Reading a few books at the moment.
Haruki Murakami “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” - Almost finished.
Dieter Rams “The Complete Works”
Floyd E. Toole “Sound Reproduction”
Nisid Hajari “Midnight’s Furies”
I read “As Little Design as Possible” last year. It’s so good.
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Did a lot of escapist reading when my power was out (twice, total of ten days) last month. Re-read some old favorites. . . novels in the B.Cool and Lam series by A.A. Fair (Earle Stanley Gardner) that are fun and very entertaining, and a Parker and then a Grofield novel by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) and “Quarry’s Choice” and “Quarry in the Black” by Max Allan Collins. Also Kurt Vonnegut’s “Bluebeard.”
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I like the visual aesthetic of Dieter Rams designs.
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I’ve been reading science books this year. I’m fascinated by the ability of scientists to meld quantum theory with Einstein’s theories of relativity and apply it to astronomy and the study of stars.
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“A Woman of No Importance”. The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped WinWorld War II, by Sonia Purnell
I’m a fan of WWII non-fiction. For those of you with similar tastes, I highly recommend this to better appreciate the role of the French Underground during WWII
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I was with the NRC. Became a Senior Resident Inspector a Beaver Valley, spent a number of years with the Office of Enforcement, and then went over to the fuel cycle until I retired. Did you ever run into a Don Beckman? He did a lot of contract work. Used to work for him at BV for a year.
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I’m reading the Tom Thorne series by Mark Billingham. I think I’m up to number eleven.
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DC Cook?
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I don’t remember Don Beckman. I met a lot of people in the industry during those years. Many of the faces remain but the names are long gone. The group that I worked with doing the TMI mods was a crazy fun bunch.
It’s a pair of 1100mw back to back units that AEP owns in Bridgman, Mi
A fabulous book that makes a credible case for our craziness being baked into our national DNA.
Over the last few years I’ve been reading a lot of political nonfiction that needn’t be discussed here, plus most recently Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Leadership” and Jon Meacham’s “Soul of America.” I love Meacham, but I think he has a tendency toward pollyanna-ishness when it comes to the American character. I’m not nearly as sanguine about our collective fortunes as he is.
Lately I feel like I haven’t been getting enough fiction in my diet, but rather than look for decent books, I’ve been relying on the one or two monthly freebies I get on my Kindle, thanks to my Amazon Prime membership. I may stop doing that, though, since these almost always trend toward suburban housewife book club kinds of things. Not that I need a hairy, masculine, rough-and-tumble book, but good literary fiction doesn’t always have to include a romance between a damaged-but-recovering heroine who has sworn off men because of her last relationship, and a mysterious, seemingly perfect strange man with hidden flaws, or one who’s equally damaged as the heroine, and whom she believes she can repair. Like many of the gender-biased films these books often become, they’re just not very good fiction. John Gardner was right when he famously decried the quality of most published fiction in the US.
It makes me wish John Irving wrote faster, or that Tim O’Brien was still writing at all. In fact, the last good examples of literary fiction I’ve read are all several years old:
In One Person - John Irving
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle - David Wroblewski
Gilead and Home - Marilynne Robinson
Driftless - David Rhodes
My favorite fiction books of all time are probably Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and Ferrol Sams’s trilogy Run with the Horsemen / The Whisper of the River / When All the World Was Young
Favorite nonfiction may be Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly but there are plenty of other contenders, too.
After I open them at Christmas, I’ll be reading A. Anatoli’s Babi Yar and the first volume of Volker Ullrich’s Hitler biography.
Feeling low lately, so rereading one of my favorites
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An excellent read.