Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Jim Thompson, The Getaway
GWF Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes
Gianni Rodari, C'era due volte Il Barone Lamberto
Robert Bringhurst, A Short History of the Printed Word

If you aren't familiar with Bruce Canfield, he has several books out and has written numerous aritcles for the American Rifleman.  I just got his US Military Bolt Action Rifles and wow!  It covers things from the Civil War up to today's bolt action sniepr rifles.  Amazing book.

Hey, I read that earlier this year! It's a real good time. I like how tough and gritty that whole book is, and yet all the F-words are censored.

My current rotation
Learning Python - Lutz. How To Talk So Kids Will Listen... - Faber, Mazlish.

Creation - Vidal. Boy, is there ever a lot of standing around and having long-winded conversations about religion in this book. But then a drunk indian prince shows up and starts groping little girls and you're like "oh, right, this is by Gore Vidal."

Apex - Ramez Naam - just started this today; quite liked the first two in this series (Nexus and Crux), looking forward to the rest of this one.

Messenger - James Walker - started this day before yesterday, got 15% of the way in, then deleted it off my kindle and my Goodreads. It's trying to do a sort of Mobile Suit Gundam / Heavy Gear / Giant Robots On A Mission kind of thing, but it just can't get out of its own damn way. Much too florid with the descriptions of mundane nonsense, clunky dialogue, and exposition seething from every pore. 1/5 DNF.

ETA: Oh my gosh, between the last time I posted and this post, I also read all of Old Man's War by John Scalzi. That was surprisingly good. There's something bizarre about the way the military people talk in it, and some of the tech stuff just strikes me as being kinda dumb (everybody has self-protecting, self-repairing suits that... don't protect the face by default, and also don't come with gas masks or air reserves or...), but on the balance I really enjoyed it. 4/5.

Just finished Song of Kali early Dan Simmons.  Kind of a long short story, almost mystery, almost thriller, almost fantasy.  It was ok.

I just read The Strain trilogy.  The TV series is based on the books, but as usual, the books are better and the story line is not quite the same.  It's a good read and a different take on vampires.

I also read the Wayward Pines series.  It's an interesting read and I really enjoyed the story line.  It's kind of futuristic but with good characters.  

Just finished Philip Magnan's Letter From the Pacific Front.

Reading Cold Mountain

If you enjoy that genre, be sure to check out James M. Cain's hard-boiled novels. They are even grittier than Chandler's.  

Awesome! Just added The Postman Always Rings Twice to my amazon wishlist. Thanks!
In terms of grit-per-square inch, how much casual 1930s racism and homophobia can I expect?

William Manchester's Goodbye Darkness.  Holy sh*t.  Some of the stuff he talks about decades after WW II.  SGM who is a queer.  They dismiss it as being crude when the SGM says the stuff while he's drunk but they later learned he was queer for real.  Then there's a col. who was also queer.

He had a d*ckhead butterbar.  Manchester attended OCS with him but got dismissed (he refused some corporal's order to clean his gun after it had passed inspection). Anyway, Manchester tried to warn the officer about going over the top and the officer humiliated Manchester in front of his squad.  The officer led the way and got stitched by a Nambu machine gun.

Just started "The Frontiersmen" from the Time-Life series of books on the Old West.

Audey Murphy's To Hell and Back.

Gunning For the Enemy by Wallace McIntosh.  McIntosh joins the RAF to escape poverty and to get three meals a day.  During WW II he is a gunner aboard a RAF bomber and bags eight jerries.

"Storm of Steel"-Ernst Jünger

Jack Reacher - Night School

I've been on a Dan Simmons kick lately.  Finished Song of Kali and then Summer of Night.  Currently reading Children of Night.

Just finished:
Lee Childs
jack reacher: bad luck and trouble

Just started:
The Dead and Those about to Die
D Day: The Big Red One at Omaha Beach
John C McManus

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli pirates, Brian Kilmeade

The Trailblazers from the Time-Life series of books on the Old West.

The Revenant.

The Last Panther by Wolfgang Faust

Read David Weber's Shadow of Victory last week, and Michael Z. Williamson's Angeleyes.

Re-reading the other Freehold books by Williamson now.  Starting on  Do Unto Others tonight.

Want to pick up the new Lee Child Jack Reacher novel, Night School, but not paying $15 on Kindle for it.  Probably pick it up at the store my wife works at.

Looking forward to Correia and Ringo's Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners in about 2 weeks.

Finished:
*How to Talk So Kids Will Listen... - 4/5 - found this a very interesting and practical look at how to deal with kids, and generally how to deal with people. Dunno if I'll put any of it into practice, but it was good.

*Apex (Nexus #3) - 5/5 - actually teared up several times while reading this. excellent cap to the Nexus series. Interesting action, surprising twists and turns.

*The Hidden Legacy of World War II: A Daughter's Journey of Discovery - Carol Schultz Vento - 3/5 - a memoir of a woman who grew up with a father and a stepfather who were combat veterans of WW2, one with undiagnosed PTSD (PTSD wasn't understood to be a thing until the 80s, and even then almost all of the focus was on Vietnam veterans, very little study was done of WW2/Korea veterans) and one without. Includes stories of other veterans dealing with undiagnosed PTSD and society's refusal to acknowledge the stresses and effects of combat on veterans. Only 3/5 because it's kind of repetitive and isn't especially well-written, but worth a look to get another perspective on the decades after WW2.

Currently only reading Creation and Learning Python, kind of dragging my feet adding anything else to the rotation for now.

Almost finished with William Andrews' The Diaries and Letters of John T. Farnham. Farnham met and shook hands with Abe Lincoln and described his hands as cold and clammy. I shared this information with Dr. John Sotos (The Physical Lincoln) who thinks that Abe had Multiple Endocrine Neoplast Type II B Cancer. Dr. Sotos wanted the date and location andthis was provided later as well as a cross-reference with Lincoln Day-by-Day which confirmed the meeting date in 1864. The cold clammy hand is a physical symptom indicating a constriction of the blood vessels, another symptom of MENT IIB.

Peter F. Hamilton's "Pandora's Star".



Pure, unadulterated WOW!





Hard Sci Fi.....in a futurist format with a detective story, a believable and very savage alien adversary, large scale, long lived political families always vying for power.....



This is the first book to present, what I think is a very realistic view if what would make a realistic, antagonist alien "race".  I never believed that a race of beings that would be able to make it to the stars would be of a war-faring variety...until I read this book.

The Texans from the Time-Life series of books on the Old West. (I'm on a roll with these TL books)

Joseph Byrd's Confederate Sharpshooter: Major William E. Simmons. I mentioned Wofford's sharpshooters in my book but this is the first full length treatment of the 3rd Battalion Georgia Sharp Shooters.

Finished "toll the hounds" and starting "dust of dreams" by Steven Erikson

I would wholeheartedly recommend the Malazan series to anyone interested in epic fantasy

The Tao of Bill Murrary.  

He is a jester and an asshole at the same time.  It seems he has a seeet soul that keeps the asshole in check.  That said he will push you in the pool.  

He has used his fame to amuse people at random.

Hyperion Book 1

The Hills of Homicide by Louis L'Amour

Fiat Paper Money: The History and Evolution of Our Currency by Ralph T. Foster

Just finished A Boy and His Dog and The Lathe of Heaven. Starting on Toad Words and Other Stories.

Citizen Soldier-By Stephen E. Ambrose

Finished Toad Words and Other Stories by T. Kingfisher on Friday. It was a lot better than I expected! It's a collection of short stories, of which maybe 3/4 are re-writings of fairy tales but from a different perspective or with a little twist (there's a lot of 'you hear the story this way, but that's a bunch of bullcrap, here's the straight dope'). 4/5 stars.

Started on Chains of Command by Marko Kloos, the fourth book in the Frontlines series. Read about 3/4 of it yesterday while sleeping off a hangover, really enjoying it so far.

Next on the list is Viking Panzers: The German SS 5th Tank Regiment in the East in World War II by Ewald Klapdor

Just finished reading Larry Correia and Mike Kupari's Dead Six series.  Pretty entertaining.  Picked up the Black Tide Rising Anthologies, and Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners.

Started reading Christopher Nuttall's most recent "The Empires Corps", 13th in the series I believe, and just can't get into it.

Still have all of Corey's "The Expanse" series, and have found that hard to get into as well.

Just finished reading Pearl Harbor survivor Donald Stratton's All the Gallant Men. Stratton was aboard the USS Arizona when she blew and had burns all over his body. After being discharged, he re-enlisted and served aboard a destroyer.

Andrew Jackson by H. W. Brands.
Learning a lot about Jackson and the political times of his life. The similarities of Jackson's to Trump's election are intriguing.
It's a difficult read. The author's syntax is complicated and he has a HUGE vocabulary. Lot's of new "words for the day" to look up.

When done, a brief review please.

Tribe, Sebastian Junger.  Good and quick read.

So far, it is as dry as dust. Going to try to stick it out to at least 20%, but really dry military history books are starting to grate on me. It is bizarrely comprehensive, though -- a few pages ago, almost apropos of nothing, the author said something to the effect of "and let us lay to rest the myth that the 5th SS Panzer Regiment went into [wherever] without adequate maps. Indeed, officers of the regiment were provided copies of--" and then literally like a kindle-page-and-a-half just listing regions covered by maps. Like, dang, Herr Klapdor, I won't talk any more mess about the SS's maps, I guess. Settle down, Fritz.

Just finished "The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins.  Not the usual ARFCOMish fare, but a good thriller nonetheless.  Interesting writing style.  All in narrative style from three different viewpoints.   Did not and probably will not see the movie, though I do like Emily Blunt.

Just started Jim Rickards' The Road to Ruin.  It's about what is going to happen when our financial system collapses.  Per Rickards it will be total lockdown of the financial system. Even private fund managers will be told by the SEC they can't sell stuff.  No stocks, bonds sales or liquidation of money market funds, ATMS or cash withdrawals.

Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game
Holding Their Own XII Copperheads
Prepping Booobytraps

Today I started "Glory Boy" by our own RikWriter no here.

How does it compare to his other books?

I read the whole of "The Terror"...it sucked for about 2/3 before getting really good.

Just started reading The Discworld series.

You said "when done", but I am being contrary, so here's a 25% update: Viking Panzers is definitely at its best when it's quoting from personal or press accounts, and it seems to always drag its toes when it is summarizing from official history. It has picked up from its early aridness, though.

It's weird to read about the wehrmacht having fancy new tanks and plenty of fuel... but to constantly get messages and orders from high command pissing and moaning about ammunition consumption (they get a message from command like "you used 2800 light artillery shells!" and the author is like "yeah, we dislodged entrenched russians from a god damn hill, what do you want?"), and to read about infighting and disagreement among various levels of command; bitchy, passive-aggressive written orders and so on. Where I am in the book, Stalingrad is starting to siphon more and more resources away from the sector where 5 SS-Panzer-Division is fighting.

In other news, I started The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock today, and then  I finished it today because I couldn't stop reading it. I pulled my nose out of it at lunch and legit could not tell how long I had been sitting in the restaurant reading it. Then I looked at the time on my phone and couldn't remember when I'd left the office to go to the restaurant. At the end of the day, instead of going home, I sat my butt down on the floor of my office and put my nose in my Kindle and didn't come up for air until the book was done. It's a somewhat filthy tale of corruption and evil (and occasionally of innocence and decency) in West Virginia and Ohio in the 50s and 60s. I dunno if I can give a stronger recommendation than "I sat on the floor in a dark office and read it until there was no more of it to read."

Finished Chains of Command by Marko Kloos, which maintains the Frontlines series' high standard and was surprisingly tense in spots.

In the last few days I've also started and finished: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, which I thought was a hell of a fun read like all the other Sherlock Holmes stuff I've read so far; and Fox Things by Kye Kitsune, which was an extremely short collection of furry smut stories that was ashamed to be smutty so all the sex was perfunctory and boring, and all the stuff that it was skimping on the sex for was a waste of time.

It was a good short story.  Way different than his other works that I've read so far.  I've only read Summer of Night, Children of the Night, and Hyperion.  I'm currently reading Fall of Hyperion.  I enjoyed the Summer of Night books, kind of a cross between Stephen King's IT and Salem's Lot.  They're loosely associated instead of being a series.  I'm enjoying The Hyperion series, though The Fall of Hyperion is kinda dragging here at the end.  Song of Kali is a pretty short read so I'd recommend picking it up.

almost finished with "at the sign of triumph" by David Weber, #9 of his safehold series.

Company Commander, Major Russell Lewis.