what are we reading?

[SteveDallas]

Hmmm I read a lot of stuff... I have to read.. all the time when I'm not doing something else. Somewhat compulsive, I guess. The problem is, when I'm very tired or wiped out, I just read "brain candy"... something I've already read several times. I sometimes end up with 2 or 3 books going at once, one for when I can concentrate and think, and one for when I can't. So what have I read recently?

In the last year I've become a fan of Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series. Her most recent entry, Diplomatic Immunity, I actually purchased as an e-book, a format I'm not really in love with, because the publisher had that out a month before the hard copy!

I also noticed the third book in a series I read the first two of a long time ago, the Camulod Chronicles by Jack Whyte. It's a retelling of the Arthur legends based on the end of Roman presence in Britain. I just finished the third volume, The Eagles' Brood.

Ghost Soldiers tells about a WWII Army Rangers operation to rescue survivors of the Bataan Death March being held by the Japanese in the Phillipines. A gripping tale, told with lots of accounts from the men who were there.

Henry VIII: The King and His Court by Alison Weir is more interesting than it sounds. Having said that, I didn't finish it due to lack of time & mental energy. But it's fascinating to see how everything was managed. (Imagine if, when The Prez went down to his ranch in Texas, the whole government had to go with him! That's sort of what happened when Henry moved around.)

The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick. To early to tell. I've liked most of Dick's stuff. At the very opening of the books, psychoanalysis has been outlawed and analysts practice under pain of arrest. Why? A large pharmaceutical company has drugs that will treat all known mental ailments, and they've lobbied the government to outlaw the "quackery" of analysis to improve their sales.