What Are You Reading?

[soprano1]

I now started The Martian by Andy Weir. Does Damon act as a millenial too in the movie? I don't know, maybe i'm used to the dialogue from 50's/60's sci-fi books.
edit:Oh no, he made a Bison Tuesday reference. The fuck?

[null1024]

Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Loved the "Way in the Middle of the Air" chapter.

When I first read it at the library as a kid, it quickly became my favorite book.

I re-read it a couple of months ago, and I'm still stunned at just how damn good it is.

[atheistgod1999]

Gonna continue reading The Hobbit from where I left off (end of chapter 1) because I'm too burned out to play video games after beating Mega Man 1 a couple of hours ago.

[Ed Oscuro]

Finally finished that garbage "The Road to Gandolfo" in its Ludlum hardback edition. Well, it was mostly trash - no characterizations or details to speak of, weird parade of "funny" incidents, antacid and airport jokes, stereotypes of all kinds, and unfunny talk about corporate culture, but it managed to come together and work for the last few pages. I think I even cracked a smile near the end of it! Everything up to that point was pretty bad, though.

It does have me wondering what exactly The Bourne Identity is going to be like.

The original psuedonymic versions had some great cover art though:



I got the lame fish pin version, but at least it's hardcover. This cover is the most honest.

The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

Man, there really is a book for everything.

This woman is either slow or a fraudster. She makes a point of noting the lack of heart attacks with the Masai while not noting their extraordinarily low life expectancy (42 for men).

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/95/1/26.short

The intake of animal fat exceeds that of American men. Measurements of the aorta showed extensive atherosclerosis with lipid infiltration and fibrous changes but very few complicated lesions. The coronary arteries showed intimal thickening by atherosclerosis which equaled that of old U.S. men.

Atherosclerosis is not part of a healthy lifestyle.

Sorry - this kind of stuff gets me going.

I don't hate myself to buy some fool's book about diet, but man, the amount of pure shit out there is maddening - especially when some of it seems so reasonable. I'm going over my own diet recently, and basically it seems to be: Get that acidic shit out (that damn law from '73), get the red and fatty meat gone, and stop eating processed sugar as much as possible. Well, there's more for it, but that's just the basics.

It's kind of sad that people in the supermarket ask me if I know about diabetes. Well, yes, I can tell you about complex and simple sugars, and the glycemic index (I like this guy's comment about parsnips, easy to understand) but we're working against all those worthless "LOW CARBS!" stickers all over everything in the market.

[EmperorIng]

It's always the sugars, man. They are the real killer. I still crack and have half a can of soda though. But the strong guilt (not unlike the infamous Catholic guilt) comes not long after.

In a funny twist, working at a university library leaves little room for recreational reading. Having to properly upload and tag books into digital libraries requires extensive skimming. This makes me now an amateur expert in nearly all published things concerning Swedish-Americans.

My forlorn copies of It Can't Happen Here and Gulliver's Travels cry out to me (along with a pathetic backlog of Genesis/PC Engine games).

[GaijinPunch]

Finished Kami he no Nagai Michi by Komatsu Sakyo, which fills up my Japanese book quota of the year (1). Apparently I'm missing out if I don't read Kyomu Kairou which is his final, and unfortunately unfinished work. Apparently it's dope though, so mulling that over. Will read something lighter until then. Got something by Vonnegut on loan from a friend. Perhaps I'll crack that open.

[Rob]

Nature Writings - A jumbo sized collection of Muir books and essays about his experiences in the outdoors and thoughts about conservation (Hetch Hetchy, redwoods, etc.). The clouds are mountain ranges, the water is champagne, the insects are insect "people". What stood out most to me was his near non-existent preparation for his jaunts (bread and notebook) and the tales of his hairier adventures in storms (climbing a tree and swaying in the wind - can just see him waving his cap there like he was on a bucking bronco) and glaciers (with dog Stickeen). Some parts can get a little monotonous for the non-botanist.

Annals of the Former World - A collection of 4-5 books about geology in the US by John McPhee. With as long as this is I'm not sure if I got more than an increased awareness of the ever-changing mess of the world and the mess of theories, which is fine. A lot of in one eye and out the other lists of rock types that will mean nothing for the man without those rocks in hand, and you better have your eons, epochs, etc. memorized.

The Fool's Progress - If you're into wilderness writing and would love for it to be written by a jackass then I recommend Desert Solitaire. This doesn't have me as entertained.

The Japanese book - I'm sure I'm nearly 600 pages into this thing and the old timey camera hasn't made its appearance yet, and the author seems to have given up writing about jaunts in the mountains for early Showa era soapy drama. I need something classic to get me back in the Japanese reading groove.

[GaijinPunch]

The Japanese book - I'm sure I'm nearly 600 pages into this thing and the old timey camera hasn't made its appearance yet, and the author seems to have given up writing about jaunts in the mountains for early Showa era soapy drama. I need something classic to get me back in the Japanese reading groove.

That sounds pretty piss poor to me. 600 pages? how many are there?

[Blinge]

Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

Christ alive this one is hard to read!
I'm reading it out of a sense of obligation; it's on my list of classics to expand my literary dong.. Also curiosity. And also cause it was way ahead of its time.

One of those books in which you need a second bookmark for the glossary which isn't always enough to make you understand the references.

The absurdity has elicited some chuckling from me though, so I'm getting something out of it.

On another note: I want to re-read The House of Leaves soon. Anyone a fan?

[MX7]

Loved House of Leaves in high school. Bought the full colour edition a few years back but haven't got round to rereading it yet. Wonder if it will have the same resonance now I'm no longer 16, though the conciet, a haunted house text recontextualised through a film studies text is still pretty appealing.

As far as meta fiction goes, strongly recommend Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov, which is utterly sublime.

[Blinge]

Wait.. full colour.. what? There aren't any pictures?

[Xyga]

Grabbed the original Necronomicon Ex Mortis, it's got pictures and it's fun, but I'm hearing like claws scratching at the door right now...wait a sec I'll go have a look, bet it's just a hungry raccoon.

...

Tch. That was only hungry Jehovah witnesses.



More seriously, I've been quite busy moving and haven't bought a book in months, so I've settled on re-reading some of my old dusty stuff and began with Edding's Belgariad/Mallory + prequels.

I expected to be bored/disappointed since it's pretty much only generic high fantasy aimed at teenage readers (which I quite enjoyed when I was one), and I was, mainly because of the poor quality and irritating repetition/reuse of the same themes over and over.
But (there is a butt) to my surprise I've discovered a new reading layer to it, with a more adult perspective to the whole thing, kind of hidden to the teen layman at first, especially with the Mallory and the prequels (Belgarath's and Polgara's early millenia).
The characters and society in fact, seem more human, and really more flawed, weak and vain than they fist appear in their primary hero outfits and epic mumbo jumbo.
The too-merry and positive dialogues sound like forced positivism almost all-along.
I've realized the author actually really insists on the bleak and disappointing aspects of his world and the various shit personas, including the gods and Co. who in the end are supernatural crytalizations of stubbornness if anything.
Fucking tons of people die horribly, civilization fails several times, and the mighty sorcerers somewhat struggle though millenia for naught (the suicide of some of them in the past is an important/taboo subject which is quickly put aside I think on purpose) actually only the stubborn and twisted live on.

That's it, Edding's message is that if you think too much about it; life is only reapeating the same shit endlessly.
The superpowers are only in the story as an excuse to provide a backstory and ex-machina for the plot.
Don't read, leave it to ignorant teenagers.

[Rob]

That sounds pretty piss poor to me. 600 pages? how many are there?

It's not great, that's for sure. It's about 900 pages in the typical 上-下 split volume.

[EmperorIng]

A friend on another forum years ago got me hooked onto Eddings' fantasy novels. The Belgariad is a rough read because it was Eddings' first attempt at fantasy, so it's filled with cliches. The Malloreon is much more polished (as well as the Elenium), and I've always had a good laugh at how Eddings tells the readers that he reuses the same themes, tropes, and characters, usually in the foreword (I love him puckishly saying something like "it's a story of good vs. evil - would it spoil things if I told you who won?" at the beginning of one of the Malloreon compilations). Even though I got burned out by my 12th Eddings book, I don't deny that I really loved reading all of them.

They are the literary equivalent of popcorn, but that's what makes them dangerous. If I read a few pages of Redemption of Althalus, those few pages turn into a few dozen, into all of the sudden I am re-reading the book. It's all about the character interactions.

I only started reading as a late teen, going into my early 20s, so I was especially attune to the wry humor and forceful battering-down of Tolkien-esque tropes.

[Grime]

I'm re-reading through The Monstrumologist books by Rick Yancey again, right after I had just finished them no less. I'm a sucker for Occult Detective stories, and anything Lovecraft. One day looking for a new book stumbled upon these gems.

Has anyone else read these books, what did you think about them, and any books you could recommend that are similar?

[EmperorIng]

I can't say that I have; I never have gotten too much into Lovecraft, though I like Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. The only HPL book I got close to finishing was The Mountains of Madness, which from what I hear might have been unfinished (so it didn't particularly grab me).

I am reading Doris K. Goodwin's The Bully Pulpit, bought on a whim during my vacation last week on a visit to a small-town bookstore. Essentially a history of Teddy Roosevelt, William H. Taft, and Progressive journalism during the 1890s/1900s.

I've gotten about 200 pages in (of a whopping 750, yikes), and while I am enjoying the characterization, it is doing some things that are making my trained-historian veins twitch and palpitate.

1) Making impossible assertions about how certain people acted/reacted: e.g. "President Hayes, in a letter, responded with a smile..." It was a letter. You don't know he was smiling. DON'T ASSUME. Yeah yeah, fictional/artistic license, but that would get a big red pen-mark on my term paper, and I am not no NYT best-selling author.

2) Seriously using Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis to explain worsening labor and class relations. Come on. It's not the 1890s anymore. You wrote this in 2013. There has been enough writing before then to show how America did not fall apart or lose its innocence the moment the "frontier" was closed in 1913 or thereabouts. I mean, fucking lol.

3) Injecting backward-looking politics into the story without context. I get it, Doris, you take the side of farmers and factory workers, Populists and Progressives vs. the Evil Capitalists. That's ok; I kinda agree too! But could you at least try to explain some of the grayer areas? You use the term "belief in private property" as if it were a sexual innuendo uttered inside a church. Isn't it worth exploring the contradictions in the Populist/Bryan movement, or admitting that not every single businessman was out to kill workers and shove everyone into slums? Where's philanthropy? Affordable commodities that improve the quality-of-life? Goodwin struggles in her sympathetic portrayal of Taft, who is just about every bit as Progressive as Roosevelt but also mindful of business interests in his judicial rulings. It's hard for her to reconcile the two because she goes too far to paint business as unconscionable. Thus when there is a nuanced approach she has to use phrases like "Taft's ruling proved to be the basis of future legal protections of organized labor, though even he could not shake his belief in private property instilled in his Republican upbringing."

A needless conflict if one approached it with more subtlety.

This is what happens when a history book isn't written by a historian.

For that itch I picked up Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon. Cronon is a good guy; his environmental history is a powerful salve to the disgusting hippy-ish "man is evil; the only way to save nature is to destroy man" writing that has dominated environmental thought since the 60s. In that vacuous and unintellectual space he instead suggests that, whoa, man is a part of nature, we create our "natural" environments (even parks, wildlife preserves, etc.), and that we can be more effective and positive in how we manage the environment once we stop seeing things as a fake man/nature dichotomy, and recognize a sliding scale of human involvement in the world around us. E.G.: 1000s of years of thought has posited a country/city dichotomy, and inherent moral judgments therein. Cronon instead intuits, obviously, that the two would not exist without one another (farms without city markets, cities without farms), and instead asks us to see how the two influence one another's approach to the environment.

In Chicago's case (the book's focus), it shows how its rapacious desire for lumber transformed all of Wisconsin into a lumber mill for the great city. This obviously had some negative side-effects in deforestation, but this is partly caused, once again, by the cultural belief that man is somehow separate or alien to the natural world vs. an integral part of it. The forests eventually regrew (and the lumber business collapsed, much to the woe of the poor Northern Wisconsiners I talked to during my vacation), but the effects of Chicago's expansion and creating an "inland empire" of tributaries (Wisconsin, the railroads, other parts of the Midwest) has left a permanent mark on the landscape. Very intellectually enriching, all in all. It helps that Cronon is a good writer - a rare breed of conscientious environmentalist who isn't a frothing nihilist or misanthrope (the type of worthless sorts who only pray for some mass extinction to save the planet). His other writings are quite good, but this is finally my getting to read his most important work.

Also trying to read Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. Everything is on-the-nose and sort of hits you over the head with its allegory of smooth-talking huckster politician grifting everyone into an American brand of fascism by promising everything and doing nothing (except for himself and his cronies). How topical! It's sort of tough to read because it really stretches out the proceedings: chapter after chapter of the main character worrying about how close Senator Buzz Windrip is getting to be president, warning about how dangerous he is, and his neighbors laughing it off, because "it can't happen here!" Rinse, repeat. I'm only about 25% through the book but I already feel like it could be 1/3rd shorter with little loss.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I'm re-reading through The Monstrumologist books by Rick Yancey again, right after I had just finished them no less. I'm a sucker for Occult Detective stories, and anything Lovecraft. One day looking for a new book stumbled upon these gems.

Has anyone else read these books, what did you think about them, and any books you could recommend that are similar?

I haven't read these, but can recommend The Big O animated series nonetheless (exceptionally good English dub, too).

[Grime]

I'm re-reading through The Monstrumologist books by Rick Yancey again, right after I had just finished them no less. I'm a sucker for Occult Detective stories, and anything Lovecraft. One day looking for a new book stumbled upon these gems.

Has anyone else read these books, what did you think about them, and any books you could recommend that are similar?

I haven't read these, but can recommend The Big O animated series nonetheless (exceptionally good English dub, too).

Thanks, I'll have to check it out.

[Obiwanshinobi]

...and to anyone with a soft spot for pulp stories from nineteen-twenties-thirties, I would recommend Gene Wolfe books (starting with The Fifth Head of Cerberus).

[Ed Oscuro]

Fletcher Knebel's "Crossing in Berlin." I think I would have liked the guy, but this book is fairly colorless and uneventful despite the number of high-concept ideas thrown into it. Like so many thriller authors, he doesn't seem to have the level of detail or "insider knowledge" (which, as far as I'm concerned, could be book learning or theoretical) to sell the plot or themes convincingly. The climate change analysis MacGuffin is a throwaway and figures strangely little in the plot. Indeed it is a striking feature of this novel that the plot unrolls so straightforwardly. The few plot twists are either absurd (at one point the US and USSR both give directly contradictory statements, both also inaccurate) or lazy (the ease with which the hero gets a startling package of information - not to mention the many other pat coincidences in the novel). What is left, again, is mostly a fairly drab look into the slow unrolling of the nightmare of life fighting an inhuman bureaucracy, a theme treated better elsewhere, even on the theme of the Berlin Wall. The plot element about the total computerization of the East German secret police files, which allows one analyst to have everything in one place to make a judgement, didn't awe me much for its forward-looking quality; in this book it is actually science fiction, as all us retrogamers know there was not much facility for digitizing audio tapes around 1981, even in a country with its own computer industry as East Germany had. To be sure, even today fiction writers neglect the bureaucracy and sheer work of intelligence gathering and analysis (usually purposefully, i.e. CSI-style "enhance!" scenes on TV). There is one bright spot, however; the ending has the strongest plotting, characterization, and dialogue of the whole work, which allows a fairly satisfying conclusion. Of Knebel's other works, "Seven Days in May" and "Sabotage" seem like the most interesting works to check up on, though almost all of his plot briefs seem fairly interesting.

I also set to work seriously reading a collection of classic Chinese philosophy, which begins with Confucius's Analects. It's calming to read, even if Confucius is perpetually walking the line between willful and unconscious self-parody, it's hard not to like the guy.

3) Injecting backward-looking politics into the story without context. I get it, Doris, you take the side of farmers and factory workers, Populists and Progressives vs. the Evil Capitalists. That's ok; I kinda agree too! But could you at least try to explain some of the grayer areas? You use the term "belief in private property" as if it were a sexual innuendo uttered inside a church. Isn't it worth exploring the contradictions in the Populist/Bryan movement, or admitting that not every single businessman was out to kill workers and shove everyone into slums? Where's philanthropy? Affordable commodities that improve the quality-of-life? Goodwin struggles in her sympathetic portrayal of Taft, who is just about every bit as Progressive as Roosevelt but also mindful of business interests in his judicial rulings. It's hard for her to reconcile the two because she goes too far to paint business as unconscionable. Thus when there is a nuanced approach she has to use phrases like "Taft's ruling proved to be the basis of future legal protections of organized labor, though even he could not shake his belief in private property instilled in his Republican upbringing."

I'm not a trained historian, and I don't consider this period my specialty. It is a period, President, and author I'm all quite interested in reading about, though. I think your comments suggest a fairly straightforward response:

I will grant that is an odd-looking sentence, though perhaps context would help. You previously (#2) complained that Goodwin was using old-fashioned theories, but now you're complaining that she's injecting anachronistic modern beliefs? This of course isn't a strict contradiction, but I feel the "historical interpretation without bias" camp hasn't ever been able to demonstrate why we should bleed personal moralizing out of history, the same as any group that tries to argue that you should never allow your own politics or emotions to show when dealing with material involving value judgements - because ultimately we are trying to judge things according to sentiment, not logic as such. Of course one can do a factual tabulation of "he said, she said," but that only goes so far. So this seems to me more like a quibble with Goodwins' politics. On top of that, in #2 that doesn't sound like the Frontier Thesis to me - and I'd be surprised if it was being used as much more than an illustration of then-current attitudes, but there is a part to it (the necessity of shrugging off inapplicable habits and models when faced with new situations, and Americans' historic habit of doing the same) that still rings true.

On a related topic I find it almost silly to complain that there's no treatment of "the grayer areas." Putting aside overly political historians: People once said the same in treatments of slavery, an issue that now is overwhelmingly seen as a black-and-white issue. Without having read the book or knowing exactly what you're aiming for I won't say much more than this, but it is clear that even with many well-intentioned industrialists we find more evidence of jealous paternalism than willingness to share profits. What strikes me as the most likely source of admiration for this is the grand edifices they left behind - like company housing or the Carnegie Libraries - but it's fairly reasonable to note that these things were ultimately made possible due to largely unheralded working stiffs and their families. While it might be precious of me to argue that a Carnegie or Pullman (or even a Kellogg or Post, to mention some names from my town) isn't in danger of being forgotten like the common person, it is still small wonder that many current historians seek to redress the balance, just as socialists tried to remedy the financial inequality.

I'm not sure Taft is a progressive in the final analysis. The following excerpt illustrates this in two ways:

[...] it is one of the deepest wounds that I have had as an American and a lover of the Constitution and a believer in progressive Conservatism, that such a man as Brandeis could be put in the Court, as I believe he is likely to be. He is a muckraker, an emotionalist for his own purposes, a socialist, prompted by jealousy, a hypocrite, a man who has certain high ideals in his imagination, but who is utterly unscrupulous in method of reaching them, a man of infinite cunning, of marked ability in that direction that hardly rises above the dignity of cunning, of great tenacity of purpose, and, in my judgement, of much power for evil.

Aside from this being an anti-semitic missive he is writing (given Woodrow Wilson's anti-black views, it may be surprising that here he was the defender and promoter of Louis Brandeis, a jew) against a man he would later come to greatly admire and work with well on the Supreme Court, Taft appears to be claiming progressivism and conservatism both, and of course this was one of the chief failures of his Presidential career; he was unable to please everybody as indeed the split was - just as Goodwin seems to have indicated - between capitalists and labor.

If anything it is my belief that the populist/Bryant story is fairly well known in outline, but the history and onetime great success of socialism in the United States in this period, probably mainly in the largest cities, remains a great blind spot. And an analysis of the why of this blind spot might suggest not the most up-to-date theories are responsible, but perhaps an old-fashioned sense bordering on nostalgia for the frontier and farming.

[gamez fan]

Currantly im re-reading The History Of U.S.Gold and Ocean Software, if you owned a Spectrum 48/128k or a Commodore 64 in the 80's
then chances are you played alotta their games. All in all it's a nice trip down memory lane for the second time

[WelshMegalodon]

Good God, U. S. Gold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucTL8AZkPFI

[soprano1]

Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

[Rob]

a rare breed of conscientious environmentalist who isn't a frothing nihilist or misanthrope

I feel the misanthropy, but I tend to not want it or sniveling or whining in my nature writing. Ordered Nature's Metropolis - looks like a winner. It was either that or Changes in the Land.

[MintyTheCat]

The Great Deformation

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Deformat ... eformation

It's a very detailed and full on book. It discusses when the US changed its banking system from one that was backed by gold and credit based to one that was based on debt. Looks at particularly the 1970s and the changes in policy and how that played out in the 1980s to today. It is quite scary as it explains how financial securities are often set up with insane levels of Leverage - 30:1 !!!!!!! It reads a lot like a horror story and the author is clearly incensed at what he witnessed generally and at first hand in his own business.

All in all, it is a heavy read and it will take you some time and he throws a lot of industry jargon and terms at the reader but it is well worth reading if only to understand why for example UK banks are deregulated whilst German banks are not.

[Rob]

Inju for an Injuns victory.

Also been reading Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, which details an interesting little piece of American history.

[BIL]

Dabbling in Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow. Weird fiction with a doomed air somewhat reminiscent of Lovecraft, who counted Chambers as an influence. The first story in the anthology, "The Repairer of Reputations," stood out the most - a choice bit of rising mad fury viewed from within. "In The Court of the Dragon" and "The Yellow Sign" have a fun nightmarish quality to them, as well, though they can't help feeling a little worn. The fleeting glimpses of the lost city Carcosa uniting much of the anthology have stuck with me - they're quite haunting, in their otherworldly imagery and longing tone. Recommended for other lazy weird fiction dabblers.

[Xyga]

Carcosa

Soon former-Washington DC, and new capital city of The King in Orange

[atheistgod1999]

Do books I'm reading for English class count?

I'm reading Huckleberry Finn. I read nearly all of Tom Sawyer a few years ago, but got bored and stopped

Spoiler

around the time he was gonna raid or something (sometime after the murderer broke out of the court room)

. I find it really boring; I don't care about any of the characters.

[Mischief Maker]

Do books I'm reading for English class count?

I'm reading Huckleberry Finn. I read nearly all of Tom Sawyer a few years ago, but got bored and stopped

Spoiler

around the time he was gonna raid or something (sometime after the murderer broke out of the court room)

. I find it really boring; I don't care about any of the characters.

Mark Twain is a satirist. You need to read his writings from a thoroughly sarcastic perspective to realize their brilliance.

And judging by your nick, I'd suggest popping down to the library and reading Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven or Letters from the Earth.

When a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.