Thread: [Books] What are you currently reading?

Originally Posted by hippopotamus

I'm reading House Of Leaves. I'm about 100 pages in.

House of Leaves can get a bit tedious referencing footnotes and when it gets really heavy into literary analysis, but it's a wildly fun book that I recommend any chance I get.

Have blast.

"What do you want to play"

"Hallways"

well togs do you expect oration?

or expectoration?

I have a terrible case of mucus in the lungs.... I could use an expectorant.

But I mean one of the main themes of HOL is its satire on literary analysis, thus the reason for the pages and pages of footnote citations that you often run across.

and the first letter of the first sixteen footnotes spell the author's name but i mean he spent a lot of time dropping fancy little easter eggs like that in there

Well I actually didn't pick up on that until I was told. But I did spend a while reading the pages in a mirror until my roommate walked in on me and told me how ridiculous I looked.

I'm reading the first Fanatic! book by Henry Rollins. He chronicles and describes each of the songs he played during his "Harmony in my Head" radio show. Definitely not for everyone, but I enjoy it.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Reading little by little as I find time and I am very much enjoying it.

Originally Posted by Mad Pino Rage

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Reading little by little as I find time and I am very much enjoying it.

Is that the one they're making a Lincoln movie out of starring Liam Neeson? Because Liam Neeson is fucking awesome.

Originally Posted by jack burden

Is that the one they're making a Lincoln movie out of starring Liam Neeson? Because Liam Neeson is fucking awesome.

I was not aware of this, but I would watch it. I'm early in the book around 1858 when all the characters were building up their character for a spot as President. It really goes in depth covering each member of Lincoln's future cabinet members' life. To think he had brought them together and befriended them and preserved the Union is something I look forward to reading. I did not expect the book to this interesting until it had reached the outbreak of the civil war.

Originally Posted by coqauvin

well togs do you expect oration?

or expectoration?

i'll give togs sum oratorial.

Originally Posted by Mad Pino Rage

I was not aware of this, but I would watch it. I'm early in the book around 1858 when all the characters were building up their character for a spot as President. It really goes in depth covering each member of Lincoln's future cabinet members' life. To think he had brought them together and befriended them and preserved the Union is something I look forward to reading. I did not expect the book to this interesting until it had reached the outbreak of the civil war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_of...braham_Lincoln

Liam Neeson!

Originally Posted by jack burden

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_of...braham_Lincoln

Liam Neeson!

Wow. That would be really cool to see a movie adaptation, but just because they secured the rights doesn't mean they are going to make a movie but definitely means no one else can. I'd eat my skivvies if they do.

Reading: The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao.

So far it's funny, but not as great as I'd hoped.

EDIT: It's more about living under Trujillo when he was dictator in the Dominican Republic than Oscar, and I'm more than 1/2 way through it. For a book with a title '... Life of Oscar Wao', there is shockingly little about him thus far except that he's fat and girls hate him. It's more about his mother, Beli, and the shit she faced in the DR under Trujillo. But I'm getting back into the Oscar part, which is good, because Beli is a fucking annoying character.

Finally finished On Writing by Stephen King

Now reading Physics of the Impossible by some string theorist.

Originally Posted by MalReynolds

Reading: The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao.

So far it's funny, but not as great as I'd hoped.

EDIT: It's more about living under Trujillo when he was dictator in the Dominican Republic than Oscar, and I'm more than 1/2 way through it. For a book with a title '... Life of Oscar Wao', there is shockingly little about him thus far except that he's fat and girls hate him. It's more about his mother, Beli, and the shit she faced in the DR under Trujillo. But I'm getting back into the Oscar part, which is good, because Beli is a fucking annoying character.

My friend was reading this on our trip to a conference. She is pretty fluent in spanish which I hear you need to be relatively... She also enjoyed it.

I studied in high school, and I'm able to put together most of the spanish in the book. It's mainly slang and a few bits of dialogue.

I've read On Writing before, but it's not super useful. The first part - the bio part - is really fascinating, but the actual instruction part wasn't super awesome. It was more of the same. Know your grammar. Avoid be-verbs. Adverbs suck.

...

Most of his work is chock full of Be-verbs. Most every text is chock full of be-verbs. It's the dumbest fucking rule.

I liked learning how he formulated his books mostly and his bio.

Originally Posted by MalReynolds

I've read On Writing before, but it's not super useful. The first part - the bio part - is really fascinating, but the actual instruction part wasn't super awesome. It was more of the same. Know your grammar. Avoid be-verbs. Adverbs suck.

...

Most of his work is chock full of Be-verbs. Most every text is chock full of be-verbs. It's the dumbest fucking rule.

I'm confued by this recommended avoidance of so-called "be-verbs." Is this in order to avoid overly long compound verbs, which I could understand, or is it to avoid even simple participles that use these verbs? How can you avoid the latter? I suppose you could do so by attaching the descriptors to the descriptee in senctences describing the descriptee's actions: "The man pushed the box. The man was strong." becomes "The strong man pushed the box." Even still, it is an odd rule...

On the other hand, I can't understand what's wrong with adverbs...

Stephen King just hates the overuse of adverbs. It's really a personal preference, but really adverbs are mostly found as dialogue indicators.

What is this summer American History assigned reading?

First part of this vacation, I read Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden. It's a tale told in first person from two perspectives: (alternating each chapter which was really confusing at first) Annie Bird, a Cree trapper in Northern Ontario who searches for her missing sister through the mysterious urban cities she's never been to before and Will Bird, a legendary local bush pilot/hunter who is recuperating from an accident in a comatose state in a hospital, and the uncle of Annie. Both use each other as a confessional that causes them to relive the major issues they've had in their lives, exploring the tension and drug abuse on the reserve where they live, the status of city indians, or the Anishnabe, and how the abuse each of them has faced in their lives shaped their choices. It's a touching story of attempted redemption and family ties in harsh environments, told in writer's voice that mimics the speech patterns of the cities and people where the story takes place (mostly Moosonee, and it's a pretty accurate voice).

The other book I read was World Without End by Ken Follet, which was pretty much a waste of time. It was just a vast soap opera set in a well researched historical background that briefly held my interest for some of the political manoeuvring, but all in all was a pretty boring grind for the 1,000 pages it weighs in at.

Next up is an old collection of short stories from Guy de Maupassant, so we'll see how I handle that.

Physics of the Impossible

An absolutely fascinating novel about the kinds of things that we think are impossible today (force fields, time travel, faster-than-light travel, parallel universes) and shows how we are actually working toward these things. It explains how today we are starting to do very basic/fundamental steps of the processes that will allow us to do/create these things in the coming decades or centuries.

The problem: You have to have a very high understanding of physics and abstract principles. The book starts you off baby-stepping you through the old world ideas of physics, bringing you through Newtonian physics, then like Maxwell's/Dirac/Faraday, Einstein/Schrodinger/Boltzmann and the quantum/wave-particle duality, to sting theory and the 11 dimensions it proposes. You need a PhD in physics to fully understand what's going on in the book. I can say I'm more educated then most in Physics, and admittedly I was lost in parts (Particularly the theory that the universe may only consist of one electron darting back and forth through time to compose everything we see. Or the idea of our inflating universe.).

I'd recommend it if you enjoy Sci-Fi, Non-fiction, or just plain science fun. Just be prepared.

From my knowledge of physics, I can say that they probably weren't saying that the universe is composed of one electron darting all around, but rather there was probably the suggestion that the wavefunctions of all electrons are entangled with each other, so that there is one giant multi-electron wavefunction that spans the universe. Because their wavefunctions are interfereing with each other, no electron has a seperate identiy from other electrons. However, this uber-wavefunction would still be a multiparticle wavefunction, since a multi-particle wavefunction is fundamentally different from a single-particle wavefunction.

At any rate, I can appreciate books like the ones you're talking about, TOGS, and what they are attempting to do, but it's dangerous to describe physics by analogy, as it is really only understandable in terms of equations. This is especially true with more abstract physics concepts such as QM. For example, I read Brian Greene's book about String Theory some time ago, and I got little out of it in the end even with my physics background (though at the time I wasn't finished with my BS). As someone said about "physics by analogy" books, you understand something, but you don't understand what that is.

I do agree with you, however, in that basic math and physics concepts will help your understanding go a long way.


I'm currently reading The Little Book of Bees by Karl Weiss. I got it for free by signing up to a Springer publications mailing list at a physics conference, but it's actually a pretty nice little read. For exampe, I learned that with the exception of a single specices of beetles, there's only two orders of insects that have true social behavior, one with bees, wasps, and ants and the other with termites, and only 15% of bees are social.

Originally Posted by faesce

in other news i cant wait until i get my new glasses so i can actually read again

having to blow up internet forums to max font size to read is frustrating

Wait, that really does suck.

Just picked up The Road by McCarthy and Naked in Dangerous Places by Cash which is a travelogue.

Originally Posted by Shinysides

On The Road by Jack Kerouac

One of the books I will never read.

Originally Posted by TheOriginalGrumpySpy

One of the books I will never read.

Why?

Originally Posted by jack burden

Why?

I enjoy travel literature, but, sometimes I get into books late.

Catcher in the Rye for example I didn't read until 2 years ago. A book I should have read while I was still a starry eyed high-schooler. I didn't like it, in fact, I hated the book. Holden was such a little bitch that complained and ended up where he started.

On The Road is like one of those books that people tell me to read. I know it put the Beat generation on the map and is like the epitome of some travel books, but I should have read it so long ago that I don't really have any interest in it. It's the hype that's stopping me. Who knows, one day I may pick it up to see what the fuss is all about, but until then I enjoy the books I read now.

Holden was a bitch, but that's why Catcher in the Rye was actually good. It's about identity and finding your place in the world, about seeing the world and life as a game and a system of it's own accord, but nobody inside the game/system sees it for what it is. This is why Holden's an outsider. It points out a couple of the cruel realities of life, and at the same time points out the flaws in Holden's character without having the character be aware of them, or absolving him of responsibility or consequence because of his poor choices. There's so much that's actually good in the book, but it's something you reall need to ponder about for a while, because, I completely agree, it's a really easy book to hate the first time through. But it's literature, and you can't read it like a fluff novel, you have to read it as literature.