# Good books



## Business_Woman (Dec 5, 2009)

Hai,

This is meant to be a thread for recommending books you're currently reading or books you've read.

Novels, sci-fi, crime, fantasy...


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## fronclynne (Dec 5, 2009)

Still in the midst of reading Piers Plowman.  (About four years since I started, ha.  Not that I haven't read a couple dozen books in the mean-time.)
I always have to pimp _The Purple Cloud_ by M.P. Shiel.  Makes _In The Days Of The Comet_ seem downright pedestrian.


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## Business_Woman (Dec 5, 2009)

i forgot to post one :\

_The Paradise war_ is the first of three books in the trilogy 
Songs of Albion by Stephen Lawhead


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## anomie (Dec 6, 2009)

Most of the books I read are about computers, finance, or fitness. (Yes, I'm really _that_ interesting.) 

IIRC, the last real book I read was _Hard Times_ by Studs Terkel. If you're not familiar with his authoring style, many of his books consist of collections of interviews on a particular topic -- this one being the Great Depression in the US. Anyway, I recommend it if you're keen on trying something new.


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## crsd (Dec 6, 2009)

Dan Simmons' "Hyperion". It's awesome.


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## Carpetsmoker (Dec 6, 2009)

Right now I'm reading the robot series by Isaac Asimov and Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.


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## hedwards (Dec 6, 2009)

I have to admit I mostly read computer books these days. But I did find "The book of PF" and "X power tools" to be quite good same for "Absolute FreeBSD."


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## saxon3049 (Dec 6, 2009)

Anything by Terry Prachet's Disk world gets my recommendation, I am rereading Jingo at the moment.


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## trev (Dec 6, 2009)

Mac OSX Internals, Amit Singh
Operating Systems - Design and Implementation, Andrew S Tanenbaum
Text, ConText and HyperText - Writing with and for the computer, Edward Barrett (ed)

Thrilling stuff


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## varnie (Dec 6, 2009)

crsd, Carpetsmoker: nice books!

as for me, i'm reading a sci-fi novel "Schismatrix" by Bruce Sterling. that book (among the few others) has given a breath to the "cyberpunk" genre.


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## Nirbo (Dec 6, 2009)

Dan Koppel's Banana: the Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World" is an excellent book.


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## Ruler2112 (Dec 7, 2009)

I just finished The Death God's Citadel by Juanita Coulson.  It's a prequel to The Web of Wizardry by the same author - both are quite old and OOP.  (I've had TWOW for years, but wasn't able to find TDGC for a long time.)

I haven't read them in quite a while, but the Star Wars books by Timothy Zhan, Michael Stackpole, and Kevin Anderson are all very good to great.  Actually, one does not read Zhan's books - they read themselves.   Stackpole is known as the Tom Clancy of science fiction and it's an apt comparison.  Anderson has a cool writing style that's also easy to read.


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## LateNiteTV (Dec 7, 2009)

paradise lost - john milton


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## fronclynne (Dec 8, 2009)

LateNiteTV said:
			
		

> paradise lost - john milton



Mmm, I started that one a year or so ago and haven't finished it yet.  Good stuff though.


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## saxon3049 (Dec 10, 2009)

The Nmap book.


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## Business_Woman (Dec 10, 2009)

Now reading the zombie survival guide, that Carpetsmoker sent me


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## saxon3049 (Dec 10, 2009)

That is one EPIC book, wait till you read about aquatic zombie warfare.


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## tangram (Dec 10, 2009)

I read computer related books (FreeBSD Unleashed, X Power Tool and BSD Unix Toolbox latelly).

As of latter I've been reading some books by Haruki Murakami (very original and fresh), novels related to Magic: The Gathering and the Brisingr novel.


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## Carpetsmoker (Dec 10, 2009)

The sequel to Zombie Survival Handbook (World War Z) is also very good. In fact, I thought it was better than the handbook.

I hope the movie will be any good ... JMS is writing it so that sounds good, but then again, most of JMS' writings related to Babylon 5 have been rather crappy as of late ...


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## Purple_Q (Dec 10, 2009)

A friend from work got this for me, figured it'd be right up my alley: "The Soul Of A New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. It's sort of an indirect, fictional remix of the founding of Apple Computer if I had to give it a quick description. I really feel that this is a book any fellow computer nerd and/or geek should read. It's old, but it's a great book.

I also recommend "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand, and for the more romantic geek "Pride And Prejudice, And Zombies" :e
  --Q


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## stevejones (Dec 11, 2009)

Mostly controversial literature. 

The Hiram Key, The Jesus Papers, The Pagan Christ, The Passover Plot are some of my favorites.

I've just recently got The Book of PF and Absolute FreeBSD so looks like I'll be busy for a while.


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## geog_dash (Dec 11, 2009)

Anything by Ellen Ullman.


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## FRANCOIS (Dec 16, 2009)

the rys chronicle by Tracy Falbe
the midnight breed by Lara Adrian
Moon Chasers Sharie Kohler

Beware not for the faint hearted(lots of blood and 6!)


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## vigol (Dec 25, 2009)

1- music/history    : The Concise Oxford History of Music By Gerald Abraham
2- music/Harmony : Harmony in Practice By Anna Butterworth (ISBN: 1-85472-833-4)
3- math/Discrete   : Discrete and Combinatorial MAthematics, An applied Introduction By Ralph P.Grimaldi (ISBN: 0-201-72634-3)
4- computer/OS   : Operating Systems - Concurrent and Distributed Software Design By Jean*beep*Bacon, Tim*beep*Harris (ISBN: 0-321-11789-1)


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