into Hitler's youth, his poor relationship with his parents, his possible Jewish ancestry, and a lot of, well, delusional projections he employed. It was an interesting read, though not particularly a casual one. It certainly isn't a book for those who just need something to read, unless you're into WW2, psychology, Hitler, or meglomaniacs.
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Jun 30, 2008 20:25
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rage until the last 50 pages or so, and ultimately, it's disappointing because it's nothing surprising considering the source. Us is better than them. Yawn.
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Vertigo posted:Just finished Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I would go with his short story collections. He's written some marvelous ones. Just finished Foundation's Edge. It was a fine book, but it really seems to differentiate from the original themes and premise of the Foundation series. I guess that's what happens when an author doesn't want to write a story while the fans are clamoring for it and the publisher puts forward an advance ten times the normal amount. I enjoyed it, but not as a follow up to the Foundation Series. I'm halfway through Foundation and Earth now and after that is a work by GRU defector Viktor Suvorov.
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May 30, 2009 19:58
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Inside the Aquarium by Victor Suvorov (actually a psuedonym). It's a memoir of a former GRU agent's time in training and experience in the GRU. Excellent understanding of the culture within Soviet military intelligence and the one thing I really admire about it is how dedicated they individually were to the cause of espionage.
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Jun 9, 2009 21:17
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Titan by Ben Bova. I thought it was a fantastic sci-fi novel about exploration. It's between Jesus Incident and Red Mars in terms of its science. A good mix of kind of hard science mixed with future life in a colony and enough futurist science fiction that made Jesus Incident really enjoyable for me.
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Jun 26, 2009 17:57
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Just finished reading Cobra II. Pretty rough indictment of the war although I thought some of the conclusions were really only through hindsight. I don't think it goes well enough in giving credit where credit's due; that is blaming Wolfowitz, Feith, and Cheney for the reasons why we had too few troops in the region post-war.
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Jul 5, 2009 09:40
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Larry Niven's Ringworld I thought I'd be really into the science of this book but frankly now I wished more was written about the fall of civilization and how it spread out.
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Jul 15, 2009 22:58
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A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. A good primer for the history of physics. A few section merit rereads having a pen and paper nearby for note-taking. Not that it is overly complex, but at the same time, it is a simplification of some complex topics.
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Jul 21, 2009 15:47
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The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Mushashi. I recognize he was in a mountain and didn't have access to an editor, still, didn't he think that telling me that, "I must study this diligently," fifty times was excessive? Otherwise, I'll need to reread it at a later point.
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Jul 25, 2009 17:52
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I just finished The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald, which is supposed to be made into a movie with Matt Damon and released this October. It was a great book about an FBI investigation into a company and the utter clusterfuck that set in after the lawyers entered the picture. Not because they're incompetent or anything, which the book goes to show they're not, but simply because of all the political dimensions that set in with such a major case. Really, while I'm not surprised at the crime, it's something we need to guard against and it really is a giant finger in the eye of people who go on about how the free market can regulate itself, as if market forces were akin to gravity.
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Aug 10, 2009 20:19
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Just finished Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi, a novel set in his Old Man's War universe, which is just The Last Colony retold from Zoe Boutin-Perry's perspective. It contained pretty much all the hallmarks of his work, fun, easy, never really taking itself too seriously, but it lacked the military sci-fi that made the others much more pleasing to me. It's still a good distraction though, especially if you like his other works.
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Aug 23, 2009 11:50
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Even though I'm reading for school now, I might as well note this book: Mass Hate by Dr. Neil Kressel. He attempts to study psychological theory in order to ascertain potential reasons behind how a population can be turned from a general law-abiding citizenry and in the span of a few months or years, be turned into mass-murdering, raping, killers, using 1994 Rwanda, 1992-5 Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Holocaust, and Islamic fundamentalists, specifically, the 1993 WTC bombing. I could have skipped the first five chapters of the book, read the last three and walked away just as unsatisfied. Actually, it's not that bad, I just had a real bad premonition fro the preface, but by chapter 5, he does begin using various sociological and psychological theories and attempts to see how those various events intermix. I kind of hope this is just a primer and there are other works that attempt to delve into the same topics more deeply.
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Sep 19, 2009 08:58
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Encryptic posted:Yeah, I noticed that too after reading several of his books (The Night Gardener and the "DC Quartet" books). He's a decent writer but that got pretty old. If he gets out of that rut with his later books, I'd want to read more of his stuff. You could get the same sense out of Drama City which I just finished. While the individuals weren't heroic in the classic sense, they were still individuals who had slipped out of a situation and trying to do right. It seems more like a brief summary of the notion of newer generation of criminal youth who don't value concepts like friends and loyalty. Where the older criminals who had reason to kill rather than the newer ones who killed because they could. On the whole though, I like Drama City for the one major point it gets across, that despite how bad the whole area is, there are still people trying to make a life for themselves in it and we shouldn't abandon them just because everything else is garbage.
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Sep 26, 2009 17:40
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Industrial posted:Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy. I'm sure everyone here already has an opinion formed on him but I thought it was a phenomenal book. I actually felt like at least 95% of the 1100 pages were necessary to tell the story. The thing I love about his writing is that I can see the picture he is trying to convey without re-reading a passage 3 or 4 times. I also think he is at his best when writing about a team, as he does in this book, rather than about a single "hero" character. Still the king of military fiction in my opinion. I certainly didn't think it his worst, but I enjoyed that book the way I enjoy The Rock. It was well done, but a lot more fluff than anything else. Especially the way they discover the evil plan was basically through luck.
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Sep 29, 2009 18:18
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While on vacation recently, I read Mars Life by Ben Bova, mostly at my folks place and on the plane. While I enjoyed it immensely, I had this sense that I enjoyed it on a politically prurient level, as opposed to a good science fiction novel. In the book, religious fundamentalists use the free market to dominate politics ranging from music to education. Musicians to run songs through "editors" or face mass-boycotting; school boards are filled with parents who don't want children exposed to secularist science, to the point where Darwin isn't taught and even the exploration of Mars is downplayed (in the book, intelligent life was found to once existed on Mars as constructed dwellings in a cliff face proved) with relativists saying, "That doesn't prove life existed on Mars, it's just a theory." The protagonists are all scientists who at a minimum accept both God and evolution and are steadfastly trying to maintain the exploration of Mars in the face of all resistance. To the author's credit (or not), the resistance stems massive flooding resulting from climate change. The societal changes revolve around a natural disaster which, so akin to the Flood sent by God (non-Halo Flood), that people have flocked to the New Morality movement by the millions. So the resistance isn't just religious in nature, it's pragmatic. The flooding has resulted in massive numbers of refugees fleeing the ruined cities toward the middle North America and the necessary construction of new cities along with developing sources of food in a wrecked economy make the scientific exploration of Mars a luxury.
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Dec 6, 2009 00:38
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