What book r u reading?

[McBell]

Yep. Watchers was published in 1987. Then, in 2020, Koontz came out with Devoted which, while not exactly a sequel to Watchers, nevertheless continued the side-story about the genetically enhanced golden retrievers who comprise "the Mysterium" and who presumably were descendants of the golden named Einstein in Watchers. I had read Devoted first, a few years ago when it first came out. I didn't know about Watchers until recently when I became so hooked on Koontz's novels that I started reading his older stuff. So now I'm currently reading Devoted for the second time, and enjoying how having read Watchers now answers some questions regarding Devoted.

Stephen King had always been my favorite author for horror, but now I'm leaning more towards Dean Koontz. Especially since I think that King tends to overwrite a bit in his later novels, and maybe could use a better editor (if he's even using an editor these days).

I find Koontz's horror to be more realistic, focusing less on the supernatural (although Koontz's horror isn't always entirely without a touch of the supernatural) and more on how flesh-and-blood human beings are the real monsters in this world. Granted, King also has written works featuring some monstrous human beings, especially the authoritarians in King's dystopian novel titled The Long Walk, which is my favorite of his (first published in 1979 under King's pseudonym of Richard Bachman). But Dean Koontz gets my vote for America's Number One writer of suspense and horror.

To others reading this: What's your opinion on Dean Koontz? Do you compare him with Stephen King, or some other author? I understand that Koontz originally began as a writer of science fiction, but I haven't read any of his science fiction.

I'm also tagging @Debater Slayer because I know he enjoys horror stories.

Wow.
I thought I was familiar with the Dean Koontz library but I was unaware of Devoted.
And now that I know it is an (unofficial) sequel to Watchers, I will most definitely be looking it up.

My opinion of Dean Koontz is that it is an insult to compare him to Stephen King.
Stephen King is almost comparable to Dean Koontz.

Don't get me wrong, I like Stephen King, but it is my opinion his writing style does not hold a candle to Dean Koontz.
Or Robin Cook.


I was recently introduced to the Body Farm series by Jefferson Bass.
The interesting thing about the one author (William Bass) is that they started the body farms project.

 

[jbg]

I just finished reading A Man of Iron; the Turbulent Life and Improbably Presidency of Grover Cleveland by Troy Senik. His final words "I have tried so hard to do right” (link) sum up his life. He is best known for being the only president to serve two non-contiguous terms, and the first Democrat elected after the Civil War. He is indeed not well known for events or achievements during his presidency.

There is much interesting both about the book and the man. Perhaps a person who serves so many positions without moral blemish should be notable. In those days as now, scandal in one form or another swirls around presidents and other prominent politicians. In fact, by the time his terms of office ended, he was clearly a man of the past. It is unfortunate that nowadays as in his days, such virtue is rewarded backhandedly or not at all. The role of the federal government is vastly expanded from his days, and he was dealt with in the headlines a lot less than modern presidents.

His example and integrity should be better known and rewarded.

 

[JustGeorge]

Today I read a bit out of Mahabharata(book 2), and some from The Druidry Handbook.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

I am currently reading "For Love of Mother Not" by Alan Dean Foster.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

It's @Heyo s fault (and my German teacher's) that seeing him makes me think of a Southerner doing Terminatoe while speaking German. "ES TOOHT MIRH LEEIID!

 

[RestlessSoul]

Im currently reading "The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire" by Dmitri Volkoganov, and "I love Russia", a collection of essays and articles by Russian journalist and activist Elena Kostyuchenko.

The former is a fairly straightforward history by someone who, in the 1990s, had access to records available to researchers for only a brief period in the post Soviet era. It probably couldn't be written now. The latter is an incredible testament to human courage; it is also an utterly heartbreaking portrait of a broken country. Kostyuchenko has been beaten and arrested several times, just for telling her readers what she sees in the various regions of her country and its satellites. Several of her colleagues on independent newspaper Novaya Gazetta have died in mysterious circumstances.

 

[Wu Wei]

It's @Heyo s fault (and my German teacher's) that seeing him makes me think of a Southerner doing Terminatoe while speaking German. "ES TOOHT MIRH LEEIID!

 

[JIMMY12345]

I bet The Bible, The Koran, The Veda's The Torah will all be mentioned but does not have to be religious.
*********************************************
I was in a charity shop and picked up David Niven's The Worlds a balloon. Hilarious 6/10.
Your turn.

Putin His Life and Times: Philip Short 2022 approx 500 pages
Phillip Short was Foreign correspondent in Moscow and Washington

It has a few pages implication Putin likes Trump but no respect.Putin does not like Biden but respects him.Follows is write up by reviewer

Vladimir Putin is the world's most dangerous man. Alone among world leaders, he has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbors, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections, and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. His regime is autocratic and deeply corrupt. But that is only half the story.

Unflinching, hard-hitting, and objective, Philip Short's biography gives us the whole tale, up to the present day. To the fullest extent anyone has yet been able, Short cracks open the strongman's thick carapace to reveal the man underneath those bare-chested horseback rides. In this deeply researched account, readers meet the Putin who slept in the same room as his parents until he was twenty-five years old, who backed out of his wedding right beforehand, and who learned English in order to be able to talk to George W. Bush.

Vladimir Putin is wreaking havoc in Europe, threatening global peace and stability and exposing his fellow citizens to devastating economic countermeasures. Yet puzzlingly many Russians continue to support him. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the many facets of the man behind the mask that Putin wears on the world stage.

Drawing on almost two hundred interviews conducted over eight years in Russia, the United States, and Europe and on source material in more than a dozen languages, Putin will be the last word for years to come.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Just started reading another few books bought whilst cheap - Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It (2019) by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, which seems to be a broad speculative coverage of human thinking over the last 200,000 years - so one perhaps not for the YEC community.

Out of Our Minds by Felipe Fernández-Armesto - review

Ideas and imagination are our starting-point, argues this big-canvas historian

www.standard.co.uk

This was so broad a sweep over time - as one might expect - as to require two or three readings. The following quotes from the author might raise a cheer from so many here on RF.

Supposedly divine revelations need human amanuenses [a person employed to take dictation or to copy manuscripts]. All scriptures are selected by tradition, modified by transmission, warped in translation, and misunderstood in reading. That they are or could be the unalloyed words of gods, 'inscribed', as the Bible says of the Ten Commandments, 'by the finger of God', must be a metaphor or a lie. They bring blights as well as blessings. Protestants of the Reformation thought they could replace the authority of the Church with the authority of Scripture, but demons lurk between the lines and pages of the Bible, waiting for someone to open the book. To a rational, sensible reader, supposedly sacred texts can only be decoded tentatively, at the cost of enormous investment in scholarship. Anti-intellectual, literal-minded interpretations fuel fundamentalist movements, often with violent effects. Renegades, terrorists, tyrants, imperialists, and self-proclaimed messiahs abuse the texts. False prophets sanctify their own perverse readings of them. p114/115

I love uncertainty. Caution, scepticism, self-doubt, tentativeness: these are the toeholds we grope for on the ascent to truth. It is when people are sure of themselves that I get worried. False certainty is far worse than uncertainty. The latter, however, breeds the former. p391

Like other books, the Bible reflects the times in which the books it comprises were written and assembled. The agendas of the authors (or, if you prefer to call them so, the human mediators of divine authorship) and the editors warp the text. Yet fundamentalists read it as if the message were uncluttered with historical context and human error, winkling out interpretations they mistake for unchallengeable truths. The faith is founded on the text. No critical exegesis can deconstruct it. No scientific evidence can gainsay it. Any supposedly holy scripture can and usually does attract literal-minded dogmatism. The name of fundamentalism is transferable: though it started in biblical circles, it is now associated with a similar doctrine, traditional in Islam, about the Qur'an. p392

 

[Rival]

Athenagoras' Plea.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

I got a physical copy of Xenogenesis, the collective trilogy of Lilith's Brood, by Octavia Butler, in one book. It was a bit pricey due to being out of print for decades now, but very worth it especially as it appears unread which means I had to start again from page one. Which itself was worth it as there's a lot going on and I forgot a bit of it.

 

[jbg]

I just finished reading The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History by Boris Johnson. Yes, that Boris Johnson, who was later a much less long serving or consequential British Prime Minister. Obviously, Winston Churchill was his hero, but he was many other people's heroes. For example, his grandson, who said: "You know, in many ways he was quite a normal sort of family man." After this quote, Boris Johnson states:

Yes, I say, but no normal family man produces more published words than Shakespeare and Dickens combined, wins the Nobel prize for literature, kills umpteen people in armed conflict on four continents, serves in every great office of state including Prime Minister (twice), is indispensable to victory in two world wars and then posthumously sells his paintings for a million dollars. I am trying to grapple with the ultimate source of all this psychic energy.
What, indeed, do we mean by mental energy? Is it something psychological or something physiological? Was he genetically or hormonally endowed with some superior process of internal combustion, or did it arise out of childhood psychological conditioning? Or perhaps it was a mixture of the two. Who knows-depends on your answer to the mind-body problem, I suppose.

I am wavering on whether to give this book 4 or 5 stars. I suppose I will give it 4 stars. The book come of like many other biographies of great leaders, verges on hagiography. I suppose this is inevitable because cover unless you are writing about a criminal or a horrible person, you write it out people who you admire. The book does not have some of the ills of most such books, which is to spend an undue amount of time on early life, which is usually quite unexceptional.

Boris Johnson does an extremely good job of laying out his greatness, without ignoring some of the shortcomings of the subject personally, or the mixed results of some of his initiatives. He obviously“hit the English language to war” (my statement coming at the authors) and earned him himself a place in history. Arguably without him, the world would have been dominated by two ogres, Stalin and Hitler. To that, we owe an immense debt. Is the crystal clear in this book.

The book also makes clear his intense ties to the United States and his love of this country.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Rabbi Sharon Brous’s book, The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World

 

[Mock Turtle]

Just started on - The Great Apes: A Short History (2017) by Chris Herzfeld - this being a fill-in as to previous knowledge about our primate cousins. Given that I have read quite a bit as to what our current knowledge is concerning such species. Quite enlightening already as to the lack of knowledge and even as to discerning the various species up until the 18th or 19th centuries, with scarcely anything larger than a monkey species arriving in Europe until the early 17th century.

 

[Starlight]

Secrets of divine love, a Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam by A Helwa

 

[exchemist]

Just finished Steinbeck's "The Moon is Down". A fictional tale of how the German occupation of a Norwegian mining village affects all those involved and how ultimately futile it is for the occupiers, as they become progressively more violent - and hated.

Before that I was reading "Refiner's Fire",which is a chronicle of the development in Britain of the historical performance revolution in early music (mainly Baroque), with period instruments, as pioneered by Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music. This is something that has taken place during my lifetime, transforming my appreciation of Baroque music, bringing to life especially Händel's operas and concerti grossi. So I was keen to read about who was involved and how it happened. A lot, interestingly, was to do with the recorded music business. Decca was a great patron of the new style and fortuitously the advent of CDs around the same time, with their greater sharpness and clarity of sound, showed off period instruments at their best. So people bought the CDs of the new style performances. One has to doubt that anything similar could happen today, now that accurate sound reproduction is no longer something anybody cares about.

 

[Rival]

The New Testament Environment, Eduard Lohse.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Just started on - The Great Apes: A Short History (2017) by Chris Herzfeld - this being a fill-in as to previous knowledge about our primate cousins. Given that I have read quite a bit as to what our current knowledge is concerning such species. Quite enlightening already as to the lack of knowledge and even as to discerning the various species up until the 18th or 19th centuries, with scarcely anything larger than a monkey species arriving in Europe until the early 17th century.

Finished this, and quite entertaining if a little horrifying as to human and other primate interactions - with the humans mostly doing much of the horrifying bits. As to firstly even trying to classify so many species correctly - when the young of any species were often classified differently from any adults for example - and as to how they were often treated whilst trying to understand them. It took a long while to just passively observe them, as Jane Goodall and others did, so as to recognise what their various actions meant to them. Given that observing any creature in a prison environment might not produce natural behaviour - and mostly just doesn't. And although much has changed, we are still using many primate species to test new drugs - because they are so closely similar to humans in many ways (note to YECs). Much to learn still, and perhaps AI will enable us to understand their communications before we wipe them all out.

A new quick read - Looking in The Distance: The Human Search For Meaning (2004) by Richard Holloway - a priest for four decades who apparently has lost his faith and now resides on the side of the demons.

 

[metis]

"Beyond Religion" by the Dalai Lama, and I'm about halfway through.

 

[JIMMY12345]

Just finished Steinbeck's "The Moon is Down". A fictional tale of how the German occupation of a Norwegian mining village affects all those involved and how ultimately futile it is for the occupiers, as they become progressively more violent - and hated.

Before that I was reading "Refiner's Fire",which is a chronicle of the development in Britain of the historical performance revolution in early music (mainly Baroque), with period instruments, as pioneered by Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music. This is something that has taken place during my lifetime, transforming my appreciation of Baroque music, bringing to life especially Händel's operas and concerti grossi. So I was keen to read about who was involved and how it happened. A lot, interestingly, was to do with the recorded music business. Decca was a great patron of the new style and fortuitously the advent of CDs around the same time, with their greater sharpness and clarity of sound, showed off period instruments at their best. So people bought the CDs of the new style performances. One has to doubt that anything similar could happen today, now that accurate sound reproduction is no longer something anybody cares about.

If he is the geezer who wrote "Grapes of wrath" Steinbeck is up with the greats