northbend 

"Horses Don't Fly" by Frederick Libby. The best memoir I've read by a WW1 aviator.

gomango

Fair enough.

I'll chill.

Fyi I'm 56 years old. I'm still trying to figure out why we were ushered into our grade school basements in 1965 for civil defense drills.

The rations would have been a joke.

Crackers, 55 gallon drums of water and a dirt floor.

As if this would have worked out in the event of an actual conflict......

rootboy 

Not to mention ducking and covering, under our desks. Seems like a truly cruel joke now,,eh?

Ha! Those guys and their nuclear weapons. Those cards.

But wait.......

JJScaliger

I don't know anything about this book and my mom told me if I didn't have anything nice to not to say anything. But...

Out of context that's pretty funny!

jimmuller 

Let me put it this way. I'll probably go to my grave suffering from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder without have been in combat or anything. Maybe it was how old I was when I read it or maybe it was the timing of other world events.

"I've just crawled through the gut of an interstellar cockroach. That just one of a thousand memories I'd rather not have" - Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black.

That's how I feel about On the Beach. And very few other books. Like I said, nuclear holocaust is not cold. It is very very hot.

rootboy 

Found a copy of a book called The Secret History in the stack of books left at the place we stayed in Belize a couple of weeks ago.
International best seller, the cover said. I thought it had potential going in, but I was yawning coming out of it.

JJScaliger

I'm almost done with sex lies and handlebar tape , a biography about Jacuques Anquitel. It's ok. I wish there was more about the racing and less about the timing and quantity of champagne consumed.

On deck for vacation is the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, renaissance sculptor and jeweler.

Chicago Al 

I have been on a reading tear lately, a bunch of large, and enjoyable books having come my way mostly through the graces of our public library.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, a truly Dickensian tale of a boy's life and misadventures following his mother's death in an (imaginary) terrorist bombing of the Metropolitan Museum, from which he escapes with his life, and the titular painting, Carel Fabritius' masterpiece. His life is turned upside down and keeping the painting hidden turns out to be a decision that haunts him. (Also I highly recommend seeing the painting if ever you can. Its home is really Mauritshuis, the Hague, though it made a brief visit to NY last fall.)

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon; I have not read anything by Pynchon in years, maybe since college, when Gravity's Rainbow was a favorite of mine. So far I'm enjoying this one a lot; it's set in NY at the tail of the dotcom boom and as expected from Pynchon there are byzantine plotlines, conspiracies everywhere you look, and characters with fantastic names.

On deck is the long-awaited and unfortunately posthumous The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor. In 1933, as a very young man with few prospects (he'd been thrown out of school and it was doubtful he was Army material) he decided to walk across Europe, from Holland to Constantinople, as he insisted on calling Istanbul. He not only made it in one piece, he thrived, alternating sleeping rough with luxurious visits with noble families who would take him in and insist he stay for weeks. It was not until the 1970s, already an author of note, that he set out to write his account of that trip. He published two volumes in his lifetime, and his last left him at the Iron Gates of the Danube. He was unable to finish the third volume, and this one has been put together from his notes. Fermor lived most of the 20th Century (he died in 2011, well into his 90s) but his writing style is 19th if not 18th century, long and flowing sentences with rich descriptions. Definitely not for everyone, but if a unique look at pre-WW2 Europe is of interest to you, Fermor's books should be.

DMC707

These type of sheep do tend to stand around (and as far as i know, aren't hunted as a game animal)




These type of sheep, OTOH, are far more of a challenge to even see sometimes , much less hunt

Italuminium

I saw Donna Tartt at a book club, talking about her love for Dickens, meaning I do want to read both her books and a lot more Dickens.. where to find the time! I'm in a pretty intensive literature course now requiring me to read voluminous tomes about Islamic expansion , very interesting material, but one does need to take a bit of distance from serious books after slogging through that kind of works all day, so I've been (re) reading some fantasy and sci-fi lately. Absolute favorite is the "His Dark Materials" trilogy by Phillip Pullman.

rootboy 

Except, this one is a goat. :>

rootboy 

I thought you guys were arguing about an Annette Funicello movie….

DMC707

Yes, yes it is --- except they occupy the same basic family of critters and hunting methods are similar

[h=2]Classification[edit][/h]The mountain goat is an even-toed ungulate of the order Artiodactyla and the family Bovidae that includes antelopes, gazelles, and cattle. It belongs to the subfamily Caprinae (goat-antelopes), along with 32 other species including true goats, sheep, the chamois, and the muskox. The mountain goat is the only species in the genus Oreamnos. The name Oreamnos is derived from the Greek term oros (stem ore-) "mountain" (or, alternatively, oreas "mountain nymph") and the word amnos "lamb".

clubman 

C&V Lunch fans must read Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor. Gastronomy, mystical murder, social anthropology, dysfunctional families and love. A perfect novel.

Truth. A one day census in 2008 found over 2500 homeless people living in that park. It's such a beautiful place as well.

Italuminium

Who Owns the Future? by J a r o n Lanier.

Completely blew me away in its clarity of assessment of the current economical and technological mess we're in.

ps. Why the fluck would that be a censored name?

autoteacher

"The Bicycle Wheel" by Jobst Brandt

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_no...+bicycle+wheel

I have the new rim, old hub, spokes and nipples and tools, will be assembling tomorrow.

rootboy 

???

rootboy 

Glad to see this thread revived.

Several good books lately. But fairly esoteric stuff. Been on a jag lately reading everything I can, and buying way too many books, on the German Expressionist art movement in the early 20th century. In particular, die Brucke group.

Camilo

Just finished The Lost Cyclist. It's a very intersting story, but not well written, imho. To me it felt like the author was simply cataloging every single detail he could muster without considering whether the details were important and/or made the story more or less interesting. Mostly my opinion is less interesting.

I skipped and skimmed entire paragraphs, sometimes pages. But those guys were real adventurers and studs.

eschlwc

oh, man i love those movies, both silents and talkies. like 'the cabinet of dr caligari' and early fritz lang, like 'metropolis,' 'm,' and 'the testament of dr mabuse.' Such incredible story telling, imagery and surreal mystery.





i haven't read anything new in months!

rootboy 

I remember first seeing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in my early 20's, and being blown away. I had never seen anything like that before. And I was transfixed from then on. Back then I was also way in to art, doing a lot of drawing and painting, etc. And studying the works of the first modernists. The move away from classicism and the academic, depicting nature by copying it as accurately as possible, was the most important development in art, in my view. The post impressionists, Kandinsky's Blue Rider and Kirchner's die Brucke group. These are the artists that moved the visual arts in to the modern world. There were none better at pure expression. IMO.

I'm particularly fond of E.L. Kirchner, as you can tell. And to keep this book-related, I recently read a fascinating study of his working techniques and the pigments he used called "No one else has these colors." That's for sure.

Kirchner


Otto Mueller


Franz Marc


Kirchner

upthywazzoo 

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, by Steven Pinker

I listened to the audiobook, and it's a pretty compelling argument for violence being much less of an issue than it was in days past. He uses mostly statistics to make his point then near the end discusses the psychology of violence. I didn't agree with him on every single point but it was certainly an eye-opening read.

eschlwc

how is it we skipped all that in my college art history class? i feel slighted.

RPK79

I had been meaning to check out the Dresden Files and when I searched in the Nook app over the weekend for a new book to read there was the Dresden Files (first 7 books) on sale for $1.99 ea. Picked up all of them and I'm about 8 chapters into the first one. Good stuff.

upthywazzoo 

Fantastic series. Also helps that I'm from Chicago.