lifetime favorites not in order
james oliver curwood
thornton w. burgess at the earth's core!
edgar rice burroughs
a lot of random older authors who wrote about the west. some are hard to read because of the language.
recent reads
founding father stuff, till 1830's, skip till civil war
lot's of position switching in the founding fathers, particularly after becoming president and having to deal with trade, notably the barbary pirates
archaeology regarding ancient civilizations which are under water, not necessarily looking for atlantis, but just where the would be if the oceans were 300 feet lower, which they were 8000,12,000, 16,000 years ago. persian gulf was land, sri lanka was attached. interesting "myth" about an evil guy who was banished to sri lanka, and hero built, or improved a land bridge there with bricks etc similar to roman roads in england. road is there. archaepeligo's in southeast asia connected, all kinds of older maps were updated onto newer ones with "old" info. mystery as to who were those mapmakers and why did they always misjudge how big the pacific was. who was doing longitude and latitude and the orgin of maps with correction lines similar to those found in rural roads to account for the narrowing of longitude.
books about the history of math by john derbyshire
and one awesome math book titled The Measure of All Things : The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World
it describes how the meter came to be, the politics, what was going on at the time, and how errors in conversion from meter to yard caused problems in satellites.
three of my all time favorites, are nikola tesla prodigal genius, in and out of print
and Critical Path by R. Buckminster Fuller, totally awesome book, also in and out of print, also talks about satellites and triangulation and other stuff.
the fountain head by ayn rand, and no i'm not smart enough to know if i am one, just hypocritical enough to embrace some things and reject others.
the movie with gary cooper and patricial neal, where big shoulders for women came in vogue, they had an affair, of course.
one of my favorite scenes in the movie and the book is when patricia neal breaks her limestone fireplace in her apartment (her father owns the quarry and cooper works there to learn about materials first hand) and cooper says to her basically, well why did you have to go through all this trouble to meet me, you could have just asked, or something like that.
another favorite movie with gary cooper and walter brennan is the westerner, where gary cooper fools roy bean into thinking he has a lock of lilly langtrees' hair and is unfolding the "sample" agonizingly slow. one of my top 10 scenes all time.
another favorite scene is in a movie (not a cooper movie) is where the actor/actress says, "Why, there he is, Mr. Tate. He can tell you his name... " i had a couple relatives like him. (the character referred to is that actor's FIRST film role) and a pretty good actor.
I do still read some, though, just not as much as I used to. All of my kids love to read, and I'm certainly glad of that.
