what are you reading? - Page 2  

where is this Dr. Strauss from? only 4% where she lives? Sounds nice.

For school I'm reading Sarum. Before that the books I was reading and thoroughly enjoying were the Camulod Chronicles by Jack Whyte.

Harrington on Hold em by Dan Harrington

at the present moment, I am reading this.

Finished Narnia books over the weekend.

Stephen Brust has finally published the next Dragaera/Vlad Taltos book: Dzur. It should be arriving this week.

Contact by Carl Sagan

It's astronomy textbook meets theology textbook meets sci-fi novel meets a room full of Mensa people. Read it.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. Is goowd!

Recently finished Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, I can NOT recommend it highly enough - absolutely f***ing BRILLIANT!!!! The man is back after the somewhat dissapointing Glamorama, he´s perfected his craft even more, this from an author who wrote a novel like Less than zero 19 years old...

Reading Indecision by a newcomer named Benjamin Kunkel ow, very entertaining NYC fluff.

Also finished the Biography of Saddam Husseins personal doctor, Ala Bashir, some time ago. Very interesting on the development of Iraq during the last century + who doesn´t love the details of the psycho antics of Uday???


MMM

A legal thriller I've been meaning to pick up for ages.......

The Firm


Probably some Ann Rule next...........Small Sacrifices, Heart Full of Lies or Green River Running Red..........

James Hall. Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005).

Alan F. Segal. Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion ( Random House, 2004).

Maria Lis-Balchin, ed. Geranium and Pelargonium: The Genera Geranium and Pelargonium (Taylor and Francis, 2002).

Odyseuss Elytis. The Axion Esti. Bilingual edition ( University of Pittsburg Press, 1975).

Just read in the past couple weeks:

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

What to start next? Will have to peruse this thread a bit more.

Melmoth the Wanderer - Charles Robert Maturin

(great uncle of Oscar Wilde) this book is considered the top english gothic romance raved about by Poe, Baudelaire, Leslie Fiedler, Balzac etc. . ..

he only wrote it for money because being a preacher wasn't paying the bills

it would have been amazing to go to that church!

Just finished:

Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist

Now reading:

The Secret of Shambhala by James Redfield.

...Basenotes!

Basenotes by Grant Osbourne. Its a thriller.

I've read lots of Finnish books this summer and autumn, but now I'm reading Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy.

I just finished

translated by
Kenneth J Northcott

104 stories by Thomas Bernhard

18 suicides
6 painful deaths
26 murders
(one love affair)
20 surprises
4 disappearances
2 instances of libel
3 character attacks
5 early deaths
1 memory loss
4 cover-ups

"The voice imitator"

Djuna Barnes

selected poems and notes toward the memoirs

the memoirs of Rupert Everett are hilarious judging from excerpts in the daily mail. I can't wait to read it. The title is awful but on the inside it's hugely entertaining.

lollol! what`s wrong with me??!!

Franklin Roosevelt: Rendezvous with Destiny

Currently:

The Law of Attraction by Esther and Jerry Hicks
The Surrender by Toni Bentley
Random Charles Bukowski poems

Recently finished:

Steel Toes by Eddie Little
Pursuit by Thomas Perry
The Analyst by John Katzenbach
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
The Story of M by Maria Isabel Pita

I had forgotten about this thread until today. Oops.


Right now I am in the middle of:


Basic Electronics Theory With Projects and Experiments by Delton T. Horn
\t
The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
\t
The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2) by Neal Stephenson

Latest edition of MAKE magazine, The New Scientist magazine, New Republic magazine, McSweeney's Quarterly...



There have been several other books that I never mentioned on here: 'Never let me go', 'The remains of the day', 'A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again', etc. I can't think of everything without my bookcases in front of me.



-ben

Reporting by David Remnick, which my little bro gave me for xmas.

Hanif Kureishi: The Buddha of Suburbia

Before that I read The Black Album by the same author.

Profane Men by Rex Miller
Rex Miller has quite a resume including 9 novels and a few how to books. His violence is very graphic in case you don't like that stuff.

Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849
by Joseph Frank -- this is book one of a 4 book biography

Five Hundred Years of Printing
by S.H. Steinberg
I spent my life printing. I love it's history.

S.T.P a journey through America with The Rolling Stones
by Robert Greenfield -- I knew I was hooked when I first saw a picture of the Stones while radio had been saturating the airwaves with the British invasion. Even the Who got dressed up to appear before cameras.

The first song I heard was them playing their Buddy Holly cover "Not Fade Away"

The Chrysanthemum & the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture by Ruth Benefict

Mars & Venus On a Date by John Gray

That thick thing has been in my 'to-read' pile for two years now....

I'm getting into the Count of Monte Cristo - I started it a few months back, but those first few chapters were hard for me to get through. I picked it up again and now I find it easy to read.

I just finished "The Quincunx" by Charles Palliser. Very Dickensian and very good.

Right now I'm reading Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" and Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber". Otranto is very dull, but I like Carter.

A wonderful novel! If you like stories where you feel connected to the characters.....read this, especially if you went through the 60s as I did.

I don't agree with much of what happens in this novel but it is a great read.

For stark, biting underworld types of stories, get all of Andrew Vachss's novels with one exception, "Two Trains Running". Very imaganitive and possibly partially true(AV is a practising attorney specializing in juvenile justice and child abuse cases.) stories.

And for the best in fictional stories about how to overcome overwhelming odds if you're retired from the Army, get Lee Child's books. Fascinating if you're into 'McGyver'-like thrillers.


Dan

Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi

Excellent choice. An Open Heart is on my To Read list. I am currently reading Teachings on Love by Thich Nhat Hanh.

-Sloan

reading Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson



and I found this while browsing some blogs

http://www.librarything.com/

it looks like I'm going to be using this tool a lot.

Just finished Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre. It was very enjoyable.

Looking for my next book at the moment.

Cheers

Hanif Kureishi: My Ear at his Heart

Before that I have read this year Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

I'm on vacation and have just finished reading two SF books by John Barnes - "Orbital Resonance" and "Kaleidoscope Century".
Renato

The Far Pavilions by Mary Margaret Kaye. Story of old India. A spray of scent and a good read before bed. Dreams of adventure on distant shores chasing Indian beauties .......... !

I haven't heard of any of the books the last 3 posters have been reading...
But the last book I've read is Moby Dick. That should be relatively well-known, though I've only read it as an assignment for my English class.

edit: wait, I've read Heart of Darkness too! Quuuite gripping.

If you liked Joseph Conrad I recommend The Secret Agent!

Hanif Kureishi's most famous novel is his debut The Buddha of Suburbia, he has also written several film scripts; do My Beautiful Laundrette, London Kills Me or My Son the Fanatic ring any bells?

Mikal Gilmore is a former Rolling Stone editor and the youngest brother of Gary Gilmore. (Thanks to DustB for introducing Shot in the Heart to me!)

Conrad is a master - The horror! The horror! When I was young I loved the connection between Heart of Darkness, TS Eliot's The Hollow Men and Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Great novella, great poem, great film.

Heart of Darkness is one of the books that everyone ought to read when they are young - all those themes of journeying, out into the splendour and danger of the world and inwards into our own heart of darkness. The catastrophe of a foreign intervention is also quite timely and instructive.

The Secret Agent is even more timely and instructive - the egotism that feeds fanaticism, official obfuscation, the primacy of family relationships. I'm not sure I would recommend it to a young adult though. It is one of darkest books I have read. The tone of relentless weariness, alienation, and bitterness is sometimes overwhelming. It famously has an ironical style that is meant to inject distance and humour, but I was glad to have a few more years under my belt before tackling this. Incredible work though and so far ahead of its time.

Just finished
Susanna Clarke - Mr Norrell & Jonathon Strange: wonderful, I'm glad had time over Xmas and New Year to savour it, astonishingly ambitious for a first novel.

Daniel Woodrell - Give Us A Kiss: A Country Noir: really fresh, hillbilly lowlife and lusty romantic poetics.

I got some great presents for Xmas (in addition to my Dior Homme!) and I am ready to get started on Alan Bennett - Untold Stories and DBC Pierre - Vernon Little Good. Both mentioned by posters above - any comments on them?

I bought this on the strength of a hilarious radio interview with Rupert and in anticipation of going to his one-man show in Manchester. The first couple of chapters are beautifully written. RE then cancelled the show due to 'exhaustion' - speaking about oneself to common folk for a couple of hours each night can such a drain, darling - and I put the book back on the shelf. But back at work now and some scurrilous gossip might be just what I need at the end of hard day!

"Red Earth, White Lies," by Vine Deloria. The immediate past two books before this were Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (hopefully this movie even shows in western South Dakota!), and "Spook": science's take on the afterlife.

Jeff

The Tender Bar

The Exquisite by Laird Hunt

Amber Room - the fate of the world's greatest lost treasure by Catherine Scott-Clark & Adrian Levy

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road - very bleak yet I could not put the book down. An excellent writer who loves to use grue and splatter for effect.

tigrushka, I had never heard of Mikhal Gilmore but I ordered the book and look forward to reading it.
Have you read The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer? Many feel that this was Mailer's greatest book. I plan on reading it again.

The Hedonism Handbook by Michael Flocker

The Genesis Code by John Case

Love Potions by Cynthia Watson

The Leader in You - Dale Carnegie and Associates

Crossing the Chasm - G. A. Moore

Inside the Tornado - G. A. Moore

Catch-22

hilarious stuff.

Running With Scissors - Augusten Burroughs

His association of the smell of his mother's Jean Nate perfume with abandonment is so poignant...

*edit* OK, so I got to some of the gay sex parts - very disturbing... Not because I'm homophobic, but because he was so young and his partner was, like, twice his age (I have kids). I'm wondering two things: Did these parts make it into the movie, and did this asshole ever wind up in prison? For that matter, did Augusten's MOTHER ever wind up in prison? ...selfish bitch... No, don't tell me. I want to finish it on my own...

I can't imagine the movie ever doing this book justice - even with a "R" rating...
I bought it because the reviews said it was "hilarious". Whoever reviewed this obviously didn't read it... It stopped being funny by about chapter 3... This guy's childhood was far more screwed up than my own, or that of anyone else I've met in my life...

OK, well I finished this one in fits and spurts. Each chapter stands alone as an independent story. I liked it better, and it truly WAS funny in many parts! Funny and touching.... I really related to the pop culture references too... I will retract my earlier statement and give it a solid 8/10.



Paul

Right now i'm reading Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury. I am only about 60 pages in but enjoying it immensely . anyone who has also read it can understand why it is so slow for me. i am trying to read it with a completely new outlook so i have been basically avoiding talk about it with anyone so i don't know why i'm posting this on a message board, i may very well make sure not to read this thread again until i finish the book (and who knows when that will be?) the friend who lent this to me annoyed me by proceeding to discuss the major plot points a few times without any nudging on my part, maybe i am anal when it comes to this but i absolutely hate having books/movies and such ruined for me ahead of time, even if it is a well-known classic or what have you.

actually after posting this i have finally decided that my irritation with this friend for telling me about a book i was excited to read one reason being i really knew hardly anything about it, i think i am just going to go ahead and look on wikipedia so i can at least feel like if i know what's going to happen at least it is of my own doing. does this make any sense?

edit: ok i have just read enough to basically affirm what this "friend" told me and not much more (basically, and if you are planning on reading it and don't want to know anything don't read.... the fact that the book is divided into different sections each from a different characters' own point of view, and the fact that quentin commits suicide. and at least now i know who this quentin character is who benjy keeps referring to because i wasn't quite sure. but then again i am sure i would have figured it out *when faulkner intended me to* so, again, ok... . still feeling annoyed but whatever . . . )