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What are you reading?

I've been working my way through the fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary. I'm 300 pages in and about to get to the letter F. It's pretty dry but it is interesting to pick up a few words I've never heard before, correct some pronunciation mistakes and learn a little bit about etymology. For instance, did you know that calzone is from the Italian word for "trouser leg"?
 
I managed to download Ayn Rand's note books. She was infatuated with a truly evil young murderer name William Hickman.
She planned a truly grotesque novel "Small Street" basing her hero on Hickman. The woman was a true psychopath. He love of narcissistic psychopaths does not end there, all her books' heros have that quality.

In these notebooks, she pours acid scorn on normal people. It is a bizarre read. Rand was truly mentally unbalanced.
 
The Beast. A. E van Vogt

I love this author and am only mildly annoyed by his having someone live in a spacesuit for about 10 days and no means of air replenishment, and similar glitches. Also trying to forgive him some of his attitudes, but still loving the ripping yarn.
 
I just finished The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. I was blown away by the baroque, graphic descriptions, the author's sheer mastery of English, also her molding of characters, which are all people inside the rigid, highly constrained hoighty-toighty culture (New York around 1900) who seem to be willingly part of it yet dying to get out. I loved the book until sometime toward the end where it lost steam, as if the author was unsure of how to wrap it up. Suspense is kept until the very last sentence, and I was highly disappointed. Dammit!

Currently reading Doctor Grimshawe by Hawthorne, then back to The Golden Bowl by Henry James, which I started and bailed out of.
 
Just finished The Dark Defiles by Richard Morgan.

Just started Artemis by Andy Weir.

Also reading A Global History of Architecture by Francis D. K. Ching, Mark M. Jarzombek, and Vikramaditya Prakash. Architecture is one of those things that has long interested me from both an artistic and engineering point of view but I wanted to understand more about how and why architectural traditions came about. Like, what's the deal with columns?
 
I’m currently reading a popular science book called We Have No Idea, A Guide to the Unknown Universe”, by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson.

The title is a mantra that’s repeated over and over in the text.

It’s basically a survey of contemporary understanding of physics, with an emphasis of things we don’t know. Some of them are “why” questions, like “Why is inertial mass exactly equivalent to gravitational mass? Ans: We have no idea.” Although “why” questions are often considered outside the realm of legitimate science, in this case the authors conclude that the answer to that question would be a definite positive step towards understanding how the universe is put together.

Other questions are “what” questions, like “What is ‘dark matter’?” and “What is ‘dark energy’?” Although they comprise 95% of the observable universe, and “ordinary” matter, with which we are familiar, only 5%, “we have no idea.”

The style of the book is a bit like a “Dummys” series book, with lots of cartoon drawings and awful puns, but I’ve gotten past that now and am enjoying it.

Jorge Cham has a PhD in robotics (Stanford). I’m guessing it’s he who contributes the cartoons. Daniel Whiteson is a professor of experimental particle physics at UC Irvine, and works with the large hadron collider at CERN.

Here is a video (over an hour!) of them talking about their book:

[youtube]keFR9hhk3jM[/youtube]
 
Having looked further afield in most of my semester time research, I'm settling into a bit of an Americana summer. I've just finished Dust Tracks on the Road, Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography. She is one of my favorites among American writers and ethnographers, and reading about her life from her own perspective was a treat. With glimpses into the lives of some of her associates, ie the people worth knowing at Columbia in her day. Her life is proof that truth is stranger than fiction; reading her account, I realize that some of the events I took as somewhat allegorical or fantastical in Their Eyes Were Watching God were in fact nearly autobiographical themselves. Fascinating lady.

Starting in on a re-read of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire. I have been traveling through what he avariciously calls "Abbey Country", and thought it was time for a review of this preservationist classic. Still poignant, still irritating. It amazes me how many of his prophecies have come true, and that the NPS is still willing to stock his books in their gift shops, that being the case!
 
I was fortunate enough to find the entire Asimov Foundation Series as a free download. I converted it, with rather satisfactory results, to a mobi file, and put it on my Kindle. So now I have it on there and on PDF.
 
rousseau said:
For some light reading, I started taking a look at The Postcolonial State in Africa today, after a recommendation from another thread.

Had it transferred between libraries on campus yesterday and picked it up today. Looks like it might be a rare title that I actually make it all the way through. Extremely well written so far.
Click to expand...

Nearly two months later and I'm about a third of the way through. These days I speed read a lot of books, but this one is so interesting that I can't help but give it the time of day.

Crawford Young has done an incredible job detailing and laying it out. Reading it feels like I've gotten invited to an academic conference of experts who are objectively assessing a specific history in depth. The guy has just written an extremely intricate and dense book and almost the whole way through has managed to not inject himself into the writing.
 
Only a few pages left in Peter the Great by Robert K. Massie. Excellent bio that filled me in on a lot of history in Eastern Europe I hadn't been aware of.
 
I just started another re-read of Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke, one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time. I've really been getting into a mood to read the classic sci-fi masters like Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov.
 
Just wanted to mention that if anyone is up for a great read, and a real breezy one, they should try Prosper Merimee's Carmen. It's short, technically a novella, and it is the only book I've ever read in one sitting. Literally couldn't stop.

Note: Don't let familiarity with the opera dissuade you. The bullfight scene is only a tiny part of the novella.
 
Time travel novel - Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor,
.
A third of the way through and finding it quite readable.

"History is just one damned thing after another."

''Behind the seemingly innocuous façade of St Mary's, a different kind of historical research is taking place. They don't do 'time-travel' - they 'investigate major historical events in contemporary time'. Maintaining the appearance of harmless eccentrics is not always within their power - especially given their propensity for causing loud explosions when things get too quiet.''
 
Reading Greg Egan's Incandescence

So far, it's in the tradition of physics based 50's SF.

I'm wondering if it was inspired by Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves. (Mental note: Reread that.)
 
I ran across him by accident (recommendation from a parent I was talking to when I took the kids swimming)/ I got it from the library, and find it is part of a trilogy. The library has No 3 but not 2. :(
 
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