I read From Here To Eternity and The Thin Red Line by James Jones about this time last year. Both were fantastic. I've found many parallels and applications to life in the modern machine I find myself interacting with every day
I read From Here To Eternity and The Thin Red Line by James Jones about this time last year. Both were fantastic. I've found many parallels and applications to life in the modern machine I find myself interacting with every day
I've just started The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. Turns out 100 years ago people used to read, write, travel around, have adventures, physically touch people, and drinking was acceptable at all hours. Seems better than now
Ryan Arnold
ryanarnold1178@gmail.com
Same here, Chris. Interesting how some of those Newspeak terms have already seeped into our vocabulary. Have you read any of Orwell's non-fiction?
Also finished off: Gulag Archipelago Volume I and All Quiet on the Western Front. Now reading Lou Gehrig's biography, Luckiest Man. It's amazing how fast even a thick book can go just by knocking out 20 pages per weeknight before bed.
I just finished reading (well... listening to the audiobook) Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America. It is a fascinating work studying the progress of a number of different immigrant ethnicities through their time in the United States.
I'm also nearly finished with Crucial Conversations.
I really enjoyed The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein really thought out both the physical ramifications of long-term life in reduced gravity, the social consequences of a colony built from a debtors prison (though I question his conclusions there), and the political development. If Hollywood could make decent movies any more, I'd like to see a film adaptation of it. Unfortunately I think they'd do about as well as they did with Starship Troopers.
While I haven't read the books, I noticed the influence of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress on The Expanse TV show, especially regarding those who were born in space.
I haven't, actually. Can you recommend any? I have been eyeing Christopher Hitchen's Why Orwell Matters - incidentally he wrote the forward to the edition I read.
To keep my German up, I got halfway through Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) and really need to get around to finishing it. Got distracted with other things.
For non-fiction, the last book I read was La Costituzione della Moneta, a book about the way EU membership has influenced and radically (maybe permanently) transformed Italy's material Constitution (and the actual one as well). Despite the subject, it's a very readable book which highlights how a Constitution can be solid like a cornerstone and fragile at the same time; a few apparently minor modifications backed by a minuscule number of custodians are enough to change its nature.
After that, I needed something different; I'm half-way through Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman; Life and Fate, by the same author, will probably be next.
IPB