Reading Thread

[Chris]

Reading for me is soul food. An opportunity to unplug and escape. I also love the tactile act.

listening vs reading is not for me. I tried once and found that the voices that my brain creates are better than the voice actors can ever achieve.

While running I listen to podcasts because I just won’t listen to them otherwise.

 

[Boone]

You are 100% right. There is no similarity at all imho. But I still love a good story. When I was a kid, I would stay up every night until 11:06 pm when CBS Mystery Theater would come on WTOP radio. I actually have every one of those shows ever produced on my computer (and many of them loaded on my personal blog site). I view audio books as old time radio more or less.

But yeah, not the same experience at all as actually reading a great book.

 

[Skinsfan1311]

I love to read. As a kid I was a voracious reader, thanks to my Mom's encouragement. But as an adult, man, I just find it hard to carve out the time. I do listen to a lot of audio books, but that's radio, not reading Hoping to get back to it when I retire.

Same, except for carving out the time. Reading to me is as essential as eating and exercise.

 

[Skinsfan1311]

Reading for me is soul food. An opportunity to unplug and escape. I also love the tactile act.

listening vs reading is not for me. I tried once and found that the voices that my brain creates are better than the voice actors can ever achieve.

While running I listen to podcasts because I just won’t listen to them otherwise.

Agreed...except for podcasts. Never listened to one.

That being said, I'll occasionally listen to an audiobook on long road-trips. A a good narrator is paramount. One of the best, if not the best, (according to Mom, who devours audiobooks), is Will Patton. If you're a fan of James Lee Burke, and his Dave Robicheaux stories), I can highly recommend them and any of the audiobooks that he narrates. His voice and inflection perfectly captures the characters. His voice is mesmerizing. I could listen to him read the ingredients from a soup label, and would enjoy it. If you watch Yellowstone, Will Patton plays Jamie Dutton's biological father.

When I do listen to an audiobook on road-trips, it's always a book that I've already read and enjoyed. That way, I can get into the the story, and not have to worry about missing any details or get overly distracted while driving.

 

[Chris]

To be fair, the only podcasts I regularly listen to are Washington football related.

 

[Chris]

Last night I finished Innocent by Scott Turow, a years later continuation of the author’s universally lauded debut novel Presumed Innocent.

Turow, widely acclaimed as one of the legal thrillers best writers, continues on with his character’s graduations through life and exposed both the foibles and the inherent introspections that aging provides, whether welcomed or not. Desire and need are both exposed and present and shown to remain every bit as prevalent as life advances. Are the adages about ‘wiser with age’ just a myth? It certainly raises the question.

There are no heroes in the story. There are no villains either. Unless, of course, you understand that we are all heroes and we are all villains, depending on circumstance and perspective.

Lastly, this is not a feel-good tale but it does provide an insightful basis for which to inspect and to try to understand the ‘human’ part of being a human being.

 

[Chris]

Today I will start The Border by Don Winslow, author of The Force that was previously mentioned.

This one is 716 pages so definitely a bargain when considering price per page.

 

[Skinsfan1311]

Today I will start The Border by Don Winslow, author of The Force that was previously mentioned.

This one is 716 pages so definitely a bargain when considering price per page.

Today I will start The Border by Don Winslow, author of The Force that was previously mentioned.

This one is 716 pages so definitely a bargain when considering price per page.

I started "Power of the Dog" the other day and can't turn the pages fast enough.

 

[Chris]

I’m jealous. Been trying for a while to get a hardcover copy. The prices are sub-optimal, to say the least.

 

[Chris]

A passage from The Border by Don Winslow-

More Americans than ever are dying from overdoses.

If you asked the average citizen to name America’s longest war, he’d probably say Vietnam and then quickly amend it to Afghanistan, but the true answer is the war on drugs. Fifty years old and counting.

It’s cost of over a trillion dollars, and that’s only one part of the financial equation- the legitimate, ‘clean’ money that goes for equipment, police, courts and prisons. But if we’re going to be really honest, Keller knows, we have to account for the dirty money, too.

Tens of billions of drug dollars- in cash- go down to Mexico alone every year, so much cash they don’t even count it, they weigh it. It has to go somewhere, the narcos can’t stick it under their pillows or dig hole in their backyards. A lot of it is invested in Mexico, the estimate being that drug money accounts for 7 to 12 percent of the Mexican economy.

But a lot of it comes back here- into real estate and other investments. Into banking and then out to legitimate businesses.

It’s the dirty secret of the war on drugs- every time an addict sticks a needle into his arm, everyone makes money.

We’re all investors.

We’re all the cartel.

 

[Skinsfan1311]

I’m jealous. Been trying for a while to get a hardcover copy. The prices are sub-optimal, to say the least.

View attachment 6552

OUCH!!! That's got to be misprint. In any event, I don't have the hardcover. I have the free download from the library on my Kindle. I rarely read "real" books anymore. I'm too much of a germaphobe to check them out at the library and too cheap to buy them.

 

[Chris]

I finally finished The Border by Don Winslow. At 700+ pages it took a while. Whew.

It is unfortunately an unsurprising story of the greed for money shared by the drug cartels, the bankers, the Wall Streeters, the developers and the politicians that is made possible by America’s unquenching thirst for narcotics.

 

[Chris]

Today I finished The Gods of Guilt, the 4th book in the Lincoln Lawyer series from Michael Connelly.

Connelly is one of my all-time favorites. Both this series and the Bosch series are ‘comfort food for my soul’ novels that I find impossible to put down.

 

[Skinsfan1311]

Today I finished The Gods of Guilt, the 4th book in the Lincoln Lawyer series from Michael Connelly.

Connelly is one of my all-time favorites. Both this series and the Bosch series are ‘comfort food for my soul’ novels that I find impossible to put down.

Amen! I can't turn the pages fast enough. The TV series is good too. Really good. Have you read any of the Craig Johnson "Longmire" series? Those are very, very well written and entertaining. They are another series of books that translated very well over to TV.

 

[Skinsfan1311]

I finally finished The Border by Don Winslow. At 700+ pages it took a while. Whew.

It is unfortunately an unsurprising story of the greed for money shared by the drug cartels, the bankers, the Wall Streeters, the developers and the politicians that is made possible by America’s unquenching thirst for narcotics.

I'm about halfway through "The Cartel" and, to repeat myself from another post, I can't turn the pages fast enough.

 

[Chris]

Amen! I can't turn the pages fast enough. The TV series is good too. Really good. Have you read any of the Craig Johnson "Longmire" series? Those are very, very well written and entertaining. They are another series of books that translated very well over to TV.

I haven’t but will check them out. I don’t remember a tv series either.

 

[Chris]

I finished The Investigator (a Letty Davenport novel) by author John Sandford.

Letty, the adopted daughter of Sandford’s main character of Lucas Davenport, who has been appearing for years in his Prey series, gets the lead role here. She is brash and cocky 24 year old following in her father’s footsteps. Actually a too brash and too cocky twenty-something.

I found it a totally forgettable and unbelievable story and found myself hoping that Sanford is not becoming James Patterson-like and reaching the point of just mailing it in. Both for the sake of the Prey series and for his first spinoff Virgil Flowers.

 

[Chris]

I’m now reading The Devil’s Hand, the 4th in the Terminal List series by Jack Carr. (Great Netflix series btw)

James Reece is back in action, working now as a weapon for the good ‘ol US of A.

 

[Chris]

I just finished The Devil’s Hand. The author, Jack Carr, is a former Navy SEAL of 20 years who led special ops teams as a team leader, platoon commander, troop commander, and task unit commander before retiring and becoming an author.

This novel explores a fictional plot by Iran to attack the United States from within through the use of a biological weapon, a modified Ebola-based strain of hemorrhagic fever with a fatality rate of 90%, that is introduced into two U.S. cities.

This book was a definite page turner that fans of Tom Clancy will enjoy.

 

[Neophyte]

Read it over the summer. Brilliant stuff.

Currently reading Fractured, the second book in the Will Trent series by Karin Slaughter (got to be a pen name, right?).

Good stuff. I started the first one after I watched the first couple of episodes of the new TV series of the same name.