This thread was inspired a similar one over the Starship Modeler forum.


Over the past few months I've read Eric Dietz Halo: the Flood, Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer, and I've started on Carl sagan's Contact.

For school I read The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albon, soon we will be starting Night by Elie Wiesel.

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Aim high (but don't blow yourself up)!- Homer Hickam

In Soviet Russia, UFO report you!- Phil Plait

Carl Sagan may have seen a pale blue dot, but I see a sapphire.- Doug Phillips, Discovering Alabama.

Clear skies Maksutov.

I've cut back my reading drastically because I am doing an Open University maths course.

But recently I read The Oxford Murders, which I thought was very clever.

I bought Stardust by Neil Gaiman, but my wife grabbed it before I got a chance to read it. Oh well, it was supposed to be a birthday present for her...

Legacy of Hereot.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Reinventing Gravity. Its awesome.

Mars 3-D, though I'll admit there's a lot of picture viewing involved.

I just finished Jay Barbree's Live from Cape Canaveral: Covering the Space Race, from Sputnik to Today.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.

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We'll have to outwit the fiend with our superior intelligence.
Yukon Cornelius

I'm taking a break from my usual fiction fare, and reading On War, by Carl von Clauswitz. It's suprisingly interesting, especially this particular edition, which features an excellent English translation and includes some very illuminating introductions and commentaries.

I'm also working my way slowly but surely through War Plan Orange: the U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897-1945.

I'm reading Where the Winds Sleep by Neil Ruzio. It's a "future history" written in the '70s about how the author imagined lunar colonization would progress. Did people back then seriously think that the Earth, Moon, and Mars all formed from the same protoplanet that spun too fast?

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

Stephen King's Danse Macabre, his history of the horror genre. Because, you see, I watched Freaks this morning, and it's mentioned in it. I haven't read Danse Macabre in a while, and I wanted to go through it again.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Just finished "The thin red line" by James Jones. Reminds me a lot of Catch-22.

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Out of my mind. Back in five minutes.

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a quarter of a beer. The bartender says "You're all idiots", and pours two beers

Just finished all three of the Science of Discworld books and am now working through Six Easy Pieces which are six of the lectures that Richard Feynman gave to the freshman and sophomore Caltech classes in 1961 and 1962. And still relevant! Waiting in the wings is Terry Pratchett's Nation.

Sojourner - Andy Mishkin
Roving Mars - Steve Squyres
Postcards from Mars - Jim Bell

Yeah - I'm researching

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman on the commuting train (some of the stories are interesting, but a Ray Bradbury he is not)
Rereading Thief of Time at home.

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Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

"Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you."

Freaks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freaks I have not seen this movie, and after reading about it... I don't know if I should.

Gillianren - What is your impression? What does Stephen King say about it?

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We'll have to outwit the fiend with our superior intelligence.
Yukon Cornelius

Well, for one, I don't think it's major horror. It's creepy and unpleasant in places, but there's very little there that's scary. King is of the opinion that the reason the censors came down so hard on it was that the movie has real circus freaks in it, and I can see no other reason.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/j...49&view=public

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Just finished Moonraker, but that was just to pass time while waiting on the new Malazan Book of the Fallen, Toll the Hounds. I'm hoping it arrives this weekend at my local library!

Just finished Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman!, which serves as my personal bible. Ordered The Forever War, so that should drop down in my mailbox soon enough. Seems pretty interesting.
I'm also trying to plow through Lovecraft's At the mountains of madness, but I feel his writing style is a few decades too deceased for my taste.

Currently reading Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds and re-reading the Harry Potter books. Haven't been reading nearly as much as usual lately; I'm back in school, plus working full time. Not much time for anything else these days.

The short answer is yes. It was one of several theories. It was centered on the Earth and Moon. The Mars formation is a new twist.

That book is very powerful, I remember reading it in high school and walking around in a state of shock for the rest of the day.

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"One does not require alien ruins in order to absorb a profound sense of wonder and mystery from the moon. That our civilization had actually visited it is miracle enough." Jason Roberts

A biography of Michael Faraday.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

Finishing off Black Sunday by Thomas Harris.

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" The universe is running away
I heard it on the news just the other day
There's this new stuff called dark energy
We can't measure and we can't see..." - from Jimmy Buffett's What if the hokey pokey is all it really is about?

I've just finished The Folklore of Discworld, and I'm now re-reading Nineteen-Eighty-Four

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If our brains were simple enough for us to understand, we'd be so simple we couldn't

QQR

Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton.

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N6MAA10816
Faber '62 ΔTX
Are you a Bright?

Currently reading two novels:

Honour Among Thieves by Jeffrey Archer - Saddam Hussein plots to steal the US Declaration of Independence and publicly burn it on July 4th, 1994.

Nimed marmortahvlil by Albert Kivikas - "Names In Marble", a story about a students battalion, set during Estonia's War of Independence 1918 - 20.

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" The universe is running away
I heard it on the news just the other day
There's this new stuff called dark energy
We can't measure and we can't see..." - from Jimmy Buffett's What if the hokey pokey is all it really is about?

I just finished Nemesis by Asimov. Great read.

Now I am halfway through Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine which I am absolutely over-enjoying.

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"The universe is cool enough without making up crap about it.” - Phil Plait

Timothy Zahn's Outbound Project.

What can I say, I'm a Star Wars geek

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Mother Stole My Sister's Boyfriend. It's a pretty good look at the genetic component to mental illness, including certain brands of sociopathy.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. While the book is nominally about how the earth would change if humans were to disappear, it also discusses how we are trashing the planet. The plastics chapter is rather depressing.

Empire From the Ashes (free online version) by David Weber. An amusing "alternate history" scenario combined with interesting SF. Mutineer's Moon is the first of the three books, and it was mentioned here on BAUT recently. I started reading it and couldn't stop.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
Meet the OOONG TOE.