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What's on Your Summer 2002 Reading List?
Quixote asks: "Well, summer is upon us, and I'm wondering: what does Slashdot read? I'm thinking of non-geeky, non-SciFi books. Anything out there that has caught your fancy? Would you like to share your reading list (stuff that you've read and/or plan to read)."
Great book about the Fast Food Industry by Eric Schlosser
See it here..
No lie. With all the anti-Muslim propaganda currently in the news, I feel it's best to try to understand things from another point of view.
Because in the end, we're not that different!
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
> With all the anti-Muslim propaganda currently in the news, I feel it's best to try to
:-) Controversial subject matter, but the book he said shouldn't have been published is judith Levine's *Harmful to Minors*:
6 8/ qid=1023794022/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/102-3562730-02361 48
> understand things from another point of view.
That's how I try to approach everything. Why believe what agenda-driven media and political people claim, when you can get closer to the source and make up your own mind?
That's why, when I saw Bill O'Reilly screaming his loudest about a recent book release, complaining bitterly that a university press would dare to publish it--I knew I had to read it.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/08166400
So, I pre-ordered it, and I have to say it's a fantastic analysis of the current situation. The author makes a lot of sense, and I feel sad that we (Americans) live in a country where people are so outraged by the simple truths most of the civilized world already takes for granted. We in the U.S. treat 15 year olds the same as 5 year olds. No wonder some kids rebel against that...
Anyway, I always like to support free speech by buying the books of authors whose books get assailed for silly personal moral reasons. So, go buy that book, or another one in need of support, as a big F-U to those who would censor our right to read.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
Animal Farm (Orwell)
1984 (Orwell)
A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana (Haven Kimmel)(really funny)
The Turk (Tom Standage)
some of Terry Pratchet's Discworld series
some of Lilian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who series (crime solving cats)
some of Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Polifax series (sweet old aunt Emily joins the CIA)
Take the Canoli (Sarah Vowell)
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Summer 2002 reading list
Summer 2001 reading list^U
Summer 2000 reading list^U
Summer 1999 reading list^U
AP English summer reading list^U
Billy Bud
A Patch of Blue
1 Shakespear tragedy
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
- John Lathrop Motley's 3-part history of the early Dutch Republic. Sheds a lot of light on Microsoft vs. everybody else, UnitedLinux, etc. These situations aren't new. The players just have different names--and, fortunately, big corporations don't actually have armies.
- The novels of George Eliot. This 19th-century writer is head and shoulders above her contemporaries. Again, in these books you will discover that people haven't changed.
- The novels of Anthony Trollope, especially the Barchester series.
- Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James II. Another historical era with big, big similarities to our own. The explosion of activity powered by the sudden end of censorship in England resembles the 1990s in several ways. For instance: Broadsheet = web page.
- H. Rider Haggard. Classic adventure stories. Anna Katherine Green, Maurice Leblanc, Gaston Leroux--all early detective novelists. William Morris--peculiar, pseudo-medieval language, but good stories.
I download these in text format, run a macro to take out the extra carriage returns, then convert them through MakeDocW and read them on the PDA.One tends not to "read" the Talmud.
None of the translations do justice to the interplay of commentators on the subjects discussed. There are also 38 seperate books in just the Babylonian Talmud, not including the Jerusalem Talmud, and most Jewish Scholars would agree that studying a page would take at least half an hour (in an english translation) and this would be without any commentaries that explain the reasoning behind the logic, and what the actual law derived from the text is, since is is rarely obvious based on the text of the talmud itself. There are just under 3000 pages of talmud (front and back, otherwise about 600 pages, obviously.) Perhaps you would be better off reading a book written in english about modern Orthodox Judaism, and would like to suggest some authors:
Aryeh Kaplan
Akiva Tatz (Especailly "A Thinking Jewish Teenager's Guide to Life)
And for lighter reading, Hanoch Teller's Books
I'm a concientious
P.S. To quickly bring this post back around to the question at hand, I've got "The Second Rumpole Omnibus" and O'Reilly's "Programming PHP" in my summer bag right now. (Hey, depending on how you look at it, they're both mysteries.)