What are you reading?

[Qingdai]

I'm reading "The end of overeating" by David Kessler.

Like most non-fiction books, even though I'm interested in reading the subject, I find that there is too much time explaining, and explaining fairly (to me) obvious things.
Parenting books are the worse, it frequently feels like they are trying to puff up what could be a short and concise book.

[freemonkey]

The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It

It's very interesting!

[SharonDee]

God, how can you people stand nonfiction?!

(I've asked this before so treat it as a rhetorical question. It's just something I'll never understand, I suppose.)

Having finished Streets of Laredo, I'm reading a Kindle Freebie called Already Dead: A Novel. It's been a wonderful help with my insomnia.

[livius drusus]

The Count of Monte Cristo, the hugely complicated and long unabridged version. I'm 300 pages in and I heart the shit out of it. Anybody who doesn't like Dumas is a butt, as far as I'm concerned, because that brother could write an adventure story like nobody's bidness.

[freemonkey]

Originally Posted by livius drusus

The Count of Monte Cristo, the hugely complicated and long unabridged version. I'm 300 pages in and I heart the shit out of it. Anybody who doesn't like Dumas is a butt, as far as I'm concerned, because that brother could write an adventure story like nobody's bidness.

that is sitting on my bookshelf and I keep looking at it. But it's so fucking huge, I'm askeert of it.

[Watser?]

There was a murder in this town a few years ago, a guy that I knew but not very well (he was very well-known in this town) was shot down in the street. Everyone thought it was a political murder: he was active in the squatter/anarchist movement and in a group that handled complaints against the police. The only lead the police had for about a year or so were a few emails under the name of Edmond Dantes. It turned out that this guy though the victim had wronged him and had borne a grudge for years. He was later arrested in Spain on some other charges and confessed.

So now the book/movie is ruined for me, all I think about when I hear the name is that murder.

[Doctor X]

Originally Posted by Prince Vegita

Read the next 5 books two or three times and you'll really appreciate them. Avoid any of KJ Anderson's follow-up abortions.

"Duncan Idaho" and a cult dedicated to Ben Gazzara sort of killed it for me.

That and it being overwrought self-indulgent Heinlein-at-His-Worse-but-without-Enough-Boobs waste of a small forest.

--J.D.

[livius drusus]

Originally Posted by freemonkey

that is sitting on my bookshelf and I keep looking at it. But it's so fucking huge, I'm askeert of it.

Don't be skeert! Think of it as a bedside book, something to pick up and read nightly for the indefinite future. That way it's enormous girth is an advantage because you don't have to look for anything new anytime soon, and it's not intimidating because the whole plan is have something to read forever.

[Nightson]

The translation is very important when dealing with classics originally written in another language. With the right translation the books are accessible and a fun read.

[Lauri D]

RAYMOND CARVER; A Writer's Life, and unfortunately I cannot credit the author because the name is obscured by the library sticker.

[Doctor X]

Carol Sklenicka

Noblesse oblige

--J.D.

[Waluigi]

I just finished Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story by Chuck Klosterman, which magically appeared on my Kindle free of charge when I bought one of his other books. It was entertaining.

This morning, I picked up The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and how to do them) by Peter Sagal of "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" fame.

I have two more holds that are making their way through the library loan system: The sweetness at the bottom of the pie by Alan Bradley and Children's Literature: A Reader's History, from Aesop to Harry Potter by Seth Lerer.

[viscousmemories]

I found a free "Classics" app for the iPhone, so I've begun reading Alice in Wonderland for the first time. Hilarious.

[ceptimus]

Originally Posted by livius drusus

Don't be skeert! Think of it as a bedside book, something to pick up and read nightly for the indefinite future. That way it's enormous girth is an advantage because you don't have to look for anything new anytime soon, and it's not intimidating because the whole plan is have something to read forever.

The first quarter of it is very good (IMO) but then there are some quite long sections that are best skimmed through. Just because a book starts off good, it doesn't mean that you have to battle through to the end if and when it becomes boring.

[Garnet]

I have quite a bit of down time at work right now and I need to be careful about how much time I spend online while I'm in the office. Someone here (sorry, I can't remember who) turned me of to free e-books. I've discovered that all the Oz books can be found online and can be down loaded.

I just finished Ozma of Oz today and started on Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz.

[Gonzo]

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

Oscar Wilde

[Nullifidian]

I started and finished up reading Best Russian Short Stories while I was sick (Gutenberg text here and Google Books scan here). During my enforced absence from LibriVox, I decided that I was going to find a new project for LV, and this one is quite wonderful. All the translations seem excellent for their age, and I love the fact that this anthology encompasses lesser-known Russian writers along with their more famous contemporaries. In fact, I found it by looking for a lesser-known Russian writer named Aleksandr Kuprin. I'm not reading the story by Kuprin for LV, but I am reading "The Queen of Spades" by Aleksandr Pushkin and "The Revolutionist" by Mikhail Artsybashev.

I also started listening to the LV recording of Walden by Henry David Thoreau. I have it in book form, in a couple of editions, but I thought it would be nice to listen to the audiobook version while I take the bus, go to the gym, or go out walking. Ever since getting my MP3 player, I've found that walking while listening to it is far more satisfactory than reading while I walk.

In the world of physical books, I'm reading Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana and The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson, which is the second book in the "Blowback Trilogy". I've only read the first (and even have it signed—Johnson lives in San Diego and occasionally gives readings), so it's nice to see the development of the argument he established in Blowback.

I'm also reading a great novel called Erasure by Percival Everett. It is a hilarious satire of the publishing industry and its insistence that its writers be "Black enough" and produce works out of the "authentic" Black experience. At the same time it's also a satire on the university system, specifically the domination of poststructuralism in the humanities and the jealousy and competition among the academic literary set, and a moving family drama. This is a real seven-layer cake of a novel.

The central "set piece" is a novel-within-a-novel written in response to a bestselling piece of blaxploitation fiction called We's Lives in da Ghetto by Juanita Mae Jenkins. The narrator of the book, a Black professor of English who grew up in upper-middle class circumstances in Annapolis, is furious when he finds out that Juanita Mae Jenkins is an Oberlin-educated woman who grew up in similarly privileged circumstances and only wrote this novel after a brief stay with some family in Harlem.

Bitter and broke, he fires back with My Pafology, which is later simply named Fuck just to drive his publishers crazy, a dead-on parody of Richard Wright's Native Son, which Everett seems to regard as the progenitor of the blaxploitation fiction genre. It's ridiculously over-the-top with an 18 year-old narrator named Van Go Jenkins who has already, in his young life, fathered four children by four different mothers. He has three daughters, Aspireene, Tylenola, Dexatrina, and a boy, Rexall. The book is published under the assumed identity (it goes farther than a mere pseudonym) of Stagg R. Leigh.

Anyway, despite the clear indications of parody, this is picked up and treated as representing the authentic Black experience, becomes a smash success, and the protagonist is faced with the choice of accepting the fame, the money, and being Stagg R. Leigh for public consumption (nobody knows that he's actually a reasonably well-off English professor) or revealing the sham, a decision made more difficult by his mother's worsening Alzheimer's.

[Lauri D]

"Thank You For Smoking" - Christopher Buckley. Lovely satire. I saw the film when if first came out and enjoyed it greatly, but must say that the book is better, as is often the case.

[Qingdai]

I finally got a copy of "Idiot America" from the library.

I will commence reading.

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Qingdai

I finally got a copy of "Idiot America" from the library.

I will commence reading.

While searching around the net for "Idiot America" I came across this video clip from 2009 of Charles Pierce on some MSNBC show with David Shuster.

Shuster wanted to play a game of "lookit the wingnut!" but Pierce wasn't having it. He wanted to turn the discussion around to the subject of why the media was too cowardly to call political bullshit what it is. I loved the point he made that Lynne Cheney thinks she can get away with this because it worked before with the active collaboration of the mass media, which sent Shuster into a rage.

I don't know how anyone can watch political commentary shows on cable. If I were ever invited on one of these things, I'd take a fucking coach's whistle with me.

[Sock Puppet]

A friend of mine just finished and recommended The Sea Wolf by Jack London. I'd never read it because I was never impressed with Call of the Wild or White Fang, which I'd read as a kid. But apparently, London considered this novel his "refutation" of Nietzsche, or at least of Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch. I decided I needed to check that out.

I downloaded the LibriVox recording, but to my disappointment, the guy reading it sounds about 150 years old and mispronounces way too many words (starting with LibriVox, ffs). To make it worse, I've flipped around several chapters and he seems to have done the whole damned book. I'll tough it out for awhile, though. It is in fact more well-written than I remember London's other works.

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Sock Puppet

mispronounces way too many words (starting with LibriVox, ffs).

So how do you think that it should be pronounced? I will say that there is no official consensus on the pronunciation of LibriVox. Most recordings fall into two camps: those that pronounce librivox with a long i and those with a short i. I'm a member of the short i camp, since I think of it as just another English word, like "liberty". The camp of the long i, I presume, are looking at it through its Latin root, where "liber" would be pronounced "lEEber", or they have a native language where the i's are long in general.

The problem of mispronunciation as well as uncommon pronunciation does seem one that plagues all audiobooks. For example, when I listened to Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory by Edward Larson, read by John McDonough, he pronounced "epoch" as if it were "epic". It's an admissible but uncommon pronunciation, and it always threw me since I'm so used to the more common way of saying the word. Larson liked the word "epoch".

But if you end up liking the story while really disliking the recording, you can always submit a second version to LV. They welcome multiple versions of recordings. If I take a dislike to it, then I might end up recording my own version too, as The Sea Wolf was one of my favorite books from my childhood.

Though if I were to redo a book already read for LV, I'd be more inclined to do something about the readings of Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread and Mutual Aid. They're not terrible per se, but the reader has such a thick, nonnative accent that it becomes very difficult to follow his reading, even with the words in front of me, which defeats the purpose of having an audiobook.

[Sock Puppet]

I admit I don't know how LibriVox should be pronounced, but this is the first reader I've heard pronounce it with a long i. So he's wrong based on my fearless appeal to popularity.

But yeah, it's difficult to get through a recording of a man's terrifying brush with death on the high seas that's told in a bored monotone by someone who, e.g., doesn't know that "deprecating" and "depreciating" are different words. As for the monotone, while I don't want Shatneresque histrionics, a level of enthusiasm somewhat above that of a corpse would be nice. He seems to be getting a little warmer as the recording goes on, though.

I definitely would like to redo this one, or do something else for LV (I have a buttery, sexy voice after all), but I can't imagine having the time to do it without interruption. If I still had an office with real walls, I'd probably do it at work.

[Nullifidian]

That's what they make free audio editors for.

I have a problem that's been with me ever since I started hitting puberty, which is the size of my tongue. I only have the clear diction that I do—tending toward the overprecise—because I sat down almost two decades ago with a copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse and drilled myself all summer vacation. I'd tape record the results, and if I couldn't understand what I heard, I'd go back and read the same thing again as many times as necessary.

Anyway, when I record more than ten minutes at a time, I start to get tired and lose control a bit, slurring my words along the way. Therefore, I always give myself frequent breaks and pick it up later, editing out the pauses between.

I'm insistent on clear diction for myself because I'm a person who believes that the reader shouldn't stand in between the listener and the text. I much prefer readers who can take a piece of text and read it crisply and correctly, leaving me with the luxury of putting my own emotional response to the text.

[Waluigi]

Now I too am reading The Count of Monte Cristo, the unabridged version. Two of my co-workers are reading it, and they pestered me sufficiently to take it on.

I am soooo glad I did. It is an excellent book. I'm only on Chapter 31, so I've got a long way to go, but I can't wait to see what happens.