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What are you reading lately?

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AndyinPA
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#126

Post by AndyinPA »

I watched the first season of Kindred on Hulu (binged, which I rarely do). I have a new favorite author, Octavia E. Butler.
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies." -Octavia E. Butler
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#127

Post by northland10 »

What if? 2, by Randall Monroe. Now I need to go back and read the first one (this one is a gift, and I did not know of him before).

https://xkcd.com/what-if-2/

It is great fun. His fun "answers" seem scientifically sound but are also fun to read,
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#128

Post by keith »

northland10 wrote: Mon Jan 16, 2023 2:27 pm What if? 2, by Randall Monroe. Now I need to go back and read the first one (this one is a gift, and I did not know of him before).

https://xkcd.com/what-if-2/

It is great fun. His fun "answers" seem scientifically sound but are also fun to read,
Randall Monroe is the guy behind the XKCD comic.

I have not read either one myself, but I intend to do so soonish.

I sent copies to both my sisters for Xmas. Are you sure you are not my sister?
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#129

Post by Foggy »

I've seen N10 on the Virtual Meetup, and if he's your sister, I feel very, very sorry for you. It must have been really tough in middle school. :lol:
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#130

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

"Fuzzy Nation" for the Fogbow Book Club three weeks late. On to "A Gentleman in Moscow".
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#131

Post by Maybenaut »

The Lincoln Tunnel by Amor Towles (same author as A Gentleman in Moscow).
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#132

Post by Slim Cognito »

Havana Nocturne
How the Mob owned Cuba...and Then Lost It to the Revolution.

I've had this book for years, but when trump surfaced, I became obsessed with doom scrolling. I think Twitter going into the toilet was good for me (I became disenchanted with Facebook a long time ago) so I'm finally getting caught up on my reading.

I'm from KC which was a big Mob Town, we even had our own Kansas City Massacre and the bullet holes that ricocheted off the Union Station facade are still visible.

When I was in high school, the mob ran what we then called the River Quay (key) area, the riverfront marketplace area. It had everything a hip urban setting required, a huge farmer's market, lots of abandoned warehouses were being turned into lofts, trendy restaurants, but still a few seedy leftovers like adult movie theaters and strip shows (I am NOT including the famous burlesque house The Folly Theatre a few blocks north in downtown proper, which although mob-adjacent, was a pretty nice place). When I was in HS, I remember a lot of places being blown up, a lot of bodies found in trunks, including the father of a girl I went to school with.

But I digress. Because of that history, I've been sort of a mob history buff. I just finished Mafia Princess by Sam Giancano's daughter. Meh. Although she had a horrible life, I guess all the women involved in such situations did, she had an attitude that somehow she was better than all the little people who worked legit jobs.

Now I'm reading how the mob installed Batista and turned Cuba into their personal playground of casinos, hotels, bars and all sorts of, ahem, adult entertainment. I'm almost done, just about where the Revolution finally succeeds.

And don't get me wrong, not tooting Castro's horn, but when he was young and trying to show the people of Cuba the depth of their government's corruption, he definitely had a way of bringing people to his side. He came from money, but when it was time to cripple Cuba's economy, he decided to burn the sugar cane fields, starting with his own family's so the people would see he was all about the common folk, not the elite. And the people loved it. They even kidnapped people, celebrities and American tourists, but treated them like royalty, fed them well, taking them around Cuba, showing them how the common folk lived compared to the high life in Havana, then released said kidnapees after showing them what's what.

You know what they say, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
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#133

Post by keith »

Foggy wrote: Tue Jan 17, 2023 7:22 am I've seen N10 on the Virtual Meetup, and if he's your sister, I feel very, very sorry for you. It must have been really tough in middle school. :lol:
But you haven't seen either of my sisters, have you? And nobody has seen N10 and either of my sisters in the same room, so how can you be so sure?

I didn't go to middle school. I went to junior high. And neither of my sisters was there with me.
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#134

Post by Foggy »

Me too. Junior high, not middle school. And neither of my sisters were there - my oldest sister is 5 years younger than me.

On the bright side, neither of my sisters looked like Northland10. Who is a damned good-looking fellow, but who has no visible evidence of femalianism. My sisters looked like girls when they reached junior high school. :lol:

Last night we had Ben-Prime on the Virtual Meetup. He didn't look like either of my sisters. :?
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#135

Post by Suranis »

Found out tonight there was a chapter removed from Bram Stoker's "Dracula" as the publisher felt the book was too long. it was published as a Short Story two years after Stoker's death.

The overall effect from reading it is to make Jonathan Harker even more of a clueless idiot than he seemed from the rest of the book. :twisted:

Anyway, you can read it in full at this link. Enjoy!

https://www.literature.org/authors/stok ... er-01.html
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#136

Post by Foggy »

We were in a Barnes & Noble yesterday, and I was talking to ol' Wifehorn about Colleen Hoover, and a guy who worked there was walking by the table full of her books and confirmed that, at least in that store, he sells more of her books than anyone else's.

And when I said that before becoming the gigantic enormous monster of romantic fiction in this great land of ours, Ms. Hoover had a fairly hardscrabble life, and was quite poor for many years, so she can write about real people, ol' Wifehorn became intrigued. She got that look.

So a nice copy of Slammed, the one that started it all, will be delivered mañana. I think she's really going to be surprised.
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#137

Post by RTH10260 »

Artificial intelligence uncovers lost work by titan of Spain’s ‘Golden Age’
Discovery of Lope de Vega play could lead to other important finds, researchers say

Sam Jones in Madrid
Sun 5 Feb 2023 08.00 GMT

Lost or misattributed works by some of the finest writers of Spain’s Golden Age could be discovered thanks to pioneering AI technology that has been used to identify a previously unknown play by the wildly prolific dramatist, poet, sailor and priest Lope de Vega.

This week Spain’s National Library announced that researchers trawling its massive archive had stumbled upon and verified a play that Lope is believed to have written a few years before his death in 1635.

Like many plays of the Spanish Golden Age – the 16th- and 17th-century cultural boom that accompanied Spain’s imperial growth and which birthed masterpieces by Lope, Cervantes, Calderón and Velázquez, among many others – La francesa Laura (The Frenchwoman Laura) is a tale of love, jealousy and social hierarchy in which suspicion demands an innocent woman be sacrificed on the altar of her husband’s honour. But, unlike many similar plays of the period, Laura survives and the third act ends happily.

Equally unusual was the manner of the play’s discovery. In 2017, Germán Vega, a Golden Age literature expert at the University of Valladolid, and Álvaro Cuéllar, now at the department of Romance studies at the University of Vienna, embarked on Etso, a project that uses AI analysis to determine the authorship of Golden Age plays, many of which are anonymous or believed misattributed.

As part of the project, 1,300 plays – most of them from Spain’s National Library – were digitally transcribed using a platform, Transkribus, trained to identify and understand 3m words.

Once transcription was complete, another program, Stylo, compared their language and style with the 2,800 digitised works by 350 authors in the Etso database.

Held by the library as an 18th-century manuscript copied from earlier texts, La francesa Laura had long been catalogued as an anonymous work, but Etso’s computer quickly came to its own conclusions.

“After it had transcribed the 1,300 texts, the computer noticed that one of them was similar to 100 or so works – almost all of which were by Lope,” says Vega.

“That really grabbed our attention – we didn’t think we’d find a Lope … [But] we then found a lot of expressions in La francesa Laura that fitted with those in other Lope plays. There were things in La francesa Laura that people in other Lope plays had said or would later say.”

More traditional analysis of the play – focusing on everything from plots and character names to metre, elisions and the pronunciation of diphthongs – corroborated the computer’s theory.




https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... golden-age
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#138

Post by Foggy »

The Man From The Future, by Ananyo Bhattacharya.

This is the book we voted for in the dearly departed book club for February.

It's a really interesting book, and I'm just getting to the part about the birth of the computer. Most excellent. :thumbsup:
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#139

Post by Dr. Ken »

I just finished the Chris Farley show written by his brother.


And I'm working on finishing Napoleon. It's about 900 pages
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#140

Post by RTH10260 »

Roald Dahl rewrites: edited language in books criticised as ‘absurd censorship’
Author Salman Rushdie among those angry after some passages relating to weight, gender, mental health and race were rewritten

Associated Press
Mon 20 Feb 2023 04.05 GMT

Critics are accusing the British publisher of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s books of censorship after it removed colourful language from works such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda to make them more acceptable to modern readers.

A review of new editions of Dahl’s books now available in bookstores shows that some passages relating to weight, mental health, gender and race were altered. The changes made by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Random House, first were reported by Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Augustus Gloop, Charlie’s gluttonous antagonist in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which originally was published in 1964, is no longer “enormously fat,” just “enormous”. In the new edition of Witches, a supernatural female posing as an ordinary woman may be working as a “top scientist or running a business” instead of as a “cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman”.

The word “black” was removed from the description of the terrible tractors in 1970s The Fabulous Mr Fox. The machines are now simply “murderous, brutal-looking monsters”.

Booker prize-winning author Salman Rushdie was among those who reacted angrily to the rewriting of Dahl’s words. Rushdie lived in hiding for years after Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 issued a fatwa calling for his death because of the alleged blasphemy in his novel The Satanic Verses. He was attacked and seriously injured last year at an event in New York state.

“Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship,’’ Rushdie wrote on Twitter. “Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.’’





https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/ ... ge-altered
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#141

Post by Volkonski »

It happens that books get reworked as attitudes change.

Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None” also retitled "Ten Little Indians" was originally published in the UK under the title "Ten Little Ni**ers".

In Roald Dahl's book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" the Ommpa Lompas were originally black Africans employed in slave-like conditions. When it was first made into a film, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" (screenplay by Roald Dahl himself), this was changed to them being from Ommpa Lompa Land and being non-humans with green hair.

The film was retitled from the book because when the film was made (1971) "Charlie" was a name used by US soldiers in Vietnam for the Viet Cong.

The musical "Cats" was changed to remove the word "chinks" which was used in the original T.S. Eliot poems and early versions of the musical.
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#142

Post by Kriselda Gray »

Currently reading:
Poetic Edda translated by Jeremy Dodds
The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginning of Britain (400-1066) by Marc Morris
Queen of Stone (Book 2 of the Celtic Rebels series) by Melanie Karsak

I try to read a bit of each every day...
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#143

Post by Lani »

Kriselda Gray wrote: Wed Feb 22, 2023 4:56 am Currently reading:
Poetic Edda translated by Jeremy Dodds
The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginning of Britain (400-1066) by Marc Morris
Queen of Stone (Book 2 of the Celtic Rebels series) by Melanie Karsak

I try to read a bit of each every day...
I read the Fogbow.
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#144

Post by Kriselda Gray »

Lani wrote: Wed Feb 22, 2023 5:30 am
Kriselda Gray wrote: Wed Feb 22, 2023 4:56 am I try to read a bit of each every day...
I read the Fogbow.
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#145

Post by Flatpoint High »

The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment by Michael Hunter
Radio Free Albemuth - Philip K. Dick
The Little Blue Book - George Lakoff
Re-reading:
Shamanism for Everyone - Ginni Graham Scott
castigat ridendo mores.
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#146

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

A good friend of mine is a Shaman!!!

I am reading The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama.
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#147

Post by Foggy »

The Unruly Queen, by Flora Fraser

Makes today's royals look really boring (they are boring). Royals knew how to do a scandal, back in the day. These newcomers are just a shallow imitation.
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#148

Post by keith »

Still working on the Expanse series. I'm only on book 6 of 10.
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#149

Post by qbawl »

On the recommendation of our fearless Rooster with the temporarily hobbled wing I am reading "Old Man's War" by John Scalzi. Great read especially for a :oldman: like me.
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#150

Post by Phoenix520 »

I love Scalzi.

I haven’t read this book in more than 40 years but everyone I’ve recommended it to loves it.

John Hersey’s White Lotus. It has nothing to do with the Netflix series although I was really excited when I heard about it cuz I thought it was this one.

It takes place in an undefined future. China has won the latest world war and Arizona is America’s new West Coast, California having been nuked into the sea. The last group of survivors is captured and taken to China as slaves.

They and all the captives are treated badly. All the indignities our slaves endured - whippings, family separation - are visited upon their American slaves. In the end, a slaves uses what he’s learned about Chinese culture to free himself and his friends.

It’s in my top 3 favorites of all time. Hersey lived in China, his parents were missionaries. He’s a great writer. It’s not an anti-China screed.
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