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I'm usually reading about four books at any one time: car, bathroom, bedside, tv lounge, and computer. But every once in a while one of those catches fire and is a 'carry everywhere' 'til finished. [Yeah, my proctologist told me: "Move the library out of the bathroom!"] Anyway, currently on fire is
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

It caught on fire about a quarter of the way in, with a jaw-dropper about every third page. It's starting with a history of the behind-the-scenes of pandemic response development beginning in the mid 2000's. Yeah, there was development before that, but it also explains how it was mostly wrong. It's also mostly apolitical (so far, anyway) with plenty of efff-ups to go around everywhere. I'll be finished with this later today.

Premonition was written by Michael Lewis, the same guy who wrote '
Moneyball', the book (and movie) that explained how much of the baseball draft was based on flawed logic. Much like the revelations in 'Freakonomics', he explains how much of what was believed about pandemics just wasn't so.

This also pairs nicely with '
The CODE Breaker'. That book was mentioned by someone here earlier and I finished it a few weeks ago. It was written by Walter Isaacson (award-winning author of biographies of Einstein, Steve Jobs, and others). It details the work of Nobel-laureate Jennifer Doudna and others over the past couple of decades that led to the gene-editing methods that enabled the rapid development of a Covid vaccine.
 
As soon as I complete the Kindle buy, now reading 'Governor' a new David Weber book, and presumably the start of a new series.

I sure wish Weber would wrap-up either or both of his two currently open-ended series, ("Honor Harrington" and "Safehome") before he gets started on yet another.
 
I haven't read his Safehome series. Worth a look at?

The first three books are pretty good and then it gets bogged down with too much happening to too many characters.

As I understood it there were supposed to be 12 books covering a multi-century period with three books each covering a span of years during which there is a massive upheaval in social and technological development all of which is overseen and directed by an immortal robotic avatar of a long dead officer of the United Earth Navy.

The how and the why of how this came to be is too complicated to try and explain.
 
The first three books are pretty good and then it gets bogged down with too much happening to too many characters.

As I understood it there were supposed to be 12 books covering a multi-century period with three books each covering a span of years during which there is a massive upheaval in social and technological development all of which is overseen and directed by an immortal robotic avatar of a long dead officer of the United Earth Navy.

The how and the why of how this came to be is too complicated to try and explain.

I think I've got eight of them, though I seem to recall I bogged down halfway through the last of those. I'll have to round them up and see where I am with it. There are ten in the series now. Huge, plodding 600-page books that are pretty hard to get through. However, the forced/compressed development of (mostly military) technology is fascinating.

EDIT: Oops. This thread gave me the incentive to pull out boxes from the garage. Found one labeled 'Weber'. Turns out I do have all 10 of the current 'Safehold' series, which means I'm pretty sure I've read 9 1/2 of them (maybe only 8 1/2, gonna have to check.)
 
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Finished "The Sandman." Good stuff. My plan is next to power through the rest of The Expanse (I'm about 3/4 through book 4 now) before the 9th and final book comes out this fall.
 
I think I've got eight of them, though I seem to recall I bogged down halfway through the last of those. I'll have to round them up and see where I am with it. There are ten in the series now. Huge, plodding 600-page books that are pretty hard to get through. However, the forced/compressed development of (mostly military) technology is fascinating.

EDIT: Oops. This thread gave me the incentive to pull out boxes from the garage. Found one labeled 'Weber'. Turns out I do have all 10 of the current 'Safehold' series, which means I'm pretty sure I've read 9 1/2 of them (maybe only 8 1/2, gonna have to check.)

It wasn't supposed to go that way but Weber got enamored with the period and stuck with it way past the point where most readers lost interest.
By the 10th book the timeframe was supposed to be centuries from whence the series began with Nymue's awakening.
This would have been the timeframe whereby the decedents of the Royal Families were leading the fleets against the Gabba.
Sadly that's not happening anytime soon and most people think that Weber is never going to bring this series to a satisfying conclusion before he passes from old age.
How long has it been since the last book was published? Three years or so?
 
I'm reading my car's owner's manual. The emergency section is full of twists and turns and the suspension is breathtaking.
 
About to complete "Silent Murders", the 2nd book in the "Roaring Twenties" series by Mary Miley.
Next up is "Renting Silence".
 
I'm reading, umm....wait a minute, it's on the tip of my tongue, umm...Oh! Yeah! How to Remember Anything by Dean Vaughn.

I received a signed copy from the author, whom I met during an investigative study we were participating in.
 
It wasn't supposed to go that way but Weber got enamored with the period and stuck with it way past the point where most readers lost interest.
By the 10th book the timeframe was supposed to be centuries from whence the series began with Nymue's awakening.
This would have been the timeframe whereby the decedents of the Royal Families were leading the fleets against the Gabba.
Sadly that's not happening anytime soon and most people think that Weber is never going to bring this series to a satisfying conclusion before he passes from old age.
How long has it been since the last book was published? Three years or so?

Sounds about right. At the current rate, it would take many more volumes just to get to basic spaceflight.

The third post on this page takes care of it all.
 
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Re-reading Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. I read it all several years ago, and really enjoyed it. Being old has some advantages, including a poor memory, so I can enjoy it again without knowing how each of the books ends. I’m about half way through the 26 books, with the last book all new to me.
 
I am re-reading "Parallel Botany" by Leo Lionni, a book I bought when it came out in 1977. I have been doing a lot of re-reading and first reading of books in the library that Sallie and I have accumulated over the years since the pandemic closed our local library.
I could not make any sense of this book when I was 30. It simply did not register.
It's actually very funny and extremely witty. Lionni is (or was) a keen observer of scientific and technical writing and this book captures (and gently makes fun of) the work of scientists and naturalists. Parallel Botany is the study of a wholly imaginary plant kingdom, with all the taxonomic, philosophical, linguistic, and ethnographic ramifications of that endeavor. I have spent my entire adult life reading scientific and technical prose, and attending scientific conferences, and Lionni's feel for the sound and flavor of those exchanges is just perfect. His description of the (imaginary) first Parallel Botany Conference in Antwerp in 1970 is absolutely hilarious, for anyone who has ever actually sat through the tedious ego-tripping and verbal hog-washing involved in a conference at which something important is introduced.
This book is not for everybody. 98% of this audience would find it boring beyond endurance. The name-dropping includes both fictional people like Max Spinder, professor of Urban Botany at the University of Hemmungen, and real (but weird) people like Pere Teilhard de Chardin.

I've got Stanley Karnow's in-depth history of Vietnam on the shelf, ready to go when I finish this one.

Alan
 
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