What are you currently reading?

Started by facehugger, April 07, 2007, 12:36:10 AM

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Bogey

There will never be another era like the Golden Age of Hollywood.  We didn't know how to blow up buildings then so we had no choice but to tell great stories with great characters.-Ben Mankiewicz

Tancata

#401
Quote from: Bogey on July 24, 2007, 09:52:42 AM
Loved the little I have read of him.

Yeah, he was a brilliant writer. He wrote a lot of stuff, some of it less brilliant than the rest, but all of it unique. What ones have you read? A Scanner Darkly, The Man in the High Castle, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are my favourites, but this one is very promising so far. There's also Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which is built around the music of Dowland and Wagner...very cool, but probably not his greatest.

Scriptavolant



Practically, a pamphlet against the new Intelligent Design drift, collusions between the Church and the Italian politics and so on with the music; the author is a philosopher of science/biology who teaches in the College I graduated at.

Mahlered

I've only just started reading this, but I've read one of this author's other books and I enjoyed it.



This one is not so much about the science behind the 1906 quake, but about how the citizens of San Francisco - particularly those with positions of responsibility and power - couldn't get their acts together to deal with the disaster and therefore allowed the situation to become far worse than it would have from just a magnitude 7.8 earthquake. So far, the tone is reminding me a lot of how people discuss how Katrina was dealt with (even though this book was written before Katrina!), and I think there are lots of interesting and important parallels to be seen there.

Justin Ignaz Franz Bieber

Quote from: bwv 1080 on July 24, 2007, 07:42:45 AM
BTW Against the Day is on sale at Amazon (US) for $7

Why are Pynchon's books always overprinted?  Mason & Dixon and Vineland were also available in the bargain bin within a year of their publication.

the penguin 20th-century version of gravity's rainbow is said to be the definitive version for some reason, if that means anything.
"I am, therefore I think." -- Nietzsche

Maciek

Quote from: Haffner on July 24, 2007, 09:30:11 AM
Tremendous Inspiration for me!

One of the most beautiful books I've ever read! :)


Maciek

Amazing! This is the second time Sienkiewicz has been mentioned in this thread! I am about to faint.......... ;D

(Quo vadis is probably my favorite novel of his, BTW.)

Mark

This:



I so much prefer to read the letters and diaries of great people, rather than some second-hand, scholarly retelling of their lives.

Steve

Quote from: Maciek on July 24, 2007, 02:15:35 PM
Amazing! This is the second time Sienkiewicz has been mentioned in this thread! I am about to faint.......... ;D

(Quo vadis is probably my favorite novel of his, BTW.)

A Masterpiece of Historical Fiction...  :)

Danny

I'm in a tizzy over 'The Devils' by Dostoevsky. 

The plot swirls, the characters get more and more intriguing, and it consistenly offers profound and interesting comments/perspectives that keep my reading.

Good Stuff!

Haffner

Quote from: Maciek on July 24, 2007, 01:22:46 PM
One of the most beautiful books I've ever read! :)





St. Montfort's Secret of the Rosary is my favorite devotional literature.

S709

I have this annoying habit of starting multiple books at once. So I am currently somewhere in the middle of the following:

Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment. I happen to have a Polish translation, which makes it more difficult to read than in English, but I figured it would be slightly closer to the original than an English version... anyway it is excellent of course.

---

Also:



There is a Kierkegaard quote just before the text: "... the specific character of despair is precisely this:  it is unaware of being despair. "
I was not certain what this means exactly at first, but the theme of the book seems to revolve around the idea that mundaneness and everyday reality is a quiet desperation, or something like that. I am finding a hard time describing it. There is a short article here that explains it quite well. It is fascinating reading.

---

And finally this book, which I picked up for $1 out of curiosity, has been eating away my time the last few days:



... the title is silly and so are a few things in the content (sometimes trying to be novel-like or an annoying writing style) but there is a great deal of interesting, detailed information and primary documents, and the whole thing is strangely absorbing. The references to writings by Thoreau, Jacques Ellul and Joseph Conrad and others are quite interesting too. Of course it isn't great literature but oh well. :)

beclemund

About a month or so ago, I read Patrick Rothfuss's novel Name of the Wind. If you enjoy a good fantasy epic, here is one that is just starting off. It is well written and engaging. Though, many may come off feeling that it is a slightly more adult Harry Potter, but you cannot do a wizard school novel without raising that comparison. It is a very different world though, and one I am looking forward to revisiting in subsequent installments.

"A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession." -- Albert Camus

Solitary Wanderer

This excellent complete libretto of the Ring.



I'm gradually working my way through the Ring cycle over the next week or so.  :)
'I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.' ~ Emily Bronte

M forever

Quote from: Solitary Wanderer on July 25, 2007, 01:20:27 PM
This excellent complete libretto of the Ring.

Does it have pictures from the movie?

Bogey

There will never be another era like the Golden Age of Hollywood.  We didn't know how to blow up buildings then so we had no choice but to tell great stories with great characters.-Ben Mankiewicz

jwinter



The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman (who often appears on The Daily Show; you might also know him as the "PC" in those Apple ads).  This may well be the stupidest book I have ever encountered, and I mean that in a good way  ;D.   Deeply silly but with a surprisingly literate wit, it's a "Compendium of All World Knowledge" which manages to cram more gags per page than you'd think possible. Think of something like Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary, modeled on Poor Richard with a post-modern twist.  If you're looking for some extremely light summer reading, it's well worth checking out.   
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.

-- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Choo Choo

Quote from: Tancata on July 24, 2007, 09:57:07 AM
Yeah, he was a brilliant writer. He wrote a lot of stuff, some of it less brilliant than the rest, but all of it unique. What ones have you read? A Scanner Darkly, The Man in the High Castle, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are my favourites, but this one is very promising so far. There's also Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which is built around the music of Dowland and Wagner...very cool, but probably not his greatest.

Another PKD fan here.  Favourite is probably Valis.

bwv 1080

Quote from: Choo Choo on July 27, 2007, 04:54:45 AM
Another PKD fan here.  Favourite is probably Valis.

Same here, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, Radio Free Albemuth and A Scanner Darkly are probably my favorites.