Book Recommendations

[Guerrero]

Orconomics and the sequel Son of a Liche. In these books, D&D or Warcraft style raiding parties are legitimate businesses with investors, and parallels to the mortgage industry. These books poke fun at banking, Wall Street, politicians (there's an orange orc who claims "no one has made more deals with the elves than me"), fantasy tropes and pop culture - there's several video game and sci fi references, including a Weyland-Yutani Corp.

They're fairly light, but great fun.

I just glanced at the Amazon reviews; those books look like a hoot!

[feudist]

They’re free to read on Kindle Unlimited. Orconomics is on the TBR list.

Yep, just added.

[Clusterfrack]

Bari Weiss interviewed Tim Urban about his new book, What's Our Problem. The book is only available in e-book form. I'm reading it on an iPad, and it's excellent so far.

Between 2013 and 2016, Tim Urban became one of the world's most popular bloggers, writing dozens of viral, long-form articles about everything from AI to colonizing Mars to procrastination. Then, he turned his attention to a new topic: the society around him. Why was everything such a mess? Why was everyone acting like such a baby? When did things get so tribal? Why do humans do this stuff?

[Wyoming Shooter]

I'm about halfway through the Audible version of "The Old Lion" by Jeff Shaara. Great stuff.

https://www.amazon.com/Old-Lion-Nove...s%2C182&sr=8-1

[revchuck38]

Another good one by Jeff Shaara is To The Last Man, a novel about Marines in WW I.

[Bigguy]

[Flamingo]

I saw an interesting book posted on Soldier System, MENTIONS IN DESPATCHES. I looked at the sample pages from the website and I think I am going to purchase it. The price looks a little expensive but the listed price is in Aussie funny money and from a basic conversion it looks like the total price will be about $100 shipping included.

The book came in and I have enjoyed what I have read so far. The book is based on letters that LT Sabben wrote home and is a great snip of life from 50ish years ago in combat. A lot of the stuff will be similar to what folks who were in Iraq/Afghanistan.

Reading the Aussie experience brings back memories for me. In 2003 I was assigned to the strategic level targeting section for the initial invasion of Iraq. I worked with some Aussie IMINT folks who were doing the first real BDA assessments from AUS aircraft strikes since Vietnam. I became pretty good friends with one of the Aussie IMINT analysts and we spent a lot of off time together. I even took him to the NRA convention in Orlando. I ran into him again in Afghanistan when he was doing IMINT support for the ASAS. The world really can be small.



The author even personalized the book for me, a really nice touch.

[Stephanie B]

Tom Hank's book Soon to be a Major Motion Picture is pretty awful.

[0ddl0t]

As a fan I had high hopes, but Elliot Page's memoir Pageboy is awful. It has some value as a famous transgender person's story, but the writing & (lack of) organization were atrocious, it lacked anything more than superficial introspection, it glossed over an incredible Hollywood career to focus on every real & perceived slight, and it was bizarrely crude (I didn't need to know that much about Page's defecations). Worse, Page narrates the audiobook in a disassociated monotone.

[Glenn E. Meyer]

Babel:
About an alternated Victorian Era Earth run on a strange tech, using silver bars and competing languages to power things. The UK at Oxford in the center of the tech. The hero is a Chinese young man brought to Oxford to be a language scholar - to program the tech - he discovers from his mentor, the UK plans to exploit China (Opium Wars) and goes underground. Excellent writer - R.F. Kuang. She is working for her PhD at Yale with a MSc from Oxford. Born in China, came here to Dallas at age 4. Impresive talent. With award winning books - wonder if she is working hard on the degree.