Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.
Arnold Lobel
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.
Arnold Lobel
What are you reading? feel free to post it in the comments, along with your news bits!
coming to African Huts long before it gets to American homes, apparently.
I’m finishing the Book Thief finally, and planning on snitching BooMan’s copy of the latest Mickey Mantle bio next…I think the “blizzard” we’re supposed to get will help out with my reading time.
Now if only ask could fly in from Europe before the snow arrives.
but it has bothered me since I read first read it: WTF?
I’m really happy for anyone who finds happiness with another person, but since when do we celebrate a story like this in the NYT Vows pages? Bully for the happy couple, but what about their kids and you know, those people that the couple had a pre-existing exchange of vows with before they met? Lots of collateral damage for this story to even happen, IMO.
That is ridiculous-the romanticism of their “feelings” justifies their actions? After the love confession at McConnells, they should have stopped seeing each other privately and figure out what’s going on in each of their marriages before deciding on divorce. my 2 cents. I agree, it shouldn’t be validated in the vows section.
I’m alternating between Patrick Lee’s THE BREACH and Larsson’s THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE.
I loved The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but haven’t gotten to the others yet.
Hornet’s Nest is on deck for me. I loved the first two. The Swedish film adaptations (also haven’t seen Hornet’s Nest yet, I read the books first) are also pretty good.
Currently: Iain Banks’ The Algebraist, Chris Hedges’ The Empire of Illusion, and Le Carre’s latest. Banks (science fiction) & Le Carre were meant as something of a break from politics, but it turns out both are pretty political (and very good). Esp. the new Le Carre, which takes on The City. And The Algebraist, written in 2004, is among many other things a pretty wicked Dubya allegory.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire plus last one-Hornet’s Nest deserve all the acclaim they received-wonderful great reads. The first two movies are out on Netflix and I’m waiting not very patiently for the third to be released. Very sad the author died before he saw his books become international sensation.
Another fun book was Abraham Lincoln-Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith.
I read this Christmas gift over the last two days: War as They Knew It: Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler, and America in a Time of Unrest.
Married to an extreme adventurer? Or moron? Or thoughtless jerk?
I’m just finishing Rick Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death; an amazing novel.. the first (but not the last) of Moody’s books I will read.
with interest in Ayn Rand peaking again (for all the wrong reasons) I recommend the excellent autobiography Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller. there’s some intriuging revelations about Rand which don’t jibe very well with her being the hero of the “conservative” teabagger mob.
Next up, Life by Keith Richards.
Next up: The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood. My brothers had a theme with me this X-Mas. Sports/History books that take the mind of contemporary politics.
Aim low. Yeah, when your goal is to reach Mt. Everest’s base camp, your dreams are achievable.
Hey, that’s not aiming low except maybe in the altitude sense! would love to trek to Everest Base camp!
I am reading 3 books: The Coffee Trader by David Liss (he writes a number of books about Jewish detectives in the early 1700s, which are really fun – this book is a little different, but illuminates the world of speculative finance in 1690s Amsterdam)
The Devil’s Broker – about the 1300s and the end of the Hundred-Years war, and myths of chivalry, and starvation and death on the battlefield and what knights really were
Liar’s Poker about the housing meltdown, and Freefall, about the housing meltdown.
also a book about Clinical Trials for my work.
I’ve been switching back and forth from Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” series and the Agatha Christie canon, all of which I’ve got on my iPod Touch. It’s so convenient having books on the iPod and available any time I have a few minutes to read. It’s been years since I read the Christie books, and I’ve only read a few of Pratchett’s series, but I am now forging ahead through both lists. I also read quite a bit of Illinois history (most recently “Devil in the White City,” “Nature’s Metropolis,” “Frontier Illinois”) in between times.
It’s his account of the American infantry’s experience in Europe in WWII which puts the lie to much of Tom Brokaw’s “greatest generation” crap.
And Fussell was actually there.
All of that “greatest generation” crap is pretty much hooey. Yes, they did the job, but any generation would have. My dad, as an 18 year old, did his part in the war, as did his brothers. But any war story which is true and there on the actual line of fire shooting other SOBs to avoid having them shoot yourself eventually comes to the realization that war is a terrible thing. My dad, dead now since Nov 2009, spent no time recounting his heroic deeds. Most of the vets were like him, and they probably look back on the war years as a terrible time. Sure, some parts were fun (they grew up fast, 18-20 YO, running around, drinking whatever they could get, doing fun stuff with German women in return for a Hershey bar, etc). But they all killed other kids their same age on the other side, and that had to be a pretty terrible memory.
I’ve been alternating between Richard Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable, Alan Dean Foster’s last couple of Flinx books, and the first two of Pratchett’s Diskworld graphic novels.
Just finished “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett. It’s a story about the “help” in the upper middle class households of her friends in her Mississippi hometown where she returns after graduating from college.
Imager by one of my favorite fantasy authors, L.E. Modesitt, Jr. Politics and intrigue in an alternate world where the good guys usually win ( but not always).
I’m reading S. J. Gould’s “Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle,” because I’ve developed an enthusiasm for history of science; Edw. Branigan’s “Narrative Comprehension and Film,” because I’m offering a 3-part course on film adaptation during MIT’s January Independent Activities Period, and want to be refreshed on narratology for any of the prissy theorists who show up; and R. K. Narayan’s “The Maneater of Malgudi,” for fun.
Huckleberry Finn.
A People’s History of The United States by Howard Zinn. It is a marathon read, 750 pages, but it is an amazing book.
On deck are Richard Dawkins latest, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence For Evolution and Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal.
Anything by Howard Zinn and what should be used in all schools.
I have to admit I haven’t been reading any good books. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve either been reading trashy romance novels (including a really bad one “Must Love Dogs” which I thought might be light fun reading similar to the movie but it was absolutely awful) and those thin papers with pictures named “Vanity Fair” and the “New Yorker”. 🙂 For some reason, possibly all the stress at work since after Thanksgiving, I just didn’t want to pick up something that was anything but light reading.
However, with the year winding down at work, I now would love to read some good books on American political history if anyone has read one lately that they highly recommend.
After usually spending close to 8 hours a day on computer reading all things political I spend nighttime reading romance/vampire type books-makes a great escape from what can be depressing reading during the day. With some history books thrown in.
Poverty is a lack of wealth…
That is the starting point for humanity…
Who is more impoverished…the first “ape” who could be rightfully classified as a “human being”…or the very poorest human being among us six billion or so…?
The very poorest people in the world are starving to death. Presumably, the ape did not.
I haven’t been reading much lately but I am finding it interesting to see what others are reading.
However, I found ‘A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York by Andre Schiffrin to be an interesting read. It is a pretty quick read… only 171 pages that are small in size.
Looking forward to next on my list The Natural West
The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo.
The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. Only about 140 pages into it, but it’s outstanding.
I can’t believe no one here is reading…
Decision Points…by George W. Bush.
BTW—sold more copies in two months than Bill Clinton’s “My Life” did in six years…
Hmmmmmm…..
I just read two books by N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn and The Ancient Child both are historical novels set in the Great Plains. Momaday’s talent is stunning. Class Action about the tremendously important fight for women’s rights in the mines of Minnesota, Listening to the Rhino Janet Dallett’s latest work on the application of CGJung’s principles through the prism of her patients and, finally, Modern Miracles by Erlendur Haraldsson who examines the paranormal activities of Sai Baba an amazing holy man from India. I am working thorugh but having a hard time with Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes, A History of the World, 1914 – 1991 probably, because the print is so small and Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth Century Paris by B. Robert Kreiser, probably because there are so many footnotes and the sentence structure is quite complex. But, the subject matter is mind blowing.