What Are You Reading?

halfway through Blackbird Rising. It's the story of the SR-71 Blackbird spyplane, from design, testing, and operations. The book has a lot of technical and systems detail, plus some awesome inside stories of engineers and test pilots.

I love airplanes. xD

 

Walking by Henry David Thoreau

---------- Post added 25th Sep 2014 at 01:32 PM ----------

Me too! What an amazing plane...decades before its time! I'll be sure to look for that book!

 

Hey greatwhale! Yeah, the SR-71 is amazing, all designed with Slide Rules.

The authors of Blackbird Rising are Donn A. Byrnes and Kenneth D. Hurley. I think you'll like it.

 

Hey, don't knock slide rules, all lubricated with the skin-oil from the noses of pubescent nerd faces (ew)! I learned my first lessons in physics with a slide rule...until the Texas Instruments SR-10 came along (SR=Slide Rule).

Thanks for the reference!

Do you know of any books that describe the construction of the U2 (I think it took about 100 days from design to prototype...)?

 

Oh, I'm not knocking Slide Rules, I think they are awesome.

I haven't read a book specifically about the U-2, but there was a book called Skunk Works that was a decent history of all the Lockheed Black Projects. The U-2's go too fast and disintegrate speed was only 10knots faster than it's stall-into-an-irreversible-spin speed. You had to *really* be on your game in the U-2.

 

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

 

^ Asimov is such a genius, I read all the Foundation's serie and some tales.

I'm reading Courtly Romances by Chrétien de Troyes, is funny.

 

Arab 201: intermed Arabic 1 & ethnographic research 302 text
These texts are enthralling . I would suggest that anyone who want an " edge of your seat " type read to go and purchase these meager $200+ texts !

 

I am reading The Grapes of Wrath at home because it is falling apart and my mom doesn't want me to take it to school, and re-reading Hamlet at school.

 

I really loved the Grapes of Wrath...reminds me, I should re-read this one day.

Currently reading Wolf Solent, by John Cowper Powys, an author who reminds me of a mixture of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and a dash of Tolkien.

 

I'm just starting to read War and Peace.

 

I'm reading The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. I found it at a yard sale and just HAD to bring it home... along with a few other books. I think i may be a book hoarder O_O

 

The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
Jung

 

Console Wars by Blake J. Harris. Basically it's about Sega's rise and fall. Thanks in large to Sega of America's then president, Tom Kalinske, Sega's of America was able to topple Nintendo and have more than %50 of the market share. However, Sega's of Japan's pride and philosophies led to a lot of fool-hardy decisions that would eventually bring down SOJ and SOA. From all the hardware that they tried to push out to the absolute refusal to work with Sony (who would, obviously, go on to create the Play Station and CRUSH the Sega Saturn in sales) and a select number of other companies (a large amount of which would go on to work for Nintendo), the downfall of Sega wasn't due to Nintendo. It was due to the civil war occurring betweens SOJ and SOA. If you're at all interested in video games and the people behind them, I'd strongly recommend it. It was created from hundreds of interviews, including some from Kalinske and his former team from SOA, the people who were responsible for making a PlayStation a success, and a number of Nintendo employees as well.

 

Great, I love it.

Sacks is very interesting, I like his books.

 

I'm currently 7 out of 14 books into the Wheel of Time series. Hoping to be finished by this point next year...

 

Demons by Dostoyevsky

 

Just finished reading The Fault in Our Stars. I'm gonna start on Of Mice and Men when it comes in the mail.

 

The Witcher, Sword of Destiny 8)