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What books are people reading now?


The manic

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15 hours ago, seabear said:

Thank you Laza.  Yes, I enjoy reading Christopher G Moore. He also edited a book "bangkok noir". A collection of stories from the following writers: John Burdett, Pico Iyer, Christopher G Moore, Timothy Hallinan, Dean Barrett, Eric Stone, Stephen Leather, Colin Cotterill, Tew Bunnag, Alex Kerr, Vasit Dejkunjorn, Collin Piprell.

 

I will check the kirkusreviews. I am not impressed by the reviews from goodreads.

 

And while  I am here, "1421"  by Gavin Menzies, is an interesting read.

Yes.. 'Bangkok Noir'  I found to be a good introduction to some authors that I haven't read before..   there is another that I haven't read yet... Phnom Penh Noir... should be good too..   I'll have a look at '1421'.. thanks...

 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17077566-phnom-penh-noir

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3 minutes ago, Dmaxdan said:

Have you tried David Baldacci's  John Puller series?  They are uncannily similar to the Jack Reacher books, to the point that Lee Child has had a few subtle digs to the series in his own novels.

I found Reacher got a bit tiresome by the time I reached Night School,which I was unable to finish. I much prefer the Arkady Renko series by Martin Cruz Smith.

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I usually read a book a week. Best one recently is "A world lit only by fire." by William Manchester. Excellent book about the Dark Ages where barely anybody could read, most people didn't know what century they were in, there were no timepieces, most people didn't travel outside their village, and the villages didn't have names, or maybe named the place by the Big Tree. So if they left to go fight in a war and they lived, they couldn't find their way home because of no names and no knowledge of the area. Popes and Cardinals were having people murdered and indulging in orgies. A pretty pathetic time. The biggest bright spot is Magellan who opened up the world and showed it was round....but the people in power didn't like that and denied it as true. But that was the beginning of the end of the Dark Ages. Fascinating read.

if you like non-fiction one of the best books about an amazing Scotsman is called, "The Knife Man." About the father of modern surgery.....but he was much more than that, an amazing human being with a huge desire to learn new things. A lot of our knowledge of the human body, animals bodies, and many other things were initiated by this man. Before him doctors and barbers used to do blood letting to resolve health issues, as had been done for nearly a thousand years. This Scot changed the way we look at the human body and surgery. Great read.

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On 9/22/2017 at 10:46 PM, giddyup said:

I found Reacher got a bit tiresome by the time I reached Night School,which I was unable to finish. I much prefer the Arkady Renko series by Martin Cruz Smith.

I like the Jack Reacher series OK, but they seem overly unrealistic to me. He is more like Superman than a human being. However, I just finished reading

No Middle Name: The Complete Collected Jack Reacher Short Stories

 

The short stories are mostly about when he was young and explain how he became the man he came to be. It makes him a lot more interesting, but it is even more obvious that no kid could be that strong/smart.

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Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson...he has locales in Saigon in 1967 that I'm familiar with like Thi Sach St where my regular hotel was in HCMC 40 years later...haven't been back inna while, mostly hang in Hanoi these days...the novel won the US National Book Award for Fiction in 2007...Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano) was an influence and things get intense...

 

before I had re - read some stuff from a few years back and found that I had missed a lot...my head musta been inna different space then; I'm retired for a year now and more relaxed...

 

 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Mark Bowden's Hue 1968.  A well written book.  An amazing amount of firsthand interviews and supporting research will make this a standard for Vietnam War narratives in the future. 

Edited by zydeco
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