What are you reading?

[Alex]

@Nullifidian

Your LibriVox link doesn't work (post #1947).

[Crumb]

Am I the only one who can't access their site right now? http://librivox.org/

ETA: Guess not...

[Nullifidian]

I know. It's some sort of server-wide problem, I think. I hope the audio files are safe. Although LVers get all their finished work put up on the Internet Archive, all the works in progress are maintained on LibriVox's own servers.

However, if you'd like to browse the finished LibriVox collection, you can just go to the Internet Archive's site here:

Internet Archive: Free Downloads: LibriVox

[Crumb]

Well hopefully recorders keep their own files on their computers until they are done.

[Nullifidian]

I keep mine on flash drives so that I don't have them cluttering up my home computer (and so that I can record and edit on my laptop at school ), but I'm not sure if everyone does.

[The Man]

I am reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson at the moment. Thus far (sixty-four pages, to be exact), I'm impressed.

Before that I read the third Dresden Files novel (Grave Peril by Jim Butcher). Good stuff; I'll probably continue the series after I finish some of the other books I've bought and not finished.

[wildernesse]

Just finished: The Mystic Arts of Erasing all Signs of Death by Charlie Huston. It was pretty hilarious and profane and disgusting.

I'll probably read more of his books.

[Jerome]

Just finished:

[Nullifidian]

So did you read The Outsider because it was on George W. Bush's alleged reading list or because you felt a certain amount of sympathy for a man who kills an Arab for no reason?

-------------------------

I finished Master and Commander (and I'll talk more about this in the Aubrey-Maturin series thread). I also managed to make my MP3 player work, so I finished listening to Persuasion, which completely charmed me. I also made serious inroads into Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, which I picked up in audiobook form from my local public library. It was a long drive up to Santa Monica yesterday.

While I was also at the library, I picked up Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast and Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire. I will be starting these soon, along with one of the novels I've recently bought: Percival Everett's Erasure, Eric Miles Williamson's Welcome to Oakland, and Nathan Singer's In the Light of You (which hasn't arrived yet).

I also ordered Lily Hoang's Parabola, but the seller I ordered it from canceled without an explanation. I can only presume that this was a used bookstore and somebody bought their copy before they could send it to me. I couldn't find another copy at the same price, so I ordered Glyn Williams' The Prize of All the Oceans: Anson's Voyage Around the World, which also hasn't arrived yet.

[Qingdai]

I'm reading Miranda July "No one here belongs more than you" the second story made me laugh like a lesbian reading Wael's book.

[Jerome]

George bush is a dick-head.


The book was recommended to me by a Phd. Have you read it?

[Jerome]

Nullifidian, that link is funny and well done.

[Gonzo]

He killed the Arab because it was hot outside.

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by JEROME DA GNOME

The book was recommended to me by a Phd. Have you read it?

Yes, I read it (along with The Plague, The Fall, and Caligula and Three Other Plays, all of which I enjoyed and would recommend) on my own when I was in high school. This seems to be a way a lot of people first encounter Camus. I've met many people who first read him in high school and none of them ever had his works as assigned texts.

[Watser?]

Same here, read them a long time ago.

Speaking about colonial settings, I am now reading Don't let's go to the dogs tonight, an African childhood, by Alexandra Fuller. She grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Zambia and Malawi. Her parents were fairly racist I'd say and she doesn't spare them, but the book is pretty light in tone.

[Caligulette]

Originally Posted by Nullifidian

Yes, I read it (along with The Plague, The Fall, and Caligula and Three Other Plays, all of which I enjoyed and would recommend) on my own when I was in high school. This seems to be a way a lot of people first encounter Camus. I've met many people who first read him in high school and none of them ever had his works as assigned texts.

I read him at about the same time - But my Camus list is: The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, Neither Victims Nor Executioners (with which I would have liked to agree, but am not a pacifist, so....).

I thought he killed the guy because The Cure told him to.

[Sock Puppet]

Originally Posted by Nullifidian

Yes, I read it (along with The Plague, The Fall, and Caligula and Three Other Plays, all of which I enjoyed and would recommend) on my own when I was in high school. This seems to be a way a lot of people first encounter Camus. I've met many people who first read him in high school and none of them ever had his works as assigned texts.

My AP English teacher assigned The Stranger during my junior year of high school.

In fairness, though, that teacher was exceptionally cool.

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Sock Puppet

My AP English teacher assigned The Stranger during my junior year of high school.

In fairness, though, that teacher was exceptionally cool.

That's weird. I thought that 11th grade was the default grade for American Literature. I know I didn't take AP English until my senior year.

Why do you hate America, Sock Puppet?

Anyway, Camus wasn't assigned in AP English. Instead, I remember we read The Brothers Karamazov, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Things Fall Apart, Hamlet, and a few others that I cannot recall. One of them was something I'd already read, so I read The Handmaid's Tale as a substitute. I did that sometimes when I was familiar with a work, although sometimes I kept mum about it if I wanted to read the work again. That's how it happened with Hamlet. The first Shakespeare I ever saw was an uncut performance of Hamlet when I was 10, then I saw Branagh's complete version in the movie theatre and bought the VHS recording, so I was pretty well-versed in Hamlet when we got around to it my senior year.

Then when it came time to do my AP English essay, I didn't write about any of the assigned works I read in high school. I wrote about Miguel Ángel Asturias' El Señor Presidente and got a 5 out of 5. The offbeat choice probably helped, since I imagine the professors who grade these essays get sick of reading about Hester Prynne and Charles Darnay. It certainly helped me by not obliging me to find something new to say about them.

[Demimonde]

We read Camus in highschool, and as it had to be the cool teacher I had, it must have been freshman year.

[Sock Puppet]

Now that I think of it, it was senior year. But we didn't have a whole year of Am Lit; we had to take an elective English class as juniors. I took Advanced Composition, I believe. We had AP English for the other three years. But yeah, aside from the AP test prep, our teacher (the same for all 3 years of AP English) spent the entire senior year assigning controversial books. Candide, Native Son, yadda yadda.

[Nullifidian]

My high school English teacher was like that too, except her controversial literature was stuff like Ellison's Invisible Man in Am Lit. Also, when she taught a world religions section of 10th grade English, she gave us selections from Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth so that the atheists were represented too.

I liked the selections so much that I went out and bought the book. I did the same thing that year with Boccaccio's Decameron, when I went to the now-defunct Blue Door Bookstore for the complete Norton edition of Burgess' A Clockwork Orange (they were the only bookstore in all of San Diego that was carrying that edition).

[Ymir's blood]

Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe. I read the play this afternoon, but haven't finished the book - the other half being commentary and whatnot.

I loved this line:

MEPHIST. Within the bowels of these elements,
Where we are tortur'd and remain for ever:
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be:

[Demimonde]

I love Faustus I remember in HS a classmate did a senior directed production, all of the cast was fantastic, with the exception of the Doctor who couldn't remember his lines. I will never forget his scene with Helen of Troy at the end of the play.

"Is this the face that lunched a thousand sheeps and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"



I also have been trying to get someone to tatoo Homo fuge on their arm for years with no takers. I think it would be an awesome tat.

[ShottleBop]

Essential Diabetes Leadership, by Laurence D. Chalem

[Lauri D]

Just finished "Big Machine" by Victor LaValle (nonfiction/novel). It was good, although I have a problem with getting really near to the end of a book and losing interest if it's not super-compelling. I forced myself this time to read all of it. It was worth it, but there seems to be a virus among writers where they get really rushed near the end and it doesn't have the same quality as the preceding 3/4 of the book.