Recent Readings

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It has been the hot, hot season here, and it’s been too hot and humid to type.  But I have been reading like a maniac.  I had hoped to review, if only briefly, what I’ve been reading, but I lost track of all of them. 

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The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006) by Lawrence Wright is a masterful work of investigative journalism.  Wright goes right to the heart of the matter:  the religious-ideological background of modern Islamic terrorist jihad.  He first covers the life, the “martyrdom,” and the vast influence of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the Egyptian academic who inspired Osama bin Laden and his fundamentalist comrades.  He traces the sequence of radicalization and plotting, also showing what agents in American intelligence agencies were thinking at this time.  Highly recommended. 

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No Shortcuts to the Top:  Climbing the world’s 14 highest peaks (2006) by Ed Viesturs.  Viesturs is one of America’s greatest high-altitude mountain climbers, and he is the first American to climb all 14 of the earth’s summits that are over 8,000 meters, all of which are in Asia’s Himalaya and Karakorum ranges.  And he climbed them all without using supplemental bottled oxygen. 

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I already had Viesturs’ book, Himalayan Quest (2009), which covers the same climbing campaign but is a National Geographic edition with large format photography featured.  Reading them both together was a treat.  Viesturs had other writers contribute to the text of both books, but most photos were his.  My favorite quote is from Viesturs’ sometimes climbing partner, the late great Jean-Christophe Lafaille, who once climbed the huge Himalayan mountain Shishapangma by a new route, solo, in winter; Lafaille said, “Never in my life have I been so cold!”  Whew!  That takes me away from the tropics for a bit. 

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Parkland (2013) by Vincent Bugliosi, tells the story of the “four days in November” (1963) in which JFK was killed as was Lee Harvey Oswald.  Bugliosi was a top prosecutor who became quite famous for prosecuting the Charles Manson family murders and writing about the case.  I have read quite a bit about the JFK assassination, but his details about Oswald and his family, about the criminal investigation, and about Jack Ruby are fascinating.  This book is more of a movie tie-in edition since the film of the same name recently appeared, and all of this is based on his huge 2007 work on the subject. 

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Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) by D.H. Lawrence is perhaps the most infamous dirty book of the early 20^th century, since it was banned in places and there were high-profile court cases surrounding it.  I finally read it and was surprised that it was not all bad as a story.  Rated X for language and sexual scenarios. 

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Under the Skin (2000) by Michel Faber.  I saw that the new film version of this was coming soon, and I wanted to see it because critics said it was unusual in many ways, and also because Scarlett Johansson stars.  So I quickly get a Kindle version of the book and read it before seeing the film.  I liked both, but they are not for everyone.  Kinda weird.  After reading this book, I got another Faber book, The Fire Gospel (2008).  I liked his earlier book better. 

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I have collected a lot of science fiction novels by Robert A. Heinlein, both in paper and Kindle.  I will review them on Zenwind eventually, as I am finding them to be among my favorites in my long life of reading. 

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-Zenwind.

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