GeekNights 071101 - Books You Should Read

Rym

Tonight on GeekNights, we tell you what to read by going through some of the books that we've loved over the years, including Kavalier and Clay, The Sun Also Rises, Earthsea, Pages of Pain, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Plutarch's Roman Lives, and American Gods. In the news, Chemistry sets are (not) being destroyed by terrorism fears, and Disney goers are too fat for a small world.
Scott's Thing - 100 mpg

Rym's Thing - Harut

Railith

I was stuck behind a large barge in It's a Small World. That was not a fun 30 minutes at all.

Starfox

My brother once puked while on Small World. True story.

Viga

I hate the Small World ride...so much.

Wheelhouse? Really....wheelhouse?

rhinocero

Oh man, getting stuck on Disney rides is like the worst thing EVER.  I mean, at least with Small World or Haunted Mansion it's in the shade, but good lord is that a terrible place to be stuck.
This episode was great, and you guys should talk more about books.

whatever

You guys need to read/talk about some Palahniuk novels.

MitchyD

I've only read Fight Club. I fucking love that book so much. I need to get more of his stuff.
 
Read "Armor" by John Steakley if you like totally-rad Sci-Fi. Also, on Dave/Joel's recommendation, Snow Crash is AMAZING.
 
Scott, I fired you an invite on Facebook...  nuh? Rym, do you not have a facebook? There are no male "Rym"'s or any DeCoster, Brandon. Not even a "De Coster" will work. I'm kind of a sucker for facebook despite my rare usage of it, but I add people I remotely know quite offen...

Paulathon

Thanks for helping to rescue Adam Smith from the dregs of US Libertarianism. Did you guys read the full set of volumes or one of the abridged editions? Also of note is the Theory of Moral Sentiments, which the Libertarians tend to gloss over.

Apreche

Thanks for helping to rescue Adam Smith from the dregs of US Libertarianism. Did you guys read the full set of volumes or one of the abridged editions? Also of note is theTheory of Moral Sentiments, which the Libertarians tend to gloss over.

I have the 1200+ page single-volume Bantam Classic version. Is that abridged?

merry_minstrel

I think I'll have to defend Karl Marx. If you read 'Das Kapital', it starts out with an analysis of economy. Whatever conclusions he draws from that (they might be wrong or not thought through or just poorly executed, but I don't want to get into that, because I'd have to do a lot of research), his analysis is accurate.

HMTKSteve

I have a big box of fantasy novels, anyone want it? I think there are nearly 50 books in the box and most are near mint paperbacks.

You can have it for real cheap, $10 + shipping.

Paulathon

Posted By: Apreche

I have the 1200+ page single-volume Bantam Classic version. Is that abridged?

I believe that would be the compleat Smith.

Victor Frost

Haha! I loved your thing of the day, Rym. I'm Armenian and I've got an uncle named Harut who looks just like that guy. He's not smart enough to use YouTube, though.

jcc

It surprised me that Rym seemed so ready to sue... I'd always assumed he'd be one of those irked by our overly litigatious culture.

A lot of times when auto companies say "impossible", they don't mean impossible to do; they mean impossible to implement on a large scale without tripling the price of everything and killing all profits for a few years. Doing a thing for one car by hand gives a person certain freedoms that aren't available when you scale up to doing 1,000,000 cars in an automated assembly line.

I think I'll have to defend Karl Marx. If you read 'Das Kapital', it starts out with an analysis of economy. Whatever conclusions he draws from that (they might be wrong or not thought through or just poorly executed, but I don't want to get into that, because I'd have to do a lot of research), his analysis is accurate.

Agreed. Well, mostly. At the very least, he had many ideas of merit that are ignored because of the ideology he'd attached to them.

HungryJoe

If anyone hasn't read Catch-22, All Quiet on the Western Front, Johnny Got His Gun, or The Short-Timers, they should drop whatever they're doing and get to the library as soon as possible.

Apreche

If anyone hasn't readCatch-22,All Quiet on the Western Front,Johnny Got His Gun, orThe Short-Timers, they should drop whatever they're doing and get to the library as soon as possible.

I got the first three covered.

HMTKSteve

What about Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies?

Apreche

What about Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies?

Only the second one.

HungryJoe

If anyone hasn't readCatch-22,All Quiet on the Western Front,Johnny Got His Gun, orThe Short-Timers, they should drop whatever they're doing and get to the library as soon as possible.

I got the first three covered.

If you liked the first three, you'll like the fourth. It's the basis for Full Metal Jacket.

The Short-Timers Wiki article.

Eating an early breakfast in the red slime of a slit trench at Khe Sanh. Yesterday I made myself a new
stove by punching air holes into an empty C's can. Inside the stove, C-4 plastic explosive glows like a
fragment of brimstone. Ham and mothers pop and bubble in another olive-drab can while I mix and stir
with a white plastic spoon.
On the horizon, orange tracers stitch the night. Puff the Magic Dragon, "Spooky", a C-47 flying electric
Gatling gun, is pouring three hundred rounds per minute into some gook's wet dreams.
Taste the ham and lima beans. Hot. Greasy. Smells like pig shit. With my bayonet I lift the full can
off the stove. I anchor the can in red mud. I balance my mess cup over the flame and pour in a packet of
powdered cocoa and then half a canteen of spring water. With some slack, hot chocolate dilutes the sour
aftertaste of halazone purification tablets.
A Viet Cong rat attacks. Obviously, he intends to bring my breakfast under the influence of
Communism.
This is a rat I know personally, so I cut him some slack and do not set him on fire with lighter fluid the
way my bros and I have done with his relatives. I stomp my foot and the rat retreats into a shadow.
In the light of the flare my bros in the Lusthog Squad of Delta One-Five look like pale lizards. My
bros look up at me with lizard eyes. No slack. I gave them the finger. Their lizard eyes click back to
their poker cards.
From his new strategic position, the Viet Cong rat stares back to assert his principles.
The illumination flare trembles, freezes Khe Sanh into a faded daguerreotype. Look at all the junk of
modern war spilled across our dusty citadel, look at how bearded grunts hang on while the world spins
and gravity cheats, look at the concrete bones of an old French outpost (patrolled at night by the ghosts
of dead Legionnaires and by the Mongol horsemen of Genghis Khan)--see how the broken walls of the
outpost are like rotting teeth, look out beyond our wire at a thousand acres of blasted moonscape, feel
the cold hard terror and the calm of it.
During the past three months the rocky terrain around Khe Sanh has been pounded with the greatest
volume of explosives in the history of war. Two hundred million pounds of bombs and whole
catalogues of other weapons have torn and plowed the sterile red earth, have shattered boulders, have
splintered and chewed the stumps of trees, have pockmarked the deck with craters big enough to be
graves for tanks.
The flare floats down beneath a miniature parachute, swaying and squeaking, dripping sparks and
hissing, until it hits the wire. Illumination dissolves.


In the darkness I am one with Khe Sanh--a living cell of this place--this erupted pimple of sandbags
and barbed wire on a bleak plateau surrounded by the end of the world. In my guts I know that my
body is one of the components of gristle and muscle and bone of Khe Sanh, a small American
community pounded daily by one-hundred-and-fifty-two-millimeter artillery pieces firing from caves
eleven kilometers away on Co Roc Ridge in Laos, pounded by fifteen hundred shells a day, pounded,
pounded, pounded with brain-numbing regularity, an anthill beneath a sledgehammer.
Today I am feeling extra fine--I'm short. Twenty-two days and a wake-up left in country.
The Viet Cong rat crouches on a sandbag an inch from my elbow. I bend over and put his share of
ham and mothers on the toe of my boot. The rat watches me with black bead eyes. Rats are little but
they're smart. After the rat is satisfied I can be trusted, he jumps off the sandbag and into the slit trench.
He hops up onto the toe of my boot. Eating, his cheeks are fat. He looks so very bad; he's beautiful.

Full text of the book.

rehand

The Death of Science

The reason why the US has few peopple going into the sciences is becuase the pay SUCKS!!!!!

I used to be a nuclear physicist, but gave it up for computer programming. Why? Because there are more jobs and I make a hell of a lot more money. Why would someone with a 140+ IQ go spend 10 years getting a PhD when the estimated salary for scientist is

Neito

Farewell to Arms is an OK book. I cried a few manly tears when SPOILER: his girlfriend and the baby dies

zombie a gogo

Stranger in a Strange Land was a favorite of mine when I was younger. I also really enjoyed Oliver Twist, Crime and Punishment, and A Tale of Two Cites. There's many others...but I'd have to go look at my book shelves to make a good list.

Andrew

Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick and one of my favorites, All the King's Men.

HungryJoe

Gatsby was odd. He threw these great parties and he was a good host, but you could tell that he wasn't really enjoying himself.

Everyone was shocked by what happened; but, strangely enough, not really surprised.

Apreche

Grapes of Wrath,The Great Gatsby,Moby Dickand one of my favorites,All the King's Men.

I've read none of those! Hahaha!

Andrew

I've read none of those! Hahaha!

Gogogogogogogo!

HungryJoe

Grapes of Wrath,The Great Gatsby,Moby Dickand one of my favorites,All the King's Men.

I've read all of these. They're all extremely worthwhile.

As far as I was concerned, Moby Dick really put a period to the argument some people made in school that we were reading too much into apparent symbolism by authors who only intended to write adventure stories. Melville as much as invited the reader to and instructed the reader in the interpretation of his symbolism.

starflyer3000

I've only read Fight Club. I fucking love that book so much. I need to get more of his stuff.

I've just started Haunted by Palahniuk, about a "writer's retreat" that turns into a social experiment. The cover's glow-in-the-dark, though, so I have to turn it over on my nightstand; it's kinda creepy to see when you're trying to go to sleep.

Diddgery

Oh man, the Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. I read that back when I was in sixth grade and didn't understand half of it; I was pretty confused when the main story of the book became a story within a story within a story for that short moment. But recently I reread it and caught a lot of the things I missed when I was younger.

Linkigi(Link-ee-jee)

Have any of you read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card? That and its sequel are basically my two favorite books ever.

Also, I liked what you said about Lord of The Rings. I really liked it and have been trying for a while to articulate why, and you just took the words right out of my mouth.

Jason

The Three Musketeers, A Prayer For Owen Meany, The World According to Garp, Cat's Cradle, The Prydain Chronicles, and all of the Fletch books by Gregory McDonald.

My wife teaches the Roald Dahl books to her middle school students every year. They are actually pretty cutting adult social satires.

WIP: I pit your All the King's Men against All the President's Men (which I know is unfair because mine is a moooovie).

That is all.