Cuz Dads do Other Things Too. Like read.

For the simpler times of Lance Lewis, Space Detective.

The Original Bender?

To use a line from my 4 yr old daughter; 'Once, a long, long time ago, when I was three...'

Dad likes to read. I don't get to as much lately, what with the whole 'Dad' thing but I'm not complaining. I still get my time in the library/toilet with only the occasional knock on the door from my kids or wife asking what I'm doing.
"Shhhh," I say, "it's Daddy's quiet time."

Right now, I am reading two books, one a Science fiction short stories book called 'Tomorrow - The Stars' which i picked up because of a Kurt Vonnegut story in there and another book by John Perkins: 'Tale of an Economic HitMan' - a true telling of how the US deliberately encouraged 3rd world countries to borrow money for needed infrastructure at ridiculously high repayment rates, keeping them forever indebted to the US and never actually giving said countries autonomous freedom.

Or as I like to think 'Tomorrow never comes'

That looks suspiciously like Bono with a briefcase.

    

It's a fascinating read that explores the relationship the US has with Saudi Arabia before 9/11 - a country that was so elitist that it had goats eating their garbage because no 'Saud' was expected to stoop so low as to collect garbage. After the oil crisis of 1973 (due to Israeli sympathies, OPEC brought the price of oil up to over $8.00 a barrel), it was decided that the US and Saudi Arabia needed to strengthen their relationship to avoid such an incident happening again. Perkins formulated the plan that would allow American companies ( such as Waste Management Inc) to contract the 'undesirable jobs' and also have other companies (Halliburton) be contracted to provide defense for Saudi Arabia and it's modernizing economy from the extremist Islamics on their borders. By having Saudi Arabia purchase American bonds to pay for these contracts, it side-stepped the need for the American Government (and people) to be informed of how America was shaping Mid-East policy.

That's the story so far. I'm just getting to Iran in the 70's but it's been an easy, interesting read and I recommend it for those that are disturbed by Edward Snowden, the NSA, Bradley Manning and basically US foreign policy.

Well that was a serious digression. Let's just talk about good boobs.

Oops, I meant good books. But you're here anyways...

I copied this post from this link and thought it was interesting enough to not only show my more literary side, but also do some side by side comparing to see how much of these I have read...

TL;NGR (too long, not gonna read) - someone took 11 'Top 100 Book Lists' and compared them.  Here are the Top 25 recommended books that made most of of the lists.  The */11 is on how many lists the book was on.

The explanation part;

This post has its roots in a post from /r/booklists which linked to a blog post about the "Top 10 Top 100 Book Lists". This post linked to 10+ "Top 100" book lists from sources such as TIME magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Modern Library, etc. They were all in such different formats, and such different ways of being presented that I wanted to amalgamate all of these into one master "list" in order to compare them (thirteen lists in total since I also added in the first 100 of the Reddit's 200 favorite books). I have since thrown this into a pdf file on Scribd if anyone is interested. My next step was to compare each of these and see what books are most recommended in top lists. I omitted two lists (100 most influential books ever written and 100 Major works of creative nonfiction) since there was VERY LITTLE overlap between the other lists which were primarily fiction. I made one giant list that combined 11 "Top 100" Book Lists. The complete table, again available as a PDF on Scribd lists all the books I'm the left hand column and all the lists along the top. An 'X' denotes that the book was included in that list regardless of position. The books are sorted vertically by the number of lists in which the book is included.

The top 26 (those that were recommended by 6/11 lists or more are:

• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller - (10/11 Lists)
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - (10/11 Lists)
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald - (10/11 Lists)
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison - (9/11 Lists)
• Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut - (9/11 Lists)
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger - (9/11 Lists)
• The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner - (9/11 Lists)
• 1984 by George Orwell - (8/11 Lists)
• Beloved by Toni Morrison - (8/11 Lists)
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - (8/11 Lists)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - (8/11 Lists)
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway - (7/11 Lists)
• An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser - (6/11 Lists)
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand - (6/11 Lists)
• Brave New World by Alduos Huxley - (6/11 Lists)
• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell - (6/11 Lists)
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie - (6/11 Lists)
• My Antonia by Willa Cather (1918) - (6/11 Lists)
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac - (6/11 Lists)
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain - (6/11 Lists)
• The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson Mccullers- (6/11 Lists)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - (6/11 Lists)
• The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934) - (6/11 Lists)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston - (6/11 Lists)
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf - (6/11 Lists)
• Ulysses by James Joyce - (6/11 Lists)

Apparently Daddy has some reading to do.  But then again...I still have to read these classics as well. Everybody is literally dying over them.

 

Spoiler Alert; Everyone Dies.