What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

[macdoc]

He has an incredible command of the English vernacular. I found myself dreaming in period English.....and laughing a lot ...he is a very engaging writer.
Yeah - listening to a work and reading it are different.

My new goal will be to
Watch a movie based on a book.
Read the book
listen to the book

all in 24 hours....I did 2 of three with Sea Biscuit and it was wonderful...the visuals in the movie really enhanced the reading.
I barely completed that trick within a day so the the triple play will have to be a shortish novel.

[Tero]

Reading about the Teutoburg forest battle. I wanted a bit more than Wikipedia.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Ah, one of Rome's more infamous military misadventures. It's not as significant as Cannae, but looms large in my mind because of the image of Roman soldiers (so powerful en masse in ordered battle) being hunted through the forest.

[macdoc]

Teutoburg forest battle

Fantastic story ...hinge point of history. Xtianity may never have taken hold. No Germany, the list of "could have beens" is enormous.

There is a series on the battle. Barbarians I think.
The ex - Roman soldier leading the German tribes

[Tero]

Yeah we watched the Netflix show. The plot is a bit fantasy/simplified. Arminius was not raised in Rome as the adopted child of a general. But he was in the Roman army and fluent in Latin.

[rasetsu]

Loading up some history and science so that I have something that doesn't require a lot of effort to read when I'm feeling lazy. Starting with Hawking's Brief History of Time, Gibbons' Decline and Fall, and Dawkins' Ancestor's Tale.

[rasetsu]

Also started on Ursula K. LeGuin's translation of the Tao Te Ching. It's certainly different.

[rasetsu]

Nice! I went to send the book on the Windows Subsystem for Linux over to my Kindle only to realize that I downloaded the wrong format when I bought it. Going to my account made me aware of other computer books I had purchased that I'd like to read, most notably refreshing my memory of sed and grep commands and syntax. I found a drag & drop interface for Send To Kindle. Before I was converting from EPUB to AZW3 and then transferring with a cable. This is hella easier.

[rasetsu]

Double score! Send To Kindle takes PDF as well as EPUB. No need for conversion.

[Brian Peacock]

Sweet.

---

Just starting Terry Tempest Williams's collection of essays, Erosion: Essays of Undoing.

[JimC]

Loading up some history and science so that I have something that doesn't require a lot of effort to read when I'm feeling lazy. Starting with Hawking's Brief History of Time, Gibbons' Decline and Fall, and Dawkins' Ancestor's Tale.

The Ancestor's Tale is just brilliant, IMO...

[macdoc]

Hawking's Brief History of Time

it's wrong - according to Hawkins
https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... k-is-wrong

Gibbons' Decline and Fall

it's old

If you want an unbiased, accurate history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire that takes into account everything we have learned about ancient Rome in the past 200 years or so, then the answer is clearly “no.” You will not find anything like that with Gibbon.

Dawkins' Ancestor's Tale

dated if you are reading the original ...okay if you have the 2016 version.

[Tero]

I found a book on the barbarians and Romans, but jeez...this one is wordy. He could have put half the info in footnotes and just get to the reasonable conclusions and it would be readable. 100 pages of book and 500 pages of footnotes.

[macdoc]

This is supposed to be accurate.


There are a few long articles on it as well.

[Tero]

This is supposed to be accurate.


There are a few long articles on it as well.

Yeah, I had a similar book. The result was that the Germani no longer were able to harass the Romans. Romans stuck to the line at the Rhine and any forts past that. Germans had no siege machinery. But Germania was mostly a loss, they were not able to tax like in Gaul.

I have a short illustrated book coming as well as the Alesia battle. These types of books. After that I've lost interest in Romans. Also, the sword clashing is overdone. Neither Germans or Romans relied on swords alone. They are convenient for movies.