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The last novel I read was a forgettable book by a forgettable author.

So this time I went for the tried and true ... John le Carré. The title is Absolute Friends. This is one of his later works, published in 2004, and is another Cold War spy thriller.

I have read 84 pages and so far there is little indication of what is to come. The setting was in London, but has now gone back in time to the student revolution days in a divided Berlin of the 80s. Like the book mentioned above by Flash you cannot read le Carré quickly. Despite that they still usually end up as 'can't put down' books.

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Here to learn
Here to enjoy

'The Goodies' book or annual from 1975, very amusing.....oh yes, um, Goody Goody yum yum.....' !

Faraway, by Lucy Irvine. Takes place at the Reef islands, in the Solomon Islands.

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Don't pull my perfs, I may become unhinged.
http://brcStamps.com

"Tokyo" by Livio Sacchi - it is about how the city/ megalopolous came about, together with the architercture of same.

My current reads are;

During and after a leisurely retirement breakfast I'm reading.
'The house of Saud.' The book was mainly written by David Holden, but he was murdered in Egypt before he could finish it. It was completed by Richard Johns. The title is exactly what the book is about.

My late evening read is.
'The plague of the spanish lady'. By Richard Collier. It was published in 1974 and is about the Influenza Pandemic that began during the latter stages of WWI.

When I can manage it there is a series that makes a third great read. However I usually have to do battle with my grandsons to get my hands on them...'Asterix!!!'

Huanga.

Started a new book on Monday, 'Berlin', by Anthony Beevor. I've had it for sometime but never managed to get around to reading it. I have also begun to read again a series of books from long ago. beginning with the 'Empire of the Arabs'. John Bagot Glubb being the author.

Huanga.

Half way through Steve Martini's The Rule of Nine

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Fellowship of Samoa Specialists is not just for specialists: http://www.samoaexpress.org/
Marty

I've just finished this:

Mesenchymal Stem Cells Derived from Human Gingiva Are Capable of Immunomodulatory Functions and Ameliorate Inflammation-Related Tissue Destruction in Experimental Colitis

http://www.jimmunol.org/content/183/12/7787.full

Gripping stuff.

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Always on the lookout for Australian pre decimal First Day Covers.

Just embarked on "Easy and Not-so-Easy Pieces", by Richard Feynman. Feynman was one of the best theoretical physicists of the 20th century, a wonderful teacher and exponent of the bongos.

This is a challenge to read, but I think I'm up to it!! I've been reading fiction for a few weeks and needed a change. My next novel will be "Azincourt", by Bernard Cornwell.

Reading the 3rd book in the Saga of the Seven Sun series by Kevin J. Anderson. Good sci-fi fun.

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Enjoy every minute

Just finished Field Gray by Philip Kerr.
Auf Wiedershen, Bernie...

Just begun to read 'Blind eye to murder' by Tom Bower. This will be my second attempt to read the book. The opening chapters appear to be the biggest obstacle to what I hope will be an interesting read?

The book is about the failure of the British and American goverments to purge Germany of the nazi influence after the second world war. A pledge betrayed.

Huanga.

Currently reading Wolfskin by Juliet Marillier..

If you like historical novels with a bit of mythology and magic then you will enjoy this book.. It is about the Vikings who first settled the Orkneys in the 9th century CE..

Cheers Bunge

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It's better to have them and not need them
Than to need them and not have them

I'm reading 'Anarchy & Old Dogs' by Colin Cotterill, the third in the series of books featuring Dr Siri Paiboun, the only coroner of the People's Democratic Republic of Laos. CSI Vientianne it's not! But if you like mystery, humour, and a bit of modern history and south-east asian culture thrown in, try this series. I just like the style.

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Ian Billings - Norvic Philatelics GB stamps info: http://www.norphil.co.uk - also /catalog for our ecommerce site, blog.norphil.co.uk, shop.norphil.co.uk and Ian_norvic on twitter

Currently a book in Dutch called 'Populisme' containing essays on populist politics in Belgium. Well, combined with a cultural history work on the development of the Faust-theme in European culture. In one word, intriguing

Charles Dickens - "Christmas Books".

Need I say more?

Started in on Hell Among the Yearlings yesterday-- had a great bit about hitching a ride in winter out to a ranch on the post stage (a Ford Model T screen panel truck) and being locked in the back with all the mail bags and helping the post driver load contraband which came to a bad result. Memoir of the early 1920s in the Montana/ Wyoming border country. I had kin running cattle in the area at the time.

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Always seeking bookseller labels....Album of Book Trade Labels
Adventures in Book Collecting: Exile Bibliophile

You have inspired me, Phragg99! I have never read A Christmas Carol, so I am putting that right, right now!

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It's good to shoot the breeze with like-minded people.

I am currently reading, among others, "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" by Alan Bradley. Has a philatelic twist and is a good read so far.
http://www.flaviadeluce.com/the-sweetness-at-the-bottom-of-the-pie/

Alyn

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Alyn Lunt
http://alynlunt.com/stamps - http://phabphilately.blogspot.com - member of the: RPSC, BNAPS, ISWSC, ATA

I've almost finished Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne, never read it before :/

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Collecting Australian FRAMA stamps on Commercial covers.

It is quite a while since I last posted here and many books have come and gone since then.

I have enjoyed the books I have read by Peter Carey so decided my December read should be Oscar and Lucinda. I have thoroughly enjoyed the first half of 330 pages but will let Wikipedia finish the story:

Oscar and Lucinda is a novel by Australian author Peter Carey which won the 1988 Booker Prize, the 1989 Miles Franklin Award, and was shortlisted for The Best of the Booker. It tells the story of Oscar Hopkins, the Cornish son of a Plymouth Brethren minister who becomes an Anglican priest, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a young Australian heiress who buys a glass factory. They meet on the boat over to Australia, and discover that they are both gamblers, one obsessive the other compulsive. Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot transport a glass church from Sydney to a remote settlement at Bellingen, some 400 km up the New South Wales coast. This bet changes both their lives forever.

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Here to learn
Here to enjoy

Unlike phrag99, I'm not exactly in the Xmas spirit...currently reading The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. I think it was unfairly filed in the "humour" section at the bookstore, a lot of practical advice that gets the little grey cells working when considering survival strategies.

This author also wrote Z: Oral History of the Zombie Wars, a highly original 'novel' of sorts. Currently been made into a film with Brad Pitt.

Before this was Metro 2033; a post-apocalyptic tale, you can guess the year, and set in the Moscow subway system. To shelter from a nuclear war, people descended into the underground for shelter, and 20 years on have developed a society down there, as the surface is uninhabitable. With elements of bizarre sci-fi thrown in, an overall interesting read.

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Collecting Mongolia; Thailand; Indo-China; Mourning Covers; OHMS.
My online 'store': http://stampsfromaethelwulf.blogspot.com/

'Andersonville' by MacKinlay Kantor; A Southerners or Confederates view of the worst prison camp in the south in the American Civil War.

Got this bookmark as a Secret Santa gift....love it!

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It's good to shoot the breeze with like-minded people.

I am currently reading " Monash, The outsider who won a war" by Roland Perry. A biography of General Sir John Monash (the first Army Commander in 200 years to be knighted in the field by the Sovereign, George V on 12th May 1918).

I highly recommend it.

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Peter
Hawthorn - AFL Premiers 1961, 1971, 1976, 1978, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 2008.

I'm rereading and have nearly finished "Temeraire, His majesty's Dragon" by Naomi Novik.
It is a great Napoleonic war story but with dragons! It reads like a Patrick O'brien or Alexander Kent story.

A Christmas present I received was volume 6 of the series where the dragon Temeraire and Captain Laurence are sent to the colony of Australia and so I'm reading the series again.

I highly recommend it if you like alternative history novels. Or Napoleonic novels. Or dragon novels.

http://www.temeraire.org/temeraire/

The movie is called "World War Z" and was being filmed partly in the UK in September. For some reason they used Glasgow as Philadelphia (must have saved them money).
Brad, Angelina and their kids were staying in a farm in the tiny village of Hurlford, just outside my hometown of Kilmarnock. My friend is the farm manager, and he said that once the news broke the paparrazzi went crazy! He said Angelina was a "nice lady, but a little bit thin", and the kids were "well-mannerred, and like most kids just wanted to play with the farm animals". He showed Angelina and the kids how cows were milked on a modern farm.
I never asked how much the farm/estate had been paid to keep quiet about them living there!

I will maybe try to find the book.

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It's good to shoot the breeze with like-minded people.

That sounds right up my street, Biggles! I love history and fantasy books. I have been watching a 5-part documentary about Napoleon this week, it's very good, they haven't mentioned dragons yet though.....that must be in the final part

Guess I'll be downloading that for my ebook next year!

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It's good to shoot the breeze with like-minded people.

I have started to re-read the Late and Great Douglas Adams five volume trilogy (!) of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Despite being thin books, they can take ages to read simply because you need to look back in wonder to some of the the way he uses English...

"They hung in the air exactly the same way that bricks don't."

"This Must Be Thursday. I Could Never Get the Hang of Thursdays ..."

"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."


42

Norm

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Geelong, VFA Premiers 1878, 1879, 1800, 1882, 1883, 1884, 1886, AFL Premiers 1925, 1931, 1937, 1951, 1952, 1963, 2007, 2009, 2011, .

I am reading Life and Fate by Grossman.
It is a view of a totalitarian state from within.

Cheers!

Reading Jules Verne Invasion of the Sea interesting view of early 1900's 'political correctness'

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Collecting Australian FRAMA stamps on Commercial covers.

I had the 'bright idea' to give this book to some secondary students as a class novel study. After a summer working through it, we got to the end of chapter 8. In its original form there were a lot of words too difficult for their level, not to mention the convoluted logic. The chapter ended on a note which had a nice conclusion, so I moved us on to "something completely diffferent".

I have been making an abridged version of the story, keeping the humour and the analogies, but its a hard book to shorten and help non-English speakers make sense of; Adams had the most wonderfully twisted way of describing things. The argument between Man and God over His existence is priceless.

On my reading list currently is "Red Plenty", a semi-fictional tale of life in the USSR in 1959. Each chapter profiles a different character, from Kruschev on his visit to America, to professors to ordinary people, it portrays the hopes and dreams of the socialist society, how close they came to success and where it all came undone.

Once I'm finished that one, I'll be moving on to a book I happened about by accident and wonderful luck in the history section of the bookstore, a biography of Baron Ungern-Sternberg, a madman Russian cavalry officer who joined the White Russian resistance post-Revolution, got it in his head that he'd set up Mongolia as an independent country, and ended up going on a bloody rampage in the capital.

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Collecting Mongolia; Thailand; Indo-China; Mourning Covers; OHMS.
My online 'store': http://stampsfromaethelwulf.blogspot.com/

A book called. 'West Coasters 1860-2010. The Golden Grey.' By the mayor of Greymouth, Tony Kokshoorn.

Its about the history and the people of the West coast of the South Island of New Zealand.

Huanga.

Recently finished the Stieg Larsson 'Millennium Trilogy' and now onto Book 3 of the Paullina Simons trilogy.

The first is 'The Bronzed Horseman' which covers the period of the siege of Leningrad; the second 'the Bridge to Holy Cross' is the period from 1942 to 1946 during which the heroine escapes to the USA and the hero fights his way in a soviet penal battalion to Berlin; and the third volume is 'The Summer Garden' with the hero and heroine re-united in the USA during the McCarthy era.

Both trilogy are 'mind bending'. Close to the bone action stuff.

Recommended (by me) reading.

PS In volume 2 Alexander (the hero) fights his way into Lublin (which is 25 kilometers from where we live; and the city in which my wife grew up) so it has considerable relevance to us.

Now reading (when I get the time ), 'Dead Men's Silver' by Hugh Edwards.

It's the story of over 50 years of discovering shipwrecks around the World. From the time he and his team discovered the East Indiaman Vergulde Draeck wrecked off the coast of Western Australia and he held in his hand a silver coin with the words "PHILLIPUS III...REX HISPANIA....DG - PhilipIV, King of Spain Dei Gratia".

He discovered the 1629 shipwreck of the Batavia and the 1727 shipwreck of the Zeewyck.

It's a good read

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Tony

I'm almost done with "Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives" by David Eagleman.

It's a collection of short novels about what the afterlife might be. Some are brilliant/entertaining (such as the first story, where afterlive is re-living your live in blocks such as 3 years of showering, 6 months of eating,30 hours at dentist etc); sadly not all the stories take off so well and are plain boring/bizarre. But all in all, this makes a quick and recommendable read.

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See pics of my latest stamp findings at Stamp Collecting Blog.

I am currently reading "The Time Of Our Lives" by Tom Brokaw,
former anchor of NBC Nightly News and who continues to report
for NBC. His book discusses the question if the United States
has wandered off course compared to the America he once thought
he knew. Some of his proposals for changing course sound great but
border on the utopia.

I am reading "What Alice Forgot" by Liane Moriarty
here is a description from amazon.com:

Alice Love is twenty-nine years old, madly in love with her husband, and pregnant with their first child. So imagine her surprise when, after a fall, she comes to on the floor of a gym (a gym! she HATES the gym!) and discovers that she's actually thirty-nine, has three children, and is in the midst of an acrimonious divorce.

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“You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”—Malcolm S. Forbes.“Image is what people think we are; integrity is what we really are.” ― John C. Maxwell

I am reading my college anthropology book for a test next week and a mid term on March 6th. Not to mention my paralegal course book.

I'm wading into "Marshall Ney", the life story of Napoleon's right hand man .
The hero of Ulm, Austria and the man who smashed the Russians at Friedland.
The author claims that Ney came within a whisker of saving the French at Waterloo, but was subject to Napoleon's counter orders.
His reward was to be tried for treason by vested interests, found guilty & shot by firing squad. (This sounds like a Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd story).

I am reading "The Apprentice. My Life in the Kitchen." by Jacques Pepin. Starts with the begining of WWII in France, and I am enthralled. I have always been a fan of Pepin and had the honor of meeting him about 35 years ago. Good read even if you don't cook!

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Jim M.

Just finished One Man's Meat by E B White. Fantastic -- could be subtitled "How to live with a dachshund." This collection is from the late 1930s into the beginnings of WW2. That difficult time is certainly reflected, but so is White (and family's) transition from NYC to a farm in Maine. White, before becoming one of the most beloved children's writers, was a journalist/ columnist of some repute, and these essays are from this period of his career. Witty, fun, and full of wisdom.

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Always seeking bookseller labels....Album of Book Trade Labels
Adventures in Book Collecting: Exile Bibliophile

Just finishing "A Town Like Alice" (Original title "The Legacy") by Neville Shute. Story of women POWs in Malaya in WWII and a romance in a QLD outback town in the late 1940's. A good read.

Then, "Solomon's Seal" by Hammond Innes. Set in England / Australia / Solomon Islands. Stamps are a central theme of this novel.

Alice Springs is actually in the Northern Territory. "A Town Like Alice" is a classic and used to be on the curriculum reading list when I was at school.

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Peter
Hawthorn - AFL Premiers 1961, 1971, 1976, 1978, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 2008.

And Another Thing... the sixth book in the Douglas Adams Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy trilogy(!).

Written by Eoin Colfer as specifically commissioned by Adams' estate it's not a bad read as far as I have gotten, but certainly lacks Adams quirky use of the English language and out of left field ideas. But Mostly Harmless fun for fans of the series.

Norm

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Geelong, VFA Premiers 1878, 1879, 1800, 1882, 1883, 1884, 1886, AFL Premiers 1925, 1931, 1937, 1951, 1952, 1963, 2007, 2009, 2011, .

Did they have schools back then?

The book was also made into a very good film in 1956 starring (English Aussie) Peter Finch and Virginia McKenna.

Norm

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Geelong, VFA Premiers 1878, 1879, 1800, 1882, 1883, 1884, 1886, AFL Premiers 1925, 1931, 1937, 1951, 1952, 1963, 2007, 2009, 2011, .

Milton Berle's Private Joke File. I love witty one-liners and comebacks & I think he is by far and away more funnier than the current mob of foul mouth comics.

D.

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Visit my Website - http://WWW.DJMSTAMPS.COM for Australia & World Stamps, Collections and Accessories

Re-reading The Hobbit, just in time for the movie release.....still wondering how they can stretch it into three films, tho.

Margaret

The man in the iron mask.

Alexandre Dumas. ....

Huanga.