What'cha readin'... book?
 

Just finished Crazy Horse and Custer by Stephan Ambrose. Its a really good read and I think he does a great job of putting the reader in heads of both men. There is more sympathy for Crazy Horse but lets face it he's a more sympathetic figure. Sometimes I think of the Indian Wars as being pretty far back in history but some of the folks in this book were still alive when the depression hit. If you were a little kid when Crazy Horse was killed you could have lived through the SA War, WWI, II, Korea and maybe even Vietnam. The guys involved with AIM were not that far removed from the wars and that history was pretty real for them. It might be time to read up on that... Although I just started a book on Josiah Harlan, you know the PA Quaker who took over Afghanistan back in the day.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This book has, if nothing else, solidified my urge to get a cruiser with my tax return. :) I'm really not sure I'll finish the book, it feels like an extremely slow read. But the visuals the author weaves seem to have unlocked a drive to explore the world from a little motorcycle, rather than the lumbering hulk of a station wagon I currently drive.

I just finished the Daily' Show's "America - The Book" and the second book in Cornwell's Starbuck Chronicles. Both were fun historical fiction, but Cornwell writes a better battle scene.

Funny, I'm reading Zen and the Art of Poker :D

I'm also reading The Great Beyond: Higher Dimensions, Parallel Universes, and the Extraordinary Search for a Theory of Everything. (The content isn't half as intimidating as the title--more about the backgrounds of the scientists than the science itself.)

ooh, do it! You neeeed a cruiser. Truly, you do. (Translation: I need to live vicariously through you.) I have a jar at home labeled "Harley Fund". I've got about two hundred bucks in change sitting in that jar. So yeah. It'll be awhile.

Ack! Thread hijacking!
Bad elf!
uhhh... I'm reading Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb. Goooood stuff, it's the second trilogy in a series... the first trilogy is The Farseer Trilogy, then this one, which is The Liveship Traders, and the next one is The Tawny Man. The hubby thinks the main character in the first and last trilogies is kind of whiney, but I think it's justified, and truly they're all good books. I've already read them once- but out of sequence - and now I'm reading though again. By the time I get to the final trilogy, the third book of it should be out in paperback (if it's not already, but I have a little while...)

/shuttin up now. :p

The Lunch-Box Chronicles : Notes from the Parenting Underground
by Marion Winik

Extremely good read, I'm about 3/4 of the way thru. Non-fiction, Marion loses her husband to AIDS (doesn't elaborate on this) and how she finds herself a single mom of 2 boys. Hilarious, great read for those with and without devilspawn. Can't wait to finish it tonight. Found myself laughing out loud while reading several times, and I'm not prone to doing this :)

I just finished Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. A friend of mine described it as perhaps his most literate work. I was in agreement with that. The man uses language in ways that should probably be illegal, they are so good. The words are fattening like handmade ice cream with extra chocolate sauce and real whipped cream.

His ability to describe and express is astonishing.

But that's not enough to carry a book all the way through to the end. He leaves a lot of loose ends and unanswered questions. The unresolved note is as painful to the reader as an orchestra going from subdominant, to dominant, leaving the listener waiting endlessly for a return to tonic that's yearned for and never comes.

Yes, I know that some authors use this to good effect, but nothing leading up to the final pages cues you in on the fact that you're going to be left high and dry, waiting, as the main character did, for the white pony to crest the hill.

The thing with the monkey was good.

Joseph Campbell - Transformations of Myth Through Time

It puts a lot of mythology into perspective but he seems to favor eastern structures.

If books on tape count, I just finished listening to Sir A. C. Doyle's The Valley of Fear. Can't decide on what book to listen to next. I want another Doyle book but they seem to be in very short supply at local big-chain bookstores.

At the moment I'm reading "Steal This Book" by Abbie Hoffman, and "It's Good To Be The King" by Michael Badnarik. Hoffman's book is interesting. Instructions on hitchhiking, shoplifting, and sticking it to "the man". And Badnarik's book is good too. He has a pretty good grasp on the U.S. Constitution other than his falling into the common misconception that the 14th amendment created a new class of citizens. He thinks one can be a "state citizen" while not being a "U.S. Citizen".

I've seen these people before. They think U.S. law only applies to those living in Washington D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico, etc. and they are mistaken.

Hoffman is also mistaken in his stupid support of socialism and communism, but that's another story. He was very creative in his Yippie days. I love the protest where he threw cash onto the floor of the stock exchange and pointed out the traders scrambling all over the floor trying to pick up money. Good visual. The funny part is they'd have made more money if they just kept trading.

Bear in mind that the advice in "Steal this Book" was written for a time before RFID, in store video monitoring and recording, and serial killers.

Colorado: A Summer Trip, a collection of letters by Bayard Taylor written in 1866 for the New York Tribune chronicling his trip out west. Standard travel writing of the time, not particularly interesting to anyone who doesn't live here, I wouldn't think. The author fancied himself a poet and novelist, but was best known for his travel stuff, which irritated him to no end. His writing is kind of overblown, but that's typical of the time. Teeny sample:

The weather continues intensely hot by day, with cool and perfect nights. Sometimes the edge of the regular afternoon thunder-storm overlaps Denver, and lays the hot dust of the streets. These storms are supurb aerial pictures. After they pass, their cloudy ruins become the material out of which the setting sun constructs unimaginable splendors. If I were to give the details of them it would seem like color run mad. Such cool rose-gray, such transparent gold, such purple velvet as are worn by the mountains and clouds, are fresh wonders to me every evening.

In contrast, a sample from the Winter 2004 Town & Country Travel magazine:

"When people in Whistler, the Canadian ski resort north of Vancouver, are buzzing about a new arrival, it is usually a world-class skier or maybe a chef...But this year the talk of the village is of sleeping arrangements: the very elegant ones at the recently opened Four Seasons Resort Whistler...blahblahblah gas-burning fireplaces, Frette linens, high-speed Internet access blahblahblah a hotel restaurant featuring Pacific Ocean fare such as snapper bouillabaisse and roasted black cod...Rooms from $265."

We're so jaded that we can go to some of the most beautiful places in the world and never go outside. It must have been nice to live in a time when there was still a sense of wonder (if not a sense of restrained writing).

The Drawing of the Three.

I just read "The Handmaiden's Tale". I'd been hearing good reviews of it for a while, and they were right.

I read a book that realy pissed me off. I got it cheap or free or something from some book club I belonged to. Can Gun Control Work? by James Jacobs.

The author spends the first third of the book examining all kinds of statistics about guns, gun crime, and crime in general.

He (correctly) concludes that there has been absolutely no impact on any of these things by gun control, and in fact areas that loosen restrictions on firearms ownership see a decrease in crime.

He then spends the remaining 2/3 of the book discussing the history of gun control and why gun control is desirable.

Even though it doesn't work.

Damn liberal weenies.

I kept my blood pressure down while reading this by highlighting passages and making marginal notes.

I am now reading Bombshell, a book about the Atomic Spies. The focus of the book seems to be one of the lesser known, but still significant, scientists from Los Alamos that passed Manhattan Project secrets to the Russians.

Since I got the book from the Conservative Book Club I'm going to hope that it isn't a love-letter to Communism and the Soviet System. If it is, I'll probably have to start highlighting and annotating again.