Chuck's Reading Room

[Bklyn]

For the literate.

[It's me Karen]

Suspecting this thread will remain quite empty.

[T Dot O Dot]

#GameOfThrones !!!!!

[Bklyn]

the timeline of the show is a little confusing. One episode Lady Stark is on her horse going to some far away land after an assassination attempt on (her and) her child, but she doesn't inform her husband. Then the next episode the daughter gets into some shit with the fake Draco Malfoy and he's back in no time.

Karen

LOL. Actually, the old World Crossing NBA guys are a bit snobbish in their bookishness. Historically, the thread keeps a decent amount of traffic.

[Chuck Nevitt]

Thanks for recreating the thread...the night before WX was imploded I scanned the old thread. Good times.

Since the Civil War started 150 years ago I've been on one of my mil-hist benders...really that and music theory/biography/criticism are all I read.

Read a really disappointing history of the entire war by John Keegan. He's an eminence, but this was crap. Another reminder that anything can get published. Now in the midst of a book about the campaigns leading up to Yorktown...it amuses me to no end that the much-worshiped Founding Fathers were a frail bunch, the Continental Army was constantly running into the Colonial version of tax rebels and deficit hawks, and the deal couldn't've been sealed without the French. The F R E N C H.

[Bklyn]

History is cluttered with ironic and fortuitous bounces...

[AugustWest]

the timeline of the show is a little confusing. One episode Lady Stark is on her horse going to some far away land after an assassination attempt on (her and) her child, but she doesn't inform her husband. Then the next episode the daughter gets into some shit with the fake Draco Malfoy and he's back in no time.

not sure exactly what you're referring to. Catlyn is basically following Ned, Sansa, and Arya to Kings Landing about two weeks behind. Travel between Kings Landing and Winterfell takes approximately a month.

[T Dot O Dot]

the timeline of the show is a little confusing. One episode Lady Stark is on her horse going to some far away land after an assassination attempt on (her and) her child, but she doesn't inform her husband. Then the next episode the daughter gets into some shit with the fake Draco Malfoy and he's back in no time.

Yeah, they are condensing some of the timelines in the effort of turning 1000+ pages into 10 episodes.

Are you still watching? I know alot of non-read viewers are starting to get skeptical

I have my own issues about how a TV series can fully capture the world of Westeros because as convoluted as it seems now, it only gets worse

in the end, I suspect the series will be for the readers and less for the casual viewer

[T Dot O Dot]

the timeline of the show is a little confusing. One episode Lady Stark is on her horse going to some far away land after an assassination attempt on (her and) her child, but she doesn't inform her husband. Then the next episode the daughter gets into some shit with the fake Draco Malfoy and he's back in no time.

not sure exactly what you're referring to. Catlyn is basically following Ned, Sansa, and Arya to Kings Landing about two weeks behind. Travel between Kings Landing and Winterfell takes approximately a month.

was a little confused myself

Brook, Catelyn Stark followed Ned to King's Landing, he didn't return to her

[It's me Karen]

the timeline of the show is a little confusing. One episode Lady Stark is on her horse going to some far away land after an assassination attempt on (her and) her child, but she doesn't inform her husband. Then the next episode the daughter gets into some shit with the fake Draco Malfoy and he's back in no time.

Karen

LOL. Actually, the old World Crossing NBA guys are a bit snobbish in their bookishness. Historically, the thread keeps a decent amount of traffic.

lol Just messin' with you all.

[bling]

Reading "Assembling California" now by John McPhee -- pretty interesting geological history of this great tectonic mash-up of a state. Fairly technical at times ("oliophite" -- new word for me) but also humanizing of the geophysicists and geologists.

[Chuck Nevitt]

McPhee is always good.

Drove to Vegas for fam reunion last weekend. On the way back, took the Extraterrestrial Highway through Rachel, NV and got a few souvenirs. (On the way down, got souvenirs for the wife's family at the Mustang Ranch, heh.) Very interesting trip geology-wise. Doing the ET Highway on a moonless night sounds downright eerie.

[Bklyn]

An extension of the heated "Tiger Mom" book that came out a few moons ago...

http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/ ... ns-2011-5/

[Chuck Nevitt]

Dead on...

The law professor and writer Tim Wu grew up in Canada with a white mother and a Taiwanese father, which allows him an interesting perspective on how whites and Asians perceive each other. After graduating from law school, he took a series of clerkships, and he remembers the subtle ways in which hierarchies were developed among the other young lawyers. There is this automatic assumption in any legal environment that Asians will have a particular talent for bitter labor, he says, and then goes on to define the word coolie,a Chinese term for bitter labor. There was this weird self-selection where the Asians would migrate toward the most brutal part of the labor.

By contrast, the white lawyers he encountered had a knack for portraying themselves as above all that. White people have this instinct that is really important: to give off the impression that they’re only going to do the really important work. You’re a quarterback. It’s a kind of arrogance that Asians are trained not to have. Someone told me not long after I moved to New York that in order to succeed, you have to understand which rules you’re supposed to break. If you break the wrong rules, you’re finished. And so the easiest thing to do is follow all the rules. But then you consign yourself to a lower status. The real trick is understanding what rules are not meant for you.

[Owlman]

one of my favorite books was A Treasury of Great American Scandals by Michael Farquhar. I actually got the Book on CD, downloaded to my IPOD and listened to it on the way to my work or in my office when I was taking a break.

[Mad]

Nearly halfway through a manga series called The Silent Service by Kaiji Kawaguchi. Reading it in Japanese so it's taking forever but it's worth it because it's so well done.

"The U.S. and a shadow Japanese government develop Japan's first nuclear-powered submarine to help protect Japan's sea lanes, keeping the project top-secret to avoid offending the Japanese public's antinuclear sensibilities. The 60,000-horsepower sub is an American design, but it incorporates superior Japanese technology and is commanded by an elite Japanese crew led by the charismatic Commander Shiro Kaieda. Everything goes according to plan until the sub embarks on a test run with the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Commander Kaieda and his crew suddenly mutiny and take off with U.S. ships in hot pursuit. And that's just the beginning. Kaieda is no ordinary mutineer. He commands the world's most powerful nuclear sub, and he has an agenda..."

Kawaguchi never mentions how Kaieda got the 76 men on his crew to buy into his plan (or hasn't yet, but if he intended to it seems he'd have done so by now).

[Bklyn]

We don’t read books about the Great Depression that were written in 1932. We don’t read newspaper accounts of the Mercury astronaut program from 1961. Instead, we turn to John Kenneth Galbraith’s book from 1954 about the Crash, and Tom Wolfe’s 1979 account of pilots being shot into space.

I say this because, 20 years from now, we won’t be reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s account of the Great Recession, boldly titled “Too Big To Fail,“—which almost seems like bragging for this 600-page tome from the well-known and much acclaimed New York Times journalist. This event’s definitive documenteur has yet to speak, and won’t until time has passed and lips have loosened. However, this shouldn’t stop us from enjoying what, until now, is the most robust account of financial and political insiders as they struggled to save the very basis of capitalism last autumn.

And enjoyable it is. Despite clearly being rushed to press—spelling errors abound, and Canary Wharf is not in London’s Square Mile, Andrew—it is an impressively detailed account that is well-paced to make the book seem half its actual length.

Its most thrilling and insightful parts, I find, focus on then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. It’s the first account I’ve seen that really delves into the man—going so far as to envision the retching sounds he made into Nancy Pelosi’s garbage can as he tried to convince hesitant Congressional Democrats that TARP was necessary. You get a very keen sense of a man who hesitantly took a job he knew would be difficult, and who would rather be back in his modest New York apartment or, even more likely, in Chicago. What was surprising is how early he seemed to know that there was severe trouble ahead for America’s economy.

However, I can’t help but feel that Sorkin’s angle might have been a little warped by whom he spoke to. Jamie Dimon clearly sat with him, and thus he comes across as a quasi-savior, trying his best to help his fierce rivals; Lloyd Blankfein comes across a little more self-centered, but still wanting to help. Since when did these men—who, through years of political infighting and jockeying, rose to the top in one of the most hostile businesses out there—become so altruistic? Perspective comes only with hindsight, and I fear that the truth of the matter was obfuscated by the months between their actions and the telling of them. I am sure they went above and beyond what would be expected of purely self-motivated characters, as they must have realized something was going down—but I will bet there were a lot of internal discussions regarding the poaching of customers and the drawing down of Lehman’s and Morgan Stanley’s credit lines that went unmentioned when Sorkin was in the room.

Another critique I have is with this very style of journalism. Tom Wolfe could get away with writing dialogue from the mind of his characters because he was, more often than not, in the room when it happened. When he wasn’t, he used such a baroque style that readers understood that he was embellishing and loved him all the more for it. Sorkin—who is taking his lead from the Dean of Financial Journalism, James Stewart—writes dialogue in such a realistic sense that you often forget he was nowhere near the room where it was said. I am on the losing end of a 30-year battle here, but it must be mentioned.

Maybe I’m just jealous that I didn’t write it. Despite all its flaws, this book is a phenomenal effort for one year later. It won’t be the last word, but it is an interesting one.

[Chuck Nevitt]

Some of this piece reek of the worst chick priv-lit assumptions (as in, physical work takes a toll), but some excellent points nonetheless:

Every so often, we’re required to attend a work-related charity auction or dinner party, and these affairs usually manage to be both dull and stressful. They’re always predictable: the guests will almost all be couples (single people are looked on with suspicion). Among those who drink, they will have a maximum of two glasses of wine or upscale beer (never hard liquor). The conversations will consist of the following topics: work, home-improvement projects, recent vacations, marathon or triathlon training, the newest technological gadgets, and recent news items that are acceptably non-controversial. By 11:00, everyone will agree that they’re exhausted and will retire home to watch TiVo and analyze the social dynamics of the evening.

http://www.alternet.org/sex/150739/3_hu ... age=entire

[Red Bird]

So much for the high brow Goat pen.

[It's me Karen]

I have read Tawni O'dell's "Sister Mine" and am now reading "Coal Run." Tawni has a fabulous use of the English language. Her words flow. I have yet to encounter an awkward sentence. Her description of the characters or the places that they inhabit are so real, you want to get in your car and seek these people and places. These two books center around the lives of children of miners or miners themselves from Pennyslvania. She tells of their struggles of living the difficult life, interwoven in wonderful storylines. Her characters come alive and you really care about them. She is a gifted writer. I eagerly await reading her other novels.