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good books for lockdown reading

I just finished Night Witches by Bruce Myles, which was pretty good. Mo doesn't usually like my kind of books, but I think she'll like that one. Sort of an aerial combat chic flick. It would make a good movie.

Then by accident I spotted The Great Influenza on a bookshelf, by John Barry. Thought we'd lost it. I'll read that again. It's about the great 1918 flu, but has a much wider scope, a lot of background about the history of science and medicine starting centuries B.C.

Barry wrote the wonderful Rising Tide, required reading for anyone who lives near the Mississippi River.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.  
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"
Reply to
jlarkin
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snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Why don't you read up on one about Trump's mobbed up criminal life?

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

I've just read a couple of books on the Spanish 'Flu: Crosby's 'America's Forgotten Pandemic' and Spinney's 'Pale Rider'. The first

2/3 of Spinney is a very good read about the actual pandemic, but then she gets off into half-baked psychology.

Crosby was writing in 1976, well within living memory of 1918-19. He makes the very interesting point that although it killed more people than WW1, most of them young adults, it left almost zero traces in literature and culture.

I'm currently re-reading Diane Vaughan's "The Challenger Launch Decision", which is a very good book indeed, despite being sociology. ;)

One poignant reminder of what America was like in 1996 is Steven Gould's jacket blurb, beginning "For the tenth anniversary of America's greatest tragedy within her finest triumph,...."

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

I have that. Another good book about really bad group-think is The Hubble Wars by Chaisson.

When it was announced what was wrong with the focus of the telescope, one scientist stepped out into the hall and vomited.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.  
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"
Reply to
jlarkin

"Thinking fast and slow" is good I'm about at pg 300.

I'm reading trashy novels at bedtime mostly. I'd be interested in 'good' trashy novel authors.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

Heinlein.

Reply to
Tom Del Rosso

When I was a teenager, I'd have agreed with you there. Subsequently I twigged to his, um, centrifugal religious and political views.

Restricting the franchise to veterans (Starship Trooper) might be defensible in a society like ancient Sparta, but encouraging vigilante justice (The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress) doesn't work anywhere.

And 'Stranger In A Strange Land' was apparently his attempt to retrieve his bet with L. Ron Hubbard, who claimed quite correctly that he could make more money starting a religion rather than writing science fiction. Fortunately Heinlein failed, despite being a much better writer than Hubbard.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Jane Austen. P G Wodehouse.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.  
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"
Reply to
jlarkin

I should add Time Enough For Love, in which his hero Woodrow Wilson Smith (aka Lazarus Long), by means of a time machine wound up screwing his own mother as well as his daughters Lapis Lazuli and Lorelei Lee.

How about some nice Charles Dickens or Dostoevsky or Harry Potter or The Hardy Boys or something more wholesome like that?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Do you mean "fortunately he failed to start a religion", or "fortunately he failed to make more money than L Ron Hubbard"?

Clifford Heath

Reply to
Clifford Heath

SF is a teenage thing. Most of it was/is very bad writing.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.  
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"
Reply to
jlarkin

He asked for trashy. :)

Reply to
Tom Del Rosso

Clarke isn't bad writing.

Reply to
Tom Del Rosso

John Zakour has an amusing series about a PI... start with _The_Plutonium_Blonde_

or, for the thrifty, all those ER Burroughs John Carter of Mars books are available for your favorite reader tablet.

Reply to
whit3rd

90% of everything is crap.

Arthur C Clarke can have good style.

Cordwainer Smith's style is unique and mesmerising, being based on oriental storytelling techniques.

I'd start with either "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul" or "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell".

I read the latter as an early teenager, didn't like it but the style was memorable. A decade later I did understand it.

The former starts... The story ran?how did the story run? Everyone knew the reference to Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more, but no one knew exactly how it happened. Their names were welded to the glittering timeless jewelry of romance. Sometimes they were compared to Heloise and Abelard, whose story had been found among books in a long-buried library. Other ages were to compare their life with the weird, ugly-lovely story of the Go-Captain Taliano and the Lady Dolores Oh.

... and ends ...

Outsiders never knew the real end of the story. ... His voice broke, but his features stayed calm. He had never before seen anyone die so confident and so happy.

https://epdf.pub/queue/smith-cordwainer-the-lady-who-sailed-the-soul.html

Reply to
Tom Gardner

Smith reminds me quite a lot of Lord Dunsany. Try out Tales of Three Hemispheres, Wonder Tales, and The Charwoman's Shadow.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Certainly the Nero Wolfe mysteries would keep someone off the streets for a while. Read them in chronological order.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.  
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"
Reply to
jlarkin

Yeah I read the ink off all my Heinlein books. I put them all in boxes up in the attic. I figure maybe I'll get dementia in old age and can read them again.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

ly I

.

Yeah I've got a set of Alexander Dumas novels from my mum. They are OK.

George

Reply to
George Herold

OK Thanks. There is an online group reading the 'Conan' series by Howard. (As they appeared in the pulps of the time.)

(The power connector on my tablet is fried... I need to buy a hot air station to fix it... or buy a new tablet.) George H.

Reply to
George Herold

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