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Judge Holden posted:Also, he's probably the only author I like better in audiobook. In fact, he's the only one I can stand. He's a great storyteller. This is probably already widely known, but his stuff on NPR's This American Life is always a treat. Some people don't like the show because it is admittedly really smug once you get down to it (see The Onion's "This American Life Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence" story), but his absurd tales are always good for a laugh. Just like in the books he throws in some bittersweet life lesson from his perspective as a young eccentric gay guy and overall it's usually very funny. Check it out on the website - I think all the episodes are available for free.
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Jan 20, 2009 06:14
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I just finished Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I'm not sure it counts as a book, but since I'm reading it for a book club, I counting it. Somehow, comic books are a piece of geekdom I've managed to avoid for most my life. I enjoyed this, but I wouldn't call it the greatest comic series ever (I think I've liked the first half of the first Ultimate Sandman book more).
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Jan 20, 2009 16:58
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There is a God by Antony Flew Flew is a professional philosopher known primarily for his anti-theological writings of the last half-century (perhaps most infamously "Theology and Falsification," which he presented to the Oxford Socratic Club in the 1950s, then chaired by C. S. Lewis). In 2004 he "converted" from atheism to deism; there was naturally a huge controversy over this event and virtually everyone who has an opinion on the matter spoke up, either deriding him or praising him, depending on which side of the "debate" you fell into. This book is meant to further explain his rationale for his change of mind from atheism to deism. I must say, however, that I was not entirely impressed. It is a 200 page book so it is rather slim to begin with, and most of his evidence was gathered from discussions with colleagues; obviously we are not privy to these. He generally looks at this from the point of view of science and argues that, formulated properly, the intelligent design argument is effective at proving the existence of God -- mainly how absurd it is that such perfection of organisms as well as physical laws of nature are entirely random; he simply finds that inconceivable. He conceptualises God as a 'first cause' in the Aristotelian sense; though he argues for the purposiveness of these things in a way that I did not find entirely convincing. That is not to say it was an uninteresting read, I just wish he went into a whole lot more depth.
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Jan 21, 2009 16:22
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As a big Dan Simmons fan, I was a little disappointed when Muse of Fire showed up and it was a skinny little thing clocking in at barely over 100 short pages. I'm not a Shakespeare buff, but this was a good quick read. It was pretty typical Simmons, starting off very focused, but slowly expanding into a much bigger picture/universe.
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Jan 21, 2009 18:27
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Jut finished The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, a nonfiction book about Project Mercury, America's first foray into space. I'm kind of biased because I'm a big space nerd but that was one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read. Wolfe does an excellent job keeping up an incredibly fast-paced book. I can't think of any part that lagged or was boring in the slightest. I'm happy, because considering the subject matter, a boring or overly technical book would be horrendous. I think it helped that Wolfe has nothing to do with the space industry, so he's able to pass on the knowledge he's collected to a more layman crowd. Wolfe does a good job of capturing the character of the original Mercury Seven, and supplements that with stories of other prominent pilots of the day, such as Chuck Yeager and Ed White. I highly recommend the book to anyone who likes space, piloting, or history.
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Jan 22, 2009 02:17
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I just finished Gone with the Wind. So wonderfully written and engrossing that I neglected homework for days so that I could finish it. I'm planning to watch the movie again since it was that good.
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Jan 22, 2009 07:30
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Completed Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson on MLK Day. Overall, it was pretty good. The only other Vietnam book I had read prior to it was The Things They Carried which is epically good. I don't think ToS beat it as "the Vietnam book" but it's definitely right up there. I love his style of writing but he isn't the best at plotting books as this long novel (702 pages) glaringly showed. It still works though, with it being pretty gripping and then jumping around to the other character's stories. It was so complex, I didn't think it was going to be this complex. It was a good complex though. In the end, I recommend it to people who want a modern novel that reads like a fine wine, with the Vietnam-backdrop about Psy-Ops operations reminding me of the Iraq War. Now, I want to step away from DJ for some air. Tomorrow I finish Liar's Poker for school and will post the review.
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Jan 22, 2009 07:31
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I finished chopping my way through Perdido Street Station by China Mieville--holy four thousand simultaneous ongoing plot threads, Batman--and am now trying very hard not to consume Emma Bull's Territory in one carnivorous sitting. I love books but I need to try and make them last.
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Jan 22, 2009 13:06
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EDIT: Post was better suited to a different thread.
King Plum the Nth fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Jan 22, 2009 |
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Jan 22, 2009 13:13
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McMurphy posted:Jut finished The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, a nonfiction book about Project Mercury I wouldn't really call it "nonfiction", he takes lots of liberties and plays fast and loose with the facts. Still, better than Moonshot.
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Jan 22, 2009 15:55
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What I've just read, in reverse chronological order. Rape: A Love Story by Joyce Carol Oates. Recommended for fans of realistic, honest, if not a little beat-metered, prose, Oates slim little novella is gritty, fast, and even enthralling despite its brevity. My previous exposure to Oates having been a short story here or there, this was a great first novel. I have her award-winning, Them, sitting in the to-read-from-Christmas-gifts stack. 4/5 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. My wife, who has slightly different tastes than I, loved Euginedes first novel, The Virgin Suicides and burned through this book as soon as it was released. Just a week before Christmas, off work with nothing to do, I picked up Middlesex, thinking it must be good, because it won the Pulitzer and was the choice for several publication's book of the year for 2003. What a fantastic book. This has got to be the most anti-goon novel I've ever read. There is not one touch of the fantastical, the masculine sword-bearing neckbeardery. Being a shameless glutton for cheap horror fiction and masculine literature (ala McCarthy, Hemingway), this was an unlikely book for me. It is the story of three generations of Greek immigrants, the latest of which is the narrator, who was born with the 5-alpha reductase enzyme, which essentially causes symptoms akin to hermaphrodites. While not strictly a book about hermaphrodites (a good 3/4 of the novel is about the first two generations of the Stephanides family), one has to wonder just how much of the story is Eugenides' own life, he himself having been raised a Greek immigrant in Detroit. Absolutely enthralling, my eyes were wet as I closed the book for the last time, not because it was sad, but because it was over. I cannot recommend this enough. 5/5 A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, because it was the season, and I had never read it before. This was actually my first Dickens. Obviously great, but the 19th century prose doesn't do much for me, personally. 4/5 The Stranger by Albert Camus. It's no wonder this book has been as important as it's been. It's only been three weeks since I finished it and I already want to read it again. Recommended for people that read books. 5/5 The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Recommended to me by a goon who wanted to prove that scifi could, in fact, be well written. He was right, but I refuse to call speculative fiction scifi. It's insulting to speculative fiction. Anyway, I loved the way Atwood diligently worked to create this countrywide dystopia, but told it from the viewpoint of a woman currently living it, so we get glimpses of what is going on, what events led us up to this point, without the traditional scifi data dump of "this happened and then this happened and this is how this works, nowadays". Just a tad slow at the beginning, I sort of let this book get dusty until about the second half. 4/5. Currently reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Murakami, and The Living Dead, a nice little zombie short story anthology. I also have The Dark Descent an enormous horror anthology kickin bedside, for a quick story before unconsciousness, and Tolstoy's The Gospels in Brief somewhere in a pile that I pick up from time to time.
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Jan 22, 2009 16:13
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Continuing in my series of really short books, I just finished The Red Pony by Steinbeck. He's my favorite author, yet there's so much by him I still haven't read. I guess this would qualify as a young adult book, but had some pretty serious themes.
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Jan 22, 2009 16:35
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Finished The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan yesterday. The majority of the book was entertaining and thoughtful although I really enjoyed certain sections more than others. The final part of the book was pretty interesting because, like Pollan, I have never hunted in my life but I have always wondered about taking the life of another creature and then eating it. I used to fish, but it just doesn't feel the same. I want to read In Defense of Food next but I'm going to hold off for a bit.
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Jan 22, 2009 18:51
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Children Playing Before A Statue of Hercules-Edited By David Sedaris its a book of shorts stories to support 826NYC, a tutoring center in Brooklyn. Spook by Mary Roach, a very interesting book on the science of life, dying, and having sex in an MRI machine. Marvel Zombies 2 I couldn't help myself on this one, everyone once and a while you just need a book you can read in ten minutes.
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Jan 22, 2009 19:40
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Holidays On Ice-David Sedaris again, on bit of a kick here, sat down and read the entire thing in an hour and a half small, small book. I would recommend it though as its the only one of his that has made me laugh out loud thus far.
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Jan 23, 2009 01:38
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Flaggy posted:Children Playing Before A Statue of Hercules-Edited By David Sedaris its a book of shorts stories to support 826NYC, a tutoring center in Brooklyn. I saw Sedaris speak live a couple years ago, and brought this for signing (it was the only book of his I had in the apartment at the time). My title page now states, "Thank you for helping miserable children." (Nice avatar, btw, but the inclusion of 'all lights hosed...' is just taunting.) To contribute, the last book I finished was Stephen Wright's The Amalgamation Polka. It's sort of 'Candide meets the civil war'. Darkly hilarious, and the writing is just gorgeous. The story does start to seem a bit forced toward the end, but it's more than interesting enough to carry you through. I'd have to rate it a B+/A-, but unfairly so, since his brilliant Meditations in Green is a curve-ruining bitch. WoG fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Jan 23, 2009 |
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Jan 23, 2009 05:10
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More Information Than You Require by John Hodgman. I want to gay-marry this man. He is quirky and weird and silly and erudite and genuinely funny. He's smart and well-read as hell, without being a snob (I'm looking at you, McSweeney's). Favorite part: the transcript of the video shown to potential jurors.
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Jan 23, 2009 16:18
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The Road by Cormack McCarthy. Short and easy, I enjoyed it a lot. Nothing extraordinary, but a good book. First few pages were creatively disfigured, apparently to set the mood. Nice touch, would have liked more of that.
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Jan 23, 2009 17:27
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Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov Very interesting, modern writing style and little coyness regarding the subject matter. The plot is fast paced and darkly funny in the first half, but kind of slows down once they're alone. The Quilty stuff struck me as far-fetched, but the whole thing is fairly fantastic, I guess. I liked how there was no obvious moral. Humbert is both a monster and quite pathetic.
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Jan 23, 2009 21:52
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Well, I finished Emma Bull's Territory, and I'm left feeling somewhat ambivalent about it. I like Emma Bull as a writer, I definitely enjoyed the book, and I'm glad I bought and read it, but... I suppose it comes down to a quibble about stylistic choices. She chose to write a Western--one that stars Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday and features plenty of shootings, fires, and assorted mayhem--and then to pile on top of the Western the whole idea of magic and 'knowledgeable men' and magical duels and so forth, but then chose to write the book in such a way that almost all of the actual action took place 'offscreen' only to be alluded to later. Including the actual climax of the book. It made the book feel oddly mannered and bloodless. Most of the tension in the book came from loaded conversations and telling facial expressions--like a drawing-room mystery--and I suppose I wanted something more visceral and raw from a magical Western. Ah, well. Next up is a collection of the first three Mike Hammer novels by Mickey Spillane, so I guess I'll get my raw and visceral fix after all!
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Jan 24, 2009 13:05
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Just finished The Dharma Bums by Kerouac. What can I say, its basically On The Road, but with Buddhism intertwined into the fabric of the plot, it is a great book nonetheless.
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Jan 25, 2009 00:14
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A Brief History of Time. I didn't have any serious trouble getting through it, and it's made me eager to read some more science stuff.
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Jan 25, 2009 00:33
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I just finished 'Dracula' by Bram Stoker and 'Unclean Spirits' by M.L.N. Hanover. They were both fairly good.
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Jan 25, 2009 17:20
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Just finished Eugene Onegin/Yevgeny Onegin/Евгений Онегин/whatever by Alexander Pushkin. I was completely and utterly blown away. I've read some Pushkin poetry before and liked it, but never any of his verse fiction. It was absolutely amazing and one of the best things I've read. I had the Falen translation and it was really good. I can't wait to read Queen of Spades now.
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Jan 25, 2009 19:22
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Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. I really liked this book from front to back, I don't really know how to describe it other than it's a crazy good book about a man remembering his life interacting with a family, and that it's definitely worth reading. Also it helped me get a question right on Jeopardy, so that was a bonus.
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Jan 26, 2009 01:05
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vegaji posted:Just finished Eugene Onegin/Yevgeny Onegin/Евгений Онегин/whatever by Alexander Pushkin. I was completely and utterly blown away. I've read some Pushkin poetry before and liked it, but never any of his verse fiction. It was absolutely amazing and one of the best things I've read. I had the Falen translation and it was really good. I can't wait to read Queen of Spades now. You should try to see the opera.
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Jan 26, 2009 04:46
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The Golden rear end by Apuleius. Proto-picaresque from the 2nd century AD, and interesting as one of the only surviving Roman novels to give a close look at how the very poor lived. Funny, historically interesting, and occasionally mystifying. Its a quick read and sheds a lot of light on a surprising amount of later works-- it's basically, as I understand it, the source of the Cupid and Psyche story as we know it, and was Keats' main source.
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Jan 26, 2009 14:40
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I just finished The Whole Truth by Balducci. Not a bad book by any means, the whole time I couldn't get Bourne out of my head while reading. Overall 8/10, book moves fast and has some twists unexpected but overall the premise is good and Balducci's books are spotty but this is one of his better ones.
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Jan 26, 2009 16:30
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Just reread 1984 by Orwell for the first time since highschool. The thing that I really noticed this time around that I missed out on the first time was how Winston really shot himself in the foot with his whole "welp, gonna get caught anyway". He really did stupid stupid things and put himself in serious danger by not being more careful simply because he thought it was inevitable to be caught.
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Jan 26, 2009 18:15
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Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. I absolutely loved his style and black humor. There were some very ominous truths on his take of a fully automated society. This was the first book I read by him, and I just started Slaughterhouse-Five.
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Jan 26, 2009 19:07
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A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz. I had stumbled on this book while blindly browsing the Borders website and bought it on a whim. I absolutely loved it. An epic story covering nearly half a century and two generations of dysfunction, the relationship between a father and a son are the heart of this novel. It is filled with mostly insane sometimes profound insights about growing up, making a mark in the world, and life in general. The book is hilarious all the way through with a lot of heart and some heartache. I really can't articulate how much I enjoyed this book. e: Also, while I think the plot is enjoyable, I think Toltz's writing is what made this book. The man is a gifted writer. Psmith fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Jan 26, 2009 |
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Jan 26, 2009 23:16
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The Killing of the Tinkers and The Magdalen Martyrs by Ken Bruen - Two more crime novels featuring his alcoholic PI Jack Taylor. Can't get enough of this guy's stuff: dark as hell but surprisingly funny. Fat White Vampire Blues by Andrew Fox - Picked this up on a recommendation from my brother. I'm not much for vampire fiction generally, but this was pretty entertaining and well-written with some interesting twists on the vampire mythos. Going to have to check out the sequel at some point. McMafia by Misha Glenny - Mentioned this in the true crime/mob book recommendation thread. Interesting look at how the collapse of the Soviet Union (and communism) and the rise of globalization paved the way for a huge amount of organized crime groups (Russian, Bulgarian, Indian, Nigerian, etc.) to branch out across the world and get involved in just about every business out there, legal or illegal.
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Jan 27, 2009 18:27
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The Mandingo posted:Just reread 1984 by Orwell for the first time since highschool. The thing that I really noticed this time around that I missed out on the first time was how Winston really shot himself in the foot with his whole "welp, gonna get caught anyway". He really did stupid stupid things and put himself in serious danger by not being more careful simply because he thought it was inevitable to be caught. I finished 1984 today, also for the first time since high school. Reading it nearly 20 years later, I was also struck by the fatalism of the whole thing. Winston (and Orwell) really had given up before it even started. I'm suffering from a serious hope deficit as a result. Also Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses, which was a quiet, introverted novel. It was a very gentle exploration of loneliness and memory.
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Jan 27, 2009 22:05
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boethius posted:I finished 1984 today, also for the first time since high school. Reading it nearly 20 years later, I was also struck by the fatalism of the whole thing. Winston (and Orwell) really had given up before it even started. I'm suffering from a serious hope deficit as a result. man, never read 1984 if you want any sort of hope or uplifting story. That book is still the most depressing thing I've ever read.
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Jan 27, 2009 22:20
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I just finished hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. I will go to Barnes & Noble to get Restaurant at the End of the Universe when I get the time.
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Jan 28, 2009 02:01
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Fartmaster posted:I just finished hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. I will go to Barnes & Noble to get Restaurant at the End of the Universe when I get the time. While your at it just big up one of the big compendiums, this way you won't have to buy them individually and you can just keep right on reading. They are pretty cheap these days five for one.
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Jan 28, 2009 02:20
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I've read some books over the past month. The first one I read was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. I loved Tipping Point and Blink, and I really liked this one as well, but it was probably my least favorite of the three. He really makes me think outside the box with his writing and his research, and I rethink a lot of common ideas when he mentions them. So this book was no different than the others in regards to that. My biggest issue with the book was that it was more anecdotal compared to the others. For some of the things he was trying to prove, there was less research than the other books. It was more of him saying something and having us read it and think of it as fact with nothing to back it up. I also thought the book could have been an article, rather than a full book. It was his shortest book already, and I think it was drawn out a bit. The second book I finished was Wages of Wins, which is a book analyzing some statistical stuff regarding sports. It was pretty fascinating, although some of the stuff I've seen about it make it seem like their research was a bit poor. It was above my level, so I couldn't analyze it like others could. I just took it for what it was and thought it was pretty neat. The third book I read in the past month was American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I really enjoyed it, although it was a little confusing at some times. It was a well written book and I am glad I finally read it. Next, I read A Clockwork Orange. I had tried to read it a few years ago, and couldn't get through the first part, as I hated Alex so much. But parts two and three were really good, and I'm glad I finally read this book. The last two chapters kinda confused me. How did he have a kid? Finally, my most recently finished book is Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. I know nothing about Indian culture, so this was a nice little crash course on it. Besides learning about things that I knew nothing about, I also really liked her style of writing. They were simple, to the point, and detailed, but the emotion expressed in each work could be felt so clearly. I really enjoyed it, and it worked quite well as a collection of short stories. None were alike, yet all were definite Lahiri works. I liked it.
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Jan 28, 2009 03:01
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Monster of Florence I would recommend this book to anyone who likes true life mystery's. About the killings in and around Florence that have spanned several decades.
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Jan 28, 2009 04:17
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Flaggy posted:While your at it just big up one of the big compendiums, this way you won't have to buy them individually and you can just keep right on reading. They are pretty cheap these days five for one. There's actually a really nice leatherbound edition you should see if you can find.
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Jan 28, 2009 04:19
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uggy posted:I've read some books over the past month. I'm reading this right now. My neuroscience professor bought it for me, I've only read the first chapter so far but yea, even that seemed really drawn out for what could have been summarized in one paragraph. I read a review of it (or maybe it was the back of the book) and it seems like they spoiled it and it's going to be pretty much him anecdotally defending all the things that it already told me were in the book.
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Jan 28, 2009 07:55
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