No sign of rinx in over a week so I'll post this again this week.
I finished up The Gunslinger. It was ok... I'll give the next book in the series a try.
I also started Proxima by Stephen Baxter. I enjoyed the handful of other books of his that I've read and so far this one is off to a good start.
I've just restarted the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I made it halfway through the two towers years ago, but then I ran out of time and they kind of slipped out of memory. I came across them again in a lovely, higgledy-piggledy second hand bookstore. I bought the first two and am almost finished the Fellowship already :D.
If you can, see if they have the Bilingual Edition. It has his modern English translation side by side with the text in Old English (or is it Gaelic? I dunno.). I mean, I can't read it or understand it, but to know it's there every time I glance to the left half of the book just makes what I'm reading seem that much more special.
I used to never read dissertations, but I've been on a kick lately. Right now I'm working through Tim O'Donnell's thesis where he introduces the Fragment Grammar model for accounting for the classic productivity/reuse problem in linguistics. I think this model might be at least vaguely useful to me in the future so I'm wrapping my head around it. I count this as a book since it's ~300 pages long :P. It's actually a very fun read!
Thanks buddy! Got back yesterday but hadn't posted yet, the jet lag is making my brain fuzzy. Over the trip I finished Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds. Now I'm mostly through Flash Boys by Michael Lewis. It's a fascinating look at what electronic trading is doing to the stock market. It's not a dry lecture though, he tells the story like a heist movie. His writing style is very simple - good guys vs bad, so I need to do a bit of research to see how accurate the book is. If it is true, the implications are kinda staggering.
Flash Boys is accurate in the important details. Do your own research and you'll learn that a) HFT is one of the most interesting topics in the news today and b) a lot of pro-Wall Streeters love to straight-up lie about it, or maintain that HFT is the solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Good book. One of the very few readable books about the modern opaque financial world, but I can recommend a couple more if you want to hate the subject.
You're a techie yourself, right? Lurk around Nuclear Phynance, it's where people working on trading algorithms hang.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307887189?Version=1&entries=0 -- quite good, more specifically about hft/electronic trading http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Our-Own-Design-Innovation/dp/0470393750/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1443489307&sr=1-1&keywords=demonofourowndesign -- interesting history that i found all but unreadable and then there's the rest of lewis' output, which is pretty much essentially reading. especially the big short
Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World gets here tomorrow and I expect to devour it before the weekend.
I still really like the Gunslinger, even if the rest of the series kind of sucks. School had me reading Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (yes, Stevenson left out the "the". I don't know why) and I actually enjoyed it a lot. The last school novel I read was The House of Seven Gables, and it was a total drag, so reading something short, sweet and to the point was nice. I'm a sucker for stories about identity, so I found Jekyll/Hyde pretty interesting. I've also been slogging through Emerson's essays for another class. I like a lot of what the guy says, but damn he repeats himself a lot. I get it, nature is great, the past is overrated, whatever, can we move on now? I was a bit bothered by what he had to say about charity in Self-Reliance, though. Being intellectually independent and following your own rationality and your own instincts is well and good, but I feel like it's kind of a stretch to apply that philosophy to the material world. It's not developed enough for me to make any kind of serious claims about Emerson's ethical system, but he's hinting at egoism in a way that I don't really agree with. Not reading anything for pleasure, sadly, I just don't have the time right now. I've got an old copy of The Grapes of Wrath that's just waiting to be re-read, though. Maybe over Christmas.
I've been so busy with juggling grenades at work and working over time, I've been too tired to really do any reading when I get home/on my days off. As a result, I'm as far into The Martian now as when I last talked about it, which is about chapter 11 or so. I'm hoping to be able to pick it up again this Friday as it really is a very fun book (that and I promised my wife I'd finish it before we went out to see the movie). Speaking of my wife and her forcing me to read things I have no interest in reading, she saw me watching a few episodes of Longmire on Netflix the other month so she bought me Wait for the Signs by Craig Johnson which is apparently what the TV series is based on. I don't have the heart to tell her that I read a spoiler about the TV show that made me write it off as crap not worth watching, but I love her, so I'll begrudgingly read the book. Who knows? Maybe I'll like it. Speaking of TV though, anyone ever see Hell on Wheels? I'm only three episodes in but I kind of like it. Is it worth sticking through?
Hmm. I might see if I'll stick with it for a bit. None of the characters or the story as a whole is really pulling me in, but at the same time it's not awful either. To be honest, I'm just kind of killing time until Daredevil Season 2 comes out. I wonder if Netflix would ever be willing to release the series on Blu-Ray . . .
I hope you do give the next book in The Dark Tower series a try! I thought it picked up big time after the first book and that's one of my favorite book series. I'm reading "We Need New Names" by NoViolet Bulawayo right now. I just finished Selasi's "Ghana Must Go," which I loved. So far I am not a big fan of "We Need New Names," but there's still plenty of time for that opinion to change.