What are you reading?

[ab]

Still reading "crossing the rubicon" by Michael Ruppert.  Halfway.  Been extending the library renewal for probably six month now.

[LMT]

The Soldier's Wife by Joanna Trollope

The Afgan war from the Brit perspective.

[lazylightnin717]

The Medici Conspiracy

A great read about the illegal antiquities trade for anybody into it although it is slightly outdated.

[superjohn]

Currently: "Underground London" by Peter Ackroyd.
Starting shortly: "Ghost Milk: Recent Adventures Among the Future Ruins of London on the Eve of the Olympics" by Iain Sinclair

[lazylightnin717]

Have you ever read Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon?

FInally got around to reading it RAT.

Fantastic read albeit very much different from Steinbeck 

“Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.”

[DesmoTull]

I'm about halfway through Two Wheels Through Terror by Glen Heggstad

[the_Journeyman]

Finished up a fair bit of Hemingway's work.  He's wordy when he really gets lit.

JM

[MendoDave]

I need to read some Hemmingway.

'The Prince and the Pauper" I dont know why I've never read this before. It's pretty good.

[RAT900]

FInally got around to reading it RAT.

Fantastic read albeit very much different from Steinbeck 

“Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.”

Glad you enjoyed it, it resonates on so many levels re: the human experience/American experience....

the quest for that which is "authentic" that is still around

in an increasingly pre-packaged corporatized/federalized world

[NoisyDante]

Reading two books currently.  'Rant' by Chuck Palahniuk and 'Cloud Atlas' by David Mitchell.

[Ddan]

Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer.  Considering it was published 10 years ago, it's pretty topical

[kopfjäger]

The Raft

[robin]

Recently finished 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' and 'Ender's Game'.  About to start 'The Girl Who Played With Fire.'

I really liked those - and the Swedish films. If you liked that, try Headhunters by Norwegian author Jo Nesbø (http://jonesbo.com/#!/books/headhunters). There's also a film version of it that's great (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1614989/). It's a good adaptation, complete with spectacular Coen brothers-like violence, irony and sarcasm.

[LMT]

Hedy Lamarr was called the most beautiful woman in the world. She was a movie star back when the movies had stars and an inventor.

I am reading Hedy's Folly The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr The Most Beautiful Woman In The World by Richard Rhodes.  From a review in the New York Times:

That a glamorous movie star whose day job involved hours of makeup calls and dress fittings would spend her off hours designing sophisticated weapons systems is one of the great curiosities of Hollywood history. Lamar, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her ­munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials. Disturbed by news reports of innocents killed at sea by U-boats, she was determined to help defeat the German attacks. And Ant­heil, arguably the most mechanically inclined of all composers, having long before mastered the byzantine mechanisms of pneumatic piano rolls, retained a special genius for “out of the box” problem ­solving.

Over several years the composer and the movie star spent countless hours together drafting and redrafting designs, not only for the torpedo system but also for a “proximity fuse” antiaircraft shell. In reality, their patent was an early version of today’s smart bombs. The device as they made it employed a constantly roving radio signal to guide the torpedo toward its target. Because the signal kept “hopping” from one frequency to another, it would be impossible for the enemy to lock onto. To solve the problems of synchronizing receiver and transmitter, Ant­heil proposed a tiny structure inspired by the workings of a piano roll. This was a feat that years later would be used in everything from cellphone and Bluetooth technology to GPS instruments.

On Aug. 11, 1942, United States Patent No. 2,292,387 was granted to them for their design. But persuading the Navy to take it seriously proved insurmountable. Pentagon bureaucracy, coupled with the fact that the design’s co-inventor was a movie star, resulted in their idea being ignored. Hedy’s folly may have been in assuming men in government might overcome their prejudice that a beautiful woman could not have brains and imagination. But she lived to see similar versions of her invention be put into common practice, and in 1997, Hedy Lamarr, at the age of 82, and George Antheil (posthumously) were honored with the Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

[kopfjäger]

Pledge to Hedley Lamarr