***Book Club***

[richwagmn]

Been hitting some "classics" this summer.

* A Tale of two Cities.
* The Great Gatsby.
* The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Also been reading some first hand accounts from the pacific campaign in WWII.

* With the Old Breed.
* Isles of the Damned.

Brutal and indescribable.

 

[The Howling Fantods]

Currently reading The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. It's about IRS agents - really boring, but then again, I think that's the point. But sometimes there's a sentence that just blows you away.

 

[42x16ss]

Just finished rereading a few modern classics:

*Trainspotting - I forgot just how heavy this book is! The film is almost light hearted comedy compared to this.

*Fight Club - Brilliant, the film just doesn't quite do the gradual separation of identity as well as the book.

*A Scanner Darkly - Trippy as hell. The paranoia scenes are just crazy. I've heard this has also been adapted into a film

 

[RedheadDane]

Finished reading People of The Lightning by Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear not too long ago (Part of their First Americans Series.

Plan on... eventually... reading Ken Follett's World Without End.

---

Saturday we were visiting some family and there I found a book with 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. I'd only read a fraction!

 

[Midnightfright]

Finished reading People of The Lightning by Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear not too long ago (Part of their First Americans Series.

Plan on... eventually... reading Ken Follett's World Without End.

---

Saturday we were visiting some family and there I found a book with 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. I'd only read a fraction!

In the UK about 2 years ago the BBC( I think) relased a 100 books to read before you die I had read 30 odd but some of them had no appeal to me but my friend is still churning there way through the list.

 

[krebs303]

The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes.
a strange tome this.

 

[RedheadDane]

In the UK about 2 years ago the BBC( I think) relased a 100 books to read before you die I had read 30 odd but some of them had no appeal to me but my friend is still churning there way through the list.

For me, reading through the 1001 list it was basically: Read this, read this, read part of this, might have read this (the titles were in Danish, I've read several books in English), read this by cheating (a prose version of the Illiad...) Don't wanna read this... or this...

 

[boomcie]

I've read quite a few books in my life and have recently finished a few as well, but unfortunately I seldom find a book that really impresses me.

These are my all-time favorites:


1. The Collector by John Fowles

This one really got to me. It blew me away in a way that I can hardly describe. I remember reading it with constant astonishment. This novel ingests your mind, sucks you into a different world than your own and confronts you with the sickness and depravity of humanity.

My whole sense of what is good literature, changed after reading it.



2. The Magus by John Fowles

When I had finished reading The Collector, I went looking for other books by mr. Fowles.
Only one of them appealed to me and that's The Magus. It proved to be one of the biggest masterpieces in modern literature.
This book is completely different from The Collector. It's a very mysterious novel. While reading it I never had the feeling that I was reading one of my favorite books. It was a good read, certainly, but it didn't exactly feel like The Collector for instance.
I never had any difficulties putting the book down, but as soon as I did put it down I wanted to pick it back up. It had completely engulfed my brain. The atmosphere in this book is unlike anything I’ve ever read. It is ominous, mysterious and fascinating.
When I had finally finished reading the book I thought to myself: that wasn’t half bad. Then I put it back on the shelf and went on with whatever I was doing at the time. What I discovered in the days after reading it, was that, while it wasn’t the greatest read I had ever had, it was the most rewarding. This book has left an indelible impression on me. It is the favorite book of my dad and my brother as well.


3 The World According to Garp by John Irving

I’m not going to spend as much time describing my experiences with this book, but it’s totally brilliant. It’s funny, it’s absurd, it’s original and it’s a great read!

 

[LeakyBoat]

I noticed that fatandfast recommends a biography of J Robert Oppenheimer and a biography of Audubon by Richard Rhodes. I'd like to link the two by recommending "A History of the Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes.

Also, I'm currently reading "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov, one of the best books I've ever read.

 

[Swede1]

Yeah i read almost all his books as well not normally my genre at all. I think if u like feists books u should give Robert Hobb, George RR Martin and brandon sanderson.

I've read Martin already, but ill definietly try sanderson and robert hobb!

 

[RedheadDane]

Just read Jules Verne's Journey to The Centre of The Earth. In English, not in French because I can't... Pretty weird and rather funny how they talk "Danish" several times (except it's more like Swedish or something...)

 

[krebs303]

"The Accountant" by Roberto Escobar

The most amazing thing I read was the spending of $2500 a month for rubber bands to bundle their money

 

[Tank Engine]

Mmm... Glad I found this thread. There's a lot of stuff I love here and some I need to look up.

Here's a couple of authors who don't seem to have been mentioned

Coetzee - I particularly like Waiting for the Barbarians. Simple, hard hitting prose.

Mario Vargas Llosa - Gives a real view into the history and mentality of South America and a very varied writer. The War at the End of the World - an epic, historical novel.
Captain Pantoja and the Secret Service - Absolutely hilarious.
The Storyteller - On the disappearing culture of the people of the Amazon jungle.
In praise of the stepmother - Playful, erotic.
Looking forward to the English language version of The Dream of the Celt, which is about Roger Casement who was an Irishman who was a UK diplomat in Africa and South America before the first world war and became an Irish freedom fighter, but met a grizzly, controversial end.

 

[Thomsena]

Just finished Brave New World. Definitely worth a read.

 

[richwagmn]

Just read this: http://www.amazon.com/Boomerang-Travels-New-Third-World/dp/0393081818/ref=pd_sim_b_3

He ties the financial collapse in several countries to "national" character/societal flaws. Not sure I buy all of it, but the chapters on Ireland, Greece and Germany were pretty interesting to me.

 

[Cobblestoned]

So they are now selling digital wiki-articles as a book ?
That will make nature happy.

 

[Father Jack]

Just finished reading The Book of Human Skin by Michelle Lovric - definitely worth a read. It takes a little while to get into but stick with it - it's great. Very dark, written in five or six different voices each in its own font and it all fits together at the end. Set in18th century Venice with great historical detail. I read lots of varied books and this is one of the best in a long while.

 

[AngusW]

"Bel Canto" (sorry can't remember the author's name) which is about a hostage taking in an ambassador's residence in a South American country.

If you like historical novels, then a couple of favourites of mine are:

I, Claudius
Claudius the God

By Robert Graves

 

[More Strides than Rides]

I've done a lot of reading lately, but not books end to end. A lot of Education and ESL book chapters and articles I'm reading for school. Really though, I just came back to post this

 

[Duartista]

Mmm... Glad I found this thread. There's a lot of stuff I love here and some I need to look up.

Here's a couple of authors who don't seem to have been mentioned

Coetzee - I particularly like Waiting for the Barbarians. Simple, hard hitting prose.

Mario Vargas Llosa - Gives a real view into the history and mentality of South America and a very varied writer. The War at the End of the World - an epic, historical novel.
Captain Pantoja and the Secret Service - Absolutely hilarious.
The Storyteller - On the disappearing culture of the people of the Amazon jungle.
In praise of the stepmother - Playful, erotic.
Looking forward to the English language version of The Dream of the Celt, which is about Roger Casement who was an Irishman who was a UK diplomat in Africa and South America before the first world war and became an Irish freedom fighter, but met a grizzly, controversial end.

Sounds like it could be interesting. Casement featured quite prominently in a book I read last year called 'King Leopold's Ghost', on the Belgian Congo. Casement played a major role in exposing the abuses of Leopold's regime.

 

[fedaia]

i've been reading 'The Accelerating Universe' by Mario Livio,
an astrophysicist who claims that a theory, or a formula, idea, has to be beautiful (symmetric, ..) to be fundamental.
nice reading about the interrelation of science, arts, literature and music.
i'm not a scientist, so i'd like to ask the scientists around here
if they'd agree that formulas have to be beautiful to be true

 

[Tank Engine]

i've been reading 'The Accelerating Universe' by Mario Livio,
an astrophysicist who claims that a theory, or a formula, idea, has to be beautiful (symmetric, ..) to be fundamental.
nice reading about the interrelation of science, arts, literature and music.
i'm not a scientist, so i'd like to ask the scientists around here
if they'd agree that formulas have to be beautiful to be true

Sounds interesting. I read (quite a long time ago now) Godel, Eschel, Bach which made comparisons between the theory of logic developed by Godel, the perception boggling pictures of Eschel and the music of J. S. Bach.

Does a formula have to be beautiful to be true? Indeed, the laws of physics often show elegance in their simplicity (e.g. gravity, Einstein's famous equation). Nature is intertwined with mathematics (the number of petals on a flower seems to always be from the Fibonacci sequence 1,1,2,3,5,8,13...), pi turns up surprisingly often. On the other hand, it is also a result of human nature. We wish to understand the world and when we can describe and understand how something works, then it is natural for us to think "Wow, that's neat".

 

[The Hitch]

Tom my man, you can read Polish right?

 

[Tank Engine]

Tom my man, you can read Polish right?

Tak jest.

I'd thought of recommending Polish authors, but the problem is that there are certain Polish authors that I wouldn't dream of reading in English (Dukaj and Lem due to their word play, apart from the fact that I don't think Dukaj has been translated. Hlasko due to the atmosphere) For English readers, I would recommend Solaris - Lem, the psychology is more important than the language. I'm not sure how well anyone could translate Bajki Robotow (Fables for the Cybernetic Age)

Have you got any recommendations?

 

[elapid]

I read two books recently that were very interesting:

"Empire of the Beetle" which was about pine beetle destruction of pines in western Canada and USA and the reasons behind this destruction and its unprecedented spread, principally poor forest and fire management policies dating back decades in combination with global warming.

"The Tall Man" which was about the death of an aboriginal man in custody on Palm Island in Australia. Side topics included the conditions that aboriginal people live, the loss of their traditions and land, and the difference in justice for aboriginals and white people in Australia. Fascinating and thought-provoking read which I am sure is just as applicable for any country wrestling with their relations with their indiginous people.