Recommended Reading

I want to have a place where the forum members can recommend various books for people to read. I think reading is something that is falling by the wayside, at least for people around my age, so this is something of a response to that phenomenon. The only rules are as follows:

1. Keep the books appropriate. The general principles of the forum apply here.

2. For every fictional book, there needs to be a recommended non-fiction book. This is just to encourage learning and provide sources of knowledge that could be useful for people. Extra "cool points" go to knife-related books.

3. Please don't provide links or references to material that is bootlegged or otherwise not keeping to it's copyrighted sources. We don't need potential legal issues.

_______________________

The King of Generalizations

Recommended books:

"Radical Honesty" by Brad Blanton

"Hitch 22: A Memoir" by the late Christopher Hitchens

"While Angels Dance" by Ralph Cotton



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/12/2016 09:00AM by Ryan Nafe.

Ryan,
Awesome post...
I'd like to suggest some authors, as there are a lot of books written by them:

Sci-Fi
William Gibson
Philip K. Dick

Non-Fiction
Mark Levine
Thomas Sowell

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"Gotta love living in 2019 baby, (63rc too soft on a production knife)"
--Shawn Houston

"I am still discussing issues of steels and performance at this stage."
--Cliff Stamp

"Cause geometry cuts, .....steel determines the level and the duration"
--Roman Landes

"But in general, I'm all about high performance, Ergos, safety. That's why I've been accused of 'designing in the dark' "
--Sal Glesser
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StoneSharpEdges

Reading isn't falling by the wayside, what are you doing right now? That is right to participate on the internet in any meaningful manner you have to read, and sometimes even write. And today its never been easier to get a work published, even if its not read by a large audience.

Books

Gargantua and Pantagruel, Divine Comedy, Aesop's Fables.

Non-fiction

Mushrooms of North America, Orson K. Miller,
First-order Logic, Raymond M. Smullyan
Weeds of California and Other Western States, Joseph M. DiTomaso.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/12/2016 10:10AM by Old Spice.

For knife related things:

The Razors Egde, John Juranitch

Leonard Lee's book on sharpening

Dr. Verhoeven's Metallurgy for Knife Makers

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"Gotta love living in 2019 baby, (63rc too soft on a production knife)"
--Shawn Houston

"I am still discussing issues of steels and performance at this stage."
--Cliff Stamp

"Cause geometry cuts, .....steel determines the level and the duration"
--Roman Landes

"But in general, I'm all about high performance, Ergos, safety. That's why I've been accused of 'designing in the dark' "
--Sal Glesser
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StoneSharpEdges

fervens started a thread on this awhile back...

[www.cliffstamp.com]


Chumgeyser on Youtube
E-nep throwing Brotherhood. Charter Member

I didn't realize that Chum, not sure what to do about it though.

Maybe Cliff can merge the threads, otherwise wouldn't worry about it.

Hunter S. Thompson

I don't really read much fiction, I enjoyed a lot of Tom Clancy's early work. I enjoyed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

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Bill22252 on YouTube. "See you space cowboy"

Resident Emerson Fanboi

Folding knives are fun, fixed blades are important.

Quote
Bugout Bill
... I enjoyed a lot of Tom Clancy's early work. I enjoyed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

I agree about Clancy and I just watched the movie version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest yesterday. The book is great too but that's one of the best film adaptations of a book I can think of. Nurse Ratched is real easy to hate.

Any of the little critter books by Mercer Mayer.

www.theflatearthsociety.org

BIGFOOT FINDS YOU, YOU DON'T FIND BIGFOOT!



IT IS THE E-NEP THROWING BROTHERHOOD

Ryan: I liked the book better. It drove home a lot of themes a bit better IMO.

I've read alot of online alternate history stuff that was pretty good if you are a history buff.

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Bill22252 on YouTube. "See you space cowboy"

Resident Emerson Fanboi

Folding knives are fun, fixed blades are important.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/12/2016 02:20PM by Bugout Bill.

Quote
Mark a
Any of the little critter books by Mercer Mayer.

Dude, good one. My ma used to read me those books.

Nonfiction: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

-I think Cliff would approve, but I first read it way back in high school.

Fiction: Ender's Game

-Most recent book I've read, before giving it to my son.

-Nate

Jocko reads a bit from "Glory of the Trenches", a book I'm going to try and find a copy of. It's a pretty interesting book by the sound of it. The author takes a very philosophical/spiritual approach to WWI. A fairly strong departure from the common way the war was described.

Reading and re-reading what I can find about the Battle of Guadalcanal which took place 73 years ago. i first read accounts of the battle in the early 60's, we lived on base at Camp Lejeune where most of the troops had trained , it had taken place 20 years previous, and veterans of the battle lived and worked nearby.
some new books have come out about the battle, more information has been declassified. the books:
Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis, civilian correspondent who landed the first day and stayed for four months. published 1943
The Island by Herbert Merillat, a marine junior officer who was part of division headquarters and stayed till December. published 1944
Guadalcanal by Richard Franks good account of the battles on land, at sea, and in the air. published 1990
Starvation Island by Eric Hammel account of the battles on land, at sea, and in the air published 1987
Neptune's Inferno by James Hornfischer account of the battles at sea and in the air. the navy suffered 3 times more casualties than the army and marines. should be mandatory reading for all sailors. published 2011
The Eagle and the Rising Sun by Alan Schom overview of all action in Pacific and East Asia from 1940 to mid 1943. OK read when he sticks to big picture but he tends to be gossipy and some of his 'facts' are contradicted in the other 5 books. published 2004

scott
[www.etsy.com]

Lately I have been enjoying reading the Nathan Heller series by Max Collins. The audiobook companion available through audible is narrated by Dan John Miller. This is a series about a Chicago private investigator during the 30s 40s and 50s. interjects a fictional character into numerous real life crimes so it's an interesting mix of fiction in history. The narrative and character building are quite good, I will have noted some historical and technical inaccuracies, overall the books are well researched. I like being able to switch seamlessly between the Kindle and the audio version

Thomas Paine, "Rights of Man". Essential reading. This should be taught in schools. It would have been cool to meet this guy.

"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."

Ryan: Read some John Locke too.

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Bill22252 on YouTube. "See you space cowboy"

Resident Emerson Fanboi

Folding knives are fun, fixed blades are important.

For those smarter than me (much smarter), Caltech has published The Feynman Lectures on Physics online:
[www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu]

Chad I'm with ya on not having the background to understand a lot of that stuff. It's annoying because I know I could easily grasp the concepts and I always enjoy learning, but a lot of it goes right over my head.

I was wandering around Barnes and Noble yesterday afternoon and found a copy of "On the Origin of Species" for $5 and Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". I did find a book by Hawking that looked interesting but it was about a million pages long (easily 3" thick) and looked like a little much for the time being.

Have any of you read Beyond Good and Evil? Or any of Nietzsche's other books?

Ryan: I read some Nietzche in college. I found it pretty innocuous, people draw their own conclusions from the work, some worse than others.

I liked Hannah Arendt, Locke, and some of the existentialist thinkers to be more enjoyable.

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Bill22252 on YouTube. "See you space cowboy"

Resident Emerson Fanboi

Folding knives are fun, fixed blades are important.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/22/2017 09:36AM by Bugout Bill.

The odd thing to me about some of his concepts like "will to power" is that they're merely asserted. Which is fine and I still find it interesting, but I find myself wondering what the underlying purposes are. Right now it just seems to be that the writing is simply meant to express what he thought and it's more for the sake of the ideas themselves than anything else. At the very least (I'm a few pages into Beyond Good and Evil) I have to give him credit for how much information he communicates in a single paragraph. It's going to take me quite a while to digest all of these ideas.

Ryan: That was a major theory presented in the political philosophy class that I took that dealt with him.

The condemnations that Nazis derived their ideas from his work, or that he was an anti-Semite are mostly due to how his sister presented his work, rather than his own.

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Bill22252 on YouTube. "See you space cowboy"

Resident Emerson Fanboi

Folding knives are fun, fixed blades are important.

Quote
Bugout Bill
...The condemnations that Nazis derived their ideas from his work...

This sort of thinking seems very problematic to me. Note that I don't mean to say that you're somehow involved in this line of thinking, I'm just talking about what I think is going on when someone says " "group x" did "y" because of "person z's" writings."

Someone can read almost any kind of idea or set of ideas and then claim that person/group "x" used the ideas for some purpose or another. The trouble is that aside from directly asking said people where they got their ideas from, there's not really much proof available. Now it's certainly possible that a person or group can become aware of various philosophical positions and then export those ideas to other people without informing the people that the ideas are rooted in a certain philosophy, but again it's hard to tell when that happens unless you directly ask the person responsible for the export of the ideas. And it's only going to be productive to directly ask the person if they're both consciously aware of the process that you think has occurred and if the person is honest enough to tell you what actually happened. Both of those requirements seem pretty unlikely to be met when you consider the kind of people who generally try to influence the minds of many people for a purpose that isn't made clear to the people that are being influenced. Basically there's underlying dishonesty and manipulation in what you think the person in question is/was doing, so it seems to me that they're not likely to be honest with you when you're asking about it.

Ryan: Yes and no.

There is literature (The Koran, Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf[/i] ) where the line tracing them to actions is quite it explicit. They are ideological tomes more than anything.

But to blame broader philosophical works to the actions of individuals is generally grasping at straws. It's like blaming Marilyn Manson for Columbine.

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Bill22252 on YouTube. "See you space cowboy"

Resident Emerson Fanboi

Folding knives are fun, fixed blades are important.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/22/2017 11:09AM by Bugout Bill.

Quote
Bugout Bill
There is literature (The Koran, Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf[/i] ) where the line tracing them to actions is quite it explicit. They are ideological tomes more than anything.

Yeah this I definitely agree with, and in many of those cases people are pretty open about why they're doing things and will directly cite various ideological sources and beliefs as the reasons for their actions.

Quote
Bugout Bill
But to blame broader philosophical works to the actions of individuals is generally grasping at straws. It's like blaming Marilyn Manson for Columbine.

This is what I was getting at in what I wrote previously.

Been meaning to read this for years, never got around to it.

[en.wikipedia.org]

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Bill22252 on YouTube. "See you space cowboy"

Resident Emerson Fanboi

Folding knives are fun, fixed blades are important.