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Whatcha readin now? (book, books, reading, read) (3 Viewers)

I jump started the whole reading gig over the holidays after waaay to long thanks to a couple of books I recieved as gifts. I flew through Mitch Albom's "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" in parts of two days over the vacation I was so reading deprived. Was so moved I wept like a baby towards the end. :cry:

:bag:

I am now about halfway into "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini. I only wish now that I had taken the time from the very beginning to look up the italicised Afghani terms as I went along. Would have been cool, even though Hosseini sets them up in such a way as to impart a reasonable idea as to their meaning. Good read.

Then I'm looking forward to picking up the "Map Makers Wife" by Robert Whitaker again and starting over. I found it to be a very interesting historical piece when I started it almost a year ago. Very detailed. But I was out of shape back then...

...I'll be ready for some heavy lifting when I'm done with TKR... :yes:

 
I Am America (and so can you!): Had some funny moments but I was a little disappointed

The Road by Cormac McCarthy: excellent

Reread Animal Farm: also excellent

Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories is going pretty slowly

Watership Down by Richard Adams: surprised by how much I enjoyed this. Planning on reading Plague Dogs soon.

Listened to God is not Great. It was good but the combination of Christopher Hitchens' accent and tendency to mumble made it difficult to follow at times. Death by Black Hole was an interesting listen.

 
I'm just polishing off a nice little history book: Thanksgiving

It's a quick, humorous, and engaging read. Really interesting stuff about the Separatists and what they went through leading up to, during, and after their pilgrimage to the New World.

 
Hawk Fan said:
I Am America (and so can you!): Had some funny moments but I was a little disappointed

The Road by Cormac McCarthy: excellent

Reread Animal Farm: also excellent

Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories is going pretty slowly

Watership Down by Richard Adams: surprised by how much I enjoyed this. Planning on reading Plague Dogs soon.

Listened to God is not Great. It was good but the combination of Christopher Hitchens' accent and tendency to mumble made it difficult to follow at times. Death by Black Hole was an interesting listen.
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big fan
 
igbomb said:
Next - War Against the Weak
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Read this for about ten minutes tonight and realized that I'm not going to be able to get through a 500+ page book on such a bummer of a topic right now. But if anyone knows of a good paper (something under 50 pages) on the topic of eugenics, I'd appreciate a link.I think I'm going to give Lonesome Dove a try. Loved the miniseries.

 
igbomb said:
igbomb said:
Next - War Against the Weak
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Read this for about ten minutes tonight and realized that I'm not going to be able to get through a 500+ page book on such a bummer of a topic right now. But if anyone knows of a good paper (something under 50 pages) on the topic of eugenics, I'd appreciate a link.I think I'm going to give Lonesome Dove a try. Loved the miniseries.
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I will provide a one sentence synopsis.From a purely evolutionary standpoint one of the major consequences of all our medical advances is that we have allowed a large number of genetic weaknesses to propogate in the human species. I am not saying that is a bad thing or that eugenics is a valid means to counteract it but it is the nature of things.

 
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roadkill1292 said:
Just finished In At The Death, Harry Turtledove's finale to the "Settling Accounts" series. I've been hooked on the story line because it sparks the imagination in a fun and fanciful way but, as usual, poor Harry once again failed to reach a conclusion of any kind. It's like he can't figure out how to end a novel.
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I've read In High Places and Disunited States of America both from the Crosstime Traffic series. I don't know if all Turtledove's books are geared towards younger audiences like this series or not. Yet, despite the minor drawbacks this created for me, they were admittedly still a lot of fun.
 
Fiddles said:
shuke said:
Fiddles said:
Just started MT Anderson's The Astonishing Life Of Octavian Nothing. Only about 60 pages in but I love it so far. Pretty twisted retelling of a young slaves life in Boston during the Revolution.
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Looks interesting. How is the writing style?
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The style is the high point. It uses the old english of that period. Here's a bit from an amazon review:
Anderson tells this story with a remarkably sure hand, using spot-on eighteenth century diction and grammar as much as he could without losing his intended audience, young adults. The majority of the story is told through the backward-looking eyes of Octavian himself, but Anderson also employs newspaper clippings and a variety of letters to further authenticate the tale and ground it.
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This was a great book and part two comes out in Oct 08. I just finished The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. Couldn't put this one down. A noir released in the 50s told from the psycho serial killers POV.

Next up is Ghostwritten by David Mitchell. Have read BSG and listened to Cloud Atlas on audio so I'm excited to read this after many peeps in this thread put it on the same tier as CA. Cloud Atlas is amazing on audio if you haven't read yet btw. Each character has its own narrator and each narrator fits the character perfectly. Really added alot to the overall concept.

 
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Fiddles said:
Fiddles said:
shuke said:
Fiddles said:
Just started MT Anderson's The Astonishing Life Of Octavian Nothing. Only about 60 pages in but I love it so far. Pretty twisted retelling of a young slaves life in Boston during the Revolution.
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Looks interesting. How is the writing style?
Click to expand...
The style is the high point. It uses the old english of that period. Here's a bit from an amazon review:
Anderson tells this story with a remarkably sure hand, using spot-on eighteenth century diction and grammar as much as he could without losing his intended audience, young adults. The majority of the story is told through the backward-looking eyes of Octavian himself, but Anderson also employs newspaper clippings and a variety of letters to further authenticate the tale and ground it.
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This was a great book and part two comes out in Oct 08. I just finished The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. Couldn't put this one down. A noir released in the 50s told from the psycho serial killers POV.

Next up is Ghostwritten by David Mitchell. Have read BSG and listened to Cloud Atlas on audio so I'm excited to read this after many peeps in this thread put it on the same tier as CA. Cloud Atlas is amazing on audio if you haven't read yet btw. Each character has its own narrator and each narrator fits the character perfectly. Really added alot to the overall concept.
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If you liked Cloud Atlas, you'll definitely enjoy Ghostwritten. Once again, Mitchell climbs inside the heads of -- and gives voice to -- several distinct characters. There's more connectivity between them than between the characters in Cloud Atlas, but I won't say any more than that for fear of giving away too much of the plot.
 
aardball44 said:
Fiddles said:
Fiddles said:
shuke said:
Fiddles said:
Just started MT Anderson's The Astonishing Life Of Octavian Nothing. Only about 60 pages in but I love it so far. Pretty twisted retelling of a young slaves life in Boston during the Revolution.
Click to expand...
Looks interesting. How is the writing style?
Click to expand...
The style is the high point. It uses the old english of that period. Here's a bit from an amazon review:
Anderson tells this story with a remarkably sure hand, using spot-on eighteenth century diction and grammar as much as he could without losing his intended audience, young adults. The majority of the story is told through the backward-looking eyes of Octavian himself, but Anderson also employs newspaper clippings and a variety of letters to further authenticate the tale and ground it.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
This was a great book and part two comes out in Oct 08. I just finished The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. Couldn't put this one down. A noir released in the 50s told from the psycho serial killers POV.

Next up is Ghostwritten by David Mitchell. Have read BSG and listened to Cloud Atlas on audio so I'm excited to read this after many peeps in this thread put it on the same tier as CA. Cloud Atlas is amazing on audio if you haven't read yet btw. Each character has its own narrator and each narrator fits the character perfectly. Really added alot to the overall concept.
Click to expand...
If you liked Cloud Atlas, you'll definitely enjoy Ghostwritten. Once again, Mitchell climbs inside the heads of -- and gives voice to -- several distinct characters. There's more connectivity between them than between the characters in Cloud Atlas, but I won't say any more than that for fear of giving away too much of the plot.
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David Mitchell is phenomenal. I would put Ghostwritten a very small step behind Cloud Atlas. And I'm really looking forward to his next novel on 17th century Japan. It's due out sometime next year.
 
Just finished Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and was suitably impressed with this classic. This book is chock full of colorful characters but they're hard to keep up with because of the tendency of Russian novels to use surnames, nicknames, and full names interchangeably throughout. Still, it's a great story and I can see why it was voted "Best novel of all time" by a list of current authors. I read this because I knew I was receiving War and Peace for Christmas and I figured it would be a good primer.

Tolstoy does a good job in Anna Karenina describing one character descending into madness. Another character (supposedly based upon Tolstoy himself) is depicted throughout the book challenging his own beliefs and feelings between God and agnosticism. Reason versus Faith. Tolstoy, I think does a superb job of describing the inner thoughts of this character and how he weighs the values of each. Pretty cool book. I'm going to take a Sci-Fi breather before tackling War and Peace.

Next up: The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov

 
Listening to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Pretty cool audio play with good voice acting. My local public library allows digital downloads in WMA format. It's very convenient.

 
I just got 3 books this weekend and I am reading all of them currently:

An Inconvient Book: Real Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems - Glenn Beck

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

War Without Death: A Year of Extreme Competition in Pro Football's NFC East

All three are excellent so far. I really like An Inconvient Book. An excellent blend of politics and entertainment. I would guess that a lot of liberals see Glenn Beck as another Rush, but he is very different... I hope more people give him a try. It was on the NYT bestseller, so maybe they are.

I read Freakonomics about 1/2 way thru a few years ago, and never finished it. The book I was reading belonged to someone else, so I couldn't take it with me. I finally bought my own this weekend, and really like it. Interesting take on how incentives explain everything.

A friend of mine recommended War Without Death and it is good so far. A different perspective on football... it gives you the 'behind the scenes' you don't always get.

 
Kumerica said:
For the last several weeks, I've been locked into the exceptional Dune series. I'd only intended to read one or two, then move onto something else, but I couldn't. It's like crack. Or something I've actually tried and been addicted to. Cigarettes? Wrapping up Book 5: Heretics of Dune, and then I'll finish Book 6 and FINALLY move onto the stack of books gathering dust in the bullpen.
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Just finished the last one the other night.Picked one up at the airport in June...then went back and read all 15 of them in order. If you haven't read the "pre-novels" like House Attreides, Butlerian Jihand, etc, I highly recommend going back and reading those.

Great series. After that, not sure what to pick up next....

 
I'm about 1/4 of the way through Last of The Amazons, by Steven Pressfield. Very similar to Gates of Fire in terms of the narrative style and jumping back and forth.

I had only read Gates of Fire by him and really enjoyed it, so I asked for more Pressfield for Christmas and got Last of the Amzon's and Alexander.

 
Accelerando by Charles Stross. Sci-fi book centering on the "singularity" when human intelligence obviates the need for biology. Interesting stuff.
 
Just finnished the Chris Jericho biography :bag: but :thumbup:

I am now reading "Meat Market" by Bruce Feldman. pretty good so far. It gives you the insiders view of college FB recruiting.

 
Just finished Rushdie's "The Santanic Verses" - much better than I anticipated, and I anticipated that it'd be very good.

I'm currently 60 pages into "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Marquez. Pretty good so far.

Next up is Gogol's "Dead Souls."

I also wanted to add to the David Mitchell love above. Great author. Real down to earth guy too - I saw him read over the summer. :popcorn:

"Ghostwritten" is a decent read, "Cloud Atlas" was amazing, while "Number 9 Dream" is a clear case of a sophomore slump. He admitted at the reading that he rushed it. As soon as "Ghostwritten" was done he suffered from the paranoid notion that if he stopped writing for any length of time he'd lose the ability to write. So he dove right into his second novel, and the structure and story suffers accordingly.

 
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe

I never knew Andrew Jackson was such a complete ####

 
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Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

It's an autobiography of his stand-up career. For someone who has been so famous for so long, I didn't really know much about Steve Martin until reading this. It's an interesting story and very well written. Obviously it's funny in spots. What impressed me the most was his dedication to his craft and how hard he worked to perfect it.

 
after getting the new bladerunner on blu-ray, was prompted to reread ****'s do androids dream of electric sleep... it was better, & a lot less like the movie, than i remembered (not that i didn't like the movie, it is one of my favorites, just that they are very different)... got a book called four novels from the '60s, which had a second novel i'd never read before... the three stigmata of palmer eldritch... about two hallucinogen's competing for man's collective psyches & souls on several planets in the future... better than androids, imo & maybe the most mind blowing novel i've ever encountered... on to ubik next, later the man in the high castle, an alternate history that presupposes germany & japan winning WW II... won the hugo i think, possibly his only one, though i don't think it is generally thought by critics to be his best work (other three cited above maybe higher in his canon or body of work?)...

recently read first cormac mccarthy novel... no country for old men... brilliant... i saw the movie first, which is pretty faithful... the novel does fill in some gaps... i just started the road... i like it better... i can see why some critics call him maybe one of the greatest living writers... some of the passages are among the most stunning i've ever encountered in terms of his command of language... subject matter about as dark as it gets...

started, but put down for above works, third & what i think is final installment of cyber-noir series by richard morgan... highly recommended (if you liked philip ****, & other seminal cyper-punk novels such as william gibson's neuromancer & neal stephenson's snow crash, diamond age & cryptonomicon... the latter a tour de force that is probably the best novel i've read in the past decade or possibly more)... altered carbon & broken angels were excellent, awoken furies was starting out that way but wanted to read **** & mccarthy more at the time... main premise is that humans in the future can be "resleeved"... consciousness can be stored & decanted in new sleeves or bodies... adds a definite new twist to typical chandler-esque noir... very richly imagined, detailed & interconnected future, in the spirit of some of the best sci-fi i've read in the past (heinlein, asimov, etc)...

 
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FILTHY THIRTEEN: From the Dustbowl to Hitler's Eagle's Nest - The True Story of the101st Airborne's Most Legendary Squad of Combat Paratroopers

Just got this over the weekend, will get to it after I finish up Guests of the Ayatollah. I'm a 101st Airborne freak so looking forward to it. The filthy 13 were legendary among the 101st, that's saying something given their history.

Since World War II, the American public has become fully aware of the exploits of the 101st Airborne Division, the paratroopers who led the Allied invasions into Nazi-held Europe. But within the ranks of the 101st, a sub-unit attained legendary status at the time, its reputation persisting among veterans over the decades.

Primarily products of the Dustbowl and the Depression, the Filthy13 grew notorious, even within the ranks of the elite 101st. Never ones to salute an officer, or take a bath, this squad became singular within the Screaming Eagles for its hard drinking, and savage fighting skill--and that was only in training. Just prior to the invasion of Normandy, a "Stars and Stripes" photographer caught U.S. paratroopers with heads shaved into Mohawks, applying war paint to their faces. Unknown to the American public at the time, these men were the Filthy 13. After parachuting behind enemy lines in the dark hours before D-Day, the Germans got a taste of the reckless courage of this unit - except now the men were fighting with Tommy guns and explosives, not just bare knuckles. In its spearhead role, the 13 suffered heavy casualties, some men wounded and others blown to bits. By the end of the war 30 men had passed through the squad.

Throughout the war, however, the heart and soul of the Filthy 13 remained a survivor named Jake McNiece, a half-breed Indian from Oklahoma - the toughest man in the squad and the one who formed its character. McNiece made four combat jumps, was in the forefront of every fight in northern Europe, yet somehow never made the rank of PFC. The survivors of the Filthy 13 stayed intact as a unit until the Allies finally conquered Nazi Germany.

The book does not draw a new portrait of earnest citizen soldiers. Instead it describes a group of hardscrabble guys whom any respectable person would be loath to meet in a bar or dark alley. But they were an integral part of the U.S. war against Nazi Germany. A brawling bunch of no-goodniks whose only saving grace was that they inflicted more damage on the Germans than on MPs, the English countryside and their own officers, the Filthy 13 remain a legend within the ranks of the 101st Airborne.

 
Just finished The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shales. A very interesting read and very eye opening with regards to the New Deal. Today it's generally thought as helping the US get through the Depression but in reality it was a colossal failure. It nearly destroyed private business/capitalism as we know it. It's amazing to think how close the US was to becoming a full-blown socialist/communist nation as many advisors around FDR were pushing him in that direction. Had the WW II not come along and the Depression lasted longer who knows what might have happened.

 
Finished Lonesome Dove

McRae now sits pretty high on my all-time favorite characters list...maybe at the top. BTW, Duvall was the perfect choice to play him in the movie.

Call and Deets were great characters, too. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but that was one hell of a great book. Phenomenal. I'm half-tempted to just start it over and read it again.

 
beer 30 said:
FILTHY THIRTEEN: From the Dustbowl to Hitler's Eagle's Nest - The True Story of the101st Airborne's Most Legendary Squad of Combat Paratroopers

Just got this over the weekend, will get to it after I finish up Guests of the Ayatollah. I'm a 101st Airborne freak so looking forward to it. The filthy 13 were legendary among the 101st, that's saying something given their history.

Since World War II, the American public has become fully aware of the exploits of the 101st Airborne Division, the paratroopers who led the Allied invasions into Nazi-held Europe. But within the ranks of the 101st, a sub-unit attained legendary status at the time, its reputation persisting among veterans over the decades.

Primarily products of the Dustbowl and the Depression, the Filthy13 grew notorious, even within the ranks of the elite 101st. Never ones to salute an officer, or take a bath, this squad became singular within the Screaming Eagles for its hard drinking, and savage fighting skill--and that was only in training. Just prior to the invasion of Normandy, a "Stars and Stripes" photographer caught U.S. paratroopers with heads shaved into Mohawks, applying war paint to their faces. Unknown to the American public at the time, these men were the Filthy 13. After parachuting behind enemy lines in the dark hours before D-Day, the Germans got a taste of the reckless courage of this unit - except now the men were fighting with Tommy guns and explosives, not just bare knuckles. In its spearhead role, the 13 suffered heavy casualties, some men wounded and others blown to bits. By the end of the war 30 men had passed through the squad.

Throughout the war, however, the heart and soul of the Filthy 13 remained a survivor named Jake McNiece, a half-breed Indian from Oklahoma - the toughest man in the squad and the one who formed its character. McNiece made four combat jumps, was in the forefront of every fight in northern Europe, yet somehow never made the rank of PFC. The survivors of the Filthy 13 stayed intact as a unit until the Allies finally conquered Nazi Germany.

The book does not draw a new portrait of earnest citizen soldiers. Instead it describes a group of hardscrabble guys whom any respectable person would be loath to meet in a bar or dark alley. But they were an integral part of the U.S. war against Nazi Germany. A brawling bunch of no-goodniks whose only saving grace was that they inflicted more damage on the Germans than on MPs, the English countryside and their own officers, the Filthy 13 remain a legend within the ranks of the 101st Airborne.
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found this article on mcniece... http://www.historynet.com/magazines/world_war_2/3033326.html

 
shuke said:
shuke said:
Getting ready to start Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
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:confused: Probably not up there with The Stand or Swan Song in terms of end of the world books, however this one didn't have any supernatural aspects which some people may see as a plus.

Next up: No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
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I really liked Lucifer's Hammer because, although it dealt with a fanciful scenario, it didn't rely on mysticism or unknown technology to advance the story line. Instead, it was about people struggling in a world turned suddenly upside down.
 
Until Proven Innocent

"Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case"

I was somewhat fascinated by this whole case when it was happening, and this book has gotten great reviews for being "Brutally honest, unflinching, exhaustively researched and compulsively readable". I am not too far into it but so far, it's excellent.

 
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