Just finished "My Thoughts Be Bloody" which is a biography oof John Wilkes Booth and his brother Edwin. It discusses how the rivalry between the two contributed in JWB's assassination of Lincoln. I am now reading "Death and The Virgin Queen" which explores the mystery of the death of Amy Dudley the wife of Elizabeth I's favorite, Robert Dudley. She was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Possibilities are suicide, murder, accident or complications of breast cancer.
The Bible Unearthed, by Israel Finklestein and Neil Asher Silberman. It's an interesting book that details how archaeology is dispelling many of the myths, legends and propaganda perpetuated by the authors of the Old Testament books.
Ideas: The History of Thought and Invention, From Fire to Freud. I've been laboring my way through this behemoth for some time, but I'd definitely recommend it.
Descartes' Error Looking for Spinoza --Antonio Damasio How We Decide--Jonah Lehrer Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul--Deepak Chopra Voltaire (cough, cough)
...you all are. I've just finished the last of the Larsson trilogy The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. They're okay, but I don't fully understand the hype over his writing as they are dreadfully slow in parts and hardly match the pace of a Robert Parker novel or the beautiful prose of a James Lee Burke novel.
My staple is fiction... especially comedy and fantasy personal favourites are Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I like stuff which is not too heavy (physically or intellectually) to take on my commute.
Usually the Non-fiction is for home consumption, but there's so many distractions at home..... like logging on to RfM
"The Compassionate Instinct". But I just received notice from Amazon.com that "Soul Dust" by Nicholas Humphrey has been shipped. Woo! Hoo! I should have it by the first of next week.
Today I finished Miguel Delibes, El Hereje (The Heretic), national prize for novels in Spain 1999. Delibes' last and perhaps greatest novel tells the sad story of the first Lutherans in Spain under the Inquisition, in the 1550s. Spoiler alert: nearly everybody gets burned at the stake. No surprises there, but a thrilling page-turner nevertheless, because it describes the evolution of human interaction under duress. I'm sure I will re-read it before year's end.
For my birthday a nice old lady at the swimming pool where I work, gave me Paul Auster, Oracle Night. I'm going to read that tomorrow. The lady runs a bookstore on the mainland and says I'll love Auster.
I've also recently read Working with anger by Thubten Chödron, author of Buddhism for beginners. Would love to meet her. Hope she comes and speaks in this area some day.
And I would love to read a book about Alan Thuring, the man who won World War II for us (oops, I mean for you lol) by breaking the nazi code Enigma, but was discredited and driven to suicide for the unspeakable perversion of homosexuality, a mere few decades before being gay got trendy. Any recommendations?
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 02/10/2011 02:46PM by Zeno Lorea.
I am about 150 pages into "In Sacred Loneliness" by Todd Compton. I am really enjoying it thus far, there are some real gems in it. Like today how I read about Zina Huntington or whatever her name is. Her husband Henry Jacobs was excommunicated because he still loved her after Brigham Young decided that she would be just his wife.
The wierd part is, BY never even visited her hardly. Why does he have to take this woman from a man who obviously loves her and then just puts her in a house with a bunch of other women.
Interesting stuff, I tell my TBM DW some of the stuff I am reading and she said JS and BY are perverted mother effers (her words). Why she continues to believe but in the same breadth calls the prophets mother effers is beyond me.