What Books Are You Reading?

[Endless Flight]

I'd like to see what everybody else likes to read about.

[Mikael Hasselstein]

I'm reading:

This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.

Less seriously, I also have picked up a copy of Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows by Michael Reaves.

[Endless Flight]

I've been reading Secret Societies: Inside the World's Most Notorious Organizations by John Reynolds. I've been reading the book chapters in random order. It's at times quite humorous because the author is a skeptic of that kind of stuff.

[Mikael Hasselstein]

Yeah, secret societies are a magnet for conspiracy theories. I used to be a conspiracy theorist, but I gave up my tin-foil hat a long time ago. :o

[Endless Flight]

At times, there are things that definitely seem suspicious, especially regarding politics, but I think it's usually just people lusting for personal power more than anything else. I find it hard to believe that hundreds or thousands of people could keep their mouth shut, especially something as large as, say, the New World Order.

[Mikael Hasselstein]

I find the following a useful phrase:

"Don't suspect conspiracy when stupidity will suffice."

It's a variation on Hanlon's Razor.

[Jedi Skyler]

The last book I read was just a couple weeks ago...the novelization for The Force Unleashed II.

My favorite books of all time, though, have to be Roger Zelazny's complete Chronicles of Amber. Besides those, I'm a SW nut. Haven't read em all, but have read most of em.  :)

[Endless Flight]

I picked up H.P. Lovecraft: Great Tales of Horror at B&N this afternoon. Hard to pass up 600 pages of great storytelling by a legend for less than $8.

[Mikael Hasselstein]

My update is: haven't read much of Coruscant Nights II. I did finish Reinhart & Rogoff (it was due at the library), and finished reading Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which I had picked up months ago and forgotten about. Now I am reading John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and kinda wish I wasn't.

I have some Turkish books on hold at the library, hoping that they come in soon.

[Endless Flight]

You like reading stuff about government, eh?

[Mikael Hasselstein]

It goes with the territory of being a political scientist.

[Endless Flight]

Do you do interviews on new programs?

[Mikael Hasselstein]

'Fraid not. Though I'd love to get an interview on Charlie Rose. He does quite a lot of interviews on my research topic, which is Turkey and the European Union.

But, by and large, you don't see a lot of political scientists on news programming. News programming likes to get sweeping incendiary remarks, rather than thoughtful analysis that has something to do with reality.

[Endless Flight]

Right now I'm reading Forged by Bart D. Ehrman. It's about biblical scholarship.