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olderthanIusedtobe
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PostSat Apr 27, 2019 4:36 pm 
Finally finished book 2 of The Expanse series. Got "Horizon" by Barry Lopez a few days ago. Read the intro but haven't dove back into it yet. Today picked up "All Systems Red" by Martha Wells, should be a quick read. Novella about a murderbot on contract for security detail for a surveying group. It managed to hack its programming so it could go on a rampage and kill the rest of the team if it wanted to, but it would rather be left alone and stream movies, tv shows and music. The team is discovering they were missing quite a bit of info about the part of the planet they are on, not sure if it's a malfunction or deliberate sabotage. Only 150 pages, should be able to breeze thru it. There are several related novellas referred to as The Murderbot Diaries. If I enjoy this I'll check out the others. Decent so far.

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Mike Collins
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PostMon Apr 29, 2019 7:03 am 
A recent visit to Cambodia spurred an interest in the human tragedy experienced by that nation during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror during 1975-1979. In First They Killed My Father-A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung the depth of that depravity is brought forward by a eyewitness survivor. The horrors of ideology gone mad are recounted with searing imagery. Those words are piercingly poignant in their exploration of this societal debacle.

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olderthanIusedtobe
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PostWed May 01, 2019 11:19 pm 
olderthanIusedtobe wrote:
Today picked up "All Systems Red" by Martha Wells, should be a quick read. Novella about a murderbot
Read it part of one day and finished it the next day. Really enjoyable. Picked up the 2nd book in the series "Artificial Condition" today and most of the way thru it already. Have the 3rd and 4th on order from the library.

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cdestroyer
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PostThu May 02, 2019 7:33 am 
Term limits by Vince Flynn Chiefs by Stuart Woods Transfer of Power by Vince Flynn

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MtnGoat
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PostThu May 02, 2019 12:40 pm 
Finished Seveneves. On to Kushiel's Dart. Sort of an alternate medieval European history meets 50 shades story.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
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markweth
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PostThu May 02, 2019 1:45 pm 
"Sometimes a Great Notion" by Ken Kesey. First book of his I've read and was highly recommended. Took me a while to get into it and I'm in the final stretch now. Had tried to read it twice before but couldn't get into it for some reason. It finally clicked when I started reading it this time around (after about 150 pages) and I'm looking forward to see how it plays out.

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PostThu May 02, 2019 1:55 pm 
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by historian Yuval Noah Harari. This is the third in a trilogy beginning with Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus. Intriguing thus far.

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Mike Collins
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PostTue May 07, 2019 2:34 pm 
The capture of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann in 1960 and his trial in Israel are explored and discussed in The Eichmann Trial by Deborah Lipstadt. She is speaking on Thursday at Temple De Hirsch Sinai. The book was read in preparation to hearing her speak about anti-Semitism which has been her life's study. Eichmann being found was simply happenstance. Eichmann's son "Klaus" boasted to his girlfriend's family in Argentina that his dad had been a high ranking Nazi. Klaus didn't know that his girlfriend's father was Jewish. The girlfriend didn't even know that fact as her dad had escaped Nazi Germany and hid his identity from even his family. The unlikely circumstance of his capture is only the preface to the trial which occupies the bulk of the narrative.

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olderthanIusedtobe
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PostTue May 07, 2019 3:25 pm 
Finished the Murderbot Diaries, would definitely recommend.

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zephyr
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PostWed May 15, 2019 8:26 pm 
Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee, Penguin Press, New York, 2019. This book is very interesting and reads easily. Here's McNamee's Wikipedia page. He.s been a Silicon Valley investor for 35 years. He co-founded successful funds in venture, crossover, and private equity. He's also a musician and partnered with U2's Bono in business projects. He was an early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg and introduced Zuckerberg to Sheryl Sandberg (the current No. 2 at FB). Good review here at Penguin Books. Available at the Seattle Public Library. Thought-provoking for sure. ~z

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neek
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PostThu May 16, 2019 8:30 am 
zephyr wrote:
Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee
Thanks for the review; I've been wanting to read this since hearing a great interview with him a few weeks ago. Also The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. But not sure I could stomach either right now. Need something more uplifting. On a different note, I recently finished The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke, particularly relevant now with the recent PG&E findings. It's a great overview of the history and politics of the US electrical grid, but don't expect any technical detail of how the grid actually works. You don't need these details, however, to follow the arguments for why the growing maintenance backlog is an issue, and why simply plugging in variable renewables isn't as easy as one might hope. I felt that the writing was decent, if a bit redundant and wandering. There's some pie in the sky stuff at the end that's fun to think about but not necessarily realistic (sprinkle some algorithms here and big data there and you've got a magic smart grid that draws power from everyone's electric car when a cloud blocks the sun, if I may oversimplify quite a bit). But the book isn't political, and is fairly nuanced and even-handed in addressing the various energy generation and storage technologies that tend to carry too much emotional baggage these days.

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olderthanIusedtobe
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PostFri May 17, 2019 12:09 pm 
From a recommendation from my dad I'm reading "The Art of Fielding" by Chad Harbach. Mostly enjoying it. Set at a fictional small college in Wisconsin, mostly about the baseball team and a shortstop that has risen from skinny unheard of kid from the Dakotas to a legit pro baseball prospect. But it jumps around from several different characters and various goings on around campus and the town. The school president having a fling with a student is wildly inappropriate and I've pretty much skipped over whole chapters to avoid that aspect of the book.

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Mike Collins
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PostSun Jun 02, 2019 6:30 am 
Nathaniel Philbrick answers the simple question of "How did America begin?" in Mayflower. His writing is a thoroughly researched account of the epic voyage and formative decades of the Pilgrims in their early years of European settlement in New England. The savage conflict of King Philip's war and the devastation for Native Americans occupies much of the narrative. The story of the Mayflower still has lessons to teach us.

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zephyr
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PostThu Jun 20, 2019 4:00 pm 
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells, Tim Duggan Books, New York, 2019. This book was written after the author first published a 2017 article in New York Magazine that drew enormous attention and raised a few hackles. Rather grim at times, but very readable. Here's a review in GoodReads. Available at the Seattle Public Library. ~z

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olderthanIusedtobe
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PostMon Jun 24, 2019 6:07 pm 
I've been in a rut. I think the last 3 books I started, I didn't finish. After taking a break I'm returning to the "Expanse" series w/ book 3, Abaddon's Gate. That will basically catch me up with where the TV series is at. Sounds like Amazon has been proceeding w/ filming the next season, although no release date has been announced.

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