(09-20-2010, 02:20 PM)Maggot Wrote: I guess this is the wrong time to comment on how thrilling my comic book collection is.
Seriously. I don't think these people get the concept of light reading.
After years and years of murder mysteries, I've switched over to what's often referred to as "urban fantasy". I prefer series (because I never want my books to end). I enjoyed the Jim Butcher Dresden File series (for example). The book I'm reading now isn't worth mentioning. It's just okay but I'm beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel in urban fantasy books. I need to find a new genre.
All the cat books are oldies but goodies. (Lilian Jackson Braun)
I lent the entire set to a friend, but the bitch never gave them back. I should have known better because her car looked like a homeless person's car. She got rear-ended one time and they had to dig her out because all the stuff from the back of the car (she couldn't see out the back window) was hurled to the front and she was buried...
(03-15-2013, 07:12 PM)aussiefriend Wrote: You see Duchess, I have set up a thread to discuss something and this troll is behaving just like Riotgear did.
(03-23-2011, 08:32 PM)Cracker Wrote: All the cat books are oldies but goodies. (Lilian Jackson Braun)
I lent the entire set to a friend, but the bitch never gave them back. I should have known better because her car looked like a homeless person's car. She got rear-ended one time and they had to dig her out because all the stuff from the back of the car (she couldn't see out the back window) was hurled to the front and she was buried...
The author's name isn't familiar to me (thank God! maybe I haven't already read them!). I'm going to look those up. Thanks.
Oh and one time, when my kids were little, my car got infested with ants. Ants!!! I didn't even know a car could get an ant infestation. I think they were hunting for a chicken mcnugget buired somewhere between the seats.
I just saw Mo recommend this book, I was interested enough to look for a synopsis.
The Tears Of Sheba ~
Loyalty, honour, murder, Bedouin, family feuds and survival in a setting reminiscent of the Arabian Nights Yemen in the 1960s was a society where loyalty, blood ties and honour meant everything, yet murder, forced marriages, family feuds and public beheadings were common. The Tears of Sheba is the inspiring story of Khadija Al-Salami, whose personal struggle for survival shows a deep-rooted love for her country and its people. Khadija tells of a childhood devastated by the impact of civil war, in a culture that allowed her to be married at the age of ten to an older man she had never met. Determined to escape the poverty, death and destruction that permeated her life, and with extraordinary tenacity, Khadija asked the local radio station to let her broadcast a programme for children, later using the money she earned to travel to the United States and forge a new life for herself. The Tears of Sheba is a magnificent tour-de-force, passionately told, spellbinding and uplifting - a tale of indomitable spirit and human triumph. KHADIJA AL-SALAMI spent her childhood in Yemen. Using the money she earned as a child for her radio broadcasts she travelled to the United States to study. She graduated from Mount Vernon College in Washington and returned to Yemen to join the Yemeni TV station. She subsequently joined the Yemeni Embassy in Paris, where she is currently Press and Cultural Attache and Director of the Yemeni Information Centre in Paris.
Right now I am reading Why I Left the Amish a memoir written by Saloma Furlong.
Here are a few words by the author about her story, plus a link to the source. Why I Left the Amish, begins with an unanticipated break in my studies during my first semester at Smith College in 2004 when my father died and I traveled back to Ohio to my childhood community for his funeral. Finding myself back in the horse and buggy world I had left twenty-four years before, and then suddenly back on Smith College campus in a matter of forty-eight hours left me reflecting on the two separate and distinct lives I have lived.
Many childhood memories were triggered before and during the funeral — memories of my father’s mental illness, my older brother’s brutality, and my mother’s lack of protection, which often left me without advocates. Besides my struggles within my specific family, I also battled my feeling of being an outsider within the only community I knew. No matter how hard I tried, I could not quiet the fundamental questions that boiled up from within any more than I could fully conform to the ways of the church, even after becoming a baptized member of the church. My desire for more formal education was always there, even though I knew it would be impossible to acquire more education if I stayed in the community.
When James Jones published "From Here to Eternity" in 1951, his editors had pulled back some of the frank language and description in his original draft. The resulting novel, which chronicled the drinking, brawling and illicit affairs of soldiers stationed in Hawaii in the months before Pearl Harbor -- was a titillating, critically acclaimed bestseller. The 1953 movie, which starred Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, got a similar reception, winning eight Oscars, including best picture.
Now, a new e-book edition of the novel will include the profanity and mentions of gay sex that were left out of the 1951 version. The uncensored "From Here to Eternity" is being published by Open Road Media and Jones' heirs, including daughter Kaylie Jones.
"It's been on my mind for quite a few years, and the right moment just hadn't come up yet," Kaylie Jones told the New York Times. “My father fought bitterly to hold on to every four-letter word in the manuscript. The publisher was concerned about getting through the censors."
In addition to the four-letter words, scenes that explicitly mention gay sex have been restored to the text. In one, Private Maggio (the character played in the film by Sinatra) mentions having oral sex with a man for money -- the kind of detail that must have been very difficult for an author to let go.
Though many books from the 1950s have gone out of print, "From Here to Eternity" has escaped that fate. The publication of an uncensored version as an e-book shows one of the ways that e-books can add to the cultural conversation -- a new print edition with these small yet telling bits restored might never have happened. Open Road will release nine other books by James Jones, including "The Ice Cream Headache," a collection of short stories, and the never-published book, "To the End of the War."
(CNN) -- Adam Mansbach's toddler wasn't thirsty. She wasn't hungry. And she definitely didn't need Dad to make up another story about farm animals having a picnic and dozing off. The possibility that he would never get to leave her room for dinner or a glass of wine or the world outside became a distinct possibility.
The noted author didn't keep his feelings to himself. Instead, he turned his frustration into writing "Go the Fuck to Sleep," a tongue-in-cheek adult bedtime book that has swept the Internet and has already hit No.1 on the Amazon bestseller list a month before its June 14 publication date. Illustrator Ricardo Cortés captures the colorful mood of Mansbach's poetry.
The cubs and the lions are snoring,
Wrapped in a big snuggly heap.
How come you can do all this other great shit
But you can't lie the fuck down and sleep?
Ok, I like light reading. I just started a highly recommended kindle series "Donovan Creed" by John Locke. I'm half way in to the first book and it's supposed to be a good mystery/witty/interesting series. I'm having a hard time "liking" Donovan though because he's basically a hit man hired by mobsters who kills innocent people while on the side he's doing good deeds for people and also works for the CIA. Blurg. Hopefully I'll find why the series is popular soon. Right now...I don't get it.
(05-14-2011, 12:16 AM)username Wrote: I just started a highly recommended kindle series "Donovan Creed" by John Locke.
I thought he died in the crash?
(03-15-2013, 07:12 PM)aussiefriend Wrote: You see Duchess, I have set up a thread to discuss something and this troll is behaving just like Riotgear did.
At the moment reading "State of Denial" by Bob Woodward. Truly hilarious!
What was especially nice was to see that Joseph C. Wilson is mentioned in the book, who wrote "What I did not find in Africa", as we just had dinner here recently. Another fascinating story about that era, with him and his wife, of which they made a movie even, with Sean Penn playing him.
What was done to his wife should have been considered treason!
More fucked up memories from the Bush administration. Bastards, every last one of them. I can hardly believe people voted for them a second time and those that did share some of the responsibility for our fucked up country & meaningless wars.
(05-14-2011, 11:56 AM)Fibonacci Prima Wrote: I'm on my way to a bookstore anyway, and I have to get a copy of "Go the fuck to sleep". It's beautiful! Hahaaa!
publish date is June 14. you can probably pre-order. amazon is taking pre-orders too.
(05-14-2011, 11:56 AM)Fibonacci Prima Wrote: I'm on my way to a bookstore anyway, and I have to get a copy of "Go the fuck to sleep". It's beautiful! Hahaaa!
publish date is June 14. you can probably pre-order. amazon is taking pre-orders too.
Yeah I'm the biggest dork. I saw the picture of the cover and got all excited to go find it, but didn't read it wasn't released yet til after I posted.
I still want it. And I'm pissed cuz I didn't find the damn books I wanted. Had a freaking awesome lunch though. Even though I'm beating myself up over it now.
They have long been famed for their love of lavish banquets and rich recipes. But what is less well known is that the British royals also had a taste for human flesh.
A new book on medicinal cannibalism has revealed that possibly as recently as the end of the 18th century British royalty swallowed parts of the human body.
The author Dr. Richard Sugg, adds that this was not a practice reserved for monarchs but was widespread among the well-to-do in Europe.
Even as they denounced the barbaric cannibals of the New World, they applied, drank, or wore powdered Egyptian mummy, human fat, flesh, bone, blood, brains and skin.
'Cannibalism was found not only in the New World, as often believed, but also in Europe.
'One thing we are rarely taught at school yet is evidenced in literary and historic texts of the time is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine.
'Along with Charles II, eminent users or prescribers included Francis I, Elizabeth I's surgeon John Banister, Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent, Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, William III, and Queen Mary.
'Whilst corpse medicine has sometimes been presented as a medieval therapy, it was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain.
'It survived well into the 18th century, and amongst the poor it lingered stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria.
'Quite apart from the question of cannibalism, the sourcing of body parts now looks highly unethical to us.
'In the heyday of medicinal cannibalism bodies or bones were routinely taken from Egyptian tombs and European graveyards. Not only that, but some way into the eighteenth century one of the biggest imports from Ireland into Britain was human skulls.
The book gives numerous vivid, often disturbing examples of the practice, ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland and on to the tribal man-eating of the Americas.
'Over in continental Europe, where the axe fell routinely on the necks of criminals, blood was the medicine of choice for many epileptics.
'In Denmark the young Hans Christian Andersen saw parents getting their sick child to drink blood at the scaffold. So popular was this treatment that hangmen routinely had their assistants catch the blood in cups as it spurted from the necks of dying felons.
'Occasionally a patient might shortcut this system. At one early sixteenth-century execution in Germany, 'a vagrant grabbed the beheaded body "before it had fallen, and drank the blood from him..".'
The last recorded instance of this practice in Germany fell in 1865.
Whilst James I had refused to take human skull, his grandson Charles II liked the idea so much that he bought the recipe. Having paid perhaps £6,000 for this, he often distilled human skull himself in his private laboratory.
Dr Sugg said: 'Accordingly known before long as "the King's Drops", this fluid remedy was used against epilepsy, convulsions, diseases of the head, and often as an emergency treatment for the dying.
'It was the very first thing which Charles reached for on February 2 1685, at the start of his last illness, and was administered not only on his deathbed, but on that of Queen Mary in 1698.'
The book, called Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, will be published on June 29 by Routledge and charts the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians.
A painting showing the 1649 execution of Charles I showed people mopping up the king's blood with handkerchiefs.
![[Image: Zy3rKpW.png]](https://i.imgur.com/Zy3rKpW.png)
![[Image: t1larg.bookillustration.jpg]](http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2011/LIVING/05/13/go.the.f--k.to.sleep/t1larg.bookillustration.jpg)
amazon is taking pre-orders too. 
![[Image: article-1389142-0C2CF41400000578-229_634x504.jpg]](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/05/20/article-1389142-0C2CF41400000578-229_634x504.jpg)