What Are You Reading

[pigeon toe]

Harry Potter! I'm only 100 pages in though. I haven't gotten a good chance yet to really sit down and get into it. I actually may go read right now...

 

[HANSOLOJONES]

Currently reading "Das Boot". I loved the film and wanted to read it's source material. So far it's outstanding!



Regards,
HSJ.

 

[Harp]

Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius.

 

[Orgetorix]

Just finished Warhorse, by Timothy Zahn.

Now reading The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, by Dorothy Sayers. I'm trying to work through all her Lord Peter novels chronologically.

School is starting next week, though, so I'll be "et up" with assigned reading for a while.

 

[Matt Deckard]

A response by Orgetorix.

 

[Dr Doran]

Currently reading "Das Boot". I loved the film and wanted to read it's source material. So far it's outstanding!



Regards,
HSJ.

I didn't "get" that movie. Maybe I need to watch it again. Maybe my claustrophobia was acting up. Maybe I was feeling homophobic with all those men cooped up. I'm not sure. I liked the fact that it was told from the enemy's point of view. That was interesting. But I just didn't "get" it.

 

[LadyStardust]

Getting into the Halloween spirit waaaay too early with J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume I.

 

[Orgetorix]

A response by Orgetorix.

I'm honored.

 

[imoldfashioned]

The Queen of Bohemia, a biography of Louise Bryant.

 

[Dr Doran]

Sarah Pomeroy's Spartan Women.

 

[Sunny]

Over the last week, mostly an orgy of 'Doc' Smith science fiction:

Triplanetary, First Lensman, Galactic Patrol, Gray Lensman, Second Stage Lensman

There are two more in the Lensman series, but I whooshed through these at such a pace that I decided to slow down a bit with a Nero Wolfe or four. Or, to be honest, I don't have the remaining two to hand. If I did, slowing down goes out the window.

 

[Harp]

I didn't "get" that movie. Maybe I need to watch it again. Maybe my claustrophobia was acting up. Maybe I was feeling homophobic with all those men cooped up. I'm not sure. I liked the fact that it was told from the enemy's point of view. That was interesting. But I just didn't "get" it.

und du bist mit das boot Berkeley allus tag laft? Schon liebchen, schon. lol

 

[Dr Doran]

I looked at the Lensmen books 20 years ago but I don't remember if I read them.

Speaking of Science Fiction, I don't read much of it nowadays. But the things that I still carry with me from that genre are (in no order):

1. The short story "I have no mouth but I must scream" by Harlan Ellison

2. H G Wells' The Time Machine

3. Orwell's 1984

4. Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix (for the ideas, the images, and the historical development, not for his "skill" at putting sentences together)

5. Piers Anthony's Battle Circle trilogy (yes, he is a hack, and some of his writing [e.g Xanth] is about the worst I have ever seen outside of bodice ripper romance novels, but the first book was a real book, and the overall theme of the trilogy is interesting)

5. Larry Niven's Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers (see note on 4)

6. Ursula K LeGuin, particularly the gender-bender Left Hand of Darkness but in fact all the Ekumen books and also the anthropological future report Always Coming Home. A superb user of the English language.

7. GENE WOLFE'S BOOK OF THE NEW SUN. This actually had great writing, a quality whose general absence in the SF field (YES I AM A SNOB) caused my departure from it. In order they are The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, The Citadel of the Autarch, The Urth of the New Sun. About the goofiest titles imaginable, I agree, but these were quite remarkable and the images were vivid, the political background utterly believable, the sensuality realistic, the sense of duty of the protagonist compelling, and the religious aspects quite provocative. HAS ANYONE READ THESE? Anyone?

 

[Harp]

Orwell's '84 is a good read; and please pardon my pun, old boy,
couldn't resist launching a torpedo at Berkeley.

 

[Dr Doran]

Torpedo Berkeley?
I do it all the time, old bean.
Check out my myspace page for some anti-berkeley insults;

myspace.com/458BC

Or my feature "Naked Graduate School" on my blog:

blogspot.com/prokatalambano

 

[MisterPaul]

I just finished my annual reading of Shogun and I've started on Seabiscuit.

 

[Miss Neecerie]

I am reading Orange Empire:California and the Fruits of Eden.

Book Description
This innovative history of California opens up new vistas on the interrelationship among culture, nature, and society by focusing on the state's signature export--the orange. From the 1870s onward, California oranges were packaged in crates bearing colorful images of an Edenic landscape. This book demystifies those lush images, revealing the orange as a manufactured product of the state's orange industry. Orange Empire brings together for the first time the full story of the orange industry--how growers, scientists, and workers transformed the natural and social landscape of California, turning it into a factory for the production of millions of oranges. That industry put up billboards in cities across the nation and placed enticing pictures of sun-kissed fruits into nearly every American's home. It convinced Americans that oranges could be consumed as embodiments of pure nature and talismans of good health. But, as this book shows, the tables were turned during the Great Depression when Upton Sinclair, Carey McWilliams, Dorothea Lange, and John Steinbeck made the Orange Empire into a symbol of what was wrong with America's relationship to nature.

 

[David V]

Code of the Woosters.

 

[A. G. Geiger]

Isis Unveiled volume II.

 

[K.D. Lightner]

Finished my excellent McCrumb novel The Songcatcher and am now reading a horror story called The Ruins, just for fun before I go back to the heavy stuff.

karol