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Old 13-09-2013, 10:32   #31
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Re: The Book Thread

David Weber - BAEN books - Honor Harrington series among others, great future history military politics
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Old 13-09-2013, 17:17   #32
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Re: The Book Thread

More that I forgot:

Fiction:

Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
Pat Conroy (The Great Santini)
Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)
Evan Clarkson (The Flight of the Osprey)

Non-Fiction:

Steven Callahan (Adrift)

Crossing 3/4th of the Atlantic Ocean on a 6 man Avon Liferaft after his boat hit a submerged object and sank. Possibly a whale.

Mark Owen (No Easy Day) Seal's raid that killed Osama bin Laden

Dakota Meyer (Into The Fire) Medal of Honor winner's Story in Afghanistan War
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Old 13-09-2013, 21:26   #33
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The "Outlander"series by Diana Gabaldon
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Old 13-09-2013, 21:59   #34
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Re: The Book Thread

Everything is illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway
Contact by Carl Sagan
Any Michael Crichton book
Anything written by Kurt Vonnegut
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Old 24-09-2013, 05:55   #35
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Re: The Book Thread

Non-Fiction

The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow
by A J Mackinnon
Slightly eccentric Aussie (trademark: always wears a pith helmet) quits his job teaching English at a college in North Wales and decides it would make a nice exit if he sailed away down the river Severn for a few miles in an old Mirror dinghy. Many months, locks, rivers, canals, and a Channel crossing later, he is still sailing, final destination: Bulgaria and the Black Sea. The wonderful self-deprecating humor, great adventure and memorable encounters make this a one-of-a-kind story that certainly will stay with you for a while.

Passage to Juneau
by Jonathan Raban
This is an account of an extended solo cruise through the Inside Passage in the Pacific Northwest, from Seattle to Juneau in Alaska. The wilderness and the narrative are interspersed with loggers, forest dwellers, bears, occasional tourists, as well as aboriginal and other presences both present and long past. In effortlessly evocative language, Raban interweaves a personal journey with a re-interpretation and re-tracing of the course, both mental and geographical, that European "explorers" such as "Captain Van" Vancouver and Puget took, busily charting and renaming everything in sight from the perfectly sensible Indian appellations such as "Having Great Ebb Tide" until practically all the names on the British Admiralty list were used up and enshrined on the charts. (Meanwhile, Spanish ships created a third set of names.) Raban's journey encompasses literary musings and attempts at (mis)communication with his wife and small daughter back in Seattle, and a nine-week interlude (brief, and an eternity) in England for family reasons. Rich and rewarding reading from one of the foremost writers engaged with the sea.

Ocean of Life -- How Our Seas Are Changing
by Callum Roberts
Roberts is a professor of marine conservation at the University of York, and a well-known authority on overfishing, the chemistry of the oceans, and the precarious (im)balance in which they are today. In his latest book he not only describes how the oceans have changed under the impact of humanity, but also points towards ways to arrest and reverse the damage (but we have to act fast).
"At the heart of this book is a deep love of the ocean and a profound concern for its viability as a resource for us all". (Nature).
Also probably worth reading (but haven't done so yet): The Unnatural History of the Sea by the same author.

Fiction

The entire Aubrey/Maturin series
by Patrick O'Brian
Richly realized tapestry of life within and without the Royal British Navy at the beginning of the 19th century, as experienced by the two titular characters, Captain "Lucky Jack" Aubrey and his friend, surgeon and anti-Napoleon spy Stephen Maturin. Does have some repetitive and formulaic bits (such as the introductory sections of some later volumes, and some battle scenes), but the story arc, the author's wit, erudition and tremendous insight into human strengths and foibles held me in thrall throughout the series, even to the unfinished 21st volume (published posthumously). Ideal books to read on a long sailing cruise, or just sitting somewhere on a beach or a rocky promontory and looking out to sea.
Unfortunately (but maybe not surprisingly), the film "Master and Commander" although helmed by a good director (Peter Weir) with a literary flair, and featuring actors well capable of inhabiting their roles does no more than slightly scratch the surface of the Aubrey/Maturin saga. Probably nothing less than, say, a 12-part series done by the HBO/BBC team that did "Rome" could.

The Debt to Pleasure
by John Lanchester
Nothing to do with sailing or the sea, but a devilishly funny short novel, narrated in the first person by Tarquin Winot, "a splendid creation, genuinely learned (the scholarship is dazzling), poisonously bigoted and wholly mad" (blurb). Interspersed with seductive recipes and affording the reader the ever intensifying pleasure of discovering what this wholly unreliable (and potentially lethal) narrator equipped with the Mossad manual of surveillance and a special gift in the kitchen is really up to.

Water Music
by T. Coraghessan Boyle
T.C. Boyle's first novel, and still his best in my opinion (though I can't claim that I've read them all). Imaginative, ribald, dazzling, scaldingly sharp and stylistically brilliant, the narrative is composed of scenes of (sometimes) searing power and (sometimes) side-splitting hilarity (often occurring almost simultaneously on the page), flashbacks and -forwards alighting on seedy London sewers, Scottish highlands, and deepest darkest Africa (full of color, tribal diversity, and hair-raising diseases), where Scottish explorer Mungo Park (1771-1806) is trying to follow the Niger and "discover" its source. Weaving Dickensian (if Dickens had known mushrooms) fictional characters with historic but freely recast events and persons, Boyle paints a tableau in words to rival anything that Hieronymus Bosch ever put on a canvas. Certainly not to everybody's taste, but if the first few pages pull you in, then you are sure to experience a rush that inextricably pulls you along till the very end (only to maybe turn around and read it again).
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Old 29-01-2016, 09:51   #36
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Re: The Book Thread

It's an old thread, but hey, I'm old too.
My two favorite non-fiction books are: Nobody Nowhere, by Donna Williams and One River, by Wade Davis.

Non-Fiction list would fill pages.
Any Sci-Fi by C. J. Cherryh but mainly the Chanur series.
All of William Gibson's cyberpunk stuff
I am particularly fond of Charles De Lint's books. Somewhere To Be Flying being my favorite.
If you like epic fantasy, Steven Erikson's "Tales of the Malazan Book of the Fallen" series is more epic than most. Well worth the read, though.
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Old 29-01-2016, 11:08   #37
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Re: The Book Thread

@Goingbuddha

Hey never too late for your faves!

Thanks for the post and the bump
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Old 29-01-2016, 11:17   #38
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Re: The Book Thread

I'm reading a great book right now. "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"
It's free and available from hpmor.com

It is a Fan Fiction re-write of the Harry Potter story. In this version he is a complete scientist rational thinking type. (Even if he is only 11 years old) So he questions everything about magic and he has now problem challenging authority based on his rational arguments. The story is very different from the original books. It is excellently written and I'm enjoying it tremendously. 1,600 pages long!!!

The story does assume that you have at least seen the movies. So, for example it does not describe the game of quidich, when Harry criticizes the scoring of catching the "flying mosquito". It just assumes that you know what the game is.
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Old 12-08-2016, 19:56   #39
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Re: The Book Thread

Earth Abides - One of the first classic sci-fi books of its kind, an enjoyable read
The Sea Wolf

The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, Philip Sugden - If you are at all interested in JTR books, Sugden does an excellent job.
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Old 12-08-2016, 20:11   #40
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Re: The Book Thread

nice
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