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Dad books for me were a lot of civil war and presidential biographies. Also something called Marketing Warfare which appealed to Young Me because it had a tank on the cover. (alas, it was about marketing and tanks were nowhere to be found) Nothing fun, though, my dad didn't read a lot. Still doesn't.
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Jun 8, 2022 01:33
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sephiRoth IRA posted:It might be niche, but Patrick F McManus, and outdoor humorist, published a bunch of his short stories in book format and my dad had them all. They were hilarious and not too of-the-time to be off putting. I kept them and now read them to my daughter, so the cycle continues. My dad loved those books, I remember reading those after he went through them. There was live book reading of some of McManus's stories here a long time ago, and it was great. The guy really got into the characters. I actually got my dad in Terry Pratchett's stuff, I kept talking up the book, but he wasn't interested at first as he wasn't really into fantasy. But after Men at Arms, we were both hooked.
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Jun 8, 2022 03:56
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My dad keep a lot of books from his childhood, so he had like the first 20 or so Hardy Boys, some Tom Swift Jr., Rick Brant. Tom Swift interested me the most as a kid. He also had a bunch Alistair Mclean books, Guns of Navarone being the most recognizable. While I was growing up he was (is) into Clive Cussler. I read those Marcinko Navy Seal books way too young. He read some Clancy but not really much. The rest of his shelf was his old college text books like his physics books, and lots of books on radio, his hobby.
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Jun 8, 2022 05:33
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Not so much "dad books" as "grandparent books"; they had a sizeable collection of Heritage Press editions of mostly classic books, which were divided up among the the children and grandchildren when they moved out of their house into assisted living. I've got a bunch and am in fact reading through one of them right now (Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain)
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Jun 8, 2022 18:33
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OK. So my dad was an insurance executive and we probably had a thousand issues of Bits n' Pieces on the rec room bathroom shelf where all our Tom Clancy lived.  If you've never read BnP, it's Paul Harvey but with fewer ads and less of J. Edgar's politics.
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Jun 10, 2022 15:26
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Flappy Bert posted:It's simultaneously cool and scary how some regular nerds could completely overturn the history of one of the major battles of the 20th century. "Hey, that primary source you've been relying on for decades; you know what he says is physically impossible, right?" And nobody did. Wild. What was impossible? Everything I've heard from it I've picked up from the milhist thread especially wrt damage control and stuff
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Jun 11, 2022 02:17
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Milo and POTUS posted:What was impossible? Everything I've heard from it I've picked up from the milhist thread especially wrt damage control and stuff The Japanese account that was taken as gospel for decades was written by one of the flight group leaders (Fuchida iirc). Perhaps in an attempt to make the battle seem more dramatic, he claimed that the IJN carriers were hit just as they were readying a powerful strike on the USN, their flight decks crammed with torpedo and dive bombers fueling up and loading ordnance. The problem with this is that the Japanese serviced their planes inside the hangar below decks, and only sent them up to the flight deck one at a time.
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Jun 11, 2022 06:29
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sephiRoth IRA posted:It might be niche, but Patrick F McManus, and outdoor humorist, published a bunch of his short stories in book format and my dad had them all. They were hilarious and not too of-the-time to be off putting. I kept them and now read them to my daughter, so the cycle continues. It was actually a friend's dad that gave it to me, but yeah The first three quarters or so of A Fine and Pleasant Misery remain some of the funniest prose I remember reading. It loses steam by the end, and his other books don't reach those heights again but man, there's stupid poo poo from that book that still rattles around my brain all these years later
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Jun 12, 2022 03:31
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I'm reading The Attack on Pearl Harbor by Zimm, which is the most granular milhist nerd poo poo ever and he's even harder on Fuchida than the folks who wrote Shattered Sword. There was this whole flare signal Fuchida came up with to let all his subordinates know whether the attack was a surprise or not and it was a stupid plan AND he made a whole dogs breakfast out of the thing which resulted in dead comrades.
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Jun 14, 2022 23:09
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Also Fuchida lied after the fact and blamed others for his own mistakes. So he comes up with a bad plan, messes up his own bad plan, gets people killed, and spends decades covering his own rear end, with the help of generations of American historians.
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Jun 14, 2022 23:13
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My favorite was probably an introduction to philosophy written as a graphic novel. It was pretty legit from what I remember. The section on Freud also had a page-sized, detailed drawing of a vagina, which was cool. Anyone know what book that was? I also read and reread my dad's copies of the Narnia Chronicles and his fuckload of P.J. O'Rourke books, which are part of the reason I thought I was a conservative Christian until well into high school. Luckily C.S. Lewis pushed the importance of logical rigor in most of his essays and O'Rourke gave lip service to freedom and responsibility in a way that made me believe in them for real, so the conservativism died even faster than the religion did.
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Jun 18, 2022 02:33
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My dad never read, he thinks he has dyslexia (I'm inclined to agree) but isn't really of a generation where anyone checked and besides, he grew up in area where all the kids could become either mechanics or alcoholics. My mum's household was too chaotic to really allow reading, and likely my granddad would have hid or destroyed any books as a "joke". So, of my course my fit of teenage rebellion was studying English lit! I do remember my dad working really hard to get through "Interview With The Vampire" when I was a kid though. He'd put time aside and read a chapter a night and was incredibly invested. I think it must have been quite difficult for him, and although Anne Rice isn't my thing, I'm really proud of him for that. In typical dad fashion, I think he's tried a couple of gangster biographies and military history in more recent years, but I'm not sure if he's finished them.
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Oct 18, 2022 12:31
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in my country dad books are your typical biographies by Big Important Politicians And Athletes, and the best-selling crime novel that week
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Oct 18, 2022 18:28
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also poo poo about the royal family and world war two
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Oct 18, 2022 18:29
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It is ridiculous the number of books/authors already listed here that are on my parents' bookshelves. That being said, this reminds me:CapitanGarlic posted:My old man owned the complete works of Louis L'Amour and if that doesn't make for a Dad-rear end library I don't know what does. No love for Larry McMurtry up in this joint? We (yes, myself included) read Lonesome Dove so often that the cover came off and eventually the spine split. 1,000-page books should probably not be released in paperback.
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Oct 18, 2022 18:44
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Ragnar34 posted:My favorite was probably an introduction to philosophy written as a graphic novel. It was pretty legit from what I remember. The section on Freud also had a page-sized, detailed drawing of a vagina, which was cool. Anyone know what book that was? i don't know if he did a philosophy one but as a kid I remember checking out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cartoon_History_of_the_Universe fairly often
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Oct 18, 2022 22:11
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Zamboni Rodeo posted:It is ridiculous the number of books/authors already listed here that are on my parents' bookshelves. That being said, this reminds me: Nary an American dad of the 80’s didn’t have Lonesome Dove on the shelf. And yeah: what is it with the economics of 80s and 90s publishing that gave us those monsters? I’ve never seen a paperback from the 60s or 70s weigh in at anything more than a few hundred pages.
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Oct 18, 2022 23:38
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My Dad read and collected MAD magazine and I got right into that. He also picked up a lot of Heavy Metal magazine and I was like "Dad... is this porno?" Some of those covers were racy. I don't know if we ever watched the movie together. He got me into a lot of comics, Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County and Tintin were the big ones, in retrospect though I don't know what he had or was into before I was born. My stepfather has more of a traditional dad book thing going on: some Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, Ken Follett, that sort of thing.
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Oct 21, 2022 06:06
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Do the Parker books by Donald Westlake/Richard Stark count? ´Cause those books rip hard. As for stuff my actual dad read, it was mostly historical novels.
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Oct 21, 2022 16:17
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Vincent posted:Do the Parker books by Donald Westlake/Richard Stark count? ´Cause those books rip hard. Oh yeah, dads loving love competence porn.
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Oct 21, 2022 17:29
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my dad didn't really make time for fiction as an adult but i read a lot of his old compsci university textbooks and The Joy of Mathematics and that's why my first brushes with programming were VAX assembly. as a kid, in like 2004 he had a couple MAD compilations from his younger days and also some compilation of some comic i have since forgotten the name of bc it was the nonsense name of the main character and said character was definitely supposed to be speaking some kind of English but it was such a thick regional something that it was illegible - idk how he read it, or if he even did. the gently caress was that
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Oct 23, 2022 03:39
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Oct 24, 2022 00:09
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Im looking at my bookshelf, realizing these are all now dad books. Im incredibly disappointed in myself.
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Oct 24, 2022 15:53
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Mister Speaker posted:My Dad read and collected MAD magazine and I got right into that. He also picked up a lot of Heavy Metal magazine and I was like "Dad... is this porno?" Some of those covers were racy. I don't know if we ever watched the movie together. He got me into a lot of comics, Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County and Tintin were the big ones, in retrospect though I don't know what he had or was into before I was born. There's so many badly written sex scenes in every Ken Follett book. Each and every one is just stuffed with them.
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Oct 24, 2022 16:40
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:There's so many badly written sex scenes in every Ken Follett book. Each and every one is just stuffed with them. The torture scene in jackdaws is pretty  Pretty fun read otherwise, but that’s a big otherwise
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Oct 24, 2022 17:30
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Killingyouguy! posted:my dad didn't really make time for fiction as an adult but i read a lot of his old compsci university textbooks and The Joy of Mathematics I'm 99% certain you're talking about Li'l Abner, the tale of a hillbilly from Norton, VA who is taken into New York high society by his cousin, who Made It. My grandad (also from Norton, VA) had every single collection of these, and given the absence of anything else to do at his house I read all of them as a child.
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Oct 26, 2022 12:52
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thunderdome winner
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Chernobyl Princess posted:I'm 99% certain you're talking about Li'l Abner, the tale of a hillbilly from Norton, VA who is taken into New York high society by his cousin, who Made It. I Googled this and unfortunately this looks way too legible to be the thing my dad had! I seriously need to get back to his place and find this book I'm pretty sure he hasn't gotten rid of it
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Oct 26, 2022 13:19
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some plague rats posted:Dad books is a pretty vague genre, but the first things that comes to mind when I think of books from my dad is a Nathanael West collection he had that I read when I was young for the simple reason that the blurb on the back went impossibly hard. I took it with me when I left the country and this inspired me to dig it out and read it again Subtext is for cowards. Super text is for dads.
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Oct 26, 2022 14:03
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A hyper-specific/local Dad Book I saw a lot in friends' and family's houses growing up: A satirical book answer the ever-present question we all had in the late 80's: "What if Vermont seceded from the United States?!" quote:This book is a "what if" telling of the adventures of a newly independent Vermont, had they kicked the rest of us out of he union in 1991 and declared themselves a free and independent republic. The book is a bit of a comedy routine written around the misadventures of the federal forces intent on reclaiming Vermont for the US and Vermont's ability to constantly outwit the flatlanders. Growing up in Vermont, EVERYONE'S dad had this on a book shelf, or nightstand, or coffee table.
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Oct 28, 2022 17:14
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:if you like middle aged white men in suits talking about the obscure technical details of military operations without getting bogged down in unnecessary poo poo, get this book. as a demonstration of their explanatory power, please find attached this speech from one of the authors basically recapping the thesis of the book live on stage at the national ww2 museum I knew I shouldn't have opened this thread. I've fallen down a rabbit hole of middle aged white men in suits talking about the obscure technical details of military operations without getting bogged down in unnecessary poo poo.
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Nov 2, 2022 05:41
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My dad mostly had weird stuff like Edgar Casey and Carlos Castaneda. I remember reading about auras and trying to see them (I don't know how I planned to do this)
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Nov 2, 2022 17:59
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The Bible
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Nov 3, 2022 20:01
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oldpainless posted:The Bible Cos you're in it 
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Nov 5, 2022 09:20
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Jurassic Park and Sphere by Michael Crichton were books of my Dad's that I distinctly remember reading as a kid. Also, all of the Red Dwarf books. Funny thing is that my memory is pretty good and my Dad claims to have read most books I mention. However, we never had them in our house and I never saw him read anything at all growing up. So either he read an absolute truck load prior to my birth and then stopped entirely or he's full of poo poo. He does have a Kindle now though. He's into Tom Clancy and poo poo.
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Nov 7, 2022 02:10
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The Ashley Book of Knots It is a useful collection of knot-tying instructions from functional to decorative, but the author is also a fascinating, well-traveled individual. It has an interesting view of history and culture, gathered entirely by following the art of knot-tying. For example, the art fell out of fashion with the spread of literacy as sailors' hands were occupied with books, then came back into fashion with the invention of the radio and their hands were now free. It makes history feel more tangible when it's linked with something you can physically do today.
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Nov 7, 2022 05:53
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Dad books for me were old pulp war novels and Tom Clancy stuff but these two stuck out for me.   Pretty bog standard Vietnam War novels but they stuck with me. Especially The Hill.
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Nov 9, 2022 05:37
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When I was a kid, over half the dads owned these babies:
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Nov 9, 2022 15:55
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Lamprotornis posted:The Ashley Book of Knots These days, an education in knots is achieved by 'owning a pair of wired earbuds'
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Nov 9, 2022 22:51
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oldpainless posted:The Bible Also a not-insignificant number of various Bible commentaries and concordances, as well as several hymnals. Why yes, my dad was a pastor, how did you guess?
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Nov 11, 2022 02:03
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Brainworm posted:Once upon a time, behind the water heater in my dad's workshop, I found a shelf full of weathered paperbacks. Dad Books. Think The Hunt for Red October, A Time to Kill, The Pillars of the Earth, The Frontiersmen, Shogun. Exactly what you'd expect from a suburban insurance salesman and father of two in or around 1987. Does it glorify rape? I'm not sure.
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Nov 14, 2022 08:36
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