HARD EIGHT, Janet Evanovich’s newest in the Stephanie Plum series.
Currently reading:
“Thief of Time” - Terry Pratchett
“Dune” - Frank Herbert
“The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying” - Sogyal Rinpoche
Grant A Biography by William McFeeley. Traded for it at a used book store.
“Baseball - A Literary Anthology” edited by Nicholas Dawidoff
“Burying Caesar - The Churchill-Chamberlain Rivalry” by Graham Stewart
The invisable computer - Donald Norman
Soldier Sahibs - Charles Allen
Dead Men Do Tell Tales by William Maples. A fun little book on forensic anthropology. Includes photographs!
That and mydog-eared old copy of The Anime Encyclopedia. God, I love that book.
Ranchoth
Just finished Ender’s Shadow.
Currently plowing through my first reading of The Fountainhead(it’s insane, how good that book is!:)).
Lastnight I bought and started reading A Collection of Poems and Short Stories by Dorthy Parker and I also recently started reading **Feel This Book by Ben Stiller and Janene Gorafalo **.
I’m finishing two books right now, The Tidewater Tales by John Barth (my favorite author), and Truman.
Next is **Night Watch{/b] by Terry Pratchett. Don’t go looking for it, American Pratchett fans – it’s not due out until November. But I have the bound galleys {gloat, gloat}.
I recently scored a bunch of baseball books I’ve been after for a while, so I just finished The Diamond Appraised by Craig Wright and Tom House and A False Spring by Pat Jordan. Right now, I have going Kevin Kerrane’s Dollar Sign on the Muscle (about baseball scouting), Roger Kahn’s Good Enough to Dream (about his experience as president of an independent minor league team) and The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (which I bought last year and have been reading at off and on ever since). I also need to blow through Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point again so that I’ll be fully prepped to talk about it in our neighborhood book group later this month, and I’m supposed to be working on Steve Kluger’s The Last Days of Summer, which is next month’s selection. I currently have checked out of the library several technical books (on UML, Java, SQL, and Perl) that I’m dabbling in, as well as Simon Garland’s Mauve: how a man invented a color that changed the world and Patrick O’Brian’s biography of Picasso.
“Katz und Maus”- by Guenter Grass. My German being weak, it’s taking me a while.
“Preacher”- book 3 on this series of graphic novels by Garth Ennis.
“Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege”- by Antony Beevor.
“Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said” by Philip K Dick.
“America’s Small Wars” by Max Boot.
Found an old copy of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
Read it in high school because I had to. Decided I’d read it this time because I wanted to.
Kind of scary how one can look at the same things differently years later. :eek:
Years ago it was pretty far fetched, now it’s just ominous. :eek:
Good reading for an old classic.
The Shining. I also have a copy of The Stand, but since this will be the first Stephen King novel I have ever read, I opted for the shorter book.
I finished Ubik by Philip K. Dick this evening, and really enjoyed it.
I have been on a bit of a scifi kick lately, reading novels by Bradbury and Card, with a little Twain mixed in too. Reading Something This Way Wicked Comes (okay, it’s not so much scifi as fantasy), Ender’s Game and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer back-to-back was an interesting experience. Before Ubik I also read several short stories by Roald Dahl, whose children’s books I read as a child. Needless to say, some of his adult fiction is pretty bizarre, and is making me consider re-reading the children’s books to see if I get anything new out of them.
After some King, I too plan to focus on reading some more “books I ought to have read by now”, although I have been reading such books on and off for years and I don’t think I will ever read all of them. I’ll most likely read Lolita by Nabokov to continue with this childhood theme I have been going with (with the notable exception of Ubik).
Then again, maybe I’ll go off this trend completely and go old skool with Resurrection by Tolstoy or new skool with Fight Club by Palahniuk.
So many books, so little time…
In the knowledge that contemporary events are often steeped in history, on top of the belief I tend to be a xenophobic, pro-western ideologue added to the fact I rarely read fiction, I’m reading Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade by James, Jr. Reston.
I only started it at the Beach yesterday but I’m already amazed at the events that occurred 915 years ago.
Hi this is my first post, so be gentle with me! I’m a born lurker (IRL as well as online, I have to confess) but the atmosphere here is so inclusive and generous, I’ve finally found the courage to dip a toe in the water. Of course, it helps that this is a thread about reading, one of my favourite pastimes.
I’m a multiple-book reader, tending to have several on the go at one time. So here they are:
I just finished (last night) The Republic of Love by Carol Shields. I was very impressed by The Stone Diaries, and liked this even better. It’s a tale of two people who fall in love, very simple, but joyful too. I read it at my work over the last week- I’m a staff nurse and was night-shift this week- and its gentle, thoughtful tone really fitted with the warm, peaceful darkness in the ward. (Do you find the circumstances in which you read a book can affect the way you feel about it?)
I’m half-way through John Irving’s A Son of the Circus and enjoying it very much: it’s packed with the wonderful and the bizarre, all linked in a mystery! I find my reaction to John Irving very uneven, so I tend to approach his work with caution, but this is one for my Good John Irving pile (Good pile: Hotel New Hampshire, Cider House Rules, World According to Garp; Bad pile: A Prayer for Owen Meany, Setting Free the Bears, The Water-Method Man, The Fourth Hand. If anyone can figure out the common factors, I’d be very interested to hear!)
I’ve just made a start on The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. This is the story of a family of a baptist missionary sent to the Belgian Congo in the 1950’s. It’s narrated by the wife and daughters each in turns, which is a very effective way of pointing out the inconsistencies and conflicts of each viewpoint. My only gripe so far is that the voices of the children ring a bit false at times, somehow like adults trying to sound like children. And, I fear there are politics looming on the horizon, which fills me with apprehension! I like the small details, the daily life and internal narratives. The Bigger Picture, I fear, may leave this philistine cold!
Planned future reading? Well, at the moment, my purchasing of interesting-sounding second-hand books from eBay is far outstripping my ability to read them (Must. Stop. Bidding.) but the top ones on the pile are:
Cold Chocolate Autopsy by Ian Sinclair
Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Anybody got any comments on any of these? I did mainly science subjects at school, and scorned literature in my foolish youth, reading only science fiction. Now I’m trying to catch up but its hard with no guidance and so very many books! Why oh why didn’t I pay any attention in English…
Louise.
First off, welcome. 
The Poisonwood Bible is a great book. I just loved it.
I agree, the voice of the youngest child sounded a bit false at times, but it was still a great story. Yes, politics figure into the picture in a BIG way, but I won’t spoil anything.
I’ve read it twice.
You might also like A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry. It reminded me of Poisonwood Bible a bit. It takes place in India in 1975, during a time of similar upheaval. It tells the tale of four dissimilar people who come to share living space, and tells the backstory of each of them and how they came to the that point in the story. The poverty of the classes and the caste system figure in. It was fascinating.
The Handmaid’s Tale is also good. I just read that this past Spring.
[The Death of Vishnu], by Manil Suri. Great book. Best I’ve read all year.
Next, [Observatory Mansions], by Edward Carey.
<off topic> Where’s woodstockybirdbird?</offtopic>
Currently I’m reading:
The Federalist Papers by John Jay, Jim Madison, and Al Hamilton
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
On deck:
Common Sense by Thos. Paine
Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris
How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It by Arthur Herman (I looked, but didn’t see a chapter about inventing modesty anywhere in the table of contents.)
In the hole:
Noel Riley Fitch’s Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child and
David McCullough’s John Adams (which got interrupted by my going back to college last fall) and
Victoria Kingston’s The Biography of Simon & Garfunkel (which I just pulled out from my bookshelf and found that one of my brother’s cats thoughtfully urped on it at some point in the last two years.)