2013 - What are you reading? - Page 14

On January 12 2012 09:51 miercat wrote:


There was a prequel written for the Wheel of Time series (The Eye of the World being the first book in the series), titled New Spring; 3 prequels were planned, however this is the only one which has been currently published; in chronological order, "New Spring" is the 2nd of the 3.

I am currently reading "Towers of Midnight (among other books)," 13th book (out of 14) in The Wheel of Time series. Recommended for fans of the style. My only complaint: the series is too short. I became aware of/started reading, the whole series in the past few months (even though publishing began in 1990), and tried to pace myself to an extent, but I seem to read too fast.

On January 09 2012 23:49 TheUltimate wrote:


This is the most update to date and complete account of the biggest disaster of the 20th century, perhaps claiming more lives than any event in history except WW2. Thanks to way-too-ambitious plans combined with incredibly naive decision-making, Mao Zedong starved, beat and tortured to death potentially 45 million of his own countrymen, while the other billion Chinese endured privation beyond imagining.

More politically speaking, it is a stunning account of precisely why autocracy is a poor form of governance, even when the leader has the best of intentions (which in Mao's case, is very debatable.)

A very interesting read, but makes me burn with anger at what so many innocent people were put through for one man's pride.

On January 14 2012 20:18 Atreides wrote:
I've gotten a few books from these threads and read most of the popular ones people list. Good stuff. (I read 1-2 novels every week over the year on average) Some random comments on some from this page.

Old Man and the Sea: Great Great book. Best Novella written imo. If you like it read other stuff by Hemingway his work shares a pretty common theme.

Inheritance: I want to go on a little rant on this one... How did his publisher let that book go to print? Did he even write the first book? I mean however many years ago when Eragon first came out, it wasn't great fantasy. But it was good fantasy from a promising young author. Then it got progressively worse up to this one.... which is.... I dunno. This is the second time in my life that I quit midway through a book in a series I was reading. It was so bad. Anyone else have thoughts on this?

Current reading list I have sitting on the shelf:

The Forever War (and accompanying sequels, this is what I am reading right now)
Pretty much all of the Jane Austen novels, I've read a couple allready. (I bought this super girly boxed set lol)
The Farseer Trilogy By Robin Hobb
Some random modern fiction by John Grisham and Ted Dekker
2 Dostoevskys I got part way through but I was super burnt out on Russian Classics (well big hard to read classics in general) so I shelved lol. (Had just read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, The Brother Karamazov and Les Miserables last year and they were all super good books but its not easy reading for me.)


Stuff I've read in the last month or so:

The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card. Not his best but hes my favorite contemporary author and I have all his stuff. ok.
Catcher in The Rye: Classic, embarassed that I somehow did not read this till I was 24
Pride and Prejudice: Classic chick book. Worth reading. (along with most of her stuff)
Like 3 John Grisham books cuz I spent a bunch of time hanging out in a hospital and I can allways find something of his in the gift shop. His stuff is repetitive but I like it.Only a couple I haven't read. I'll stick in here that "The Rainmaker" was my favorite of his lawyer books, but Bleachers is still the best one by far for me.

Reread a couple good ones from long ago:
Lord of the Flies so short, def worth a reread.
Cook Inlet Decision by Elsa Pedersen. Local Alaskan author who writes on topics near and dear to me. This was a favorite of mine growing up and someone gave my parents a really nice original edition copy for Christmas. (my mom collects local authors stuff kind of)


Stuff that I heartily recommend to anyone and everyone interested in sci-fi/fantasy:

Dune by Frank Herbert. All 6 of them. I know a lot of people dont like the last 3 but god I love these books.
Enders Game and all associated titles by Orson Scott Card. Again a lot of people don't like Xenocide/Children of the Mind but I loved all of it.
The Foundation Trilogy by Isacc Asimov. (This is a little different but its very classic and very awesome)

I've read allmost all of the popular fantasy stuff published recently and I enjoyed everything but the Sword of Truth series which I thought was pretty terrible compared to most of the other popular works. (eg. Wheel of Time, Game of Thrones, Brandon Sanderson, R. A. Salvatore etc.)

Anyways. Sorry I am to lazy to find pictures of all these books. lol
Feel free to PM if you have questions about any books mentioned. I like talking about them.

On January 01 2012 16:29 MrBludgeon wrote:
I've mainly been doing some light reading as of late to let the brain calm down a bit after this nightmare of a semester. However, I've also recently become interested in some of the more wonky bits of mathematics (free non-abelian groups, non-measurable sets, and the Banach-Tarski paradox in particular). So, in order to satisfy my urge for mathematically weird shit and to keep the reading light, I recently read through:



It gives a fairly easy to read account of the history and sketch of the proofs behind some of these paradoxes. The Banach-Tarski paradox (or theorem) is particularly interesting since it (basically) states you can take a sphere of radius one in three dimensional euclidean space (R^3), split it onto five "pieces", move those pieces around, and end up with two spheres of radius one (no holes or anything). ...

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