OT: Book and App recommendations.
- Thread starter RuBird
- Start date
My app recommendation is a podcast manager. I use BeyondPod premium. I'm a big fan of podcasts. Sword and Scale, The Unresolved, Criminal. Someone Knows Something, The Trail Went Cold, and Last Podcast on the Left are true crime podcasts I like. 99% Invisible, Lore, StoryCorps, The Dollop, Myths and Legends are others I have on my regular rotation and are more human interest/history stories. Archive 81 and Welcome to Nightvale if you are interested in serialized fiction.
If you want to extend a bit, Graham Greene was a great British writer. Our Man in Havana, Travels with My Aunt, The Quiet American, The Third Man, Monsieur Quixote. These are all really interesting books that are typically set in "hot spots" in places like Cambodia, Haiti, Viet Nam, and the protagonists are typically ex-pats or foreign nationals. What I like about them is Greene's ability to take you to a different place and time and give you an understanding of such places. Willa Cather is great for this as well, especially if you are interested in the settling of the plains states.
Edit: And if you just want something laugh out loud drop dead funny, and massively irreverent, you cannot beat "Lamb" by Christopher Moore. Maybe the funniest book I've ever read.
Edit: And if you just want something laugh out loud drop dead funny, and massively irreverent, you cannot beat "Lamb" by Christopher Moore. Maybe the funniest book I've ever read.
Whenever this topic comes up about light beach/vacation reading I always mention this book by the late David Brinkley...
Washington Goes To War
It's about Washington DC and how it coped with all the things needed to wage a world war from our nation's capital which as the author states was, "a sleepy little Southern town at the time."
New York Times review of the book
goodreads.com review of the book
To piggyback on what @SkilletHead2 said, I would recommend any of the novels by the late Helen McInnes if your looking for a light read about espionage during WWII or the Cold War. She was good at the BOLDED too.
Terry Brooks and his Shannara series.
If you were going to start, I would read "The Sword of Shannara" first.
Last edited:
I enjoyed these as well but wouldn't rate them that high. Game of Thrones is better in my opinion ( and I was reading well before the HBO series.). I also think about 50% of Wheel of Time was better than Mistborn - the other 50% maybe not. LOL.
If you prefer books, here's a few I have read this year that were interesting:
Non-Fiction: "The Boys in the Boat" by Daniel James Brown, about the UW rowing team that went to the 1939 Olympics in Nazi Germany.
"The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the Economy Bigger" by Mark Levinson (on Bill Gates reading list last year.) Absolutely fascinating.
"The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City" by Alan Erenhalt. The evolution of the revival of urban living, with some good case studies of the rennaisance of some pretty hard core inner city neighborhoods.
Fiction: Try any of the "Longmire" series by Craig Johnson. A Wyoming sheriff in a contemporary setting involving small town mysteries woven into the culture of the nearby reservations.
Non-Fiction: "The Boys in the Boat" by Daniel James Brown, about the UW rowing team that went to the 1939 Olympics in Nazi Germany.
"The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the Economy Bigger" by Mark Levinson (on Bill Gates reading list last year.) Absolutely fascinating.
"The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City" by Alan Erenhalt. The evolution of the revival of urban living, with some good case studies of the rennaisance of some pretty hard core inner city neighborhoods.
Fiction: Try any of the "Longmire" series by Craig Johnson. A Wyoming sheriff in a contemporary setting involving small town mysteries woven into the culture of the nearby reservations.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The amazing story of Homo sapiens and how we came to dominate the earth. My entire worldview changed after reading this book.
I second Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. A good look into the business aspects that influenced the beginnings of Nike.
For fiction, Red Sparrow and Palace of Treason by Jason Matthews are very good spy thrillers. Matthews formerly worked at the CIA in operative capacities - his novels are incredibly well written and accurate representations of modern trade-craft in the intelligence communities.
For fiction, Red Sparrow and Palace of Treason by Jason Matthews are very good spy thrillers. Matthews formerly worked at the CIA in operative capacities - his novels are incredibly well written and accurate representations of modern trade-craft in the intelligence communities.
It's funny, I refuse to read the Fire and Ice series because of what happened with The Wheel of Time series. Not investing the time until I can read them all in a row!
Second, "Boys in the Boat"and "Undaunted Courage" for non-fiction, anything by Don Winslow for great beach books (fiction).
Ok, you got my attention with this recommendation and I pulled up a long list of books by her. Do you have a recommendation on to start with?
For Sci-fi/Fantasy, I'd recommend the Ender series by Orson Scott Card. Ender's Game (the first) is outstanding, then they follow a very different track that I didn't like as much but I still read them all. Years later he published a side-story to the first set that starts with Ender's Shadow, which I read a few months ago and was excellent. It follows the storyline of one of the characters in Ender's Game through the same timeline from from a different perspective and was really well done. I'm on the 2nd of that series now.
Non-Fiction
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Designing with the Mind in Mind
The Code Book
Cryptonomicon
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
How the Mind Works
The Tell-Tale Brain
The Elegant Universe
The Fabric of the Cosmos
The Hidden Reality
SciFi/Fantasy
Dresden Files
Codex Alera
Runelords
A Song Of Ice And Fire
Timeline
I, Robot (any Asimov book really)
Star Wars Expanded Universe Books
Farseer Trilogy
The Tawny Man Trilogy
Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Hobbit
The Gentlemen Bastards
Black Company
Warbreaker
The Way of Kings
Demon Cycle
Malazan Book of the Fallen
Mistborn
The First Law
Borderlands
The Kingkiller Chronicle
Night Angel Trilogy
Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Designing with the Mind in Mind
The Code Book
Cryptonomicon
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
How the Mind Works
The Tell-Tale Brain
The Elegant Universe
The Fabric of the Cosmos
The Hidden Reality
SciFi/Fantasy
Dresden Files
Codex Alera
Runelords
A Song Of Ice And Fire
Timeline
I, Robot (any Asimov book really)
Star Wars Expanded Universe Books
Farseer Trilogy
The Tawny Man Trilogy
Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Hobbit
The Gentlemen Bastards
Black Company
Warbreaker
The Way of Kings
Demon Cycle
Malazan Book of the Fallen
Mistborn
The First Law
Borderlands
The Kingkiller Chronicle
Night Angel Trilogy
Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less
Last edited:
Any Cold War-era spy novels by John Le Carre (can't go wrong with the Karla trilogy, my favorite is Smiley's People)
Non-fiction I'd go with Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States and the World compiled by Graham Allison
Non-fiction I'd go with Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States and the World compiled by Graham Allison
Try her last three in this order:
- The Hidden Target (1980)
- Cloak of Darkness (1982)
- Ride a Pale Horse (1984)
I never read it but I do remember as a kid at the Peninsula House in Sea Bright (a great place to summer as a kid) all the people reading Ludlum's "The Bourne Identity" on the beach.
Similar threads
