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What are you reading?

 
 
 
sensiblesue

sensiblesue

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Might as well get one of my favorite threads going over here in the new place:

Continental Drift by Russell Banks. This fellow was the keynote speaker at the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference several years ago. He was not a very likable guy--seemed aloof and sort of stuck on himself--but he writes with a confidence that few can manage. This is a remarkable novel of twentieth-century America.
 
"Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football" by Nicholas Dawidoff.

A break from the time travel stuff I have been reading of late.
 
Re-reading all of Dawkins' books and Sagan's currently. Also Vonnegut's.
 
Just finished 'The Orenda', by Joseph Boyden. The story of the extermination of the Hurons by the Iroquois from the viewpoint of a Wendat headman, a captive Iroquois girl, and a Jesuit missionary. Harrowing, ends in tears. Not for the faint-hearted. Multiple prize winner in Canada.
 
dendrast said:
Just finished 'The Orenda', by Joseph Boyden. The story of the extermination of the Hurons by the Iroquois from the viewpoint of a Wendat headman, a captive Iroquois girl, and a Jesuit missionary. Harrowing, ends in tears. Not for the faint-hearted. Multiple prize winner in Canada.
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Well, now I'm dying to read this, but Amazon says it won't be released until May. :sorrow:
 
Nothing heavy. Going through the C.S.Forester, Horatio Hornblower adventures again. Otherwise Astronomy magazine when it arrives.
 
sensiblesue said:
Well, now I'm dying to read this, but Amazon says it won't be released until May. :sorrow:
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It's been out for a while in Canada, at least since before xmas. Can you get it from Indigo in Canada?

Next on my list: 'MaddAddam' by Margaret Atwood. It's the third in her environmental dystopian (Sci-fi) trilogy that started with 'Oryx and Crake', followed by 'The Year of the Flood'. My Mum (who gave it me) says it's just as good as the first two. Not that I've ever been disappointed by Margaret Atwood.

I'm just about finished 'Waging Heavy Peace' by Neil Young. A rambling autobiography, sort of like sitting around listening to him tell stories. Interesting to find out the backgrounds to some of his great songs. I didn't know he was a model train nut. He owns a significant amount of stock in Lionel Lines.
 
Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea. It's the Big Read book in my town this year. Pretty funny so far.
 
The System of Nature by Baron D'Holbach

It's in the public domain, so you can find free and legal copies all over the place, including your favorite eBook retailers. Pretty dry stuff, so this is slow going for me. Originally published under the name of someone who died ten years prior, this is arguably the first book in the western tradition to openly espouse atheism and naturalism.
 
My reading at the moment is just waiting for some new books
I'm currently going back through Worlds of Honor by David Weber while waiting for Cauldron of Ghosts to come out

And have been looking at Seanan McGuires book Rosemary and Rue while waiting for her next book Half Off Ragnarok to come out
 
Just finished Child of God by Cormac McCarthy.

Very dark, disturbing, but a good, very artful read. By that I mean that McCarthy's writing is poetic but most of the time he manages to not get up his own ass with it. It seems like a lot of very critically acclaimed authors are loved by critics because they can pile up adjectives like bouquets at a florist's funeral. McCarthy flirts with that from time to time but for the most part it's story and character. At times the story becomes disjointed. There's a part that seems really important but is simply never explained--almost like he just forgot about it and when it came to revise he just said fuck it, my deadline's due.

Oh, it's about a mentally disturbed guy who was falsely accused of rape. Once out of jail he wanders the hills in Tennessee doing seriously weird and violent stuff.

It's a relatively short book too and I was glad for that. I'd read a lot of stuff about McCarthy via critical reviews and I was afraid of getting bogged down in a sea of over-description. I'm rambling...

Anyway, pick it up. You can finish it in a few hours. Good book.
 
A couple of years ago I read through most of Cormac McCarthy. Unconventional and violent and yes, he leaves some things hanging for you to figure out. He doesn't fill in all the holes he digs; that's part of his style.

For brutal violence, Blood Meridian is by far his harshest book. I love the Border Trilogy; IMO his best work. Suttree is a good read as well.

Oddly enough, The Road, his best known book, is my least favorite.

Anyway, I recently finished Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Another book down in my 19th century lit effort. I've recently read a bit of Borges (Dreamtigers) and have been rereading some PK Dick; right now, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (the one with Perky Pat, Can-D, and Chew-Z).

If you've never read Dick and Borges, you're missing something!

And hey, look what I found online...

http://thefloatinglibrary.com/borges/
 
Re-reading Michael Shermer's - Why people believe weird things on Kindle and Ted Kennedy's autobiography True Compass: A Memoir in hard cover. I've got Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Clint Hill's book Five Days in November, but I haven't started it yet. Just waiting for a week or two with some free time and that baby is getting all my attention!
 
For lack of anything else to read I have gone back and re-re-re read Daughter of the Empire by Raymond Feist and Janny Wurts, and am about to go onto Servant of the Empire
 
braces_for_impact said:
I'm reading Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us. It's interesting, because I know very little about the subject and I find this book quite readable.
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Just finished it. I got the two Cartoon Economics books to go with it, just in case I needed a refresher on some concepts. I liked it, especially the history of the ideas.

Now I am reading:

The Ministry of Guidance invites you to not stay : an American family in Iran
Author Majd, Hooman.

Basically, I am going down the Daily Show book list, but just added some stuff from the Sci Fi thread on this forum
 
I've found that I'm a fan of writers who use crisp, original metaphors. If you're into that sort of thing, check out Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.

Just finished reading Stephen Coonts's Liberty. Met the man at a fund-raiser last summer, spent the evening chatting with him, and he sent me a couple of his works along with a couple of other favorites. It was a fun read; I look forward to the next one.

I'm currently reading Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind, Part 1 of The Kingkiller Chronicles--on a well-read friend's recommendation.

d
 
Stranger in a Strange Land (the original uncut version) by Heinlein.

I read the "cut" version in high school about 40 years ago. I didn't recall too much about it except grok, sex and cannibalism.

This version was published in about 1990 after Heinlein's widow discovered the orignal manuscript. This version contains an additional 60,000 words that supposedly expand upon Heinlein's views on woman, society, sexuality, politics, etc.

I'm about 360 pages into this 500 page work, and I've spent much of that time mentally screaming "Get on with it!"

There's too much dialogue before that juicy stuff even begins, and too much talking in between brief periods of good reading. And I'm not finding Heinlein's views of the world, if they are accurately expressed here, very enlightening.

I think I'm finding out why I continued to read Bradbury and Vonnegut after high school and have mostly skipped Heinlein. But I did buy a copy of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", too.

That's completely new material to me, and maybe it'll be a more enjoyable experience.
 
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