what are you reading?

GinnyT11, I couldn't agree more. My wife and I have a B&N Nook, but I never use it. I too like the feel of a book in my hands, and I like to make notes in it and go back to check something on earlier pages. Nothing like a good book, a nice, comfortable chair and a glass of Irish whiskey. :eek:ld:
 
Nothing like a good book, a nice, comfortable chair and a glass of Irish whiskey. :eek:ld:

Irish whiskey...? We're studying single-malt Scotch whisky (see how the spelling varies by country?), usually while watching Netflix movies, but maybe sipping while reading is an equally good combination. Does the sun have to be low?

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I like to make notes in it and go back to check something on earlier pages.

I do this too! To the point where I'm sometimes a bit embarrassed to lend books to others because they'll find out too much about me :)
 
Just finished The Sun Also Rises; finally! Made it three-quarters way through some seven years ago, but for reasons that escape me, I stopped. Interestingly, I tried to get my oldest son to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn- which I've read, probably my favorite book ever- but he's only starting fifth grade this year (like, in two days) and I think it's over his head as yet; but, here's a quote from Hemingway about Huck Finn which ultimately made me dust off my old copy of a The Sun Also Rises, only recently:

http://classiclit.about.com/od/adventuresofhuckleberry/a/huckfinn_writer.htm

I'm only halfway through the reread of Huck Finn, but nevertheless I suppose Hemingway made a valid point about the ending, although I think, so far, halfway through again, it might not matter- considering how powerful the beginning and bulk of the story are. I'm rambling now and there's a fat chance this post is riddled with typos; alas, so it goes, so it goes... :cool: -- Matt
 
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven which was good, but painfully real and sad, but very well written.
Glad to see some Murakami reviews; might have to check the newest out.
Excitedly waiting for the new David Mitchell novel this week
 
I have a side job working for a publishing company, so often times I am reading those books, but when I can read whatever I want, it is usually escapist thrillers -- James Patterson, Gone Girl, that kind of mind candy. Right now I am reading the second book in the Game of Thrones series, Clash of Kings. I'm trying very carefully not to get ahead of the tv show and heard it is safe to read through the fourth book since it is about a book a season. Did Storm of Swords basically match up to the third season of the show?

I only caught the tail end of the third season because I really don't watch much TV at all (it just became "what we did" after playing D&D on Sundays)...but so far, it's exactly like the third season. I started the first book way back when it first came out...and it's taken me all this time to get through to the end of the third.

Dan Simmons 'Ilium' (I recently finished his 'Hyperion' and 'Fall of Hyperion' - my favorite SF writer)
'Folk, The Essential Album Guide' (musicHound)

Loooooooooooooooove Hyperion??


Are any of you on Goodreads?? I'm Concertina on there as well.
 
Soupking, you mention rereading Huck Finn. How many of you reread books? There are SO MANY that it seems you're losing opportunities to read new recommendations when you go back.

Some books don't hold up...I found Catcher in the Rye to be really boring when I reread it a couple years ago.

However, if many years pass between readings, you get an interesting view of yourself and how you've changed. When I read Diary of a Young Girl as a teen, I identified with Anne Frank. When I read it in my 30s, I identified more with her mother and the could see her difficulty in dealing with a teen daughter who didn't like her.
 
I kust finished our own steveperrywriter's Dog Paddling the Third Wave and enjoyed ithoroughly.

Mahalo, Steve!

(Now, off to his Matadora series again . . . )

bobinde
 
GinnyT11, I read Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" and Michener's "The Source" and Scott 's "Ivanhoe", so many times I had to get rid of them. I cut my library way down because I wasn't reading anything new. A really good book is a treasure. I've just gotten back to reading lately. I guess I had book burnout. :eek:ld:
 
Soupking, you mention rereading Huck Finn. How many of you reread books? There are SO MANY that it seems you're losing opportunities to read new recommendations when you go back.

Some books don't hold up...I found Catcher in the Rye to be really boring when I reread it a couple years ago.

However, if many years pass between readings, you get an interesting view of yourself and how you've changed. When I read Diary of a Young Girl as a teen, I identified with Anne Frank. When I read it in my 30s, I identified more with her mother and the could see her difficulty in dealing with a teen daughter who didn't like her.

I've done my fair share of re-reading over the years - I usually pick a writer or subject and make it my "summer reading" project. Last year it was re-reading Kerouac for the first time since my teens; this year it's been Joan Didion. I do this in part for the reason you mentioned - it's an exercise in learning about myself! And sometimes it really makes me wonder about the person I was at 16 or whatever who just loved this book or that - mostly I find myself wondering how the heck I understood it at that age.

And I've kept a copy of "The Grapes of Wrath" on hand my entire adult life to re-read when I'm in tough economic times. Really gives one perspective!

As for "Catcher in the Rye" - I've NEVER been able to make it through that book. Didn't relate to it as a teen, can't relate to it as an adult. Makes me wonder if I'm just not the target audience - wrong gender, wrong economic class, wrong coast to have been born and raised on - or if there's just something my head is too thick to "get." Same goes for much of Fitzgerald's fiction, for that matter.
 
janeray1940, I feel the same about "Catcher in the Rye". I didn't understand (or like it) the first time I read it, and then, in college, I read it again and felt about the same. I might have understood it a bit better, but I'm not even sure of that. I don't care for F. Scott Fitzgerald either. Some novels just seem to wander, or float on and on. I really prefer English Literature, and/or historical fiction. I don't read very many translations--only the great ones. :eek:ld:
 
janeray1940, I feel the same about "Catcher in the Rye". I didn't understand (or like it) the first time I read it, and then, in college, I read it again and felt about the same. I might have understood it a bit better, but I'm not even sure of that. I don't care for F. Scott Fitzgerald either. Some novels just seem to wander, or float on and on. I really prefer English Literature, and/or historical fiction. I don't read very many translations--only the great ones. :eek:ld:

Thanks for the validation :) You just might be the only other person I've encountered who felt similarly "meh" about Catcher as well as Fitzgerald. Generally I read more nonfiction than I do fiction - I prefer actual storytelling, where there's a sequence of events and a resolution, than I do novels that are more about emotions and conversations and such where nothing really happens. I was a history major in college - that kinda says it all I guess!
 
I'm an English Major. My main period of study was Medieval Literature, but I read so much of King Arthur and some of the other stuff that I got very tired of it. I still enjoy Chaucer though. A while back I started him again, but I wandered into some other things. I'm really into poetry too, but I don't care for modern poetry. Except, and it may seem strange, I really like Cowboy Poetry. I can relate to it somehow, and I can get deeply into it. :eek:ld:
 
Colorless Tsuzuki Takami review

Mr. Murakami has taken what, in essence, could have been a short story of twenty or so pages and stretched it to a novel length. I will omit repeating here the essence of the story, but I will provide my criticisms.

The writing is simple, but preachy. Rather than let the reader understand the story on their own, Murakami tells us, in painstaking detail, every thought, every feeling from each character, especially Tazaki. There is no show--it's all "tell". It's painful reading at times. Many examples, from the minor (like when Yuri's Finnish husband is leaving with her kids and mentions "ice cream", there is another line stating that they must be going to ice cream), to the major (the entire sequence of Sara, T.T.'s girlfriend, planning his trip to Finland).

There are major passages that serve no purpose in the story. Again, Sara planning Tsukuru's trip to Finland. His entire interaction with Olga. His going home, briefly, to see his own family in Nagoya. All wasted pages. His entire pre-occupation with the train stations takes pages upon pages, and comes back time and again in the story, for no plot purpose. We get it: he likes trains and stations! There is enough padding in this story to fill a futon.

The writing is stiff. I find no elegance in it. It has at least one mixed metaphor per page, some laughable. Laugh out loud. A cosmopolitan woman in high heels leads Tsukuru down a hall is described as: "She led him down the hallway in long strides, heels clicking hard and precise like the sound a faithful blacksmith makes early in the morning." Ha ha. There are so many--worse than that one--that truly break the experience for the reader.

The dream sequences, a hallmark of Haruki's writing, are vivid, but disconnected and meaningless. The most profound example is the mysterious piano jazz musician and the bag atop the piano. Never comes up again in the story once told, left hanging like lint on a black suit coat (I'm trying to write with lousy metaphors like Murakami. Can you tell?)

My review of H. Murakami: the essence is that the guy is overrated as a writer. Although some could be attributed to translational shortcomings, most is just his style--or lack thereof.

The conversations (dialogue) are so stilted, so unnatural. Long discourses that few living people would say to one another. Humorless and dull. Every character speaks the same; the hallmark of an exceptional writer is that, if one were to remove the dialogue attributions, the reader could still tell who was speaking by inflection, word choices, length of sentences, etc. Toni Morrison and W. Faulkner are exemplary. Murakami is not.

I could go into it more, but this review will fall down the UU page faster than a setting sun over a hot desert (I'm getting good at this lousy mixed metaphor thing; so I did learn something from Murakami!). I truly believe, based on Colorless and short story Samsa, that H.M. might be the most overrated writer today (Updike might be a close second). I realize that most who read his works enjoy them greatly, and I acknowledge that I share the minority view.

:2cents:
 
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DUD and JR40, Salinger and Fitzgerald are two of my favorite authors. lol Funny how art is so subjective. But I respect your opinions. I adore both of those writers, with a sense of far-away kinships, like lost cousins. The Great Gatsby --and I've avoided all of the films as I would busy hornets' nests so as not to endure the painful stings of seeing my vivid imagination relegated to the flatness of Technicolor--has, literally, not one wasted line, not one missed beat. Every line, every paragraph, every page contributes to the whole. None of it could be removed and still convey the story. And to do it all from Nick's perspective rather than that of Gatsby--it's heaven!

For any Salinger fan (and it appears there are none here...lol), I have a tip. He has three unpublished stories, one of which, The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls, being a prequel to Catcher, that Mr. Salinger did not want published until 60 years after his death (purportedly). They are housed at Princeton's archives. Well, some "academic" gained access, hand-copied them, then typed and posted them on the internet. Scandalous this past winter, but then the hoo ha died, and they are still online. (Please don't shoot the messenger, i.e. me). So, if that bothers someone, they can wait until 2070 when it's officially published. In the meantime, the three short stories are here.
http://www.alwayssometimesanytime.c...hree-unpublished-short-stories-by-jd-salinger

For anyone who wishes to appreciate Salinger's writing (rather than only the titillation surrounding his reclusiveness and penchant for young women), grab some chips and a Coke and listen to this fascinating 22-minute summary of his style and contribution to American literature from the always articulate Adam Gopnik, of The New Yorker, on Charlie Rose. At one point, soup and ginny, Mr. Gopnik compares the voice of Holden Caulfield to that of Huck Finn. At 8:40 minutes, Mr. Gopnik reads a description of Mrs. Glass from Franny that is literary genius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqc0Gn5Yb90

JR40, I do like Steinbeck, too. His writing is quite straightforward, but moves along, great pace and atmosphere. I just read The Pearl about six months ago. Sweet in every way. The message that what we desire may not be, in the end, what we really want in life. I have never read The Grapes of Wrath, but as you find it a book that you often come back to, I will now read it at some point.

Ginny, I love the whip-smart attitude of Junot Diaz. So authentic. I read Wao when it came out three years ago--I have to re-read it again. It was lovely. I'll have to brush up on my "Spanglish" first.

God, this is so interesting to see what everyone is reading. Everything from Typee by Melville to cowboy poems. I'm learning so much.
 
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Two kiddos under the age of three does not make for great reading conditions, so this has been a summer of re-reads for me (I'm not complaining):

Slocum's Sailing Alone around the World, Stevenson's Treasure Island, the collected works of Odgen Nash, and Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action, (which I read every summer to stay sharp for school).

Every one of them is as wonderful as I remember. (I wish I could say the same for Kerouac -- I never, never should have re-visited him after I settled down and became more adultish.)

I've got Wallace's Consider the Lobster (half-read) on the nightstand, and Eggers' newest waiting underneath it.

And since I could reminisce/dream about books all night long, I'm going to stop typing... Now.

Great thread, Janeray. OK... Now.
 
Hawaii may take longer to finish than I expected. I just found out that all 3 volumes of the Feynman lectures on physics are available free online. I've nearly purchased these books a dozen time over the past 30 years, but always pulled back due to the price. I suspect that while I am trying to cut down on physical objects I may finally buy this as I think it will be more satisfying in hardback than on the iPad. If you haven't experienced Feynman, the book 6 Easy Pieces contains some very accessible lectures on basic physics principals. Even better if you can find a copy that includes CDs of the actual lectures.
 
I was an English major until my senior year when I switched to Art, so read a ton of English and American literature, from "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and "The Canterbury Tales" (in Middle English which was fun) and of course Shakespeare and some really hideous early authors to Fitzgerald and Frank Norris, but my favorite material was always some good SciFi and poetry. I guess I got enough of it as apparently compared to the rest of you I currently read junk! I just finished the last book in the GOT series, "A Dance With Dragons". I read it on my phone for three weeks until the library loan expired, then went back to print. Helluva writer!!! I ran out of time because I was reading it concurrently with Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend". I've read every great zombie book out there and some not so great. Joe Hill's "Twittering from the Circus of the Dead" was fun.

I'm currently reading "Inside of A Dog" and "If I Stay" (didn't seem to be something I would be impressed with but it's a digital loan, and so far it's well conceived and written). I also just finished Hugh Howey's short "Glitch", and read Stephen King's short "UR" for the third time, and recently read "John Dies at the End" and the sequel "This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude Don't Touch It". I read for entertainment so anything I can get my hands on by Alice Hoffman, Stephen King (looking to find all "The Gunslinger" graphic novels which are brilliant as I read all of the series), Joe Hill, Dean Koontz, F. Paul Wilson and N. D. Wilson. I also need to reaquire "Wicked: Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked Years) by Gregory Maguire.

For classics I re-read Kipling regularly, and am starting "The Complete Works of Lovecraft". I also read the first three books of ERBs Mars series last year. In high school every summer as soon as school was out I read The Hobbit and the Trilogy before the rest of my summer fare, so was ecstatic that I lived long enough to see it into the current films, though I was disappointed with the first installment of The Hobbit and did not see the second. I think I have read Clavell's "Shogun" three times. Michener's "Hawaii" is on my list.

I regularly dip into Buddhist texts like the traditional Dhamapada and Pema Chodron's current take on The 37 Practices and 108 Teachings, and we take Buddhadharma and the Shambhala Sun magazines.

+1 for "Catcher in the Rye", it was agony reading it in high school, but "The Grapes of Wrath" still holds up for me.
 
Recent (for me) good stuff:

  • Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (This is science fiction at its best.)
  • Statistics by David Freedman, Robert Pisani and Roger Purves (The authors take a thoughtful approach to basic statistics, focusing on concepts and meanings rather than definitions and computation.)
  • Long Division by Kiese Laymon (This is a recent magical-realist, time-traveling, Southern, African-American novel.)
  • The Case of the Ice-Cold Hands by Erle Stanley Gardner (I read mystery novels aloud to my wife for fun.)
 
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