I haven't hit 75 yet and don't expect to in 2012, but it sure is fun trying!

I am thankful to have found LibraryThing and this group. I have read more books and more books I might not have otherwise read since I first did this in 2010 and look forward to more of the same this year.

The Ball and the Cross by G.K. Chesterton

As I have said in the past I really like G. K. Chesterton's writing. I still like his writing and in this book I appreciate his even handedness in the handling of two characters' world views, so diametrically opposed that the driving motivation for a good part of the story is their search for a quiet place where they can duel to the death without interruption.

If I have anything against the book it's that I was hoping for a different type of conclusion. That may be because I didn't understand the type of story it was when I started, I don't know. In any event, at the end I was left not so much wanting more as I was left wanting something different.

St. Thomas Aquinas by G.K. Chesterton

I had read several reviews for this book on Amazon and decided to load it onto my Kindle and have a go. I am not Catholic (not that it matters in appreciating the subject matter) and so really most everything about the book, the people and the arguments was new to me. Even so, I enjoyed it because I enjoy watching G.K. Chesterton think. In addition, it is always striking to me how much things change and at the same time stay the same. Much of the issues that St. Thomas Aquinas wrestled with in his time, that Chesterton points out still existed in his time remain in our time today. I thought this was a fascinating introduction to a subject I had never given a second thought to before.

Welcome back!

I have to admit it--I've never read any G. K. Chesteron. Do you have a favorite that you'd recommend to someone starting out with him?

Ditto streamsong

I like G K C too - though it is ages since I have read any...

streamsong and fuzzi:

I cut my teeth on him reading Orthodoxy, still one of my favorite books. If you don't like apologetics, don't subscribe to the Christian world view or that bothers you, it may not be the right place to start. I have several on my list of "to read" and for fiction he wrote the Father Brown mysteries so perhaps that is a good starting point instead. I haven't read any of those yet so if you take one of them up you will have to let me know how it goes. If you have a Kindle then the good news is there are a LOT of his books out there for free.

I have some reading to do for work so am taking just a little hiatus from him for a week or so, but will come back to him after that is done and will continue to let you know.

Thank you, eddie. I appreciate it.

My TBR keeps growing, and growing, and growing.......

I know exactly how you feel :)

Heart of Darkness

Maybe it's just me, but I liked everything about Apocalypse Now better than this book. Of course it may be just that all along as Conrad was telling the story I was seeing the corresponding bit from the movie in my mind, but I most definitely liked the movie's ending better than the book. Just call me shallow and move on.

Would you recommend Heart of Darkness?

I think I would; I liked it but was continually referring back to Apocalypse Now in my head. I don't know what I would think if I already didn't know that story. I understand that is no help to you but it's all I have. One thing, you won't have spent very much time either way. It's a quick read, I read it in a morning and evening.

I've seen Apocalypse Now many times. I don't know if that would enhance or detract from reading the original source.

However, I may put Heart of Darkness on my ever-growing TBR list...

Lean Integration

This is an wonderful book a co-worker of mine suggested. I say this more from the perspective of how encouraging it was to read this and how much it's message correlated with some findings and recommendations a team I am on at work made on how to improve how we do integration across the enterprise.

Lots of very good information about how to do this and general patterns on what to watch out for and focus on. This one is going to stay at my fingertips for some time to come.

For me, Heart of Darkness was the first book that I ever saw the point of being taught. I read it before school started, quickly, like I read everything else. I shrugged, tossed it aside and thought it was okay. Then when we read it in class and it was really taught, it became one of my favorite books. It's a lot like poetry in that a lot of meaning is achieved with relatively few (but carefully chosen) words.

That makes sense to me.

Wanderer

This is now, officially, one of my favorite books of all time. What a great writer! What an interesting life! What an interesting (and honest) guy! I really connect with Hayden's way of thinking about a lot of things and could not put this book down. It is wonderful.

The Power of Habit

I really enjoyed this book. I love finding out about how we work, and as I get older I find that more and more fascinating.
My copy of this book was a pre-release copy and so the "how to put this information into practice" section was missing. Never the less, I found the book completely engaging and a very interesting read. Some of the information about how data about us is gathered and used is eye opening as well. The bottom line is if we don't like things about ourselves, we can change them and if we don't we have no one to blame but ourselves.
I absolutely recommend this book.

Ender's Game

Believe it or not I had never read this book. My son was home from school over the summer and mentioned it and said he thought I would like it. Based on that (I almost always take my kids' recommendations about books, movies and music) I bought it for my Kindle and got started. I really liked the story and the way things were described. I thought it was a very interesting world that Orson Scott Card has created and very rich. I have to say I had the ending figured out somewhat early on but still the book is a good read.

The Sirens of Titan

I loved this book! It was one of Amazon's daily deals and so I went ahead and bought it. I am very happy that I did. I thought the characters were interesting and the story was very engaging.

The start-up of you

If you need to understand why social media is important, if the "why" of networking with others escapes you, read this book!
Each chapter is full of great stories that reinforce the point the author is trying to make, and there are action items at the end of each as well. I plowed through the book quickly the first time I read it, now my goal is to go back and DO everything the author suggests.

A Far Rockaway of the Heart

I just finished this little book of 101 poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I know I liked it but I can't say too easily why. If I compare this with Billy Collins' work I think the language is more beautiful and the imagery is more abstract. I took my time with it more than most poetry I have read, often reading the poems twice or three times. This was not because I had hard time understanding it; I just didn't want to let them go! I am glad that I read this book and now look forward to reading A Coney Island of the Mind.

There was one unexpected thing about A Far Rockaway of the Heart that I discovered by accident.

When I finish any book that I have really enjoyed, I often turn back to the beginning once I have finished the last page. This is part of my "contemplation/digestion/meditation" process I go through when I have really liked a book. It is my way of coming down from that particular high I was on.

When I did this after having read the last page and contemplating a while, I found that if you start reading the first poem again immediately after reading the last poem, these two poems seem to be connected in much the same way that the rest of the poems are connected. So the whole collection of poems form a ring, rather than a chain. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but I like to think it is.

I *highly* recommend this book.

The Night Torn Mad With Footsteps by Charles Bukowski

I am 52 years old and have always been aware I have lived a pretty sheltered life. I was fortunate to get to live overseas for a while as a teenager, mostly in places where people dream of going but also in places most people have never been. Never the less, a sheltered life as I believe most of us have lived.

It has been a long time since just HOW sheltered a life I have led was made so blindingly clear to me. This is the first book of Bukowski's I have ever read. I guarantee I will read more. I can't say his work is beautiful, but as he says himself in one of his poems;

"beautiful things can be terrible and terrible things can be beautiful."

I loved this book of poems; I could hardly put it down. Reading it made me sad and disgusted and intrigued. The stories are so clear and present. He packs so much into so little space it is as if I were doing those things, seeing those people, drinking until I couldn't stand anymore.

I wanted to live in a flop house on the bad side of town and go into bars that are the last stop on the downward spiral to the bottom. I wanted to see what that was like, living on that road to collective self destruction. My wife, of course says "No!"

Fine, I will just have to find more of Bukowski's stuff to read then!

The War of Art

This was a very good, very challenging book. Pressfield is a good writer; I loved Gates of Fire and was certainly not disappointed with this book.

I have only read through it once and it will need another go. There are lots of exercises at the end of the chapters that I passed over on the first go through that I would like to take the time to go back and actually do.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

This was a really good book which conveys a very important message in a very accessible style. Team building and communication are very important to me in my work, so this may hit me more in my wheelhouse than it would hit you, but I can say that I highly recommend this book to anyone that needs to work well with others to get anything done.

The Angel's Game

Carlos Ruiz Zafon is one heck of a story teller! I absolutely could not put this book down. I never had anything figured out in advance and it was nothing like what I was expecting. If you haven't read it I don't want to spoil anything, just let me say that as soon as I finished this book, I started reading The Shadow of the Wind immediately.

Good stuff!

I love The Shadow of the Wind! I hope you enjoy it, Eddie. I still need to get The Angel's Game read. Thanks for the reminder.

A Coney Island of the Mind

I can positively say I recommend this book but have to admit I am still digesting it.

Fly Fishing Advice from an Old Timer

This book started out feeling like I was reading an encyclopedia. As I came to the end I felt more like I was visiting with a friendly older man who loved fly fishing and wanted to help me love it too. Besides loving fly fishing, he also obviously loves books, because he suggests many many books that I now want to find.

I don't recommend this book unless you are really into fly fishing, but if you are I think you will enjoy your time with this gent!

The Extraordinary Leader

I don't know what to say about this book. It has a lot to say, and a lot of promise. Unfortunately the details I was looking for, the nitty gritty of the message it is trying to convey are no where to be found here. Instead, at nearly every opportunity, when I was dying to get something I could really sink my teeth into, I was directed to their website. There, I found I was welcome to contact their sales department where I could spend oodles of money to find out what the book had seemed to promise. In the end I felt like I was locked into watching a very long, very well done infomercial. One that kept teasing me into hanging on, hoping for more, but in the end never really delivering. I would not recommend this book to anyone not planning on engaging them for the whole enchilada regardless of the cost.

In the company of rivers

I loved this book. Yes it has a serious bent towards fly fishing, but really it is a book of travel essays. Where to eat and shop in London, lots of info about Ireland and northern Canada, and just stories about interesting people. If you like, or can abide fishing and at the same time like to read about interesting people and places, I cannot imagine you not liking this book!

#32: I will have to give that one a try - I enjoy travel essays. Thanks for the recommendation, Eddie.

L.L. Bean Fly-Fishing Handbook

I read two of these books back to back. One was the Orvis book (next message) and the other this one. Together they are very complementary of each other. Of the two I enjoyed this one more because it went into more details about the different types of fish and how they live, the different insects and their life-cycles and finally it talked about fly tying as well as fly fishing. If you are getting started in fly fishing, this is a book I can gladly recommend.

The Orvis Guide to Beginning Fly Fishing

I liked this book in that it tells you enough to give you a feeling of what you don't know, and it gives you some ideas for how to go about gaining the information you need that you are now aware of. Good place to start for anyone.

The Shadow of the Wind

NO LOOSE ENDS!

This is a continuation of the cycle of books I started with The Angel's Game. Carlos Ruiz Zafon can tell a story! Beware, I lost lots of sleep as I neared the end; I found it very hard to put this book down. Now on to The Prisoner of Heaven. Beware, these books may soon be classified as a controlled substance!

Fly Fishing in Wonderland

Whenever I get stressed out at work, I take out time to read about fly fishing. Any good narrative about being on the water or the people one meets that like to fish or nature or the like, the things you find in books about fly fishing, is a mini vacation for me and keeps me going a little while longer until I can go do these things for real myself.

I was in a funk and wanted something like this and found this book in the Kindle store for free. It is a delightful little book about fishing and hiking and camping in the north Rockies at the early part of the 20th century. Some day I would like to see what it would be like to retrace some of the trips described in this book and see if we can still see what the author saw then, of if we have completely messed it up in the intervening years.

I hope some of it is still there.

The Prisoner of Heaven

Now I have finished all three books in the cycle, I couldn't put this one down and finished it in less than 24 hours.

Just Wow!

Everything good I said about the other two here goes for this book. It really is true that you can read these in any order. I read them in order as the stories happened chronologically; The Angel's Game, The Shadow of the Wind and The Prisoner of Heaven. If I were going to start over again, or if I were suggesting to someone else how they might think about reading them, I think I would start at The Shadow of the Wind, then The Prisoner of Heaven and end with The Angel's Game, but the most important thing is that anyone who hasn't read them should READ them!

The Prince of Mist

Yes this is a book for young adults, and the first book Carlos Ruiz Zafon had published. Don't let that stop you from taking the time to read it.

I had to try it out because I had just finished The Cemetery of Forgotten Books cycle by Zafon and wasn't ready to let go of him yet. This is very reminiscent of what I imagine Gothic to be; maybe "post modern Gothic" if there is such a thing. It is a good quick read that keeps you turning the pages and from it you can see how he grew into the guy that can do something like the rest of his works I have talked about above.

Motivate to Create

All I can say with this book is, I don't think it is finished: if it is then I would not recommend it as something to spend time with. Inconsistent formatting, obvious spelling and proof reading mistakes and the like make this look more like a first or second draft rather than something ready for the masses. I have to make clear that I read from an early reviewer copy, so perhaps there is another iteration in the works somewhere and they will have a chance to do some more polishing. I hope so.

I struggle just a little, because there is some good information here; mostly links to other resources and suggestions of books to read. I think you could come up with most of this information by sifting through the results of a single Google search for "how to become a freelance writer." In that sense the book does a service by doing that sifting for you, that said I still don't think the small amount of good that can be gleaned from this book is worth the time.

The best thing I can say about this book is that it does motivate me, in that when I came to the end the thought I had was, "if this guy can make a living turning out work like this, what am I waiting for?"

The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site

Ever since I can remember, I have wanted to own a bookstore. This ebook was less than $5 on Amazon's Kindle store, had good reviews and I just couldn't resist.

I am not sure I am going to start my own online bookstore, but after reading this book I feel pretty confident that I would do a better job at it now than I would have before reading the book. It seems to be a good reference and provide links to resources you are bound to need. If you are thinking about this yourself I can't see you being sorry you spent the time reading this. I certainly wasn't!