I still love love love my Kindle and I think it is the best product of this decade. In the past three years I’ve read barely any books on paper. Yesterday I started reading a paperback for the first time in 14 months and realized I was getting annoyed because I couldn’t read while eating since it required two hands part of the time in order to hold both flaps open (which is not a problem with the Kindle).

Base on my rough calculations from Amazon’s page I have bought 362 Kindle books or newspapers since I’ve had one. Plus you save money as most books are slightly cheaper!

I strongly recommend you go buy one! Here is my original Kindle review too! Batter life on the new ones is just amazing.

I don’t often post book recommendations on the blog, in fact I’ve only written two full blog posts on books this year, the rest just get a small blurb on the big list. So keep that in mind as the title of this book I’m about to recommend should scare you away, the title is Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French.

So the title sounds a bit retarded but the book is absolutely amazing! I’ve visited France three or four times over the last couple years and I’ve been trying to learn more about french culture and history and this book is the answer, it is as if someone forced a book on french history, french politics, and french business outlook to have menage a trois and this book is the baby. The book is well written, well researched, and well laid out.

And a quick example, I’ve been involved with computers for a long time and I’ve never heard of the Minitel yet after a chapter of reading about it in this book I was stunned. This was basically a very successful precursor to the internet that launched in 1982, a mere year after I was born. This little networked device could do online dating, message boards, buy airline or train tickets, order stuff, porn, etc. Crazy that I’ve never heard of it.

So go buy this book if you want to learn how France works. It is great to learn more about another democracy that continually chooses a different path then the USA. And hopefully we can pull some ways to change our system out of the mistakes they have made, and the things they are doing very well.

And…

The other book I strongly recommended this year is War (Click Here to learn more about it). A documentary is also going to come out about the author and the soldiers he wrote about.

This is an amazing book and I highly recommend everyone read it, the book is called War by Sebastian Junger.

It is a must read because:

1. You come away with the clearest understanding possible of what it means to be a soldier in their own words. A bit of a cliche maybe, but you realize what soldiers go through for “us” in the worst possible place in Afghanistan. And you get to follow them home, off the front, and see what it’s like to adapt to normal society after being put at the fringes by that society.

2. It is one of the most brilliantly written accounts of war I’ve encountered. The author has amazing way to place you right in the middle of everything and he writes like a video camera.

3. And finally, you get to see from ground level what it is like in Afghanistan, which we have been fighting in for almost 10 years. And we will probably be there for a lot longer… So important to read and understand what modern warfare has turned into, why it costs so much, and what tactics it takes to win in a place Alexander the Great got stuck in.

Here is the official description:

Junger spent 14 months in 2007–2008 intermittently embedded with a platoon of the 173rd Airborne brigade in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, one of the bloodiest corners of the conflict. The soldiers are a scruffy, warped lot, with unkempt uniforms—they sometimes do battle in shorts and flip-flops—and a ritual of administering friendly beatings to new arrivals, but Junger finds them to be superlative soldiers. Junger experiences everything they do—nerve-racking patrols, terrifying roadside bombings and ambushes, stultifying weeks in camp when they long for a firefight to relieve the tedium. Despite the stress and the grief when buddies die, the author finds war to be something of an exalted state: soldiers experience an almost sexual thrill in the excitement of a firefight—a response Junger struggles to understand—and a profound sense of commitment to subordinating their self-interests to the good of the unit. Junger mixes visceral combat scenes—raptly aware of his own fear and exhaustion—with quieter reportage and insightful discussions of the physiology, social psychology, and even genetics of soldiering. The result is an unforgettable portrait of men under fire.

I love the internet because a book on Amazon entitled “WHAT ARE THESE STRAWBERRIES DOING ON MY NIPPLES?: I NEED THEM FOR THE FRUIT SALAD!” is receiving hilarious reviews about the book. Which btw is listed as an import and not for sale.

Just read the 11 reviews left so far and you get such awesome lines such as:

“First of all, a warning. This book is packed with such useful and POWERFUL information, it should be approached with caution. Amazon has not provided a synopsis, and rightly so. I attempted to download a summary to my computer and my monitor EXPLODED. Normally, I would complain to the author and demand a refund, but the mere opportunity to witness this miracle of written word is payment for my loss ten times over. ”

“This book changed my life. Period. Colon: I have long had strawberries on my nipples. I also have had blueberries in my eye sockets and celery in my urethra. The celery remains, but I await the next book with eager expectations.”

“Not as good as the sequel “What are those bananas doing in my vagina I need them for my fruit salad” or the prequel “Popped Cherry Pie – where have all the fresh cherries gone”. But this serves its purpose of telling you where the strawberries go when they are missing from your fruit salad. With the color and shape of strawberries it is easy to see that you can misplace them on your nipples. Vanessa Feltz is truly the girl next door. She is just a woman trying to have a dinner party with strawberries on her nipples. Once she actually gets them off of her nipples she makes a great fruit salad and all the guest love her nipple salad “oops a nip slip”, I mean fruit salad.”

“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t” – Robert Benchley (American Humorist). This book, while laced with divine comedic interludes, divides the world into two difinitive subsections of society. This divide tears at my frail emotions when realizing that I myself am in a group of people who have been repressed and belittled; those of us with megaareolasis, also known as BNS, or Big Nipple Syndrome. I am disquieted to finally come to the stark realization that there is a class system in this country. Those with nipples that can at least be fully covered by a mulberry or rainier cherry are considered acceptable, those enveloped by a blueberry are hailed, and those the size of a mere red currant are revered as Gods. And to the title of this book, there are those that nessecitate the coverage of a fully developed conventionally grown strawberry from Costco, who are shunned as lepers. They are routinely humiliated and asked to hold objects, such as coins, leaves, and wide mouth bottle caps up to their bare bossoms to display the montrosity of their genetic freakdom. What little comfort if any I draw from this piece of literature is knowing that there are others like me out there who share the pain of suffering from the cruelty of our large nipple defaming culture. It has inspired me to write a new book – “What is this pomegranate doing on my nipple, I need it for my Hors D’Ouevres” that will urge congress to add nipple size as a new protected class under Title VII of the civil rights act.”

Just hilarious!