Spring Thaw Reading Thread

[Rush2112]

For old times sake.

[howard]

A gramme is better than a damn!

[Rush2112]

I think that this avatar was my second in the swamp. Not sure what the quote was but it had to do with soma.

[Johnnie]

Damn, you already re-read the book? You read fast. Every time I start a book I'm reminded of how slow I read and get discouraged from continuing.

[howard]

Damn, you already re-read the book? You read fast.

~The clunky, idiosyncratic language I had little trouble with, being a re-read
~I was highly motivated to clear my mind from work and escape yesterday. Giants' game and Timmay's 4th inning contributed to my need for escape
~I have been crowing about parallels between Huxley's dystopia and the world today; I kept finding more similarities I had forgotten or had not occurred to me
~I really, really love this little book

[Scottie]

I've had this prejudice, ever since I was a kid, that Science Fiction was (and remains) a senseless irrelevance. So I rarely read any of it. "Read", in that case, works both as Present Indicative and straight Past Tense. Even if it gets redefined as "Speculative Fiction", it's still all tiresome basement sockfucking Dad bought us a microscope for Christmas bullshit to me and I reflexively resort to serious authors who create far more substantial works of art or studies.

So, anyway, assnozzle literary snob aside, I found a superbly preserved first-edition of The Mote In God's Eye a couple of weeks ago. For a buck. Really. A buck. At some thrift shop that racks off a small percentage of its gains for some cause I couldn't possibly give a fuck about.

The nickel review? It's a compelling enough page-turner. Niven and Pournelle know just enough about science to make interstellar first contact fiction readable; given the advances made since the novel was written, it holds up in some ways that outweigh the ways in which it absurdly fails. Sort of. But it suffers from the one thing that all Sci-Fi suffers from; they aren't novelists. The characters are wood and the plot is painful. Still, despite the flaws, not a bad waste of a few hours.

Oh, hang on. That was also assnozzle literary snobby, eh? Hmm. Well, for something that sucks, it's not that bad.

Why did I bother buying it in the first place? Because it is a pristine first-edition of a relatively rare book and I'm all over that like a crackwhore on welfare cheque day. Earlier this year I read Niven/Pournelle's Inferno. And that is a decent paperback page turner. They simply do not understand Dante (or Virgil) but it has its moments. Sure, it's a tosser. You won't put it on your bookshelf next to Pynchon or Shakespeare. The reason for even reading it is I had just read three different translations of Dante and that was a sort of after-drug come down (could have been a worse selection, Dan Brown attempting to reboot Dante is beyond my stomach; no amount of Pepto Bismol would get me to attempt that one). Niven and Pournelle's Inferno? Cute book. But it has a sequel. So I then went and got that from a library. It's called Escape From Hell and I would rank that among the five or so worst books I have ever read. It's staggeringly awful, that one. How bad? Dante chose, carefully, the genius of Virgil as his guide. The Niven/Pournelle protagonist chooses Sylvia Plath. Feminist, shitty poet, suicide; and Niven/Pournelle give her dialogue as if she is a 14-year old watching America Can Facebook Karaoke. It's Hell in a nut-nut-nutshell Bad? Bad. How bad? You'll find yourself checking to see how many Air Miles you have on the off chance you break and decide to fly to Larry Niven's home so you can punch him in the nuts.

[DaveInSeattle]

For some reason, I decided that not having read any Jane Austen was a hole in my knowledge base. So I reading "Pride and Prejudice".

For the love of god, I hope something happens soon. I'm halfway through and so far its been nothing but snooty English people sitting around talking to each other, and not saying anything.

[cerrano]

You Can Find Uranium
A non-technical guide written in plain understandable language
Weiss and Orlandi
1948



h/t awfullibrarybooks.net

[A_B]

For some reason, I decided that not having read any Jane Austen was a hole in my knowledge base. So I reading "Pride and Prejudice".

For the love of god, I hope something happens soon. I'm halfway through and so far its been nothing but snooty English people sitting around talking to each other, and not saying anything.

Give Edith Wharton a spin. Better in all aspects, IMO. Plus, MURICA.

[Giff]

For some reason, I decided that not having read any Jane Austen was a hole in my knowledge base. So I reading "Pride and Prejudice".

For the love of god, I hope something happens soon. I'm halfway through and so far its been nothing but snooty English people sitting around talking to each other, and not saying anything.

Give Edith Wharton a spin. Better in all aspects, IMO. Plus, MURICA.

We had to read The Age of Innocence in high school, so one of my friend's dad took us to see the movie. He is the vulgar sort and not very patient with what he perceives to be horrible movies, so about halfway through the movie he yelled, "would you just fuck her already!", got up and walked out. We happily followed.

[A_B]

I read The Custom of the Country recently and really enjoyed the way wharton spun some sentences.

Lonesome Dove is a lot of fun.

Also listening to Our Kind of Traitor. I much prefer Le Carre's Smiley books.

[Scottie]

I was looking for a decent history of the plague in Europe (don't ask) and that hunk of junk is hands down the worst non-fiction writing I've come across in ages.

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly was quite good.

Just to follow up . . . that is an excellent book. Highly recommend. Great storyteller even though he is, of course, writing a history. Riveting book.

Books about the plague, which is staggering in its enormity and in some ways a blank in the contemporary stock of knowledge, tend to be brutally dry and chock full of multisyllabic scientific chunkage like symtacticbulbogakological. The author spares you such pain; instead of repeating latin terms, for example, he'll use the latin once and thereafter use "Y. pestis". Very impressive (and harrowing) book.

(Thanks, Rush)

[Rush2112]

You're welcome, it's sort of what I do, though not currently....yes I went to library school to work in IT, sigh.

I have the eBook if anyone would like a copy.

Also just started this:

[BTTG]

Both are excellent so far

[Scottie]

Riffing on the plague . . . I decided to give Boccaccio's The Decameron another go. This one is a newer translation than that with which I am familiar; my own copy being a translation from another century or so ago, so dusty it begs vacuuming.

The 2008 modern translation in Oxford World's Classics as sung by one Guido Waldman. Because you just cannot have enough of the plague. You can't!

Note to self: Bubonic Plague: The Musical.



Pic, link, Amazon.

Note to self: In aforementioned musical, do not rhyme "It's the bubonic plague" with "Oh, man, what a drag".

[DaveInSeattle]

I gave up on "Pride and Prejudice". I was slogging through it, and was making no progress. I may return to it at some point.

I've been reading a Margaret Atwood Serial on my Kindle, called "Positron". Another of her dystopia type of stories. There are 4 episodes so far, and each has been good.

[P.D.X.]

Actually not a bad read. Any book on finance/investing that actually keeps my attention is good by me.

Also just started:



... so I could learn more about my people's oppressed history.

[A_B]

I loved Lonesome Dove. I didn't want it to end, despite being 860+ pages.

[Pruitt]

Really enjoying this one:



The author has taken a ridiculously far-fetched scenario and made it believable.

[Shrew]

For some reason, I decided that not having read any Jane Austen was a hole in my knowledge base. So I reading "Pride and Prejudice".

For the love of god, I hope something happens soon. I'm halfway through and so far its been nothing but snooty English people sitting around talking to each other, and not saying anything.

Give Edith Wharton a spin. Better in all aspects, IMO. Plus, MURICA.

We had to read The Age of Innocence in high school, so one of my friend's dad took us to see the movie. He is the vulgar sort and not very patient with what he perceives to be horrible movies, so about halfway through the movie he yelled, "would you just fuck her already!", got up and walked out. We happily followed.

So its agreed, all future swamp gatherings will coincide with performances of Austenland?

I've never made it more than a chapter into Jane Austen. Even listening to a podcast of Jane Austen's life bored me to tears. My brother and his wife visited Steventon and Bath, where Austen grew up, while vacationing in England as my sis in law adores Jane Austen. Big bro says they are as depressing and boring as her novels.

[howard]

An interview with...
Barry Ritholtz on Causes of the Financial Crisis

I've read four of the five, all excellent. Barry has his own book on the crisis, Bailout Nation, which I skipped because I was reading his column daily for a couple of years when he published it, and I already knew his real-time view of the mess.

[A_B]

Finished up two yesterday on the road.

Our Kind of Traitor was boring. Took me over a month to listen to. Just didn't catch me and then just ended with a transparency I hadn't noticed in Le Carre's other books.

Turn of the Screw was a classic horror novella. None of the goriness or monsters that are prevalent today, but just good old psychological horror. Read a little about it and was surprised to notice that the two theories I came up with while listening are apparently very well debated upon as it concerns the book. Solid, quick listen (and ergo, read) and the language is pretty strong.

Finally finishing Zone One in the next few days after taking a break from it for a while. I have enjoyed the second half much more than the first, which led to my struggling to get into it.



Picked up this because it is the name of the street I grew up on:

[That French Guy]

So I'm more than halfway through an early Bond novel and not only hasn't he killed/fucked anyone yet, he even declined to jump into the sleeping bag of the gorgeous chick he's stuck with on an island.

[Scottie]

'zon link, as usual.

[A_B]

So I'm more than halfway through an early Bond novel and not only hasn't he killed/fucked anyone yet, he even declined to jump into the sleeping bag of the gorgeous chick he's stuck with on an island.

Dr. No, huh?

The books are quite a bit different. I read 4-5 of the early ones and they were much slower paced than the movies, but I was OK with that. Then they started to be pretty much the same thing but in different locations.

[Pruitt]

Just a crazy, crazy book.

And a true story - the author's grandfather invented Sweet and Low. An amazing family memoir.

[That French Guy]

Dr. No, huh?

The books are quite a bit different. I read 4-5 of the early ones and they were much slower paced than the movies, but I was OK with that. Then they started to be pretty much the same thing but in different locations.

Yep.
I picked it up because I kept hearing how the novels were darker and Bond more of a bad guy than the movies (Hello Roger Moore !!) and wanted to check, but from what I've read, it's mostly a blander Bond. Much slower indeed. I'm sure half of the book could fit in 20 minutes of screen time.

[The Sybian]

Picked up At Home again after a long delay. Chapter 1 was boring me. It has picked up, but gets bogged down in minutia and too much anthropology at times, but it is fascinating. Basically, Bryson explains the origin of how houses came to be as they are. Studying ancient dwellings and the history of additional rooms being added to the original "hall," which was a single room abode with many people living in it. Along the way, he explains the origin of countless words, for example the phrase room and board. At some point in England's history, nobody had tables. They ate off of small boards they placed on their laps. Hence, an Inn provides room and board.

[wlu_lax6]

Just finished


now onto