What are you reading?

[Shelli]

I just finished "Infidel" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Completely mesmerizing.

[Adam]

Originally Posted by Clutch Munny

Good book, IMO, but it frustrated me. I thought there was a truly fabulous novel trying to escape from it, but rarely succeeding. Too much of the cleverness struck me as contrived. I remember thinking that someone sharp and funny and lyrically gifted should write with a bit less craft. But then, I think that about a good many contemporary intellectual novelists, and clearly much of the intellectual novelist/reviewer world disagrees with me!

That's a fair assessment, IMO. There are a number of images and ideas that I thought were very powerful, but I thought the book would have benefited from a little more editorial discretion.

Read over the course of several plane trips this past week:

Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End - Not bad. Dark office comedy with sort of a dramatic centerpiece fashioned out of one character's breast cancer. Interesting use of a sort of detached first person royal "we" as the narrator. A bit heavy on telling instead of showing, IMO. It did get me thinking about the prevalence of job loss as a metaphor for death in office fiction. Somebody should write a paper or something about that.

Jeff Vandermeer's Finch - Excellent. A sequel (actually, the third book, but I thought it was the second and so read them out of order, but I don't think it matters) to his earlier City of Saints and Madmen. Where that was a collection of short stories, mock histories, and other assorted oddities related to the city of Ambergris, this is a noirish detective story set in the future of that collection, where the mysterious fungal Grey Caps have taken control of the city.

The interesting parts of the WashingtonPost's Landmark: The Inside Story of America's New Health Care Law and What It Means for Us All - The first section is a short history of the political maneuvering leading up to the law which, meh, followed it in excruciating detail as it unfolded, don't ever need to deal with that again. The second section is a breakdown of how the law actually works. While it's nothing I haven't read onine, it's a handy reference and, to be honest, I mostly wanted to familiarize myself with the book before lending it to family and friends who spout off about the ACA without knowing the first thing about it.

Currently reading:

Justin Cronin's The Passage - Not bad so far. Reminds me a lot of early Stephen King. A little cutesy with some of the details of its fifteen minutes into the future setting. Oh, LOL, Jenna Bush is Governor of Texas!

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy - A history of the end of the Pacific war. Not bad so far.

[The Man]

Should I pick up Landmark do you think then? I've already forgotten some of what the bill does.

Stuff I've recently read:

Noam Chomsky - Hopes and Prospects. It goes without saying that this is chock full of important information that conveniently gets left out of mainstream media outlets; anyone who's read one of Chomsky's major books before should know what to expect. Needless to say he's not a fan of the current administration and he makes it clear just how far they've descended into the same lawlessness practised by the Bush administration. I'd say this is pretty much essential reading for anyone who wants insight into why the country hasn't improved as much as so many of our media types believed it would. And, as is par for the course with Chomsky, the documentation for his claims is quite thorough, so you can figure out where he's getting his information pretty easy with a trivial amount of googling.

Daniel Suarez - Daemon and Freedom™. After a famed computer game developer's obituary is posted in the news, a computer program activates that begins killing former employees of his company, and later law enforcement officials who attempt to investigate his property. And that's only the beginning. I'm not going to disclose any of the plot beyond this because Suarez takes delight in constantly confounding the reader's expectations, especially in the first book. I will say that this is a technothriller with no letup on either the techno or the thriller that was written by a person who clearly understands the technology he's writing about, which is a nice change of pace for the usual entries in the genre (Dan Brown I'm looking at you). All of the technologies described within either exist in real life or are expected to exist within short notice, and the fact that Sobol was a multibillionaire who spent a lot of his fortune on R&D makes the existence of anticipated technologies more believable. I will also say that Suarez has a superb grasp of the issues facing mankind and many of the solutions he has for them are things I'd never even thought of before. Whether they're realistic will be up for the reader to decide.

Current reading includes:

Nouriel Roubini & Stephen Mihm - Crisis Economics. Roubini has a reputation as the economist who predicted the current economic crisis in perhaps the greatest detail, and the analysis here goes a long way towards explaining how he was able to do it. The authors contend that financial crises are entirely predictable based on certain behaviours in the market, and go into exhaustive detail describing some of these behaviours. The authors then review how various schools recommend dealing with crises (Austrian, Keynesian, Marxist, etc.), going into the strengths and weaknesses of each, and then make specific policy recommendations for how to deal with crises in the future, most of which seem to be eminently reasonable (I've only skimmed through this part of the book at this point). Recommended reading.

John Twelve Hawks - The Traveller. Since the final volume of the trilogy finally came out in paperback this week, I just picked this up in the book store based on a recommendation from customers who seemed to know what they were talking about last year. Thus far the surveillance depicted within makes Orwell look downright complacent. If the rest of the book is as good as the first few chapters were then this trilogy is going to be must reading.

Also I loved Gravity's Rainbow. It would've been more accessible with more editing, sure, but I can't imagine it any other way to be honest. The sprawling nature of the book helps reinforce Pynchon's point about how history is created, in my opinion. I also liked what bits of DeLillo I've read (Mao II mostly thus far). I've started White Noise recently (although haven't really read enough to come up with insightful commentary yet) and need to pick Libra back up.

[Adam]

Originally Posted by The Man

Should I pick up Landmark do you think then? I've already forgotten some of what the bill does.

It's a nice concise reference, IMO, although it will become out of date pretty quickly as we start to see the actual decisions made by the executive branch in implementing the requirements of the law, and the "we're not sure exactly how this will work" questiosn get resolved.

Nouriel Roubini & Stephen Mihm - Crisis Economics.

This is on my short list. Glad to hear it's recommended.

[Watser?]

I am now reading Th Zenith Angle by Bruce Sterling which I bought in Austin. I only noticed later that he lives there.

Also bought Collapse by Jared Diamond and 1948 by Benny Morris. So I have plenty to read for a while. Also bought some urban/rural legends and tall tale kinda books in New Orleans and in Terlingua in the Big Bend region.

[wildernesse]

Crime and Punishment--re-reading, for a reason that escapes me at this time. Unfortunately, it cranks my brain in funny ways so that I have weird, frightening dreams since I read it before I go to sleep. I think this was the first Russian novel I ever read, long ago.

Also,Remarkable Creatures-Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Speciesby Sean Carroll, which is very good. He gave a talk from the book at the opening reception for Evolution, and was quite entertaining. So far, very interesting and accessible.

[Qingdai]

I'm ignoring several good books, but am actively reading my son "The Scarecrow of Oz."

[teasasue]

Swallowing the Darkness by Laurell K Hamilton

[Watser?]

Sounds like yguy's kinda porn.

[teasasue]

lol its about fairy
pretty good actually if you like paranormal books.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by teasasue

Swallowing the Darkness by Laurell K Hamilton

Originally Posted by Watser?

Sounds like yguy's kinda porn.

Originally Posted by teasasue

lol its about fairy

Even more so, then

[teasasue]

yeah it could also be classified as porn

[Twistedgypsychild]

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

and

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Jamie

[ChuckF]

Right now I am reading The Sovereign State, a rather sweet book from the 70s about the pseudo-state functions of enormous multi-nationals. It's interesting to see how benign its revelations are, relative to what goes on 40 years later.

Originally Posted by Twistedgypsychild

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

[Deadlokd]

Originally Posted by ChuckF

Right now I am reading The Sovereign State, a rather fap worthy tale about a young American man living in his mother's basement who builds a massive island and sets up the perfect Utopian society even though members on a forum in an obscure corner of the internet that no one links to said he wouldn't.

[Deadlokd]

And double @ the twisted Gypsy.

[viscousmemories]

The Cartoon History of the United States

It's a warm-up for the US History class I'm starting in the fall.

[SharonDee]

You people suck for not including popular fiction in this thread. Getting all high-brow with that high-falutin' nonfiction and shit.

You know how I found about a character named Aloysius Pendergast? I had to find it on my own!

Suckage, y'all has it!

[Adam]

Two of the five books in my last poast were best selling fiction, SharonMEAN!

[freemonkey]

Sharon, I'm reading The Help. Are you happy now?

[Ymir's blood]

Originally Posted by viscousmemories

Cartoon History of the United States, by Larry Gonick

Originally Posted by viscousmemories

The Cartoon History of the United States

It's a warm-up for the US History class I'm starting in the fall.

4 years? Really?

[wildernesse]

Originally Posted by wildernesse

Crime and Punishment--re-reading, for a reason that escapes me at this time. Unfortunately, it cranks my brain in funny ways so that I have weird, frightening dreams since I read it before I go to sleep. I think this was the first Russian novel I ever read, long ago.

Aaannndd, we're really going to stop reading this at bedtime. When RA came to bed last night, I sat up and stared at him while saying "WHO ARE YOU?" a bunch of times and also acted terrified of the cat. All while apparently being asleep.

Wheee.

[vremya]

I put Reds aside (a history of Communism in the US) and am now reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, because reading about Joe McCarthy before bedtime was giving me scary dreams.

[Qingdai]

It's OK. Joe is dead.

I'm trying to read "Brother I'm Dying" by Edwidge Danticat, about her uncle dying in US immigration custody while trying to visit his dying brother, "Facing West: The metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building" by Richard Drinnon, and "The Turkish Lover" by Esmeralda Santiago, all of which are rather depressing, so far.

On to "The Lost Princess of OZ" by Frank L. Baum!

[Clutch Munny]

Originally Posted by ChuckF

Right now I am reading The Sovereign State, a rather sweet book from the 70s about the pseudo-state functions of enormous multi-nationals. It's interesting to see how benign its revelations are, relative to what goes on 40 years later.

ITT itt!