Cicero's Wisdom

A home without books is a body without soul.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

Review: Monster Hunter International

Monster Hunter International could best have been titled 'Gun Porn Meets Deadly Mythical Monsters'. Larry Correia certainly wrote what he knows, being a competitive shooter, gunsmith, and general gun afficionado (nut sounds prejudicial).

On the plus side, the monsters are bad. Not bad as in poorly done, bad as in 'badass'. There are no sparkly vampires here. There is no urbane hedonist with whom to have a long philosophical discussion. There are bloodsucking undead monsters and their minions. There are creatures from fantasy that are and are not what you would expect. There are horrors from beyond our mortal realm that have the distinct odeur of Lovecraftianity. (Yes, I just invented a word.... but it was better than Lovecraftiness...)

While I'm not 100% fond of Larry's 'gun porn', that could just be me. Oddly enough, I used to like this kind of thing when I was a teen, but enough time with professional soldiers and police and one too many John Ringo volumes showering deep and abiding love upon the minutiae of firearms specifications kind of shattered my interest in that and it appears not to be healing.

I also wasn't fond of the life story of our hero. I'm not going to spoil it here, but simply let us say that to hunt monsters, you have to be badass. Badass is okay. Badass and accountancy just aren't. A number of apsects of the hero's backstory tried to explain the combination and the raison d'etre for that reality, but it came off feeling still incredibly unlikely.

The nature of hunting such supernatural beasties requires the hunters be nigh supernatural themselves (in competence, in will, in experience and skills, and perhaps in other respects). It's probably because I've always gotten more from stories of how average men rise above their humble roots to be something more that I don't find hero background tales with nobility, rich family, overachieving honours student, super martial arts master, etc. to make for terribly interesting protagonists, even if they don't acknowledge their gifts for some lengthy stint.

I also found some of the plot twists rather obviously telegraphed (that may have been intentional, but I can certainly say it was suspensful) and others less obviously telegraphed were equally predictable. 

But those are my major complaints and they still won't stop me giving the book a 7/10 overall rating. If I had to decompose that, I might give it a 6/10 on character origin and development, mostly because I wasn't fond of the main protagonist but did like many of the supporting players, a 7/10 on plot due to some of the telegraphing, and a 9/10 on narrative style.

Narrative style is Larry's strongest asset as a writer in my opinion. His narrative reads easily and it has a certain mojo to it. That's not a very technical term, but it feels like the right term because when you read it, you do kind of get sucked in and the pages flow by (even though there are a lot of them in MHI). I didn't find his prose made me want to skip over sections or use the book to suffocate myself. Overall, I quite enjoyed the read.

I think the work is good enough to have me consider picking up the second one (Monster Hunter Vendetta). There's a third one in the series, but I think I want to take this one book at a time, even though the third one focuses on one of the more interesting characters from MHI.

If you do enjoy technically detailed firearms discussions, that probably won't bug you like it did me. If you more easily accept truly exceptional hero backgrounds, that probably won't bother you either. You'll glide smoothly through Larry'a narrative unless perhaps you have a pro-authority/anti-libertarian sort of outlook since Larry's MHI characters are about as anti-government as you can get without being in a militia blowing up government buildings. Now, in their defense, his Feds are the sort of characters few might like, even if they do think they're doing what they do for the right reasons.

If you enjoy scenes of evil critters getting their just deserts from desperate heroic characters, then MHI is just the book for you. No sparkles. No teenage vampire angst. Just a lot of throw down, beat down, blow down and burn the bits fights. Car chases. Airborne adventures. Dungeon delving. You name it, it's there. Larry knows how to weave a good pulp adventure tale - disparate and unique locations, each of which becomes a life-or-worse-than-death battleground with dramatic heroics and sacrifice at every turn.

I'm going to probably pick up the next one in a short time and see where this road leads. You may want to do the same.

More pages fall before me!

Nitpicker's Guide for Next Generation Trekkers

This was a loaner from my cousin in Missouri. I have to admit, I never thought I'd enjoy a book like this, but I am a trivia buff and much of what the author dug up was entertaining. He poked a lot of holes in continuity and in terms of on-going logic (invent something cool, never see it again, don't appreciate its ramifications). He also pointed out a lot of inconsistencies in ship design and other sorts of changes that most humans would never notice.

All in all, I'd rate this one a guilty pleasure if you enjoy all things Star Trek and have a penchant for the trivial. I owe Alan a good book, maybe something about real football (like the CFL) so he could appreciate that soccer or footie is a distinct sport but will never be 'football'.

 
Widowmaker
Mike Resnick wrote this one. Apparently there are an entire series of stories about the character Jefferson Nighthawk, a retired (or cryo-suspended if you prefer) bounty hunter and gunman, one of the nastiest killers on the Frontier.

The book is more about one of his (apparently several) clones, the idea being that people needed his skillset and he was too sick so they made a clone.

The clone exists to complete a mission but has a mind of his own. He's got the reflexes of the widowmaker, but the memories he gets quick loaded are from other people. He has the steel of a killer, but his (accelerated) upbringing doesn't make him an unthinking killer like his antecedent might be. He's a bit more naive as well. That said, he has his own mind and is as stubborn as the original and probably as deadly.

I liked this story because, like Serenity, it crosses the boundary between Western and SciFi. You could strip off the sci-fi and something of the sort could fit in a Klondike Gold Rush story. The characters act like Western novel characters and the flavour is there. There is enough of the sci-fi dressing to make it fit the scene, but that's just well applied varnish.

It's not the best book from a prose perspective and deep thought you probably won't get, but it is enjoyable and interesting for the way it ends. That made me want to find and read the others (before and after this one) in the series.
 

Cobra War!

I've moved through the third book of the Cobra War, but they've ended it with the need for either another book or a new trilogy (which is fine with me). If you are a fan of the franchise, you'll enjoy it. If not, you'll have to go back and do some homework because they don't rehash a lot of the history except in very slight references. Read the other books, it is a good ride to get to this point starting with "Cobra" itself.

I enjoyed this work but I knew I would as I enjoyed the others of the series. This book has the Aventinian and Caelian Cobras working hand in hand with their former enemy, the Quasamans and their Djinn to fight the invading Trofts. I won't spoil it, but these Trofts aren't the Trofts you are used to seeing through most of the other recent books and there is a really neat twist right at the end of the book tying back to the distant past that makes me even more anxious for the next one.

To prove not everything I read is escapist drivel or absolute trivia (or both at once), I submit the other book I worried my way through: "Jutland 1916: Death in the Grey Wastes".

This book works more to be a balanced narrative account of what happened to capture the flow of events rather than to focus on any one theory of what went right or wrong or to deal with any particular controversies or inconsistencies within accounts. It mentions briefly some of these, but it focuses mostly on giving the reader and accounting of who went where and did what and how well that worked out (or didn't).

The fascinating thing about this book is the clear explanation of how Dreadnaughts meeting even large, thousand plus man crewed pre-Dreadnaughts outclassed the prior designs by light years. What becomes quite clear here is it had to be nearly criminal to send out the pre-Dreadnaughts as they could not match slug-for-slug with the newer ships with their bigger guns, better fire control, belt armour, armoured decks, internal bulkheading and better fire suppression discipline. The book was also pretty graphic about what happened to light cruisers or destroyers that happened across Line of Battle vessels... and it was not pretty.

The other thing that is striking is how mundane some parts of the account were, like one of the head bakers on one of the ships working hard to save the bread after his ship's superstructure was shot to shards so that his surviving crew would eat something fresh, or the stories of the many underage (by today's standards) boys employed on such ships and their experience of this battle that would shake experienced Captains to the core.

Lastly, the account captures the power of PR in wartime. Scheer did not succeed in inflicting much of a defeat in detail on the Royal Navy nor of attriting is sufficiently to allow a subsequent even-strength clash between the German High Seas Fleet and the Royal Navy. He did succeed in escaping the trap he'd walked into, at least partly because of good training (his side practiced a bit of night fighting, the British did not)  and partly because of a degree of luck. He did succeed in getting back to his home port first to tell the story which he put quite spin on.

Scheer played up the German outcome to the point where when Jellicoe and his Battle Line arrived home, there was little fanfare and some condemnation already apparent (from reports coming back out of Europe via the press). Jellicoe did the only strategically important thing for him to do (not lose enough of his force to be unable to contain the Germans or allow them to have an even strength clash) and yet he for quite a while was portrayed as the loser of the battle thanks in large part to Scheer's early characterization of the outcome. The media had power even in WWI Europe!

A good historical lesson that sometimes the loser can at least for a time be the winner if he courts public opinion effectively.

E-reader!

The last two above I read on my Kobo. That thing goes on and on without needing recharged and is a joy to read. Great buy and even better when I got it free from Chapters. My only bit of luck recently of a financial sort but a good bit nonetheless.


Works In Progress

T.A. Mahan's "The Major Operations of the Navies of the War of American Independence" is one book I'm working my way through. I had no idea the Colonists were so fast off the mark and so hot-blooded at the start of the Revolution. I suppose they stole a march or two on the British to good effect by being so and I'm grateful for expanding my knowledge of North American history, something often taugh rather poorly in North American public schools. Perhaps much like mathematics or English.

I've discovered another interesting free T.A. Mahan book at Project Gutenberg. It has the long title "Types of Naval Officers (drawn from the History of the British Navy)" and seems like it may be worth a read for anyone interested in nautical matters.

I'm also working through "Agent of Vega" by James H. Schmitz as re-released by Baen. This is a re-release of the 1960 classic. It focuses on espionage and the work of Zone agents within the larger tapestry of the Schmitz universe where characters like Telzey and Trigger from his other works roam. I've enjoyed every other Schmitz reprint.

This one has a foreward by noted author Mercedes Lackey about how this was the book that got her into Sci-Fi originally and how that inevitably lead to her being a Sci-Fi author.

I wonder, if I ever get published, if I'll be able to name my first read sci-fi novel. Star Wars, a New Hope? Something from RA Heinlein? Aasimov? I can name my first Fantasy Novel (LOTR!) but not sure I can name my first Sci Fi novel. Heinlein, Vonnegut, Asimov, L. Neil Smith and any number of others would have filled the early days.

Anyway, if this book is half as good as Schmitz other work, it'll be a great read.

Waded through another book on my backlog....

I had picked up another book about Vorkosigan with some reluctance. I have several friends that consider Lois McMaster Bujold's writing style to be delectable, so I once again tested the waters.



Capsule Review:

It must just be me, but I find Bujold's writing style to be somewhat self-indulgent and flowery for the genre of military SF. Some amount of that can be hand-waved away by saying that the main character Miles Vorkosigan is a very different sort of fellow - intense, driven, intellectual, etc. Some amount of it can be hand-waved away by realizing the book is about military and espionage covert operations more or less made up on the fly if such a thing makes any sense. And still, I find it a bit much.

I did learn a couple of new words, which I find enjoyable (swive and uxorial). But then, betimes I enjoy reading a dictionary, so I might just not be the average reader.

The story itself was not glaringly problematic. I did see a bit of (depending on your taste) incredibly ingenious plotting or incredibly contrived plotting in how the main challenge appeared and was dealt with.

I also take an issue with this due to the genre the book was written in (military and/or espionage SF). I've met a fair number of people from both modern communities of that ilk and it seems to me Vorkosigan is not fit for the work. His personality type (self-doubting, somewhat flighty as his mind flits from worry to worry, and rather glibly chatty) does not fit with the members of either profession.

In some sense, that may be the point; Miles is a fish of a different variety. That said, I think he would not survive the actuality of such operations. I just don't find him believable in the role. I find many of the leaps of logic he makes rather unlikely and I cannot shake the feeling that he would be busted out of the service. The books make lip service to the latter threat, trading against his Imperial bloodline in many cases or the success of his unconvential operation as the bromide. My experience of the sort of people who work in both the espionage and covert special operations realms (or the broader combat arms) is that they are not the sort to excuse bad process and poor craft simply based upon good results so far.


Will many readers enjoy the book? I don't doubt it, in the same way many readers enjoy Stainless Steel Rat or similar works. This work has the same improvisational plotlines that make for a fun read, if you happen not to know how the real professions work or the sorts of people that populate them (and most people do not have those sorts of connections).

I enjoyed the book well enough, but I did regularly have to beat down the little voice saying 'that wouldn't fly' or 'that was convenient' or 'person X I know would have thought about having this guy shot'.

Perhaps I judge too harshly and this is meant to be more of an adventure story than military SF. But the story cloaks itself in that sort of accoutrement so against that background I judge it.

Overall, I'd say it is about a 3 out of 5. If you need to fill some time, its not a bad read. But this author has not impressed me enough to buy another of these books.

I got some reading in!

Blackcollar: The Judas Solution 

Capsule Review:

Follows on from Blackcollar and Blackcollar:Backlash Mission and provides (perhaps) a wrap up for the series. Without spoiling the story, the Blackcollars are at their usual shenanigans again - guerilla warfare, midirection, tactical actions that support inobvious strategic ends, etc. The ending is vaguely bittersweet and it does provide what could be a warp on the series and the conflict between the Human and the Ryquil if the author wants this to be the last book. I enjoyed it, but it was exactly what I was expecting and you need to read the others books first.

Cobra Alliance: Cobra War: Book I 

Capsule Review:

Follows on from Cobra, Cobra Strike, Cobra Bargain (the first trilogy, available together ) with a story of a new generation of Cobras from the Cobra Worlds (Aventine particularly). It invokes the character of Jasmine "Jin" Moreau Broom from Cobra Bargain and sets her off on a cryptic secret mission. At this point, she's an older lady with some of the early onset of the problems that beset the Cobras due to all of their implants. The story traces that mission and the outcomes as a whole new arc (for the new trilogy) unfolds, involving Jin, her husband, her offspring, and some old familiar faces along with many new ones. Another interesting yarn, if you liked the other three in the series.

Cobra Guardian: Cobra War, Book 2

Capsule Review:

Technically, this one doesn't count as reading because I heard it as an audible.com audiobook on my iPod. I must say, for eyes that have been strained by lengthy times in front of the computer, the audiobook is a nice touch. OTOH, I think it adds 25-50% to the reading time for a book. OTGH, this means that you could be doing other things while you listen to it. I will be buying the book in paperback just to have the complete set to loan out or reread, but the audiobook is a good thing to have too. 


This follows up on Cobra Alliance and follows more of the happenings to Jin, her husband and some of the offspring. It follows activities on Caelian and Aventine with a Quasama tie-in and sets the stage for the third book in the series, coming January 2012, called Cobra Gamble which will supposedly tie up this trilogy. I enjoyed this book although I will note this is more of the same sort of writing and stories from the first three books so one knew what one was getting. 

The narrator of the audiobook was okay (its a hard task to do well and alien voices always will be problematic) so I could listen to it easily enough - far easier than my lastest Han Solo book from audible.com.  I understand as the reader, you want to help the listener feel the book, but that effort should be a light touch and I found this was true with this narrator, but not with the one reading the Han Solo book (rather too emphatic for my tastes, although it did integrate some musical soundtracking if I recall which wasn't a bad idea). 

Latest shipment of Dead Tree Readers

Sails on the Horizon: A Novel of the Napoleonic Wars

The Photographer's Eye Field Guide: The essential handbook for traveling with your digital SLR camera 

The above is a pocket book sized format. I admit I did not pay enough attention and did not expect that!

Blackcollar: The Judas Solution 

Cobra Alliance: Cobra War: Book I  

  Writing Dialogue 

  Guidebook to the Historic Sites of the War of 1812: 2nd Edition, Revised and Updated 

Any Approaching Enemy: A Novel of the Napoleonic Wars 



 That ought to cover most of the low-hanging fruit that was easily available on my Amazon wish-list. And add to the never-ending queue of unread books. I am working through Horse Soldiers. This is a good novel about the initial movement of US SF into Afghanistan at the start of the current conflict. 

An interesting article on the progress of E-books and book pricing

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703838004576274813963609784.html

It is interesting that the self-published authors are now getting more attention as the consumers decide whose works they enjoy and are willing to pay for. I suppose this could reduce the standards of literature, but I don't really fear for the 'good book'. They'll still exist even in the new world of digital production and distribution.

Fun Quotes

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
William James

Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.
Peter Marshall

A true friend stabs you in the front.
Oscar Wilde

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.
Thomas Jefferson

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx

My friend James Cameron and I made three films together - True Lies, The Terminator and Terminator 2. Of course, that was during his early, low-budget, art-house period.
Arnold Schwarzenegger


The poor dog, in life the firmest friend. The first to welcome, foremost to defend.
Lord Byron


At every crisis in one's life, it is absolute salvation to have some sympathetic friend to whom you can think aloud without restraint or misgiving.
Woodrow Wilson

 You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.
Laurence J. Peter

 The cat could very well be man's best friend but would never stoop to admitting it.
Doug Larson

 Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
Mark Twain

Beware of the person of one book.
Thomas Aquinas

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
Ray Bradbury 

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
Edward Gibbon

A nice quote....

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.

James A. Froude (1818 - 1894)

How To Destroy Your Credibility As An Author

http://booksandpals.blogspot.com/2011/03/greek-seaman-jacqueline-howett.html

The book review was tough but fair. The author's replies in the comments to follow went from impolite to downright offensive and passed well off into 'tainted for life'.

The correct response for a review, even one you disagree with, is 'Thank you'. Thank your reviewer, display some class. Don't argue, don't engage in a duel about the review, just thank the reviewer for taking the time to review your work.

Professionalism isn't just a matter of blind convention; Professionalism is noticed by those who publish and by the reading public in general. So is its opposite.

Fantastic Book Quote

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.

How I love them!
How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
  - Arnold Lobel

20 Untranslatable Words... and some translations....

20 Untranslatable Words

I suppose by untranslatable, they mean not translated by a single equivalent word in another language.

Some of them embody interesting concepts from another culture and other are just simply a piece of the mundane for which most of us just don't have a specific word.

Review: Into The Storm (Destroyermen, Book 1)

I am not, generally, a fan of revisionist histories or alternate histories. The two examples I can think of that make that an incomplete generalization are Into The Storm and The Peshawr Lancers.

I dislike the genre often because it is so typically focused on American History and often preoccupied with World War II European or Pacific Theater or with the American Civil War (some sort of counter-insurgency that most Americans are obsessed with... *grin*).

The Peshawr Lancers was different as it focused on a British Empire that had had to move its capital to the Raj. Also the main character, an English Officer, had a Sikh for a side-kick and that was quite an interesting choice.

What makes Into The Storm fascinating is the history lesson that goes with it. From the description on Amazon, where they talk about Taylor Anderson (the author):

Taylor Anderson has a Master's Degree in History and teaches that subject at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. He is the author of a historical work entitled "The Life and Tools of the Rocky Mountain Free Trapper" and a number of short stories and articles. He also won several Inter-Collegiate Press Association awards while a student. He is a voracious consumer of literature of every description and a careful and meticulous historian.

Besides his academic accomplishments, he is a gun-maker and forensic ballistic archeologist, having collaborated with numerous museums as well as the National Parks Service and the U.S. Army. He is a technical and dialogue consultant for movies and documentaries and has even done some acting. A list of productions in which he has been involved is available, but it is safe to say he has played at least an advisory role in many of the movies made in the last 15 years that involved 19th and early 20th Century combat.

He is a member of the National Historical Honor Society and the United States Field Artillery Association - from which he was awarded the Honorable Order of St. Barbara. He owns a collection of 18th and 19th century artillery pieces and fires them with live rounds for movie sound, documentaries, competition and fun. His cannons have also appeared in many films. He knows precisely what they are capable of and that is reflected in his writing.

As a sailor, he is conversant in the capricious vagaries of the weather and the sea and as a historian, he is trained to research what he is unable to experience first-hand. Careful research was essential to writing Destroyermen because one of the main characters is, after all, USS Walker. Over 270 "four-stacker" destroyers were built during and after WW I, but none remain today. Anderson spent thousands of hours researching the class and volunteering to work on the restoration of a similar type ship.

He also wanted the "alternate Earth" he created for the story to seem as though it could realistically have evolved the way it did. That required studying the most recent theories regarding prehistoric life and scientifically extrapolating evolutionary trends based on millions of years of environmental fluctuations. The result is a novel that is far more unusual and thought provoking than the basic "alternate history/universe" premise might imply.

He was moved to write Destroyermen because he has long been inspired by the sacrifice made by the men (and women) of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet at the outbreak of WW II. Long neglected by historians, the stand they made truly ranks with Thermopylae, The Alamo, Bastogne and Wake Island. He hopes to keep alive, at least peripherally, their memory. The alternate history/fantasy angle finds an opening because some of the ships of the Asiatic Fleet really did disappear without a trace.

I learned a lot about the experience of Americans in the early war in the Pacific as they were hammered by the Japanese. I learned about battles I'd never heard of and learned a bit about the sorts of sailors the US Asiatic Fleet was made up of. I also learned a lot about the ships like the USS Walker, a DD well into late life even by the start of the war.

Now, of course, this is an alternate timeline book and the Walker's fate is considerably different than that of the historical one. But the story weaves an interesting series of what-if turns. It explores what might have happened if lands and seas were the same, but species upon them or under them were not. It has a Mcguffin to create the situation, but otherwise feels reasonable.

I have to say I'd recommend this book. The yarn is good, the characters (good, bad or indifferent) are endearing, and the ship (as a character of sorts) is vividly brought to life. I look forward to the two sequels (I guess a 4th book is on the way or out in hardcover).

If I had any criticisms, they would be twofold: the enemy of the piece is initially laid out as inexorable, terrible, and nearly mindless. Over time, things come to light which makes this assessment both too simplistic and too mild, and one of the characters (a captured Japanese) is made rather sympathetic - although possible, this feels somewhat like a cop-out, but perhaps this was done as a counterbalance to the enemy of the book who turn out to be the boogeymen everyone saw the Japanese as - powerful, merciless, ruthless, etc.

At any rate, I enjoyed the heck out of this book and can't wait for the sequels I have ordered to arrive at my local bookstore!

Altered Sense of Time

This article gives a little bit of a perspective as a neuroscientist looks into why we have an altered sense of time in life threatening situations along with very vivid recall.

I post it on a blog about books and writing because it may help inform someone writing about these sorts of situations with some sense of what might actually be happening neurologically. I guess this is the sort of general background knowledge a writer needs to absorb. Neuroscience these days is telling writers all sorts of useful things about the mind and the body if they are paying attention.

Article from npr.org

"Turns out, when you're falling you don't actually see in slow motion. It's not equivalent to the way a slow-motion camera would work," David says. "It's something more interesting than that."

According to David, it's all about memory, not turbo perception. "Normally, our memories are like sieves," he says. "We're not writing down most of what's passing through our system." Think about walking down a crowded street: You see a lot of faces, street signs, all kinds of stimuli. Most of this, though, never becomes a part of your memory. But if a car suddenly swerves and heads straight for you, your memory shifts gears. Now it's writing down everything — every cloud, every piece of dirt, every little fleeting thought, anything that might be useful.

Because of this, David believes, you accumulate a tremendous amount of memory in an unusually short amount of time. The slow-motion effect may be your brain's way of making sense of all this extra information. "When you read that back out," David says, "the experience feels like it must have taken a very long time." But really, in a crisis situation, you're getting a peek into all the pictures and smells and thoughts that usually just pass through your brain and float away, forgotten forever.

Quote:

Ever tried? Ever failed? No Matter, try again, fail again, Fail better.
- Samuel Beckett

The 9 Most Amazing Bookstores in the World

Pardon the source, but this is a great set of pictures and short descriptions of some pretty amazing bookstores. I'd like to visit most of them.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/26/9-of-the-most-amazing-boo_n_659870.html#s117832

---

I wonder if e-books, growing as they are in popularity, will turn real books once again into a special item, expensive to produce, fine of quality, and more artisanal than mass-production oriented?

I wonder if the real books someone keeps in their house will be of special value to them or if they'll simply represent what they want others to think they read, while they actually read tawdry teen vampire suck-novels on their electronic tablet? 

I'd hate to see the tangible, physical book die out. There is a substance and a reality to them that are hard to valuate, but which I think have a meaning. I'm not such a fan of e-books, even though I own many PDFs which are exceptionally portable.

There's just something about wandering in a book store with a hot cider in the winter. Or perusing the latest offerings in my local mall bookseller at lunchtime. And bookstores with character are like public houses with character - you just can't help hoping they never die out or change into something lesser.

And if things go bad in the world, we'll still be able to read conventional books by sunlight. Hopefully we'll have saved some good ones.

The BBC: Destroyers of the English Language

Participatory
Normal: PAR-tih-sih-pah-toh-ree
BBC: par-tih-sih-PAY-toh-ree

Regulatory
Normal: REG-yoo-lah-toh-ree
BBC: reg-yoo-LAY-toh-ree
 
Syracuse
Normal: SEE-rah-cue-suh
BBC: SYE-rah-cue-seh

Osaka
Normal: OH-saw-kah
BBC: aw-SAY-kah

There was another one from tonight I can't remember.

And the uniformity of their crappy pronunciation shows an attention and focus upon getting it wrong consistently.

They are awful. They have posh sounding accents but sound remarkably backward when they can't correctly pronounce common english words. 

English is a wonderful language. Who is going to teach it to the English?

Word of the Day: Sybilline

http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/archive/2010/07/08.html

This word has a classical, although somewhat murky derivation. I like it because of that classical tie in and the fact one of its definition involves another word I quite enjoy - oracular.

Great Quote

Adventure is just bad planning.  - Roald Amundsen

Your Ten Top Non-Fiction Books

A friend of mine had a great idea... a list of the ten best fiction books on his shelves.

I'm taking advantage of the concept but proposing the posting of lists of the ten best non-fiction books on your shelves. A brief description of why you chose your ten is a bonus.

My List:

1. The Prince and the Discourses (Niccolo Machiavelli)
2. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)
3. The Art of War (Sun Tzu, Cleary Translation)
4. Design Patterns (the "Gang of Four")
5. The Mythical Man Month (Fred Brooks)
6. The Second World War (Winston Churchill)
7. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Waterson)
8. The SAS Survival Guide (John Wiseman)
9. A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking)
10. Amo, Amas, Amat and More (Eugene Ehrlich)

Bonus Entry: Anything starting with FM-xxxx. (FM stands for Field Manual, US military) But since these I have on CD, I'd have to not include them in my base 10.

Another friend of mine said #1 and 3 above give you advice on how to live, #2 on why. I put #4 in because it represented a pardigm shift (literally) in my field and in my mindset. #5 explains why Project Management appears to have nothing in common with science or art (or success usually). #6 is about one of the key wars in human history and written by one of the most key figures. #7 is joy in book form. #8 could save your life. #9 will blow your mind (at least it did mine). #10 reminds us why some things from antiquity matter and how they can still be fun two thousand years later.

Your list?