What are you reading? Part 2 - Page 5

The Book of Human Skin, Michelle Lovric, a novel.

Lord Jim, by Conrad.

I started it a few years ago, but didn't get on with the writing style. Basically, it's just as if someone is telling you the tale, with parts in the wrong order, and backtracks to add information. At the time, it annoyed me - but I picked it up again the other day and now I love it.

For some reason, the only fiction I read these days is Victorian.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.

Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters

How is this? This is on my list next to get, along with the new Haruki Murakami coming out next week and the most recent Lev Grossman novel. I can't decide which one to get next.

The Doomsday Key by James Rollins

Started reading Carl Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, but hubby hijacked it, so I'm waiting patiently.
Looking forward to the film that will come out next month based on this, called A Dangerous Method, starring Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightly.

Anna Karenina - Tolstoy

Just finished reading The Little Book of Perfumes by Turin & Sanchez.

I like it so far but I don't love it. I'm about half way through. It seems to be a love or hate book to most people who've read it. I'm confused by people comparing it as the next Harry Potter. The author is good at describing imagery, but it's not quite the epic action packed buildup or desperate romance between the main two characters the publisher wants readers to think it is. It might be just me, but I think it's a book that is better left borrowed from someone else or gotten for free. I hope the movie will be better.

Thanks!

You're welcome

"The Rights Of Man"- Thomas Paine

IQ84 by Haruki Murakami



It just got released today in the U.S. I snatched it up at my local bookstore and I'm already enjoying it immensely.

Talking to the ground By Douglas Preston.
It's about a families trip on horse back across the four corners area, and also tells the Navajo creation story. Really pretty bizarre and interesting.

Drink with the Devil by Jack Higgins

At last!



I bought the UK Edition (weighs about the same as the US so should be fine )

All my friends here read it in Chinese two years ago . . . patience is a virtue.

Budapest by Chico Buarque. On Hungarian as a language.... "the only one that the devil respects".

Good one! I love Jack Higgins..

Just started Siege by Richard Hoyt

Baudolino by Umberto Eco

got one on straw bale and rammed earth on deck...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Just finished the Book 1 today, and will start the book 2 tomorrow. VERY funny and intelligent.

I'm usually not big on management books, but I'm enjoying "It's Your Ship" by Capt. D. Michael Abrashoff. Interesting story of taking over as commander of a low performing ship when morale was low, and turning it into one of the best ships in the US Navy without getting rid of any of the crew.

Killing Lincoln... by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard.

Alexandria: City of the Western Mind, by Theodore Vrettos.

Not a sequential account of the historic city so much as a meandering account of the power bases and main players in the Mediterranean region as the empires shifted between Greek, Egyptian and Roman. It becomes a tale of two cities, as much about Rome as Alexandria at times, but I suppose you cannot tell the story of either in isolation.

If nothing else, it details how smart the ancients were, and how they were prone to doing dumb things. Just like today, really.

A Mountain of Crumbs by Elena Gorokhova - great read
I'm in a non-fiction kind of mood this week...

The Three Musketeers (1844)
Alexandre Dumas


I haven't read this in about 25 years, and I had forgotten just how well written it was. Like most people, the characters have taken up an amalgam of Hollywood created personas that I have unwisely absorbed over the years. In particular the faces of Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Michael York and Richard Chamberlain from the 1973 production peered back at me for the first fifty pages or so. Gradually, I have created my own version again - the brisk narrative and the detailed descriptions have worked their magic once more. I really should avoid watching a celluloid/digital interpretation of something I have enjoyed in print. It is rare for it ever to be an improvement.

In some quarters it may well be regarded as passe, but it's a cracking yarn told with real gusto. I am glad dusted it off and took the plunge again.

I just finished Reading J.C. Ellena's book for the second time.

Piled on the floor or in the bowels of the iPad are:

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson
Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley by Timothy White

Personally, I think the Duke of Buckingham steals the show.

See, the characters just seem to come alive

You know, that Gutenberg fellow really had a pretty good idea! Probaly put a-lot of monks out of business though. LOL!

Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending, his Booker Award winner.

Lost Moon by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger, still on the non-fiction stuff, but have much fiction on deck..

Getting More: How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World by Stuart Diamond.

Best book I've read so far on negotiation.

Against all Enemies - Tom Clancy

White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era
The title caught my eye as I couldn't imagine what it would be about. It is very interesting, short and simply written but it is a complex concept.

Catastrophe....Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

Two books about style/dressing, etc:

Dressing The Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion, by Alan Flusser

Style: The Thinking Man's Guide to Dress, by Russel Smith.

I started on Dressing The Man, which at first seems like 320 pages on how to buy a suit. It's a coffee table book, which I tend to object to - great for flicking through at the end of the day, but impossible to read on the bus. So I switched to the Smith's Style. I find him more able to explain why something is so, rather than present it as if we all should know it anyway. If that was the case I wouldn't be reading the book. . .

However, the amazing thing about Dressing The Man is that the Hollywood stars photographed in the fifties would not look out of date in that outfit today, although there is some cheating going on in the section on how the colour of your suit/shirt washes you out or emphasises your face - the compare-and-contast pictures have been processed very differently to make the point.

I'd say Style was more about putting together a few versatile outfits that will leave you looking good around the year.

I bought this excellent book a few years ago. It's a mine of useful tips, and it has been carefully researched. You are quite correct in asserting that the majority of the celebrities printed in the book would still look stylish if they were dressed that way today. What is also apparent is that once you learn the rules of engagement, you can start to push the boundaries and be a little quirky. One need only look at the images of Gianni Agnelli with his odd ties and his habit of wearing his wristwatch over his shirt cuff.

It has certainly influenced my own purchasing behaviour, much of it is just a question of playing to your strengths.

I'm just part way through it right now, but already I've started to understand why certain things look good/bad on me (I'm tall and thin) and certain colours make me look washed out (dark hair but pale skin).

Before looking at this book, I didn't realize the purpose of dressing up - to draw attention to your face, and to frame it in the best possible light. It's not about having the most expensive suit so much as knowing how to put together clothes that will make you look your best.

Everyone should read this book, or one very similar, as soon as they are old enough to start buying clothes.

Now reading Zero Day by David Baldacci

Broke....Glenn Beck

Just started The Auctioneer by Joan Samson.

Peter Ackroyd, London Under.

A factual account of what goes on underneath people's feet in the UK city. Actually, I'm starting to prefer Ackroyd as a factual writer. While his fiction is wonderfully gothic, at times I suspect he's going out of his way to make unpleasant things happen to his characters (Kurt Vonnegut is the world's worst at this).

Anyway, this is how London Under starts. Under the chapter title Darkness Visible:

"Tread carefully on the pavements of London for you are treading on skin, a skein of stone that covers rivers and labrynths, tunnels and chambers, streams and caverns, pipes and cables, springs and passages, crypts and sewers, creeping things that will never see the light of day."

As openers go, it's a bit of a shopping list, but hooked me.

I just finished A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. Good sci-fi, just short of great.

Listened to Simplexity by Jeffry Kluger on my holiday road trip. Kind of Gladwell-esque explanation of how humans interpret "simple" and "complex" under various conditions.

Now reading Faulkner's Sanctuary.

On the second book from "The Early Works of John Dos Passos". Almost threw in the towel after the first one, but the second book Three Soldiers, an anti-war novel from World War 1 has been just great.

Well worth the $2 for the Kindle.

Re-reading the Hobbit, perfect for a winter's night.

I just finished "Diplomatic Immunity" which is currently the second last book in Lois McMaster Bujold's ultra long series. I'm about to start the latest part of that series "Cryoburn".
Renato

The Shipkiller by Justin Scott

Locked On by Tom Clancy

I can't speak for this one, but as a rule of thumb, US editions tend to have better quality paper and binding (sewn, not glued).

Firewall, by Henning Mankell, a Kurt Wallander novel

my copy of the Emperor Scent came in last night. will start reading it tonight.

Curtains, by Tom Jokinen ( Adventures of an Undertaker in Training ) Very witty so far....

Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.

A few years ago I realized I knew nothing about classical mythology. I started off with Bulfinch’s Age of Fable, a Victorian view of the whole thing with lots of thee’ing and thou’ing, and heavily biased towards the might of the Roman Empire (and didn’t the Victorians love to compare themselves to that bunch of proto-fascists). I can’t remember the exact section, but at one point he's blundering about trying to understand how one particular character can be described as both beautiful and dark skinned. Not recommended.

After that I read Greek Myths by Robert Graves. I’d earlier said I’d never again read anything by Graves after trying to wade through White Goddess, his turgid make-it-up-as-you-go-along neo-pagan fantasy, but I found his Myths entertaining. It’s all sex and violence, basically, with each story getting a few paragraphs of idiosyncratic notes. These observations are particularly eccentric, with Graves hammering his obsession about the myths being a retelling of earlier struggles between beautiful matriarchal moon priestesses and ugly guys that wanted to be god kings and build empires. Like Bulfinch, he’d looked into the myths and seen what he wanted to. The fact that it’s mostly sexual fantasies mixed with extreme violence, however, means Graves is never dull, although not quite to be trusted.

I picked up the Hamilton because hers is supposed to be a more prim and scholarly reading of it all. So far I’m only around 40 pages in, but I like her early observations. She seems to be saying that starting with the Greeks, we have happily been creating gods in our own likeness, and that myths change over time to serve the government of the day. (God of war Ares, or Mars to the Romans, in particular received a lot of spin, with the afterlife becoming more welcoming to warriors.) Writing in the early 1940s, she dances around some of these ideas rather than stating them outright, but that makes reading her so much more involving. Modern authors like to beat you over the head with their ideas, but books of this era presume you have the intelligence to peer between the lines.

So far, I’ve only read the first book in Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God series, and I need to return here. But later. It didn’t really move me, to be honest.