Watcha readin'?

K

kboman

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Since there are many intelligent and/or educated people on this board with wildly different opinions and tastes, I was wondering what everyone is reading at the moment? Feel free to update as your reading progresses as per the "what's for dinner?" thread :)

I've just started re-reading Leif GW Persson's fourth police novel, whose title roughly translates to "Between summer's longing and winter's cold". The man is a god of the Swedish language, it's like eating healthy and nourishing candy.
 
Just finished, last two
reckless endangerment,
the original argument,
currently reading
life
on the night stand ready to start
to big to fail
want to buy
does the noise in my head bother you

studying a copy of Bachs article written to refute a article on the major Triad
 
A few things -

Alan Moore's The Saga of Swamp Thing
The Definitive HP Lovecraft
Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card
and my regular guitar study book
 
All musicians should read "This is Your Brain On Music" by Daniel Levitin

http://product.half.ebay.com/This-Is-Your-Brain-on-Music-The-Science-of-a-Human-Obsession-by-Daniel-J-Levitin-2007-Paperback-Reprint/57078376&tg=info

A musician then educated to be sound engineer who still had questions about the ways in which your brain reacts to, stores and retrieves information about music, Levitin went back to school and became a brain researcher. A must.

 

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I always have about a dozen books in progress.  Must be ADD or something.

The Pyramid, by Henning MAenkel (sorry, gotta read it inEnglish -my Swediish is nonexistent).
Caesar: portrait of a colossus. Author escapes me at the moment.  Excellent bio of Julius Caesar and history of the demise of the Roman Republic.
Stalled out halfway through a re-read of War'n'Peace.  I'll resume soon enough.
Gun with occasional music, Jonathan Lethem.  Awesome noir sf thingy.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabom.  Incredible.  Hannah, if you haven't read it you MUST.  And if you have, you know what I'm talking about.
A few others but I'm on the iPhone so I'll quit for now. 
 
Gulliver's Travels. Really liking it! When the movie came out I really wanted to see it. Watched it on demand not too long ago and wasn't a big fan. Always wanted to read the book so the movie kind of motivated me into it.
 
Bagman67 said:
The Pyramid, by Henning MAenkel (sorry, gotta read it inEnglish -my Swediish is nonexistent).
Click to expand...

No prob - but if you feel like you want more Swedish crime literature stay FAR AWAY from Stieg Larsson and "The girl with the dragon tattoo". I mean the underlying story was interesting enough, sure, but the writing... Oy vey. To be blunt I don't think it would have sold nearly as well as it has if the poor guy hadn't up and died. Or maybe I just don't "get" the crime genre. I only really like the aforementioned Persson and Jens Lapidus where the language is either fantastic or fascinating, respectively.

I'm really a fantasy/sf kind of guy at heart. I recently finished part four of Kerr's "Deverry" series. It takes me a while to shift gears to her world, but after that I need no further convincing.
 
HG Wells. I got a book with his seven main novels. I have so far read the time machine, the island of dr. moreau, the invisible man, the war of the worlds, and the first men in the moon. I am currently reading the food of the gods, and will finish with in the days of the comet. My first impressions are that his shorter stories are very good but his longer writing suffers because he does not create very well rounded characters. He does however, seem to have a better grasp on how people act as a whole and all of his books reflect that. The concepts that drive the stories put people into places where their underlying points of view and philosophies are exposed, and this make his shorter stories very fun for me. The food of the gods, however has been a less enjoyable so far, and in the days of the comet doesn't look much better. I may just try and tough it out but I've been feeling "character" deprived. Thinking of starting the Patrick O'Brian master and commander series when I'm done.
 
I tried to read Master and Commander, but I couldn't get through it because every other sentence had some antiquated sailing reference that I had to look up in the dictionary, and that got old after a hundred pages or so.  My mom read all of Patrick O'Brien's books though, and she really liked them. 

I did read The First Men In The Moon at one point though. 
 
I just finished An American Childhood by Annie Dillard.  Last week I got about 5 or 6 James Beard books out of the library, which I am reading sort of simultaneously.  These particular volumes are more like essays on food and cooking, followed by several recipies in the back of the book.  I prefer to read about the stories behind foods in my cookbooks rather than just a bunch of recipies.  In the end I always view recipies as guidelines, which are to be blurred by the particulars of your own taste or what you actually have on hand to cook with.  If you understand the theory behind the food its easy to manipulate recipies to better suit yourself.
 
You should check out Cucina & Famiglia.  It's a really good Italian cookbook with stories behind all the recipes.  Stanley Tucci's family wrote it, and his movie Big Night features a lot of the recipes out of the book.  I've cooked a lot of the recipes, and they've all turned out very tasty.
 
Finally getting round to reading full version of Dracula,

Along with going to be ordering some Java books for final year project i have to do from september onwards
 
k-k-kboooman said:
Bagman67 said:
The Pyramid, by Henning MAenkel (sorry, gotta read it inEnglish -my Swediish is nonexistent).
Click to expand...

No prob - but if you feel like you want more Swedish crime literature stay FAR AWAY from Stieg Larsson and "The girl with the dragon tattoo". I mean the underlying story was interesting enough, sure, but the writing... Oy vey. To be blunt I don't think it would have sold nearly as well as it has if the poor guy hadn't up and died.
Click to expand...

I think you hit the nail on the head there. I've read the first two parts of the Millennium trilogy (I read the first, so I have to read the other two, don't I?) and was less than impressed. To be fair, I read them in French--they're huuuuge here in Québec--not the original Swedish, but the writing, especially the pacing, is just awful. Fifty plus pages devoted to an Ikea shopping list? Are you kidding me?  :help:

I just finished reading The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass (in English, as I have no knowledge of German to speak of). Excellent book, especially if you're into the whole "magic realism" thing (think Jose Saramago). However, it took me a while to get through it, as I've been busy, so I think I may have missed some stuff. It's been added to my "books to read again" list. 

Next up is La tribu (The Tribe) by Québec author François Barcelo.
 
Ordered the following yesterday:

Asimov, Isaac: Foundation's Edge
Kerr, Katharine: Time of Exile
Reynolds, Alastair: Terminal World
Wilson, Daniel H: Robopocalypse
Miyazaki, Hayao: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind Vol 2

Looking forward to Kerr and Reynolds and getting closer to completing the Foundation and Nausicaä collections. Wilson was an impulse buy, no idea what to expect there :)
 
Silly question i know
But Nausicaa that the Studio Ghibli film is based on?  or two different things?
Think i need to order some :p
 
Yep, Miyazaki made both, the manga first and later the anime. IIRC the manga is six volumes.
 
Finished/started in last week:

Reckless Endangerment - Gretchen Morgenson, et. al.
Bloodmoney - David Ignatius
Facts are Subversive - Timothy Ash
 
The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene, Most of the hardest books I've ever had to understand, I keep reading the first hundred pages because there is a lot of information that doesn't make sense.
 
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