What book are you reading right now?

**SiLeakHunt** · 13-05-2017, 09:16 PM

currently ploughing through The Naked Lunch, William Buroughs.
Just finished Nice Mr Nasty by Joseph King, easy enough truish tale of a drug smuggler, and also This thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson, bit of a grind but interesting if you're into natural history.

**Crestofawave** · 05-06-2017, 03:39 PM

I've just finished reading 'Tales and travels of a teacher in Thailand' by Jeff Sparks. Some of the situations and teachers he describes are just downright funny. Some lovely descriptions of the countryside too.
I really must get to the Yasothon rocket festival one day.

**kmart** · 05-06-2017, 04:12 PM

Just reading Nick Kent's (former NME music journo) collection of anecdotes and interviews with rock luminaries and icons, such as Iggy Pop, Brian Wilson, Roy Orbison, Neil Young, Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain, Miles Davis, Syd Barrett, etc., etc.

Entitled "The Dark Stuff", Kent wrote a lot of these pieces at the peak of his powers in the 70's and 80's so there is a weird retrospective quality about some of the chapters. As one of the vanguard of Rolling Stone hangers on and junkies, Kent has certainly a lot of inside knowledge and tremendous fascination with the subjects of his musings. Some real insights and comic gold in this book.

**baldrick** · 18-06-2017, 02:29 PM

Everybody Lies - Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

I highly recommend this book - this is about the things that are revealed from googles dataset - the only place where people really tell the truth is googles search box

Blending the informed analysis of The Signal and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak, a fascinating, illuminating, and witty look at what the vast amounts of information now instantly available to us reveals about ourselves and our world—provided we ask the right questions.

By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century, human beings searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of information—unprecedented in history—can tell us a great deal about who we are—the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than twenty years ago, seemed unfathomable.

American Shaolin - Matthew Polly

I quite enjoyed this book about a young american who went to shaolin , china to learn kungfu - easy to read and quite funny in parts

Bill Bryson meets Bruce Lee in this raucously funny story of one scrawny American’s quest to become a kung fu master at China’s legendary Shaolin Temple. Growing up a ninety-pound weakling tormented by bullies in the schoolyards of Kansas, young Matthew Polly dreamed of one day journeying to the Shaolin Temple in China to become the toughest fighter in the world, like Caine in his favorite 1970s TV series, Kung Fu. While in college, Matthew decided the time had come to pursue this quixotic dream before it was too late. Much to the dismay of his parents, he dropped out of Princeton to spend two years training with the legendary sect of monks who invented kung fu and Zen Buddhism.

Hun Sen's Cambodia - Sebastian Strangio

a bit of a dry read , but worth it for the detailed charting of the cambodian political circus and the roles of the govts of china , france , usa and NGOs in the tortuous path of cambodia over the last 40 years

To many in the West, the name Cambodia still conjures up indelible images of destruction and death, the legacy of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime and the terror it inflicted in its attempt to create a communist utopia in the 1970s. Sebastian Strangio, a journalist based in the capital city of Phnom Penh, now offers an eye-opening appraisal of modern-day Cambodia in the years following its emergence from bitter conflict and bloody upheaval.

A Soldier on the Southern Front - Emilio Lussu

this was an interesting book about the Italians fighting in WW1 in the north of italy

A rediscovered Italian masterpiece chronicling the author's experience as an infantryman, newly translated and reissued to commemorate the centennial of World War I. Taking its place alongside works by Ernst JŸnger, Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque, Emilio Lussu's memoir is one of the most affecting accounts to come out of the First World War. A classic in Italy but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, it reveals, in spare and detached prose, the almost farcical side of the war as seen by a Sardinian officer fighting the Austrian army on the Asiago plateau in northeastern Italy, the alpine front so poignantly evoked by Ernest Hemingway in "A Farewell to Arms.

Fatal System Error - Joseph Menn

an ok book if you are interested in how much is going on in the background as you watch pr0n on xhamster

Joseph Menn’s third book, "Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet," was published in the US in January 2010 and in the UK in February 2010 by PublicAffairs Books. Part true-life thriller and part expose, it became an immediate bestseller, with Menn interviewed on national television and radio programs in the US, Canada and elsewhere. Menn has spoken at major security conferences on his findings, which include hard evidence that the governments of Russia and China are protecting and directing the behavior of some of the world’s worst cyber-criminals.
“Fatal System Error accurately reveals the secretive global cyber cartels and their hidden multibillion-dollar business, proving cybercrime does pay and pays well,”

Warren Olson - Thai Private Eye

easy read with some interesting insights about thailand

For more than a decade, the intrepid Warren Olson trawled the mean streets of Bangkok and the lesser-known corners of the Land of Smiles. His brief? To uncover unsavoury truths about Thai bargirl lovers, philandering spouses, insurance fraud and scam artists of various stripes. He was a private eye prying into nooks and crannies few dared to explore and, along the way, he uncovered fascinating secrets of Thais and foreigners engaged in no good.

**tomcat** · 18-06-2017, 05:06 PM

The Force by Don Winslow: a summer reading who-dun-it, tense and tightly packed action in this crime novel...

**blue** · 18-06-2017, 05:29 PM

Originally Posted by baldrick