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What are you reading?

 
 
 
For Christmas this year I got myself a hard copy of The Blue Cliff Record and The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics. It's been interesting to see how Stoicism parallels some of the Eastern philosophy I've been reading, in certain ways.

I'm getting to the point now where it's difficult to find titles that I'm genuinely interested in. The copy of The Blue Cliff Record was really because it'd look nice with my other Buddhist books, I am interested in the title on Stoicism. More and more I find myself looking at antiques, and for first editions and the like.
 
ideologyhunter said:
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson (1995)
Bryson has become one of my favorite writers based on this book, the first of his that I've read. It's his description of a seven week tour of England, Wales and Scotland, told with great humor. Bryson is American by birth but now has dual citizenship. He loves the Brits, their slang, their pubs, their temperament, their little villages, the whole panorama. To give you an example of Bryson's style and wit:
"The towns along the way all had names that sounded like a cat bringing up a hairball: Llywyngwril, Morfa Mawddach, Llandecwyn, Dyffryn Ardudwy." Here's another:
"The colonels were all shortish, round men with tweedy jackets, well-slicked silvery hair, an outwardly gruff manner that concealed within a heart of flint, and, when they walked, a rakish limp. Their wives, lavishly rouged and powdered, looked as if they had just come from a coffin fitting."
Wonderful stuff. I didn't want the book to end.
Click to expand...
He writes some great stuff.

I love One Summer and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Those are about the past. (The past is like a foreign country: They do things differently there.)

The Mother Tongue and Made in America are about where words come from. I read them over and over.

My favorite is A Short History of Nearly Everything, a history of science.
 
Just finished Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel. Instantly got online and tracked down the sequel.

The writing style is a little odd. You have to take a minute to figure out who is talking, and who the author is referring to, but that slows down your reading and is not a bad thing, IMV. I like her style in general. Characterisation. Unexpected flashes of humour.

I saw the series based on the book some years ago and this clarified some queries, filling in some gaps in my knowledge of the period.

Bit pissed off. I am reading things off the stack I have bought over a span of years. The idea is to read them and be able to get them out of the house, curiosity satisfied.

Instead, about half of them turn out to be books I can't part with. Grrrrr.
 
I've been reading The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer, in the gaps of other reading. Just finished it.

It is available as a free spoken book, and presumably an e-book, and I highly recommend reading it. I prefer to hold a book but evidently some quite famous people read chapters. Stephen Fry among them.

It is an exhortation to all of us to be more generous, and to target our giving where it will do the most good. We can all react as we wish to that pressure, but it is also worth reading as an insight to how governments deal with foreign aid, both as dispensers and receivers.

Most enlightening.
 
I’m reading two books of mostly local interest (North Texas). Standing, by Ernest McMillan, is a memoir of a black man coming of age in the Sixties and actively participating in the Civil Rights Movement in the deep south and in his hometown of Dallas, Texas. Of particular interest to me, so far, are his descriptions of his childhood in a segregated black community in the heart of Dallas, which I never knew existed, and which was eradicated by freeway construction in the Sixties.

Second up, which I have just finished, is The City that Killed the President, by Tim Cloward, a social history of Dallas following the Kennedy assassination. It is a remarkable, unique book. It displays exhaustive research, such as the section in which he describes and analyzes the dozens and dozens of conspiracy theorists, theories, and publications. A major theme of the book is memory, individual, collective, and civic, which includes digressions into the nature, history and psychology of memories as phenomena. The book is a comprehensive and discursive meditation, advertised as Book One of an upcoming trilogy.
 
The complete Tom Strong compilation, by Alan Moore and friends. Quite enjoyable, and I'm sorry I didn't read them when they were originally published.

Rob
 
Grant by Ron Chernow. Its kind of clearing up my opinion of Grant the general vs Grant the corrupt president. In the end I think he was just a man who trusted some untrustworthy people.
 
Joanna Russ's classic feminist SF novel The Female Man. Semi stream-of-consciousness and an excellent work full of brilliant and cynical wit.

Rob
 
I have been reading a lot of WWI history recently. Christopher Clark's "The Sleepwalkers"; Margaret McMillan's "The War that Ended Peace"; and Nick Lloyd's "The Western Front".

It's becoming clear to me that the reasons for the Great War are completely unreasonable, and that the whole business has no better explanation than that offered by Private Baldrick:

"I heard it started when some fella called Archie Duke shot an ostrich 'cos he was hungry"

 
Just finished The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland snd The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O’donnell.

The firmer is the true story if Rudy Vrba who was the first Jew along with his friend to escaoe Auschwitz to warn the Jews of Hungary. Compelling story that is well told, including rhe difficulty he had of getting the news out and countries to act.

The House on Vespers Sands is a fictional murder mystery set in Victorian England. Very witty and well written.
 
I like physical bookstores. Some of my favorite books are ones I saw randomly on shelves, books on subjects I'd never consider searching for at an on-line bookstore.

An example I'm reading now is Gods, Graves & Scholars: The Story of Archeology by C.W. Ceram -- not a topic I particularly sought but it caught my eye in a used bookstore. Rather than just drily recitating key discoveries, the author does a great job of vividly depicting the key persons, settings and events.

I'm reading some other books also, e.g. Mission to Paris, a spy thriller by Alan Furst; and am re-reading two fascinating books by the biochemist Nick Lane.
 
I've just finished Miriam Margolyes' autobiography This Much is True and have just started Robin Hobbs' 3rd book in the Rain Wild series.


There was a time when, if you highlighted some text and then hit "italicise", that text would be italicised.

It is some weeks since that worked for me.
 
Reading Devil Makes Three, by Ben Fountain. It's a novel set in Haiti. The award-winning author has visited Haiti numerous times (although not in the very recent past) and communicates a great feeling for for Haitian culture and sensibilities. I find it's a compelling read.
Full disclosure: Ben is a friend of mine.
 
I'm listening to Pride and Prejudice. It leaves me in awe of the scriptwriters of the Keira Knightly version.
 
I just finished the new Emily Wilson translation of The Iliad. I read another version in high school and barely remembered the details. This is an incredible story and it's a good thing it's 3000 years old. I can imagine an editor sitting across from Homer and saying, "You can't have two guys pointing spears at each other and spend a page describing the armor and another page where one of them talks about his home town. You'll lose everybody by the fourth page."
 
I was going through some of Crawford Young's writing on civil conflict in Africa recently, which led me to Africa's World War by Gerard Prunier. It's an incredibly interesting book so far.

Bonus points that the section of the library stack had about three or four other books I'd checked out before, so I got a trip through memory lane.
 
The Mistress of Life and Death, a biography of Auschwitz women's guard leader Maria Mandl. If you've never read directly about some of the horrible, horrible things done to prisoners during World War II, this one has examples to spare. It's not a pleasant read, but a necessary one.

Rob
 
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