So... what are you reading right now?

[Tysyacha]

Stephen King's UNDER THE DOME.

 

Fantastic so far, even though the reading level isn't exactly taxing.

[ForeverNight]

Thanks Pav

 

Well, I finished Guns, Germs and Steel (Highly suggest it!), and Storm Front by Jim Butcher.

 

Storm Front is the first book in the Dresden Files, it feels like the old noir films with the main character being a wizard/detective hybrid with a semi-shady past. Very interesting!

 

I'm gonna try and find Moral Sentiments now before I forget about it.

[Litofsky]

Hilariously, the day I got the Fountainhead at my local bookstore, I also picked the Manifesto as part of one of my book binges. Read and loved Fountainhead, but I've only got part way through ol Marxy's work.

 

I have the two sitting right next to each other right now. If only Rand could see it now...

[Ser'eck]

I just borrowed SW: Fate of the Jedi Outcast from the library. I'm hoping that I can finish reading this book, it's been difficult to read books lately but at least I try.

[Samuel Dravis]

For fun, I am reading Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason. This is a very pretentious title, I know, but it does seem to be interesting so far. I haven't finished it yet, but it generally attacks the idea that philosophy consists (solely) of arguments for or against things, and is critical of anyone who wants to understand, e.g., Plato, by identifying the logical structure of his arguments and saying that is the only, or even most, important part. I do like that about it; it is consistent with my overall views and it reminds me strongly of a quote from another of my favorite authors:

 

Of what use would it be for me to discover a so-called objective truth, to work through the philosophical systems so that I could, if asked, make critical judgements about them, could point out the fallacies in each system; of what use would it be for me to develop a theory of state, getting details from various sources and combining them into a whole, and constructing a world I did not live in but held up for others to see [...] if it had no deeper meaning for me and for my life?

 

I have also been reading more of the comic Transmetropolitan. I picked up several collections today and have gone through two of them. The simple outrageousness of the situations that occur - Presidential candidates growing their running mates in a tank to make sure they have clean histories, for example - makes the points of similarity they have to the real world (particularly politics, or social inequality) even more obvious. Spider is my favorite people-hater. Definitely not kid-friendly though.

[Sabretooth]

After finishing Kafka (and skipping several of his stories that were either a.) too boring, b.) not making any sense, even from a bizarre perspective, c.) little more than blog entires; I've taken up Newtons Sleep, written by one Daniel O'Mahony, the recommendation coming from Darathy, which makes this a Fiction Par deux novel.

 

The "chapter zero" was rather strange, but the story seems to be picking up well in the first chapter. Writing's not bad (better than Kafka at any rate), and it's been a while since I've read a story set earlier than the 18th century, the last being The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, IIRC.

[LordOfTheFish]

I'm reading Death of a Rug Lord by Tamar Myers. It's just a short comedy/mystery but it's been quite an enjoyable read so far.

[Te Darasuum Mandalor]

I just finished the Percy Jackson series in one month one month! It was funny, exciting, and the only book that I was super into since LOTR. I heard it was good, but didn't pay much mind to it thinking it was just a kids book. I finally got a chance to read it after my friend Erich gave it to me after being confirmed. I couldn't keep my hands off it following that!

[Ping]

I'm reading the volume 3 of the manga Black Cat.

[LordOfTheFish]

I'm reading the volume 3 of the manga Black Cat.

 

Is that worth reading?

 

 

OT: If manga counts than I just started reading Death Note.

[Astor]

I've been slowly collecting a series of books known as The Battles of World War II, which originally required a magazine subscription (I however, have managed to get my collection for nothing - it helps knowing someone who works for a nationwide magazine distributor. ).

 

There are 50 books in the series going from Poland right through to Berlin. I haven't even thought about reading them in order, so have just been reading the ones i'm more interested in.

 

The one i'm reading at the moment is about the Anglo-Iraqi War, which is proving to be quite interesting.

[Mandalore The Shadow]

Im reading The Road it is the most depressing book ive ever read in my life

[HdVaderII]

At the moment, I'm leafing through a London Underground Tube map. From experiences in New York, Chicago, and various other cities, I have to say that the London Underground is the easiest to get around.

[Miltiades]

I've finished Machiavelli's Il Principe yesterday and am now reading Voltaire's Candide, ou l'optimisme. It's a satire on Leibniz's philosophy (Earth's the best of all possible worlds). Since it's not that long, I'm probably going to begin reading either Sun Tzu's The Art of War or Cervantes' Don Quichot at the end of the week.

[Sabretooth]

Finished with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? yesterday. Philip K. Dick's seminal novel reads like a blend of the sci-fi pulp fiction he wrote previously and the cyberpunk of Gibson and Stephenson that would follow him.

 

Compared to Blade Runner, DADoES is less grandiose and much more personal about discussing human-android relations while commenting on the fate of organised religion in a future where you may use machines to select what emotion you want to feel like, the fate of humanity left behind on a barely inhabitable Earth after a radioactive war.

 

Having finished with that, I've picked up Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, which appears to be a colourful, postmodern and poetic work that has Marco Polo describing the cities he has seen in his travels to Kublai Khan. It is written with an unbridled imagination and its very creatively constructed cities are embedded with observations of our own urban culture, a drawing out of unspoken conventions and structural relations that proper postmodernism is supposed to convey.

[Astrotoy7]

proper postmodernism

 

now there's a curious arrangement of letters.

 

* * *

 

I love DADoES My avvie at another tech site is a geeky homage to it. I also thoroughly recommend the audio book version of DADoES/blade runner

 

 

As part of interviews I had to do - I recently read, and thoroughly enjoyed:

 

How to Mellify A Corpse: And Other Human Stories of Ancient Science and Superstition by Vicki Leon, which is an humorous but quite detailed look at scientific discoveries of the ancient world.

 

Caravaggio, a Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon. The most well researched and engaging book on Caravaggio I've ever read.

 

For my upcoming plane trip - Im also really looking forward to checking out Xenophon's March of The Ten Thousand - chiefly the audio book version read by Charlton Griffin

 

I thoroughly recommend audiobooks as my medium of choice - they allow you to soak things up on a long and contemplative hike - which is a bit harder to do with a tire your eyes and develop a paunch edition. I found as I have gotten older, and now working full time in a profession that requires a different type of reading and writing, sitting down to enjoy a good book is usually followed by slumber about 10 minutes.

 

mtfbwya

[Pavlos]

I'm making my way through Dickens's distinctly sinister final novel, Our Mutual Friend. Old Harmon's 'profitable dust heaps' are left to young John Harmon. But when Young Harmon is found dead in the River Thames, the fortune defaults to the dustman Nicodemus Boffin whose subsequent descent into miserliness and the ramifications on a London centred upon the corpse-strewn and rotting Thames the novel charts.

 

In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.

 

The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty, sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband, kept an eager look out. He had no net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, no appliance beyond a rusty boathook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small to take in cargo for delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze. The tide, which had turned an hour before, was running down, and his eyes watched every little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as the boat made slight head-way against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he directed his daughter by a movement of his head. She watched his face as earnestly as he watched the river. But, in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror.

 

Allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface, by reason of the slime and ooze with which it was covered, and its sodden state, this boat and the two figures in it obviously were doing something that they often did, and were seeking what they often sought. Half savage as the man showed, with no covering on his matted head, with his brown arms bare to between the elbow and the shoulder, with the loose knot of a looser kerchief lying low on his bare breast in a wilderness of beard and whisker, with such dress as he wore seeming to be made out of the mud that begrimed his boat, still there was a business-like usage in his steady gaze. So with every lithe action of the girl, with every turn of her wrist, perhaps most of all with her look of dread or horror; they were things of usage.

 

Like so many of Dickens's later novels, Our Mutual Friend is filled with those spectral hands that reach out from the past to push and prod events in our present (that 'witch of the place' Miss Havisham springs to mind) and how later generations are shaped by what has gone before.

[Ping]

I'm reading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1910. The series just keeps getting better, which means I can't wait for the next issue to be released. I'm also planning to read Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex after I finish the League issue.

[Liverandbacon]

Right now I'm reading my way through the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser. I read the first years and years ago, but didn't realize that it was a series until recently (I have a really old edition so it doesn't have a series list on the inside cover). I reread the first, since it's been a long time, and now I'm almost done with the 2nd, Royal Flash, which I'm enjoying a lot.

[Platypus Man]

Just finished reading "Eldest" again.

[Dread Advocate]

as of this past saturday, ive been reading Dead Space: Martyr, StarCraft: Heaven's Devils, and Diablo: Legacy of Blood (which ive been on for some odd 6 months)

[Astor]

I'm almost done with the 2nd, Royal Flash, which I'm enjoying a lot.

 

I love the series, especially Royal Flash, although I really need to get into gear and finish reading the series.

 

As for my own reading material, I'm currently reading the Fate of the Jedi series (I'm a glutton for punishment, it seems, but at least Traviss isn't involved).

[adamqd]

 

As for my own reading material, I'm currently reading the Fate of the Jedi series (I'm a glutton for punishment, it seems, but at least Traviss isn't involved).

 

I'm what some would call an illiterate ****bird, with no idea of what a good writer is... but I am thoroughly enjoying the Fate of the Jedi series, Book one is a bit slow, but once you get an idea of what the "Crazy Jedi" stuff actually means, it's great

 

I would suggest at least checking wookieepedia for a run down of the NJO-LOTF cast and happenings before getting too far into it though.

[Miltiades]

I've started Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil", which requires more concentration from me than most books I've read so far. Phew. I'm also starting Dante's "La Divina Commedia".

[Pavlos]

I've started Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil", which requires more concentration from me than most books I've read so far. Phew. I'm also starting Dante's "La Divina Commedia".

Just a bit of light bedtime reading, then?

 

Botticelli's sketches for the Comedy are worth a look at if your edition includes them; I know the Allen Mandelbaum (English) translation in the Everyman Library does.