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Brian Miller
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 28 July 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 31326
Posted: 09 February 2023 at 12:07pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply

Started BOSSYPANTS by Tina Fey. I’m about 1/3 into it. Great stuff.
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James Best
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 02 March 2014
Location: United States
Posts: 899
Posted: 10 March 2023 at 11:30pm | IP Logged | 2 post reply

I'm going a bit retro this week. I'm now about a quarter of the way through BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS by the late Stephen Jay Gould.
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Matthew Chartrand
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 17 June 2007
Location: United States
Posts: 1359
Posted: 11 March 2023 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | 3 post reply


  Just finished THE BOYS by Ron and Clint Howard. An auto-biography about growing up in Hollywood. Great, fun read.

  Starting THE RECKONING by John Grisham. This is the first Grisham I've read in quite awhile, I hope he is still as good as his earlier work.
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John Byrne

Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 133704
Posted: 11 March 2023 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | 4 post reply

VOR

A James Blish novel from the Fifties. Last read when I was about 19. Turning out to be very different from what I remembered.

The title is the “name” of an alien that communicates by flashing colors on its faceplate. In this case, Violet, Orange, Red.

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Brian Miller
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 28 July 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 31326
Posted: 11 March 2023 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | 5 post reply

BOSSYPANTS was fantastic. A very fun read.
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John Byrne

Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 133704
Posted: 22 June 2023 at 1:58pm | IP Logged | 6 post reply

HIS MAJESTY’S AIRSHIP - S. C. Gwynne

Pretty much the whole world knows the story of the Hindenberg, the giant German airship that came to a fiery end in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937. But seven years earlier an even deadlier disaster had ended the trouble career of Britain’s R101, at the time the largest rigid airship ever built.

I first learned of the R101 when relatives in England sent me a large plastic model for my 15th birthday. At that time I was not well informed about airships, but my father, who had been 10 years old at the time of the R101 crash, filled me in on many details and participated in the birth of what would become a lifelong fascination.

This book, by an American author, details the history of lighter-than-air vessels, and strips away most of the attached romance. (What airships did best was crash!) There are several harrowing sketches of the dangers of flying these things, and an overall image is built of the driving insanity that propelled their construction until they were finally abandoned. (I learned from this book that it was not the crash of the Hindenberg that finally doomed the big rigids. The Germans were already flying the Graf Zepplin 2. It was WW2 and the proven impracticality of such ships in warfare that ended the grand experiment.)

Recommended.

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John Byrne

Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 133704
Posted: 22 June 2023 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | 7 post reply

Just finished a lunchtime reading of the CCS Books hardcover reprint of Jules Verne’s OFF ON A COMET. I first read this in the original Classics Illustrated edition when I was probably around 12 years old, and reading it now for virtually the first time since then, I am amused to note how much of the Author’s fanciful “science” grafted itself onto my brain.

The printing here is muddy, except for the colors, but enough survives to make a fun read. I’ve acquired a few others of these reprints, including THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, THE TIME MACHINE, THE INVISIBLE MAN and DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.

Much nostalgia.

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James Best
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 02 March 2014
Location: United States
Posts: 899
Posted: 23 June 2023 at 4:31am | IP Logged | 8 post reply

I'm now about half way through THE LAST STAND OF THE TIN CAN SAILORS (2004) by the late James D. Hornfischer. 

The book recounts the WWII naval battle of the San Bernadino Strait in late October 1944, when a decoy tactic by the remaining Japanese aircraft carriers pulled Admiral Halsey and his 3rd Fleet northward away from the strait and the troops who had just landed on the beaches of Leyte in the Philippines.

This left a ragtag U.S. force of small escort carriers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts guarding the strait, only to be ambushed (and completely overmatched) by the largest Japanese naval battle force assembled during the war.

A very good read so far. And I believe it was even adapted into a graphic novel a few years after it was first published.



Edited by James Best on 23 June 2023 at 4:31am
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John Byrne

Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 133704
Posted: 28 June 2023 at 12:33pm | IP Logged | 9 post reply

THE TIME MACHINE by HG Wells

Long time since I last dipped into this one. Beyond the tale being told, I find fascinating the structure of the writing. And that almost the whole book is in the form of a spoken narrative, every paragraph beginning with quotation marks. Arthur Conan Doyle did this occasionally.

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Dave Kopperman
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 27 December 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 3504
Posted: 28 June 2023 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | 10 post reply

It's frustrating that there's never been a really accurate film adaptation of The Time Machine, since it's such a cinematic book in the first place.
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Craig Earl
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 13 July 2019
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 1416
Posted: 28 June 2023 at 6:40pm | IP Logged | 11 post reply

Ditto 'The War of the Worlds'




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Rebecca Jansen
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 12 February 2018
Location: Canada
Posts: 4635
Posted: 28 June 2023 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | 12 post reply

I tend to jump around a lot in my reading so various magazines old and new and a couple music bios right now (one by musician Al Kooper, and another on Birmingham's Moody Blues group up to 1979, oh yeah, and a French book on Women cartoonists not too well translated into English I found in the local library branch). I read fiction much less than I used to, which was a ton, maybe I overdosed or something? Mostly gone backwards in fiction to somewhat past a hundred plus year old things, maybe not even the most readable nor recommendable. Wells would be very modern compared to some of these (William Morris for example).

Edited by Rebecca Jansen on 28 June 2023 at 6:54pm
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