'One Man's Winderness', a collection of diary entries from Richard Proenneke 1916-2003. Stayed in Alaska after a career in the Navy, packed up and built a cabin 50 miles by air from anyone with few hand tools lived in it from 1969-1999. Foraged, hunted and scavenged, helped back country trekkers who a) got lost or b) actually came to see him. The real deal, no MREs or Mountain Home freezed dried meals... and after a few years of hunting gave that up for the scavenging... nothing wasted in nature. The guy was a true inspiration for me, just more hardcore than I could be. I occasionally like sunlight and talking to somebody other than myself. Look him up on YouTube, National Geographic and the State of Alaska both did documentaries on him.

 

Wise Guy by Nicholas Pileggi

I read this years before Goodfellas came out. - Great book - great movie. If you've never read the book where Goodfellas came from, do yourself a favor and pick it up. I was soooo happy when it was made into a movie - especially with Martine Scorsese directing.

 

It is worth noting that Aldrich Ames was motivated solely by money paid to him by the Soviet government. He was not a Communist Party member or a Communist sympathizer.

 

Why is it worth noting?

This is a post about books, not politics!

 

Brilliant book. I've read it a few times.

 

I read a lot but The Lord of the Rings trilogy is still my favourite book of all time. I have an old copy of it I brought when I was about 18 or 19 and I still have it.

 

The book Airframe, written in the 1990’s, was an amazing book. Lots of good facts with plenty of twists in the plot line. I read it in 3 long nights; just wouldn’t put it down. Work sucked for three days!

 

Any Tom Clancy solo written

 

Genre: Non-fiction, hobby history

This one's for the gaming folks hiding out there. Book covers the rise and early years of TSR, the company that published Dungeons and Dragons. It's an MIT Press book and is written mostly as a business history, so it's a touch to the dry side at times - but it chronicles how D&D got started as a published rule set, how they marketed it, how they sold it, along with the huge fight between the co-creators (Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson) over royalties and direction. Then comes the schism, with Arneson on the outs, and through a series of accidents TSR takes off.

And then crashes, because these folks didn't know much about running a business. Also because of public moral crusades, some boardroom shenanigans, excessive lifestyles, and more -- but mostly just through inept business moves. Story arc runs from the early '70s through late 1985, when Gygax loses control of the company (with some footnotes stretching into '86 about the resulting legal battle and its conclusion). Interesting tidbits inside include the origins of the now-massive GenCon, where and how D&D got leveraged as part of the "Satanic Panic" of the 80s, the tale of a kid who "went missing in the steam tunnels" beneath his university (but actually didn't), a note about an author using a tabletop game system to plan out the movement of submarines for a book he was writing (then some nobody named Tom Clancy, writing The Hunt for Red October - I think he went on to do a bunch of other stuff).

 

Creature by John Saul.

 

On the spiritual side... I'd say the Upanishads. It's the only book I remember ever being recommended to a character in a novel, i.e. a Welsh miner to Larry in 'The Razor's Edge.' Read it... gave me deep and insightful confusion.

 

Title: The Stand by Stephen King
Genre: Horror fiction

Synopsis: A flu-like virus (Captain Tripps) is let loose on humanity (as well as it can be in just the USA), causing rapid death to all but a few. They congregate in Las Vegas with Randy Flagg (evil) or in Boulder with Mother Abagail (good).

I’d recommend reading the original edition, not the unabridged. But, that’s my preference.

 

Mindgames, by "Jasmine Gold."
Genre: dystopian romance, with many naked sex slaves

A friend's novel, available for download as a Kindle book. An erotic romance, a story of redemption ... and incredibly dirty. Back in the heyday of the BDSMLibrary, it had a perfect 10/10 rating and just under 400,000 readers. Freakishly, the site mod had a temper tantrum or brain fart of something, and stopped publishing new chapters then banned her. It is, that said, a really compelling novel set in a long-post apocalyptic world where the great city is far gone into moral and physical decay ... and then they make the mistake of summoning a Healer, Gabriel, from far away to treat the leader's child.

 

The original novel 'The Falcon and the Snowman' - great movie, but the source material is an excellent read.

 

Bow Down Humans by James Patterson

 

The Notebook from Nicolas Sparks