june gloom on 30/9/2013 at 05:53

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[video=youtube;-2Ag4B4m0Cs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2Ag4B4m0Cs[/video]

henke on 3/10/2013 at 07:29

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IIRC I've read 1 or 2 of the Jack Ryan novels. Remembered liking them. RIP Clancy.

Volitions Advocate on 3/10/2013 at 08:22

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They're fantastic books. I dove into them straight after reading all of the Hannibal Lecter books. I was on a detective / violent crime kind of kick.

If you get the chance, see if you can get a hold of the audios as well. Simon Vance is the reader and the man is better than Stephen Fry.

Brian The Dog on 3/10/2013 at 22:56

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I've read some of the Clancy books, and whilst there's a dropping of the standards towards the end, the early ones were good quality. It's sad that he's gone. Does anyone know why so few of his novels are available on ebook? I really want some of the early Jack Ryan and John Clark books, but Amazon UK are only selling "Hunt for Red October" of his early works on Kindle.

Muzman on 4/10/2013 at 06:46

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I'm all audio books of late. Mostly since podcasts don't come out fast enough. They can be really good, but they depends on the reader a lot of the time.
I got a free Audible account and then kept it for a while, initially because I could never find All the President's Men to actually read myself.
That is particularly good though and the reader guys really sells it. (a book everyone should read anyway. The amount of internet conspiracy theorists who think they are following Woodward and Bernstein's footsteps when they have not and will not do the tiniest fraction of what those two did to check all their facts and put the story together right. Instead they mostly hang around each other and discuss how much smarter they are than everyone else.)
Then I went on to drier fare, so it's harder to say if more vibrant reading would have made any difference. First was Bruce Schneier's 'Liars and Outliers' which is a really interesting broad take on practical security covering biology, neuroscience, political science, psychology, law and history (security as the enabler of society and civilisation itself, as he puts it). It's just smart enough and reasonable enough that everyone who really needs to pay attention to it will be able to ignore it.
Then I got one of Bruce's anthologies of essays and things.
Then I got David Aaronovich's Voodoo Histories, all about the very real history that has been made by conspiracy theories (plus some stuff about conspiracy theories more broadly). It's quite snarky and fun, but also scary. He does and exhaustive look at the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the endless persistence of that document to this day. What's weird is that part starts to seem like a DaVinci Code-esque theory, drawing tiny connections and threads between things back to some over arching evil. Only instead of finding the Illuminati or the Jews it's a forged document by a couple of the Tzar's chief hoods to libel the Bolsheviks. It's a fact based spooky Secret History that explains another one. Quite funny (if you don't think too hard about how it's actually wrapped up deeply in half the 20th century's worst shit, from WW 2 and Stalinism right up Al Qaida.)

I cancelled my account (which involves clicking through about ten pages of them begging you not to, btw) just because I don't need to be paying for a new one every month. But the service is good, even though its weirdly random which titles have an audiobook and which don't.

Then I discovered (http://librivox.org/) Librivox, which is a collective that reads public domain books, like and audio Project Gutenburg. It's all volunteers though so its completely variable who you get, from one chapter to the next sometimes. But that's part of the fun in a way.