What are you currently reading?

[Florestan]

Thanks! I'll look out for those. And, no, never, what would you recommend by him?

The War of the End of The World, Conversation in the Cathedral, The Green House, Death in the Andes, Who Killed Palomino Molero?. All excellent, the latter two are mystery novels, go figure!

[Florestan]

Thomas Hardy - Life's Little Ironies and Other Stories (complete)

I love the (often dark, sometimes gentle) humor of these stories about common people and their life. They are not even Levin and Kitty, let alone Anna and Vronsky, but they live their uninteresting lives and adventures just as intense.

[SimonNZ]

Started:




also on the go, for when I need something lighter:

[Iota]

Finding this interesting, despite the fact that much of the trigonometry/calculus Maor brings to bear on e.g explaining frequency ratios, and how history uncovered them, goes over my head.
Am about 2/3 the way through, and there's mention of the earliest musical instrument we know of (discovered in 2008), fashioned from the wing bone of griffon vulture, with five precisely drilled holes (so in essence a kind of flute, but one that is 35,000 years old!). It was part of a community that drank beer, played drums and danced around the campfire on cold winters evenings. And I'd so love to know what sort of music that flute player conjured up for his listeners/revellers!

[Mandryka]

A sort of cross between Tristram Shandy and Gargantua.

[vers la flamme]

I'm somewhere in the middle of Great Expectations. Paused to start GGM's Of Love and Other Demons. Dark and decadent as all hell, it seems like GGM's attempt to give Joris-Karl Huysmans a run for his money.

[vers la flamme]

Continuing my GGM binge with a reread of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I was in high school when I first read this, ten years ago or so. It's a great book, though my youthful enthusiasm may have waned somewhat. I definitely don't agree with William Kennedy's ridiculous assertion which adorns the back cover:

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race... Mr. García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is powerful, meaningful, and meaningless in life.

... but maybe that's due to my aversion to the concept of "required reading". Anyway, I'm only a quarter of the way into it and we'll see how my opinion changes throughout the rest of the book.

[Florestan]

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race...

A strong contender for the stupidest hyperbole ever. 

[vers la flamme]

I started yesterday William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I must say I am pretty ignorant on the subject, though it is one I have always had a morbid fascination with. However, it's such a massive book that I have no idea whether I'll ever finish it.