Topic: What are you currently reading?

[MN Dave]

I took this out from the library.

[ChamberNut]

Red Dragon - Thomas Harris

[MN Dave]

Red Dragon - Thomas Harris

I love that book.

[MN Dave]

[karlhenning]

Water Music, T.C. Boyle

[Haffner]

Red Dragon - Thomas Harris

Very creepy.

[Florestan]

Pio Baroja - The Adventures of Shanti Andia

[karlhenning]

Water Music, T.C. Boyle

How, I wonder, could one not immediately like a novel opening with the sentence:

At an age when most Scotsmen were lifting skirts, plowing furrows and spreading seed, Mungo Park was displaying his bare buttocks to al-haj' Ali Ibn Fatoudi, Emir of Ludamar.

[MN Dave]

How, I wonder, could one not immediately like a novel opening with the sentence:

Indeed.

[karlhenning]

Of course, The Sot-Weed Factor opens with a corker, too:

In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.

[MN Dave]

Of course, The Sot-Weed Factor opens with a corker, too:

Very nice. I like it.

[orbital]

Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu (Moncrieff translation)

The Modern Library edition right? I've started reading the same translation a few times but could not get halfway through Swann's way in my many attempts yet 

[Kullervo]

The Modern Library edition right? I've started reading the same translation a few times but could not get halfway through Swann's way in my many attempts yet 

It's the same translation that the Modern Library uses, but this one is a crusty old two-volume Random House edition from the 30s. I'm putting my nose to the grindstone and finishing the whole thing this time.

[orbital]

It's the same translation that the Modern Library uses, but this one is a crusty old two-volume Random House edition from the 30s. I'm putting my nose to the grindstone and finishing the whole thing this time.

Best of luck. I hope to do the same someday.

[toledobass]

Giving this stuff some attention....slow gowing for me though.

Allan

[MN Dave]

A vengeful Sioux spirit wreaks havoc in Minneapolis - When her children are kidnapped, in desperation Lily Blake seeks the services of a Sioux shaman, who summons up the Indian spirit, Wendigo, to find them. The price for this service is a spit of land that Lily's firm is selling for development land that once belonged to the Sioux. Lily is soon drawn into the destructive world of the Wendigo and learns to the detriment of those closest to her that you should never underestimate the power of a spirit betrayed . . .

[SonicMan46]

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008) by Mary Roach - looks like a FUN book!     Just read an excellent review in the NYC Book Review section the Sunday before last, put in an Amazon order, and arrived yesterday - just started my read last night - she is a funny writer who should make this topic quite entertaining - CLICK on the image for some top comments from the Amazonians, if interested; must explore some of her other books, like Stiff (about cadavers!) - 

[val]

THOMAS KUHN:     The Copernican Revolution

A very detailed analysis of the beginning of new science. The best book on the subject with Alexandre Koyré's "Du monde clos à l'univers infini".

[rockerreds]

Jane Austen-Sense and Sensibility

[vandermolen]

Moscow 1941: A City and its People at War by Roderick Braithwaite. V good.