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The BOOK Thread

I need a book, looking over all your posts here. None is tickling my fancy. Into Thin Air is probably the closest one.

I'm into non fiction. My fiction days are over.
 
Cire 5th said:
I'm into non fiction. My fiction days are over.
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I felt like exactly like that years ago, until a friend got me to read Little, Big by John Crowley.

If you're digging the slow, tedious detail typical of non fiction, then you'll be able to penetrate the slow start of Little, Big. Then you'll enjoy a complex, challenging story with some of the most beautiful prose that has ever been put to paper.

Little, Big got me back into fiction, but unfortunately I haven't appreciated anything nearly as much, with the possible exception of The Windup Girl.
 
CoorsLight said:
I felt like exactly like that years ago, until a friend got me to read Little, Big by John Crowley.

If you're digging the slow, tedious detail typical of non fiction, then you'll be able to penetrate the slow start of Little, Big. Then you'll enjoy a complex, challenging story with some of the most beautiful prose that has ever been put to paper.

Little, Big got me back into fiction, but unfortunately I haven't appreciated anything nearly as much, with the possible exception of The Windup Girl.
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hey! :mad




:laughing
 
Lol it's ok. Just fucking with you.

I tend to read non fiction as well. Whenever I read fiction, it tends to be for artistic style and/or inspiration. Other times its for the philosophical ideas expressed, or th e literary theory stuff. I wrote a separate book that was very much experimenting with a surrealistic style and I read a lot of fiction as inspiration and style tweaking. Otherwise I'm a non fiction guy myself. I'm currently reading Wittgenstein: duty of a genius. It's a biography of Wittgenstein that has great reviews. My hope is that finishing it will give me a better idea of how to read and understand "philosophical investigations"
 
Just finished the second book of the His Dark Materials trilogy. Very entertaining so far.
 

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Hey! I picked that series up and still have not cracked them open. I thought you didn't like woo-woo stuff? ;)
We can compare notes in a week or two. :happygurlishappy
 
Just read Abarat (Clive Barker), Friday (Robert A. Heinlein), and A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula K. Le Guin). Reading Ready Player One (Ernest Cline) now and then have to work through The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern) and The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde). All for my English class this semester. Should be an easy A, we have to read all 6 for class discussions but only write papers on our choice of 3 of them. There's deadlines though - there's 6 essays spread out over every few weeks and you have to pick 3, no extra credit for writing on all 6. Since I get to pick which 3 to write on I figured I'd read em all early on while the rest of my workload's relatively light, figure out which ones to write about, knock it out and have no homework for that class for the remainder of the semester.
 
HeavenzJai said:
just finished Ready Player One. I really enjoyed it.
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Lol, nice. I saw an interview with the author this morning on x-play. Interesting, not into sci fiction books anymore. In my youth i was heavy into gaming. I might take a look into this.
 
Cire 5th said:
Lol, nice. I saw an interview with the author this morning on x-play. Interesting, not into sci fiction books anymore. In my youth i was heavy into gaming. I might take a look into this.
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Wil Wheaton does a GREAT job on the audio book. The part on monty python is hilarious !
If you were into gaming and everything else in the 80's, you'll enjoy the book.
 
I've been reading a fair fuckton of books since I've been laid up, and shoulda been posting in this thread. Total mix of fiction and non-fiction, basically whatever folks send me, I get as a free ebook, or what friends bring by.

Highlights lately: They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War by DeAnn Blanton and Lauren Cook kinda blew my mind. The writing isn't spectacular and the organization could be better (I'd rather each documented person's life was followed longitudinally rather than snippets broken out by phase of the war). Still, the subject matter is amazing; the authors are military historians who used newspapers, reports, letters, legal decisions, and the National Archives to definitively document the participation of HUNDREDS of women, in disguise, in the American Civil War. And those are just the ones who got caught... Also detailed how the information was later covered up when the idea of women in combat became more unpopular. I was especially intrigued by folks like Albert Cashier, who had been Jennie Hodges, but went in as a soldier, fought the whole war through, and then decided to live as a guy for the rest of his/her life--with the support of all the old comrades in the unit. One of those books that turns what you think you know on its head.

Also loved One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey by Richard Proenneke and Sam Keith. I saw this guy's films when I was up in Alaska, and Proenneke was amazing--an early sort of applied conservationist, he'd worked for years as a diesel mechanic, then retired and built himself a cabin on the shores of Twin Lakes in Alaska. With friggin' hand tools. Chopped down every tree himself, and did a brilliant craftsman's job of it--he proceeded to live there for the next 30 years, in fact. His diaries are pretty simple, but he's obviously a true man of the wilderness and an amazing craftsman. I'd love to do half of what he did out there in the Great North.

Also reading, much more slowly, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. James is quite a stylish rhetoritician, and is surprisingly tolerant and humanist for a Victorian dude. It's an interesting book, written in a time period that bridges the gap between comparative religions, psychology, and theology. Why and how the hell people might do this religion thing is the subject of his investigation, mostly christian of course, but pretty fascinating even if you aren't religious (I sure as hell am not). He does a good job of using religion simply as a lens to look hard at human nature.
 
Climbing Free: My Life in the Vertical World by Lynn Hill and Greg Child is pretty amazing.
Nutz too. And true.
 
I saw Fawzia Koofi on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart". She is pretty amazing.

I just finished her book "The Favored Daughter". Incredible.

It should be required reading in our schools. It kinda explains how much of the world works, and what has to happen for people to have freedom and justice.

Unfortunately, most humans are selfish assholes, so most won't get freedom and justice.

We live like kings. This book is a reminder of that. Get your kids to read this.

http://www.fawziakoofi.org/
 
Brown81 said:
If you liked Into Thin Air you must also read:

Touching the Void
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The ultimate is "Anapurna"... First 8000 meter peak summited. Ed Visteurs actually recommended it to me in an email exchange.
 
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