What's bad about atheist bashing? Atheists are unfortunate people who do not believe. This is a tragedy. Their chief argument, evolution, has been disproved multiple times. Creationism? Never disproved. The odds of evolution being true are 1 in 100000000000000.

Otherwise known as one in one-hundred-trillion.

and I am willing to hijack this thread to pull an atheist's faulty logic out from under him(her).

such a child, i think its your bedtime diplofool.

anyway i wanted to ask...has anyone used the new Amazon Kindle? what's it like? i have yet to actually see one.

Someone on my bus uses the kindle and loves it. I still like the feel of a real book with paper and pages to turn, but have been tempted. Maybe on my next quarterly bonus (no, my company is NOT getting bailed out as we are doing just fine).

And I wouldn't hijack the thread, Diplofool. It might be the last hijack you ever do.

might I suggest the "Redwall" books Diplomat? I really enjoyed them at your age.

All jokes aside, those were some sweet books.

Actually, I read the Redwall series a few years back (in my late 30s at the time) and thoroughly enjoyed them. They were rather simplistic compared to Richard Adams Watership Down and Plague Dogs, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Can we please drop the personal attacks, people? The only juvenilism I see in this thread is the personal attacks. "Dipfool"? Really? That's a name I'd think an 8th grader would come up with. Come on people, act like adults...

Back on topic: All this talk about "Heart Of Darkness" interests me. I'm going to go pick that one up!

And Herbert's original "Dune" was one of my favs... but the series got weirder and weirder, and I eventually gave up. Completely unsure of finishing the rest and trying his kids prequels...

the russian tradition by tibor szamuely, i absolutely devoured the thing, although it did get a little slow when he started talking about the revolutionaries in the last 2/3 of the book rather than the state as endowed in the autocratic tsar

such a child, i think its your bedtime diplofool.


You just proved your own immaturity, sean

@ FortKnox

How far did you get?

@fortknox -
I never finished Chapterhouse: Dune (got REALLY weird, a little too weird for my taste) but will probably go back and try again one of these days. I sometimes wonder if something happened inside his head at the end...

Brian's prequels (what I have read so far at least) are not nearly as layered and complex. They are a "deep" read in that they are lengthy and there is lots of political intrigue, but nothing compared to the depth of the original works, and the weirdeness factor is greatly reduced. They are more of a traditional scifi story so far. I would compare them with Orson Scott Card's Enderverse beyond the original Ender's Game. Straightforward stories you can follow, filled with plenty of politics and intrigue, but not so deep you have to keep referring back if you don't read them all in a short time period.

Guys, don't feed the troll, it'll only make him talk more.

I recently re-read Neuromancer...great book. Started up Count Zero, but haven't gotten very far.

As for the Dune prequels, they were good in that they allowed us to see more of the rich backstory Frank Herbert had created, but they were written with very poor style, imho. As for the Dune 7 books (Hunters of Dune, Sandworms of Dune), they let us see where he was going with it all...again, I really wish Frank had been alive to write it.

I read through Children of Dune, without issue, though when the kid is turning into a worm (its been a while, so I don't remember specifics), I found it to be very weird... then started reading the next (god-emperor?) and found it to be far too weird to continue on...
FYI - not to be blasphemous, but I found the second Dune to be slow and boring (and he killed my fav character!). The first and third were great, though...

I never read dune, barely even know of the movie's existance...

I'm ashamed to admit that I never could quite get into Dune. I'm not sure why, I really expected to like it.
Also, I'm currently reading Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It's quite good, though I'm only about halfway through. It's a bunch of short essays, the title is pretty self-explanatory.

Myself? I'm about 3/4 of the way though a re-telling of the epic of Gilgamesh, this version is written by Stephan Grundy.

When I finish, I'm planning on writing Vladmir Nobokov's Lolita. Wish me Luck, everyone.

draugnar, fortknox i know exactly what you mean, Dune- great, spiritually deep and a glimpse into the Genuis' herbets mind, his later books....almost like he was slipping too deep, into madness, once again the fine line between a genius and insanity is shown. Wonderllama, not that good....but good enough to read all of them?

ahh neuromancer , than man should get a cut of every scifi movie made in the last 10 years. have you tried Richard Morgan? he is somewhat similar but more assessable writing style. (the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy)

WonderLlama - I LOVE Neuromancer. Hunted it down in a used half price book store to add it to my collection again a couple of years back. The whole Dorsai saga is great, but Neuromancer really kicks off the history behind the Dorsai.

Oner? your going to write someone else's book? WTF???

Draugnar,

I believe llama is referring to Neuromancer by WIlliam Gibson. You seem to be talking about Necromancer by Gordon R. Dickson.

Both awesome books, but very different!

I said write, didn't I? Damn!
I meant to say read, lol.

I feel like "Heart of Darkness" is hardly a book that you can just pick up and read casually. A local college offered a class on just that book alone, and I sorta regret not auditing it.

I've been hunting for Assimov's "Foundation" books but none of the area libraries have them, can you believe it?? I think I may have to resort to buying them.

I just finished the "Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories," which was great, so I'm starting to re-read Tolkien's LOTR books. I generally think that there are too many good books out there to read the same one twice, but I last read them in grade-school so I think I'll pick up a lot more this time around.

After those, I'm thinking "The World is Flat," but this Neuromancer book sounds interesting. A definite two-thumbs-up?

Heart of darkness was rediculous. It droned on a bit, and I think maybe I was in over my head. I didn't understand a lot of it, got discouraged, and never actually finished it.

I think Heart of Darkness is a bit less complex than professors of English literature like to imagine. I certainly can't imagine having a course where all you did was study it.

diplomat, you cant use the lack of contradictory evidence to believ in something.
creationism never disproved?
maybe so, but leprechuans, bigfoot, gnomes, loch ness monster, elves, wizards, unicorns, and the flying spaghetti monster have also never bveen disproved.

my favorite author may be khalil gibran.
hom or derrick jensen.

return to neveryon series by samuel delaney
fledgling by octavia butler (read it for like the 8th time, so good)

@Jake: I dunno. At the very least it's more than a book about, "a guy who goes into the jungles of Africa."

i honestly dont see why people are harassing each other and making fun of them for their opinion on BOOKS, but personally i enjoyed the bourne series by robert ludlum. very different from the movies, about a government trained agent who loses his memory while tracking down the worlds most dangerous assassin