What are you currently reading?

[Todd]

[Geo Dude]

After reading through part of 2001 and the beginning of ...Rama I've realized that Clarke's style has started to wear on me and I need a change. I can always return to Clarke later. I grabbed the LoA '50s sci-fi collection and started on The Space Merchants. It was just the jolt of caffeine I needed. (No pun intended.)

[Wakefield]

A Spanish translation of this book:



http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Machine-Technics-Human-Development/dp/0156623412/ref=sr_il_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1359907605&sr=1-4&keywords=lewis+mumford

[Daverz]

After reading through part of 2001 and the beginning of ...Rama I've realized that Clarke's style has started to wear on me and I need a change. I can always return to Clarke later. I grabbed the LoA '50s sci-fi collection and started on The Space Merchants. It was just the jolt of caffeine I needed. (No pun intended.)

Alastair Reynolds's Pushing Ice is somewhat of an homage to Rama:

[asin]0441015026[/asin]

[listener]

The Making of ... by Brecht Evens
I'm not really into graphic novels and thought I had made a bad mistake when I started this English edition of a Flemish original, but the humour started to click in about page 15 and I'm quite happy with the purchase.   Rather like Flight of the Conchords in its laid-back tone, with suble watercolours instead of the usual bold black-and-white outlines.

[Geo Dude]

Finished The Space Merchants and Sturgeon's More Than Human.  Now I'm starting on The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett.

[val]

VARGAS LLOSA:        "La civilizacion del espectáculo"   (2012)

Nobel Prize of Literature a few years ago, Vargas Llosa was always a deep critic of our modern civilization. This essay is a very lucid analysis of the false values, the mediocrity, the emptiness of modern culture, including art.

[Florestan]

Edward Behr - The Last Emperor

[Wakefield]

Edward Behr - The Last Emperor

I hadn't seen this name before.

Edward Behr's titles look quite varied and resounding (which I like):

Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite: The Rise and Fall of the Ceausescus

Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?

Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America

The Artful Eater: A Gourmet Investigates the Ingredients of Great Food

[Geo Dude]

Starting on Bradbury's Martian Chronicles now.

[Fëanor]

Starting on Bradbury's Martian Chronicles now.

Just stop it: you're reminding me of my Sci-Fi obsessed period of forty years ago. 

[Geo Dude]

Just stop it: you're reminding me of my Sci-Fi obsessed period of forty years ago. 

Can't help it, I have research to do.

Finished The Martian Chronicles, great stuff.  Now working on Asimov's Foundation.

[Mirror Image]

I've been making my way through this book:



Up to Chapter 4 now. Really a fantastic book so far!

[Mirror Image]

I've been enjoying the book Delius As I Knew Him immensely.

[Octave]

Can't help it, I have research to do.

Finished The Martian Chronicles, great stuff.  Now working on Asimov's Foundation.

Are you writing a thesis on SF?  I actually read that big Bradbury STORIES anthology recently when it was reissued by the Everyman's Library imprint, simply because I'd been a kid when I checked him out last.  I really liked it a lot, and it was quite a shock how much his writing and thinking had affected my own in the meantime, though we're not talking about "influences" on "my work" or anything quite that important.  Remarkable, though how his voice or his tone had stayed in my head so long, I'd forgotten it was him.  Kind of spooky!

[Geo Dude]

Are you writing a thesis on SF?  I actually read that big Bradbury STORIES anthology recently when it was reissued by the Everyman's Library imprint, simply because I'd been a kid when I checked him out last.  I really liked it a lot, and it was quite a shock how much his writing and thinking had affected my own in the meantime, though we're not talking about "influences" on "my work" or anything quite that important.  Remarkable, though how his voice or his tone had stayed in my head so long, I'd forgotten it was him.  Kind of spooky!

No, no thesis, but I'm planning on taking a crack at a novel and want to know the field well before doing so.  Great story, by the way.

[Todd]

You say you want a revolution?

[Brahmsian]

Found 7 books today at the annual book sale fundraiser for the Winnipeg Humane Society:

*Misery - Stephen King

*The Dark Tower (The Gunslinger) - Stephen King

*The Dark Tower II (The Drawing of the Three) - Stephen King

*The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

*The Cider House Rules - John Irving

*Paradise Lost - John Milton

*Moby Dick - Herman Melville (My favourite book of all time) 

[Florestan]

A Romanian translation of Ricarda Huch's monumental two-volume work on German literary Romanticism.

Vol. 1: Die Blütezeit der Romantik (The Blossoming of Romanticism)
Vol. 2: Ausbreitung und Verfall der Romantik (Expansion and Decline of Romanticism)

An excellent dissection of the mind of the German Romantics. Although limited to literature, the insights and comments can be fruitfully applied on musical philosophy as well.

[Octave]

I have returned to reading William Blake and looking at reproductions of his engravings and other visual art.  Can anyone recommend some excellent writing on/about Blake and his work?  Books or essays, paper/glue or online; I don't care what the angle is: scholarly, synoptic, biographical, critical.