What Are You Reading?

[sjewkestheloon]

Fante is brilliant, I need to read the last few Bandini novels at some point.

Reading a selection from 1001 Nights, as translated by Richard Burton. A lot more fun than I thought it was going to be, morally dubious entertainment.

[kengou]

Just finished Hyperion, now reading Fall of Hyperion. Great reads so far, I just really hope the explanation for the Shrike lives up to all the mystery.

[xris]

Just read The Forrest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan. It was okay, a neat look at what life might be like a couple hundred years after a zombie apocalypse. Life continues in a small fenced in village that's run by a preistesshood. It is believed that there is no other humans left besides them. The main character girl wants nothing else but the boy she can't have, and to see the ocean that her mother told her legends of. In all I thought it was just okay, nothing special. The world setting was kinda neat, but the story was too wrapped up in a pointless romance. For being set in a zombie world from birth, these were some rather helpless survivors, in a way it had allot to do with the religious order that dominated their society. I can't really suggest reading this book, sure it might be a little better than the rest of the zombie stuff that has been flooding the market, but it was boring for the most part. Just pick up one of the many short story anthologies that are out there right now instead.
Next week, Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins comes out!!! The final book in the Hunger Games trilogy, and I cannot wait to read this!

[Square King]

I went to the bookstore to pick up Blood Music and The Road -- they didn't have either, so I got Darwin's Radio, Red Mars, House of Leaves, 100 Years of Solitude and a few graphic and industrial design books. Half Price Books is the best store in the world.

[moozooh]

House of Leaves

Reading this atm, amazing stuff! Do you have the full-color edition?

[Square King]

House of Leaves

Reading this atm, amazing stuff! Do you have the full-color edition?

I just realized I bumped the wrong thread. Balls.

Yes I do! I've heard so much about it but didn't have it in mind when I got to the store. It was on the banned books table in the checkout line and I couldn't resist.

[incognoscente]

I just realized I bumped the wrong thread. Balls.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

[Square King]

I have no idea what you're talking about.

FUCKING INCEPTION

[Blue Protoman]

I'm reading From Russia With Love.



Almost on Part 2.

[xris]

What are some of your impressions about The House of Leaves? This is some thing I've been meaning to read, because the developers of Silent Hill 2 have listed this as one of the main influences for the game.

[SuperGrafx]

Blue Ocean Strategy

Harvard Press

[Slump]

Revisiting Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy this week. Picked hard back versions for three bucks each at half-price books! I also finally got around to reading Dune last week and enjoyed it immensely!

[captpain]

What are some of your impressions about The House of Leaves? This is some thing I've been meaning to read, because the developers of Silent Hill 2 have listed this as one of the main influences for the game.

It's fun. If you like Silent Hill 2, you will like House of Leaves.

[CMoon]

Setting out to embaress my self here...

I miss the talking animal fantasy books of my youth: Watership Down, Kipling's Jungle Books, even the books for younger kids like Rats of NIMH. I see the kids reading a lot of fantasy series now (all post harry-potter), and it's probably mostly garbage, but maybe there's something new that's good. The owl movie (you know, GDOM) got my hopes up, but I've heard those books are of questionable quality. Not sure I want to dump my time into Redwall, but maybe that's all there is...

I really don't care about the age level it's written for. I've read lots of shitty books for all ages.

[Square King]

^ I hear awesome things about the Redwall series. I recommend The Unlikely Ones. Cheesy love story, talking animals, witchcraft, etc but fuck if I wasn't all teary at the end.

[xris]

Thanks for the suggestion on House of Leaves.
I would really suggest Redwall. This series was really good, and talking animals kinda bug me. The series as a whole is pretty mature as far as the story content. If you like medival stories this is a great read.

[CMoon]

I've heard a lot about redwall, and it seemed like it would just become the same thing over and over and over, on the other hand, beggers can't be choosers.

[Acid King]

Marijuana is safer: So why are we driving people to drink?

Highlights the many ways marijuana is a safer alternative to alcohol and how public policy pushes people toward the more dangerous substance. As a drinker I'm tiring of the endless attacks on alcohol, but this does a good job of explaining the hypocrisy inherent in modern public policy.

[Ed Oscuro]

Recently I have done more serious reading. I read the news without fail, but lately I've felt strongly that there were theoretical and depth..."issues" with my knowledge of some political subjects. Thankfully, right now I'm taking a course entitled "Scope and Methodology of Political Science" which has had a lot of VERY interesting (to me) readings. Most of it is very dry, but the implications of some of them have been quite staggering. It does help that most of it is written from the 1960s onward, where readability is much better than it once was. The most provocative parts so far (and likely shall remain) have been the selections from Chalmers Johnson's book "The Sorrows of Empire," his 2004 semi-sequel to a book he wrote before 9/11 called Blowback. He posits that the staggeringly huge American presence throughout the world constitutes not just an imperial structure but in fact an empire, as the Roman or British, and lists four "sorrows" he argues will inevitably result. The hopeless antics of the Bush Administration provide the necessary comic backdrop, and the possibility of economic insolvency provides the ultimate waypoint of such a venture. I think on the main points he's convincing. He is usually rather stridently partisan, unfortunately, but all the same his information has been stunning at times. I had never heard of Operation Northwoods before the book. Though I am not sure he's 100% correct on all the details, the big picture - in 1962 the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent along a proposal to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that acts of terrorism be carried out in Washington, Miami, and other cities; innocent people shot in the streets to drum up support for new action against Cuba. Johnson gets closer to the reader when he talks about his realization, working as one of the few academic analysts employed by the CIA, that most secrets were secret simply to protect the bureaucracy, a lesson he applied to the selective admission of intelligence in the lead-up to the April 2003 invasion of Iraq. Fascinating also to read his comment that at evening gathering at the house of John Foster Dulles, first director of the CIA, anybody there was free to read through the library which was stocked with classified reports spanning the history of that Agency. The other readings have been mainly classics from the field of political science theory, with people asking questions about objectivity and other "big picture" questions.

It all sounds very boring, I know, but I think anybody interested in political science, even as a politician, or an agent working for a bureaucracy, should be asked to consider some of these issues. From "Our Enemies and US," by Ido Oren: Can a political scientist claim to be objective, and what of evidence that political scientists were very happy looking through the Italian Fascist, Nazi German, and Stalinist Soviet regimes, until we warred with each? After the outbreak of conflicts, favorable comments about aspects of "civic education" (Italian propaganda, by another name), German administrative efficiency (from Imperial Germany to 1939, a source of admiration from Woodrow Wilson on) died quickly and mercilessly, and Oren argues that the change in professional opinion is too quick to be simply the result of disinterested scientists taking stock of new information - why a political scientist's interest in bureaucratic efficiency as evident in Nazi Germany should change decisively from one month to another obviously hinged on something more closely held than new facts, like the Holocaust, which didn't arrive in time to make the difference. It wasn't the Night of Long Knives of Kristallnacht that did in American admiration for German political efficiency, but the outbreak of wars in 1939 and 1940. And Social Science even changed its name in the 1950s for a time to avoid being confused with Socialism.

The strangest part of it all is the lead story on the two-facedness of the late Samuel P. Huntington, onetime President of the American Political Science Association, who claimed both that political science supports democracy, and in fact a democratic sort of science, after having gone to South Africa and lent his support to Afrikaner politicians and the systems of apartheid. His argument was that, while us liberal democrats (compared to revanchists and proponents of Grand Apartheid) cherish freedom and universal suffrage, it didn't make sense to push for it right away in South Africa. In fact yet more oppression might have been unavoidable, and even advisable, before tracing a path to freedom for all South Africans. All the same, this path deeper into the night of opression had as its obvious and single goal democracy, to hear Huntington tell it.

Biographies, then:

Early last month I finished Churchill's Bodyguard, a biography of Walter H. Thompson, the Scotland Yard agent responsible for protecting the great man during much of his public career, mainly from the 1920s on and again after 1939 with Churchill's US speaking tour and of course through the War. It's an awesome book. Churchill's personal foibles and follies are well known but this provides a clear and I think fair view of how they not only affected other people but how they affected the course of events, mainly for the good. There is a saying - "behind every great man is a great woman" - and while his wife Clementine comes off as fairly useless in this book (probably unfairly), it's a good reason to extend the saying to "every great person has their helpers." Walter H. Thompson was more than a pistol-toting bodyguard; he carried luggage, took the occasional abuse, and was a friend to the Prime Minister. While Thompson is the focus of the book, it's made clear that other members of Churchill's wartime circle (general staff, and secretaries in particular) had to have a certain mindset and fortitude to deal effectively with Churchill. It wasn't easy for anybody, but it was a successful team venture.

A week ago I finished up David McCullough's biography of John Adams. It's well regarded, and it seems to deserve that reputation. I went from basically no knowledge of the man, to having an idea of a number of the issues of the day, and of the personalities of many of the leading figures of his time - Washington, Jefferson, Frankin, Hamilton, and of course John Adams' amazing wife Abigail Adams, and his son John Quincy.

Aside from promoting sneering at how much Adams was aware of, and despised, but never quite mastered, his own "vanity," or how Jefferson constantly professed to wish for the life of a humble country farmer while employing (along with Washington) 1/500th of the nation's slave labor and living outrageously outside his means - writing extremely detailed expense reports which he never bothered to add up in at least most years - and writing oftentimes nasty backstabbing messages behind Adams' back, the book does a great job of showing also how their great ideas and talents influenced the early and enduring culture of the nation's government.

The one issue I felt to be a hole in the book was its apparent endorsement of the idea that Adams was the critical force not just behind the Declaration of Independence (convincingly presented), and of establishing the first American Embassy and credit lines in The Netherlands (also convincingly stated, and thanks to the Dutch!), but also the main imaginative force behind the Constitution. To explain a bit further: Adams is the author of the oldest unamended Constitution still in use anywhere in the world (in Massachusetts), and I had the impression the McCullough argues that state Constitution, and a couple booklets Adams wrote defending his political ideas while the British Ambassador, were the major force behind the US Constitution. He offers evidence that some of its ideas (the freedom of religion Adams' original Massachusetts Constitution draft would have provided, for instance, and other critical features) first made the jump from theory to practice there, but other people seem to take the course that James Madison was more up-to-date on the currents of political thought. I haven't come to a conclusion of this; I'm reading some guy right now who's arguing that most Madison scholars have been wrong.

Actual literary works!

In other news, I got to meet Professor Jeffrey Angles again today, after his more than a year overseas in Japan. Apparently he has made the leap into being a published poet, and come back to a no more hopeful political scene than he left. On the spur of the moment I got him to sign a copy of one of the two books he published while away, Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Chimako Tada," a translation of a (duh) Japanese poet. I reflected after looking at it that I haven't really enjoyed reading poetry for a while - writing is one thing, as everybody here knows, but reading? I think this will be the right thing to bring me back a bit. The state of what you might call "academic poetry" here in the US doesn't sit well with me; I like to be free, and the two poets Angles have written have been quite free of Japanese conventions. He also has published Hiromi Ito. Prof. Angles presented her poetry - at least some of which are the same poems in the present book, "Killing Kanoko," a couple years ago at a reading I attended; she reading the original Japanese, and he reading in English, line-by-line, very dynamic and a fun presentation. In the poem "Killing Kanoko," as I recall, the poet hypothesizes about aborting her daughter (who is actually older than me IIRC). It sounds horrible but it's great fun (at least some of the time) and is (to be cliche) "thought provoking" without being too grim (not for any stretch of time at least).

I hope there's something there somebody will be interested in.

[sjewkestheloon]

Good reading there mate, piqued my interest a few times.

Recently I have read Jean Paul Satre's Roads to Freedom which was painful. Over the years I have had a lot of enjoyment from Camus and thought that I might have been in for a similar treat from one of his contemporaries; instead I get a drawn our parade of social encounters between some frustrated and impotent characters. The soul searching is at times lucid but often delves into bitter irrelevance. I found myself wishing it to end.

I also read Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 which was blissful. I'm sure that somewhere in this thread I've bitched and moaned about how impenetrable Pynchon is but on the evidence of this book alone I am inclined to proclaim him a comic genius. Real 'writer's english' full of colour and shading that seems to take the piss out of so much post modern angst whilst also engaging with the genre. This has prompted me to pick up a copy of V which I am looking forward to.

Just finished Philip K. Dick's The Penultimate Truth which is definately at the upper end of Dick's mystery/conspiracy page turners. Plenty of his stereotypical traits including, but not exclusively so, an evil aged corporation head capable of terrible evil, quiet and wrathful females defined only by their hair colour and breast size, acceptance of fictions, etc. Love him.

Also in a wonderful little book shop in Windermere village I found a 1910 children's copy of the 'Arabian Nights' Entertainment' based on, but not faithful to, the Jonathon Scott 1811 translation. It has been somewhat tidied up and simplified but makes a wonderful counterpoint to the Sir Richard Burton translation that I devoured earlier this year. Burton's is full of sex and violence, as well as playful language and beautiful verse in couplet form. Scott's is simplified and neutered with no sex and little violence, but reads like a collection of english fairy tales with an Arabesque twist. Burton is without a doubt superior in every concievable way but for pure and simple story telling without the constant and enforced repetition given by age Scott's is entertaining.

Just to stretch the wall of text a little further, has anyone got a Kindle? I am probably going to get one as a combined birthday and Christmas present from the missus and I can't wait. I've been browsing through the www.archive.org collections as well as the free kindle store stuff on Amazon and I think I could occupy myself for the rest of my life without spending a penny. Add to that the expanding ebook library collections held by the local council and I think I could save a fair amount of money. Obviously it won't replace books altogether, but it will certainly make travelling with my dodgy back a lot more comfortable.

[Teufel_in_Blau]

Right now, I'm reading two books, depending on my moods.

One is from Haruki Murakami - 1Q84 and the other is Ravenor, a good old W40K-monster, by Dan Abnett.

I'm a little bit disappointed by the Murakami book, maybe my hopes were too high, but it's still a nice story. Only the "Little People" making no fucking sense.

And Ravenor, well, it's good for my Sci-Fi-fix. I like the Warhammer 40K setting, even though I never played the tabletop games.

I have a third one which I'm not count because I'm reading it just once every few weeks. It's a book with some Stephen King short storys. I can't even remember the name of it.



<mod edit: merged posts from new thread into old one. -inc>

[xris]

Too busy trying to write my own novel to be reading anything right now.

[rancor]

I'm a vine reviewer for Amazon, so I get a lot of free books each month... With that being said, I have to say that I've been throughly unimpressed lately. I'm currently working my way through the best short fiction of 2010, and the stories are so hit-or-miss. You'll have an edge of your seat thriller put back to back with some vagina monologues type shit. The flow on this book is terrible. I recently got through "Half Empty" by David Rakoff and it was entertaining. In recent memory the best things I've read have been "A Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man" by by Bill Klegg - gutter reading to the extreme - about a homosexual drug addict finding new lows to attain on a daily basis as well as "High" by Brian O'Dea. He's a top-level drug smuggler who pretty much introduced what we know today as modern cocaine smuggling by any means necessary.

[drauch]

Dirty Pair - The Great Adventure of (Book 1)

The original light novel and it rules hard.

[CMoon]

Read Collins' Gregor the Overlander and the 9th (!) goddamn gahool book. Been slowly working on How To Brew by John Palmer. Time to read something new.

[KindGrind]

100 Years of Solitude

This is the book, ever. I read it in French, English and Spanish numerous times and it never ceases to amaze me. This is the book I'd bring along on a deserted island. The most beautiful dream I have ever had is dreaming I had written it. GGM is truly one of the greatest minds alive.

[Skykid]

Just finished Bruce Lee: Fighting Spirit biography over Christmas. It's a great read, very insightful and thoughtfully put together by the author, who thankfully has an understanding of the spiritual side of martial arts and goes to great lengths to establish myth from reality. Worth a look for sure if you're interested in Bruce Lee the human being rather than Bruce Lee the fictional movie star.

Currently reading: I Am Jackie Chan, given to me by my little brother as a late xmas gift.

I would struggle greatly to get across just how superb a book this is, so suffice to say it's one of the best autobiographies I've ever had the pleasure of reading and I would recommend it to anyone, whether Jackie Chan interests you or otherwise: it's that good.

It totally sells itself short by having a cover that appears playful and silly, belying a wonderful rags to riches story that is impossible to put down and will have you laughing out loud in public places at times.
All credit to the translator who worked with JC to document his story, he puts you right in the middle of the action and captures characters so brilliantly I was a little shocked when I got to the centre page photos and found everyone was exactly as I imagined them. It's full of surprises too.

Seriously, buy this book, I defy anyone not to love it from the word go.

[RGC]

.

[dunpeal2064]

I am currently reading the 7th book in the Dresden Files, "Dead Beat" I love this series.

Also, still awaiting the next Song of Ice and Fire book from George R.R. Martin. He is taking soooo long

[Acid King]

Right now I'm reading the Process by Brion Gysin, Radio Free Albemuth by Philip K Dick and I've got the Black Hole as my graphic novel on the side. The Black Hole is one of the best graphic novels I've read and one of the few where I actively find myself marveling at the artwork. It follows teenagers in 1970's Seattle and a sexually transmitted disease that turns people into mutants. Some real crazy, tripped out shit in this one.

The Process is an interesting kind of road novel. It's about a history professor using a Fulbright scholarship to travel across the Sahara. It's got a lot of hallucinatory imagery and descriptions in it and altogether not what I had expected from hearing how closely associated he is with Burroughs.