Currently reading Cycling Home from Siberia by Rob Lilwall
The book is an account of the author’s 3 year, 30,000 mile bike ride from Siberia to England via Australia.
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Currently reading Hardcore Troubadour by Lauren St John.
The Life and Near Death of Steve Earle, a biography of Steve Earle, is a well written account of a great musician.
Foundation is the second-greatest science fiction series of all time.
(The greatest, of course, is Dune.) In 1973, the BBC recorded an 8-episode radio series of Asimov‘s Foundation Trilogy. The show is now in the public domain and available for download at the Internet Archive. It’s well done. When I read Foundation I failed to continue past the original trilogy into the later work. This show has encouraged me to revisit the books.
Currently reading This Machine Kills Secrets by Andy Greenberg
When the book was first published I assumed it would be just another entry into the media hubbub around WikiLeaks. When I saw that John Young – cranky old man of the cypherpunk movement – gave it a positive review I decided that it would be worth a read. While the book does center on Assange, Greenberg does an admirable job of tracing the history of the cypherpunks and describing what in the future we will probably refer to as a sequel to the cryptowars. It is a recommended read.
Currently reading Escape the Wolf by Clint Emerson.
The book is in a similar vein as Gavin de Becker’s The Gift Of Fear (a book I strongly recommend), but with more acronyms and typos. Clint Emerson focuses on external awareness more than the internal awareness discussed by de Becker. There are some good tidbits in it, but overall I would award the book a “meh” rating.
Currently reading Spook Country by William Gibson.
Gibson was one of the most influential authors of my childhood. I had not kept up with him in this millennium, but have begun to rectify that by reading Pattern Recognition a while ago and now Spook Country.
Currently reading Canyons and Ice: The Wilderness Travels of Dick Griffith by Kaylene Johnson.
Dick Griffith has pursued human-powered travel in the wilderness areas of the American West since 1946. He pioneered the use of a packraft in 1952. This book chronicles his travels.
Currently reading: Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Richard and Nicholas Crane.
If you’re at all interested in bikes, lightweight backpacking, or a combination thereof, you must read this book.
In 1986, Dick and Nick rode lightweight, steel race bikes from the Bay of Bengal across Bangladesh, up and over the Himalaya, across the Tibetan Plateau, and through the Gobi desert to the point of the earth furthest from the sea. They were sawing their toothbrushes in half and cutting extraneous buckles off of their panniers before “bikepacking” (or “ultralight backpacking”) was a thing. The appendix includes a complete gear list and relevant discussion.
The book is currently out of print, but used copies can be found. A PDF version is available here.