What are you reading?

[KarateMonkey]

Is anybody else out there always looking for something new and interesting to read. What are you working on now? What have you finished recently? What are some of you favorites?

I just started Living with the Dead by Kelly Armstrong. If you enjoy fantasy set in the modern world it's the most recent book in a decent series. I'll be honest the first couple books were very good, but it's fallen off since then. At this point, I don't know if I'd keep buying the books if the first one wasn't partially responsible for my wife and I meeting.

I recently finished and absolutely loved Replay by Ken Grimwood and Prisoner of Birth by Jeffrey Archer on audio book. Replay is about a guy who dies in 1988 and wakes in 1963 as himself at 18 years old. Prisoner of Birth is a modern retelling of the Count of Monte Cristo. If you can find an unabridged version on audio book, the reader is great.

Another recent discovery that I devoured was the Joe Pitt series by Charlie Huston. This is primarily a noir series that just happens to feature vampires. I listened to the first two on audio book, and again the reader on these is excellent.

One more, since I feel like I should include some non-fiction as well. Rapture Ready by Daniel Radosh is a fascinating trip through Christian Pop culture.

[GodlessHeathen]

I'm just starting Huxley's Brave New World. The edition I have has a (quite verbose) foreword by Christopher Hitchens, and it's taken me about a day to get through it.

Before that, I finished Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. It's a depressing book, but good nonetheless.

[ubs]

GodlessHeathen wrote

I'm just starting Huxley's Brave New World.

I heard they're remaking the movie.

[Tenspace]

I read like some people do anal.... a lot.

Right now, i just finished Rushdie's "Midnight's Children", as well as the first two books of Pratchett's Discworld series. My main reads are Gleick's "Chaos", Barbour's "The End of Time", as well as two very thick college textbooks on molecular biology. On deck is Deutsch's "Fabric of Reality", though I will probably skim it; I've already read it a few times.

Come March is the US release of Peter F Hamilton's next book in his Void series, The Temporal Void. I have been debating whether to pick up his book, Misspent Youth.

[KarateMonkey]

Tenspace wrote

...as well as the first two books of Pratchett's Discworld series.

What did you think of them? I read Good Omens, the book he wrote with Neil Gaiman some time back and liked it alot, but I've been too intimdated by the sheer number of Discworld books to start the series.

[Tenspace]

KarateMonkey wrote

What did you think of them? I read Good Omens, the book he wrote with Neil Gaiman some time back and liked it alot, but I've been too intimdated by the sheer number of Discworld books to start the series.

Good Omens was great.. it was the first Pratchett I had read. I really like the Discworld series; Pratchett's humor fits fantasy well. C'mon, you've got a world on the backs of elephants on the back of a galactic turtle; a bumbling wizard; Luggage, a chest that never gets lost, an inept tourist, heroes like Cohen the Barbarian.... man, I gotta go pick up the third book.

I loved Brave New World! Right now I've got tons of stuff to read for school (Classic & Contemporary lit. and Philosophy of Language) which is fine because I'm waiting for Gregory Maguire's "A Lion Among Men" to come out in paperback. The last non-fiction I read was "The Lemon Tree," which was really interesting for anyone interested in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

[Professor Chaos]

I just read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I think somebody here suggested it, if I remember correctly. Great little novel.

[calpurnpiso]

I am reading & studying The Bello Gallico ( translation by Hammond). The Civil War by the God Iulius Caesar Christ with Excellent NEW translation by John Carter. I'm comparing this to Civil War by Lucan ( we must realize Lucan lived during Nero which makes his understanding of the Civil War that occurred 100 years before questionable but this example is excellent material for understanding the mind of those ancient folks in such a vast empire & their understanding/ interpretation of previous events. All under the umbrella of religious beliefs. It is fascinating & illuminating.

Another book is Nature of the Gods by the Stoic Cicero a contemporary of God Caesar Christ. Every atheist must read this to understand the type of seed that was planted before Caesar was killed, then a new plants were grafted to it & fertilized by Constantinus I 350 year later forming a new type of Tree. E pluribus unum. Out of many ( beliefs) one. The tree of intolerance emerged. This is Christianity.

[psychodiva]

still studying- Seminars in the Psychotherapies by Naismith & grant. Understanding Attachment Disorders - Prior & Glaser. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - Campling and Sharpe, CFS and its syndromes- Wesseley, Hotopf, Sharpe.

One day I will read a novel again

[Waddlie]

[psychodiva]

yeah thats a good one- found some of them a bit unreadable- mainly the older ones but after trying to read the original Vanity Fair it wasn't so bad

still think its not very portable tho

I just started Why I Became an Atheist, by John Loftus.

He is a former preacher turned atheist. It seems pretty good thus far.

[Philboid Studge]

I like to keep about three books going at once. At the moment I'm working on Consilience by E.O. Wilson:

Outside our heads there is freestanding reality. Only madmen and a scattering of constructivist philosophers doubt its existence. Inside our heads is a reconstitution of reality based on sensory input and the self-assembly of concepts. Input and self-assembly, rather than an independent entity in the brain - the "ghost in the machine" in the philosopher Gilbert Ryle's famous derogation - constitute the mind. The alignment of outer existence with its inner representation has been distorted by the idiosyncrasies of human evolution, as I noted earlier. That is, natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the misalignment. The effort to do so has only begun. No one should suppose that objective truth is impossible to attain, even when the most committed philosophers urge us to acknowledge that incapacity. In particular it is too early for scientists, the foot soldiers of epistemology, to yield ground so vital to their mission

And in the porcelain library I've got Cradle to Cradle, a must-read for serious, reality-based tree-huggers:

This book is not a tree.

It is printed on a synthetic "paper" and bound into a book format developed by innovative book packager Charles Melcher of Melcher Media. Unlike the paper with which we are familiar, it does not use any wood pulp or cotton fiber but is made from plastic resins and inorganic fillers. This material is not only waterproof, extremely durable, and (in many localities) recyclable by conventional means; it is also a prototype for the book as a "technical nutrient," that is, as a product that can be broken down and circulated infinitely in industrial cycles made and remade as "paper" or other products.

And on the iBrain I'm reading Origin of Species. Longtime listener, first time reader. (The mobile app 'Stanza' is the most excellent thing to ever mate with an iPhone.)


[Godless H, I just ordered Shock Doctrine from library.]

[psychodiva]

just doing some research on Narcissistic Personality Disorder and came accross this- interesting read - for those of you who haven't already found it

Addicted to Hate