Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite
3 Likes
Pharma by Gerald Posner. A look at how pharma got itās start and what it has become in the interim.
A most excellent book. You will never view politics the same. Congrats on educating yourself.
2 Likes
Penthouse Letters. Still.
3 Likes
Hate Inc by Matt Taibbi is a good follow-up/modern twist based on Manufacturing Consent. I probably should have read the latter first in hindsight.
Iāve heard this as well.
Just finished The Kaiserās Web by Steve Berry. Great Cotton Malone story.
Just picked up Battle Ground, latest in the Dresden Files series.
Also reading The Wheel of Darkness, Pendergast series, a @ChickenLittle recommendation.
1 Like
Iām a few chapters into The Queenās Gambit by Walter Tevis. Really good so far.
I usually prefer the book to the film, but the Netflix series of this was awesome, got me playing chess again.
Shuggie Bain, which so far is pretty engrossing.
Shuggie Bain is the debut novel by Scottish-American writer Douglas Stuart, published in 2020. It tells the story of the youngest of the three children, Shuggie, growing up with his alcoholic mother, Agnes, in the 1980s, in Thatcher-era post-industrial working-class Glasgow, Scotland.
Currently reading The Zealot and the Emancipator a book on John Brown and Abe Lincoln. Interesting take on the tumultuous time in Americas History.
Looking forward to reading Klara and the Sun by one of my favorite authors - Kazuo Ishiguro.
So after taking a break I did finish this, and I guess I was able to forgive the father in the end for being such a colossal disappointment. āAll the Light We Cannot Seeā is my favorite recent book, so it may have been that my expectations were too high. Still. I donāt forgive completely, lol.
After all that trauma, Iām afraid to ask if/how you got on with The Fault In Our Stars!
Haha, it probably - honestly - is a little triggering of trauma for me. My mother walked away when I was 12 and I spend my days listening to peopleās stories of similar or worse disappointment. I see kids with incarcerated or similarly their-choice not available parents. I just loathed that protagonist. I havenāt picked up another Doerr yet. I will. After a bit.
Go for The Shell Collector next. Same beautiful writing, but itās short stories so it has natural breaks in case of trauma overloadā¦
(Iām not going to comment on your very personal life experience in a public forum, but 
)
Eh, my personal life is all over this forum and Iām very free with it in my work. People have it much, much worse than me and I could talk about the many advantages each of my parents offered my childhood. They were complex. But thank you.
1 Like
Today I finished First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing ā¦ and Life by Joe Moran. I donāt read this genre much, but this is a brilliant and underrated book.
In the middle of The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis by Thomas Goetz.
Starting Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putinās Russia by Joshua Yaffa.
Quite possibly the shittiest novel I have ever read - and I taught it to my Contemp Lit seniors. What a pile of dreck.
Edit - I was talking about The Fault in Our Stars, off topic, sorry!
1 Like
Longbow: A Social and Military History by Robert Hardy (you may know him as the actor who played Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter movies, but he was also a world authority on the longbow)
1 Like
J.K. Rowling, who wrote the Harry Potter series, started a detective series under the pen name Robert Galbraith. Everyone knows itās her now, but she used a pen name so that her fame/influence would have no bearing on the āpublishabilityā of the novels.
Iām reading Troubled Blood, the 5th and latest in the series. Apparently thereās some big pc/social justice whatever shite controversy over transgender blah blah, which I will ignore until Iāve finished the book.
Itās also a TV series now, which I have not watched.
1 Like