Canterbury Tales Guesthouse

[Daveo]

Uncompromising Honor by David Weber

SCI - FI @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

HONOR'S FINISHING WHAT SHE STARTED The Solarian League navy counts its super dreadnoughts by the thousands.

Not even its own government knows how enormous its economy truly is and for hundreds of years, the League has borne the banner of human civilization, been the ideal to which humanity aspires in its diaspora across the galaxy. But the bureaucrats known as the "Mandarins," who rule today's League, are not the men and women who founded it so long ago.

They are corrupt, venal, accountable to no one . . . and they've decided the upstart Star Kingdom of Manticore must be destroyed. Honor Harrington has worn the Star Kingdom's uniform for half a century and served her monarch and her people well.

In the course of those years, the woman the newsies call the Salamander has grown from a tactically brilliant but politically naïve junior officer to supreme fleet command and a seat on the highest military and political councils of the Grand Alliance. Very few people know war the way Honor Harrington does. Very few have lost as many men and women, as many friends, as much family, as she has. Yet despite that, hers has been a voice of caution.

She knows the Mandarins and the Solarian League Navy are growing increasingly desperate as the truth of their technological inferiority sinks home, but she also knows the sheer size of the League.

And she knows how its citizens will react if the Grand Alliance takes the war to the League, attacks its star systems, destroys its infrastructure . . . kills its civilians. Today's victory, bought on those terms, can only guarantee a future war of revenge against a resurgent Solarian League and its navy. Honor knows the Grand Alliance must find a victory that doesn't require incursions deep into Solarian space, doesn't leave a legacy of bottomless hatred, and the strategy she supports has been working. The League is sliding towards inglorious defeat as it steadily loses ground in the Protectorates and the Verge. As its central government teeters towards bankruptcy and even some of its core systems opt to secede in the face of the Mandarins' corruption.

As the Solarian Navy finally realizes it cannot face an Alliance battle fleet and win. But the Mandarins have embraced a desperate new strategy, and in pursuit of that strategy, the SLN has committed atrocities such as the galaxy has not known in a thousand years.

The League have violated its own Eridani Edict against mass civilian casualties, violated the Deneb Accords prohibition on war crimes. And they have finally killed too many of the people Honor Harrington loves. Hers is the voice of caution and compromise no longer, and the galaxy is about to see something it has never imagined. The Salamander is coming for the Solarian League, and Hell is coming in her wake.

[Daveo]

Rites of Passage (To the Ends of the Earth #1) by William Golding.. . .

 

In the classics section @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

 

In the cabin of an ancient, stinking warship bound for Australia, a man writes a journal to entertain his godfather back in England.

With wit and disdain he records mounting tensions on board, as an obsequious clergyman attracts the animosity of the tyrannical captain and surly crew.

[Daveo]

The Element Of Surprise: Navy Seals In Vietnam

by Darryl Young . . .

Another fascinating hard to find book @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

[Daveo]

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.....

This book Asia books cost - 385 baht - our price 140 baht @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange...plus the 50% trade in for credit when you finished with it..

A lot of professors give talks titled 'The Last Lecture'. Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them:

What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy? When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

But the lecture he gave, 'Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams', wasn't about dying.

It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think).

It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living. In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humour, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form.

It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.

[Daveo]

The Japanese Haiku by Kenneth Yasuda.

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

For lovers of literature and students of Japanese culture, this is a revealing exploration of the haiku. The author describes the subtle nature and beauty of haiku, emphasizing the form's unique place in the realm of poetry.

[Daveo]

Working With The Thais: A Guide To Managing In Thailand by Henry Holmes & Roy Tomizawa...

This book Asia books was 495 baht - our price 180 baht @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange...plus the 50% trade in for credit when you finished with it..

[Daveo]

Snakes Of The World by Scott Weidensaul...

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange..

Challenges myths and presents facts about the anatomy and behavior of snakes, depicts their beauty, and discusses each of the major families of snake

[Daveo]

Forever and a Day (James Bond - Extended Series #48) by Anthony Horowitz. . . . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.. A spy is dead. A legend is born. Read the explosive new James Bond thriller. A British agent floats in the waters of the French Riviera, murdered by an unknown hand. Determined to uncover the truth, James Bond enters a world of fast cars, grand casinos and luxury yachts. But beneath the glamour, he soon encounters a dangerous network of organised crime. It’s time for Bond to earn his licence to kill. He must find those responsible and unravel their devastating plan – before he becomes their next victim… The exhilarating prequel to Casino Royale

[Daveo]

Breakdown by Jonathan Kellerman

More books in daily @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

Author Jonathan Kellerman’s thrilling Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis investigate the murder of a Hollywood actress pushed to the limits of sanity. Psychologist sleuth Alex Delaware is surprised to get the call when well-known TV actress Zelda Chase turns up half-naked, half-mad in the LA’s rural Westside.

He has little connection to the starlet, save a psychiatric evaluation he performed on her adopted son several years ago, a child who has since vanished without a trace and whom Zelda refuses to talk about.

When the actress turns up dead a few weeks later without a scratch on her, Delaware calls in police lieutenant Milo Sturgis to help him crack the case, or at least the wall of silence surrounding it.

When the body of a second actress turns up with the same mysterious cause of death, Delaware and Sturgis start to wonder - is this a copycat case or a coincidence?

When they uncover the death of another actress, a star from another era who vanished decades ago, never to be found, they realize they’re facing one of their most baffling, mind-bending cases yet.

[Daveo]

Across the Top; the World's First Complete Traverse of the Himalayas by Sorrel Wilby.

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

On 20 November 1991, Sorrel Wilby and her husband Chris Ciantar became the first people ever to traverse the highest, wildest and toughest mountain range known to man.

Commencing their expedition in June 1990, the Australian duo trekked 6500 kilometers from the banks of the mighty Indus in Pakistan to the banks of the Brahmaputra in India's restricted tribal State, Arunachal Pradesh.

[Daveo]

Neil Young FAQ: Everything Left to Know about the Iconic and Mercurial Rocker by Glen Boyd. . . .

This new book US cost - $19.95 baht - our price 200 baht @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange...plus the 50% trade in for credit when you finished with it..

(FAQ).

Neil Young has had one of the most remarkable careers in the history of music.

He hasn't just outlived many of his contemporaries some of whom were great inspirations for him ("From Hank to Hendrix," as one of his own songs says); his artistry lives on through those he has inspired (Pearl Jam, Radiohead), and he remains relevant and vital well into his fifth decade of making music.

Young also continues to crank out records at a rate that would kill most artists half his age.

Between his solo and live albums, and his work with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, his remarkable career has spanned well over 50 albums. Although he has experimented in genres from syntho-pop to rockabilly, Neil Young is best known for the fully cranked, feedback-laden noise he makes with Crazy Horse ( Rust Never Sleeps and Ragged Glory ) and the more introspective folk-pop ( Harvest ). The glue that binds his work together is the songwriting.

Because when it comes to writing great, timeless songs, Neil Young has few equals.

Neil Young FAQ is the first definitive guide to the music of this mercurial and methodical, enduring, and infuriating icon.

From the Archives to Zuma and from the Ditch Trilogy to the Geffen years, this book covers every song and album in painstaking detail-including bootlegs and such lost recordings as Homegrown, Chrome Dreams, Toast, and Meadow Dusk .

Obscure facts and anecdotes from the studio to the road, along with dozens of rare images, make this book a must-have for Young fans.

[Daveo]

Killing Season by Faye Kellerman..

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

Faye Kellerman delivers an electrifying novel of suspense as a young man’s investigation into his sister’s death draws him into the path of a sadistic serial killer. He went searching for the truth.

Now a killer has found him. The more you know, the more there is to fear… Four years ago, fifteen-year-old Ellen Vicksburg went missing in the quiet town of River Remez, New Mexico. Ellen was kind, studious, and universally liked.

Her younger brother, Ben, could imagine nothing worse than never knowing what happened to her, until, on the first anniversary of her death, he found her body in a shallow grave by the river’s edge. Ben, now sixteen, is committed to finding the monster who abducted and strangled Ellen.

Police believe she was the victim of a psychopath known as the Demon. But Ben, a math geek too smart for his high-school classes, continues to pore over the evidence at the local police precinct, gaining an unlikely ally in his school’s popular new girl, Ro Majors.

In his sister’s files, Ben’s analytical mind sees patterns that don’t fit, tiny threads that he adds to the clues from other similar unsolved murders.

As the body count rises, a picture emerges of an adversary who is as cunning and methodical as he is twisted. At first the police view Ben’s investigation with suspicion. Soon his obsession will mark him as a threat.

But uncovering the truth may not be enough to keep Ben and those he loves safe from a relentless killer who has nothing left to lose.

[Daveo]

The Loch Ness Legacy by Boyd Morrison

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange..

During a trek to Loch Ness, Scotland, a young Charles Darwin encounters a mysterious and terrifying creature that provides a spark for his evolutionary theory. Almost two hundred years later and across the Channel in Paris, the Eiffel Tower is under attack.

Only through detective work, intuition, and a judicious application of high-tech weaponry does former Army combat engineer Tyler Locke prevent a massacre. What Tyler doesn't know is that the assault is just the beginning of a conspiracy so dark that it not only threatens the lives of those he loves, but could also ignite World War III.

Racing against time to uncover Darwin's centuries-old secret, he must solve a series of cryptic clues to find a manuscript that has been so cleverly hidden it hasn't been seen since the Victorian age. Tyler's quest takes him from the bustling tourist hotspots of Seattle to the splendor of Versailles to the remote Highlands of Scotland in a battle to reveal the shocking truth behind the legend of the Loch Ness monster.

[Daveo]

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom..

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange..

From the author of the Tuesdays with Morrie, a novel that explores the unexpected connections of our lives, and the idea that heaven is more than a place; it's an answer. Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life.

His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park.

On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart.

He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination.

It's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers.

One by one, from childhood to soldier to old age, Eddie's five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his "meaningless" life, and revealing the haunting secret behind the eternal question: "Why was I here?"

[Daveo]

One Crowded Hour by Tim Bowden. . .

Traded in @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange..

This is the story of Neil Davis, the celebrated combat cameraman in Vietnam.

[Daveo]

Sharpe's Trafalgar (The Sharpe Series #4) by Bernard Cornwell...

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

Richard Sharpe, travelling home aboard the ‘Revenant’, meets Admiral Nelson and his fleet, on what was a calm October day off Cape Trafalgar. Soldier, hero, rogue, Sharpe is the man you always want on your side.

Born in poverty, he joined the army to escape jail and climbed the ranks by sheer brutal courage.

He knows no other family than the regiment of the 95th Rifles whose green jacket he proudly wears.

[Daveo]

No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden by Mark Owen.

Traded in @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange..

For the first time anywhere, the first-person account of the planning and execution of the Bin Laden raid from a Navy Seal who confronted the terrorist mastermind and witnessed his final moment From the streets of Iraq to the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips in the Indian Ocean, and from the mountaintops of Afghanistan to the third floor of Osama Bin Laden's compound, operator Mark Owen of the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group, commonly known as SEAL Team Six - has been a part of some of the most memorable special operations in history, as well as countless missions that never made headlines. No Easy Day puts readers alongside Owen and the other hand picked members of the twenty-four-man team as they train for the biggest mission of their lives.

The blow-by-blow narrative of the assault, beginning with the helicopter crash that could have ended Owen's life straight through to the radio call confirming Bin Laden’s death, is an essential piece of modern history. In No Easy Day, Owen also takes readers onto the field of battle in America's ongoing War on Terror and details the selection and training process for one of the most elite units in the military.

Owen's story draws on his youth in Alaska and describes the SEALs' quest to challenge themselves at the highest levels of physical and mental endurance. With boots-on-the-ground detail, Owen describes numerous previously unreported missions that illustrate the life and work of a SEAL and the evolution of the team after the events of September 11.

In telling the true story of the SEALs whose talents, skills, experiences, and exceptional sacrifices led to one of the greatest victories in the War on Terror, Mark Owen honors the men who risk everything for our country, and he leaves readers with a deep understanding of the warriors who keep America safe.

[Daveo]

The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong by W. Somerset Maugham..

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

Best known for his novels and plays, Somerset Maugham also produced delightfully engaging and absorbing non-fiction, of which The Gentleman in the Parlour is a prime example.

First published in 1935 it describes a journey the author took from Rangoon to Haipong.

Whether by river to Mandalay, on horse through the mountains and forests of the Shan States to Bangkok, or onwards by sea, Maugham’s muse is in the spirit of Hazlitt, who wrote: “It is great to shake off the trammels of the world and public opinion...and to be known by no other title than The Gentleman in the Parlour.

[Daveo]

50 People Who Buggered Up Britain by Quentin Letts...

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

Which fifty people made Britain the wreck she is?

From ludicrous propagandist Alastair Campbell to the Luftwaffe's allies, the modernist architects, it's time to name the guilty.

Quentin Letts sharpens his nib and stabs them where they deserve it, from TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh, the dumbed-down buffoon who put the 'h' in Aspidistra, to the perpetrators of the 'Credit Crunch'.

Margaret Thatcher ruptured our national unity.

The creators of EastEnders trashed our brand over high tea.

Thus, he argues, are the people who made our country the ugly, scheming, cheating, beer-ridden bum of the Western world.

Here are the fools and knaves and vulgarians who ripped down our British glories and imposed the tawdry and the trite.

In a half century we have gone from end-of-Empire to descent-into-Hell.

[Daveo]

Ancestral Vices by Tom Sharpe. . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

This title involves left-wing academics, right-wing capitalists, true-blue country gentry, workers, peasants, police and lawyers.

[Daveo]

The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening (An Eckhart Tolle Edition) by Steve Taylor. . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

What does it mean to be enlightened or spiritually awakened?

In The Leap, Steve Taylor shows that this state is much more common than is generally believed.

He shows that ordinary people - from all walks of life - can and do regularly “wake up” to a more intense reality, even if they know nothing about spiritual practices and paths. Wakefulness is a more expansive and harmonious state of being that can be cultivated or that can arise accidentally.

It may also be a process we are undergoing collectively. Drawing on his years of research as a psychologist and on his own experiences, Taylor provides what is perhaps the clearest psychological study of the state of wakefulness ever published.

Above all, he reminds us that it is our most natural state - accessible to us all, anytime, anyplace.

[Daveo]

The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel In Two Semesters by Chip Kidd. . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

After 15 years of designing more than 1,500 book jackets at Knopf for such authors as Anne Rice and Michael Crichton, Kidd has crafted an affecting an entertaining novel set at a state university in the late 1950's that is both slap-happily funny and heartbreakingly sad.

The Cheese Monkeys is a college novel that takes place over a tightly written two semesters.

The book is set in the late 1950's at State U, where the young narrator, has decided to major in art, much to his parents’ dismay.

It is an autobiographical, coming-of-age novel which tells universally appealing stories of maturity, finding a calling in life, and being inspired by a loving, demanding, and highly eccentric teacher.

[Daveo]

Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga #1) by James Lee Burke

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A sprawling thriller drenched with atmosphere and intrigue that takes a young boy from a chance encounter with Bonnie and Clyde to the trenches of World War II and the oil fields along the Texas-Louisiana coast. It is 1934 and the Depression is bearing down when sixteen-year-old Weldon Avery Holland happens upon infamous criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow after one of their notorious armed robberies.

A confrontation with the outlaws ends as Weldon puts a bullet through the rear window of Clyde’s stolen automobile. Ten years later, Second Lieutenant Weldon Holland and his sergeant, Hershel Pine, escape certain death in the Battle of the Bulge and encounter a beautiful young woman named Rosita Lowenstein hiding in a deserted extermination camp.

Eventually, Weldon and Rosita fall in love and marry and, with Hershel, return to Texas to seek their fortunes. There, they enter the domain of jackals known as the oil business.

They meet Roy Wiseheart, a former Marine aviator haunted with guilt for deserting his squadron leader over the South Pacific and Roy’s wife Clara, a vicious anti-Semite who is determined to make Weldon and Rosita’s life a nightmare.

It will be the frontier justice upheld by Weldon’s grandfather, Texas lawman Hackberry Holland, and the legendary antics of Bonnie and Clyde that shape Weldon’s plans for saving his family from the evil forces that lurk in peacetime America and threaten to destroy them all.

[Daveo]

Kowloon Tong by Paul Theroux

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

Ninety-nine years of colonial rule are ending as the British prepare to hand over Hong Kong to China.

For Betty Mullard and her son, Bunt, it doesn't concern them, until the mysterious Mr. Hung from the mainland offers them a large sum for their family business.

They refuse, yet fail to realize Mr. Hung is unlike the Chinese they've known: he will accept no refusals.

When a young female employee whom Bunt has been dating vanishes, he is forced to make important decisions for the first time in his life, but his good intentions are pitted against the will of Mr. Hung and the threat of the ultimate betrayal.

[Daveo]

Soldiers by Philip Ziegler. . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

As revealed through the lives of nine British military men whose wartime experiences span the course of the twentieth century, a study of the soldier's world explores the ways in which military training, values, and everyday life have changed over the course of the last century.