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Zeke

Developmental years inspirational authors

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I always had my nose in a book... when I was really young, my favs were Walter Farley (The Black Stallion series), Marguerite Henry (The Misty of Chincoteague series), James Heriott (All Creatures Great and Small series) and, of course, Jack London.  (Who didn't like Jack London as a kid? Terrific writer! :)

By about 12, I was more into the classics – primarily American, British & Russian – and also loved good murder mysteries. This ones below were my favs... I still enjoy their work today.   

·         Jane Austen

·         Charlotte Bronte

·         Emily Bronte

·         Charles Dickens

·         Emily Dickenson

·         Fyodor Dostoevsky

·         Henry James

·         P.D. James

·         Edgar Allen Poe

·         John Steinbeck

·         Henry David Thoreau

·         Leo Tolstoy

 

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22 minutes ago, Mrs. Peel said:

I always had my nose in a book... when I was really young, my favs were Walter Farley (The Black Stallion series), Marguerite Henry (The Misty of Chincoteague series), James Heriott (All Creatures Great and Small series) and, of course, Jack London.  (Who didn't like Jack London as a kid? Terrific writer! :)

By about 12, I was more into the classics – primarily American, British & Russian – and also loved good murder mysteries. This ones below were my favs... I still enjoy their work today.   

·         Jane Austen

·         Charlotte Bronte

·         Emily Bronte

·         Charles Dickens

·         Emily Dickenson

·         Fyodor Dostoevsky

·         Henry James

·         P.D. James

·         Edgar Allen Poe

·         John Steinbeck

·         Henry David Thoreau

·         Leo Tolstoy

 

Love me some Poe! Tell tale heart!

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I read everything as a kid....my mother owned a bookstore and I poured through fiction and non fiction. Fitzgerald, Poe, Melvin, Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Grisham,  Michener...

Still like to read, but it’s more quantum mechanics now.

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“A house without books is like a room without windows”. - Heinrich Mann

Like all of the previous posters, I also love to read books and have from a very early age.
My mother was an English major and my parents had a pretty extensive library and encouraged my sister and me to read as much as possible, starting at an early age.  So as far as what I read in my developmental years, is a tough task to quantify since I consider that we all are developing and learning continuously as part of life.  But starting at a early age through college I enjoyed reading the following:

- Almost all of the work by William Shakespeare

The essays and poetry of:
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Henry David Thoreau
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Walt Whitman
- Emily Dickinson
- Robert Frost
- T.S. Eliot

Some of the classics that I read that made a real impression upon me during my time in both junior high and high school, include:
- James Joyce - (Ulysses)
- Herman Melville - (Moby-Dick)
- Virginia Woolf - (A Room of One’s Own)
- Jack London - (White Fang)
- Charles Dickens - (A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations)
- Ernest Hemingway - (A Farewell to Arms & The Old Man and the Sea)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald - (The Great Gatsby)
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - (Faust)
- J.D. Salinger - (The Catcher in the Rye)
- John Steinbeck - (The Grapes of Wrath & Of Mice and Men)
- Aldous Huxley - (Brave New World)
- Vladimir Nabokov - (Lolita)
- Robert Graves - (I, Claudius)
- Harper Lee - (To Kill A Mockingbird)
- William Golding - (Lord of the Flies)
- Erich Maria Remarque - (All Quiet on the Western Front)
-
Joseph Heller - (Catch-22)
- George Orwell - (1984 & Animal Farm)
- Nevil Shute - (On the Beach)
- Truman Capote - (In Cold Blood)
- Robert Penn Warren - (All the King’s Men)
- Kurt Vonnegut - (Slaughterhouse-Five)
- Jack Kerouac - (On the Road)
-
Larry McMurtry - (Lonesome Dove)
- Lothar-Gunther Buchheim - (Das Boot)
-
Frank Herbert – (Dune)

- Ayn Rand - (The Fountainhead)

Today, I enjoy reading both fiction and non-fiction, as well as listening to audio books while driving to and from my workplace in Manhattan.  Since I essentially have 2.5 - 3 hours of driving each day, (M-F), audio books offer an ideal way to make what would otherwise be unproductive time into an entertaining and educational respite.  I look forward to and find that listening to an audio book actually can de-stress the aggravations of commuter traffic and the multitude of knucklehead drivers doing stupid stuff while driving, (i.e. texting, etc...), and therefore probably lowers my tension level and blood pressure. So, for those who may be interested, here is a selection of some of my ‘reads’ over the past couple of years:

- Tom Clancy (All of his books….)
- David McCollough (Biographies on John Adams, Harry S. Truman, the Wright Brothers)


Here are links to a number of posts in other threads on NJGF from a several years ago, where I posted what I was reading at that period of time:

The latest book that I just finished is:
Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic
by David Frum

AVB-AMG

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6 minutes ago, Displaced Texan said:

Most of Sun Tso’s translations of the ‘Art of War’ are pretty good. When I get home, I’ll get you the info on the one I have. 

It’s not the “ art of war” it’s different.

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1 hour ago, Zeke said:

Now the Iliad and the  Odyssey 

@GRIZ recommended sum supplement art of war book. I wrote it down somewhere.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu.  Keep on mind there are various translations as Tex pointed out.  All are good IMO though.

Book of the 5 Rings by Miyamoto Musashi (available as a free download)

On War by Carl Clausewitz

Infantry Attacks by Erwin Rommel (make sure you read the unabridged version)

 

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5 minutes ago, GRIZ said:

The Art of War by Sun Tzu.  Keep on mind there are various translations as Tex pointed out.  All are good IMO though.

Book of the 5 Rings by Miyamoto Musashi (available as a free download)

On War by Carl Clausrwitz

Infantry Attacks by Erwin Rommel (make sure you read the unabridged version)

 

That’s what it was @Displaced Texan.

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4 hours ago, GRIZ said:

The Art of War by Sun Tzu.  Keep on mind there are various translations as Tex pointed out.  All are good IMO though.

Book of the 5 Rings by Miyamoto Musashi (available as a free download)

On War by Carl Clausewitz

Infantry Attacks by Erwin Rommel (make sure you read the unabridged version)

GRIZ:

This one's for you......
The important dialogue begins at 1:50 into the video clip.

AVB-AMG
 

 

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If I had to name on book, without a doubt,  it would be "one hundred years of solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I've always liked to read. But after highschool I stopped until, by chance, I picked up that book; it rekindled my love of reading.

I became so enamored with the genre that I read everything he ever wrote. Then I mixed in some Salman Rushdie and Isabel Allende. Moved on to some Mario Vargas Llosa and, WTH why not since I'm going around South America, I read a bunch of George Amado.

Now, looking back I did read alot of pinko, commie fiction book writers.

Anyway, latter on, another by chance book pick lead to refocus my reading interest. It was "flags of our fathers" by James Bradley. That lead to read his other book "Flyboys"

That opened the flood gates to read all I could find about the American involvement in the Pacific during WW2. I was never interested in the big picture of troop movements, grand strategy...;my interests were always stories from the "boots on the ground", "the grunt, " the blood, the fear, the piss, the shit"  perspective. One of the better books of the genre is "With the old breed at Peleliu and Okinawa" by Eugene Sledge.

Then I become interest in the sadism and depravity exhibited by the Japanese in their occupied territories, so I read a few books about that.; "Unit 732" and "the rape of Naking" come to mind. There were a few about the experiences the westerners -mainly the dutch- civilians suffered under the Japanese occupation of Indonesia.

Then one day I picked up "The Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn and that sent me down the rabbit hole of exploring another aspect of human depravity; being caught in the meatgrinder of the soviet purges.

A few books come to mind: "Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag" by Bardach, "Journey into the Whirlwind" and "Within the Whirlwind" by Ginsburg.

Then I stopped reading books. I still read a couple hours a day online but it seems I just don't have the interest to pick up a book.

It will come back.

 

 

 

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I enjoy reading but never really found the time to read much, to be honest. Most of my reading was done as School Assignments and what not.
Once things settle down and i move and what not i'd certainly like to start up a little home library and start reading. I will most definitely be the PITA parent that pushes my kids to read, as well.
Hoping my kids don't talk in text-speak when they are teenagers.....

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10 hours ago, AVB-AMG said:

GRIZ:

This one's for you......
The important dialogue begins at 1:50 into the video clip.

AVB-AMG
 

 

Thank AVB.  You also might want to add "War as I Knew It" by Patton. 

There's also a collection of poems Patton wrote during WW2.  The editor includes notes on the setting each poem was written.  This provides an interesting perspective.

I noted to read the unabridged version of Rommel's book.  There was an abridged version that was circulated among US Army officers as they didn't want them to adopt some of Rommel's ideas.

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GRIZ:

Thanks for the recommendation.  I just purchased George S. Patton's "War as I Knew It" (Audiobook version).
I am actually more interested in hearing what he had to say and get his perspective about honor, leadership and staying mentally and physically fit, than I am in the military battle tactics in the World War II European campaign.  Since he kept a daily diary I think this should be a really detailed and fascinating book.

AVB-AMG

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I thought that with everything that is currently going on in our country, as well as around the world, that it would be appropriate to revisit and re-read (actually, listen to the audiobook version), of the classic novel:

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

FYI, here is a link to the audiobook version I have just purchased and a "cut and paste' of one of the succinct reviews of it:

AVB-AMG

Review:

“Brave New World is a bitterly funny and humorously tragic dystopian novel published 75 years ago, in which Aldous Huxley satirizes modern civilization’s obsession with consumerism, sensual pleasure, popular culture entertainment, mass production, and eugenics. His far future world limits individual freedom in exchange for communal happiness via mass culture arts like “feelies” (movies with sensual immersion), the state-produced feel-good drug soma, sex-hormone gum, popular sports like “obstacle golf,” and the assembly line chemical manipulation of ova and fetuses so as to decant from their bottles babies perfectly suited for their destined castes and jobs, babies who are then mentally conditioned to become satisfied workers and consumers who believe that everyone belongs to everyone. In a way it’s more horrible than the more obviously brutal and violent repression of individuals by totalitarian systems in dystopias like George Orwell’s 1984, because Huxley’s novel implies that people are happy being mindless cogs in the wheels of economic production as long as they get their entertainments and new goods.”

https://www.audible.com/pd/Classics/Brave-New-World-Audiobook/B002V1BVK4?ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_1&pf_rd_p=e81b7c27-6880-467a-b5a7-13cef5d729fe&pf_rd_r=B1M4VN7GS660T4H05AS3&

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9 minutes ago, Lettan1982 said:

to be honest, movies have a much better inspiration on me than book authors, i guess that's because i rarely read. anyway, anyway, i once loved Shakespear, but I don't really read his books anymore.

Wow...!

His first post here on NJGF is to say that he does not read anymore.   Sounds like a typical lazy ignorant juvenile American kid...   Amazing!  No wonder our country is going down the crapper...

Good luck in life buddy!

AVB-AMG

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I was forced to read & do book reports in school.  As a product of the late 50's and living thru DUCK & COVER grammar school in the 60's I HATED it & felt that since the world was spinning out of control, I'd rather spend my time with current events.  The classics bored me to death.  I was "into guns" at an early age (12), and used allowance money to buy gun magazines.  Only after I became successful did my love for reading develop.  Hard cover editions of things such as "Running Silent, My years in a WW2 attack submarine" by Admiral James Calvert and other such notables now adorn my book shelves.  Anything Clancy!  Killing Patton.  I have an entire collection of bound books w/ gold leaf that were published by the NRA years ago, and they include all of the old experts' writings such as those by Hatcher that follow the development of small arms thru the ages.

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On 3/10/2018 at 7:06 PM, Mrs. Peel said:

 

I always had my nose in a book

 

Which I have always found to be better than having a book in my nose. 

 

I think Poe for me mostly but “In Cold Blood” was the first time I realized there are books you can’t put down. 

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