What are you reading?

[CJSF]

Hello - I know I've not visited this thread in a while, but since I was passing through, you might like to know what I am reading.

Currently reading (s)mythology by Jeremy Tarr, as well as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I got through about half of Huxley's Brave New World a while back, but work and life got too complicated and the library wouldn't let me renew it any longer.

CJSF

[Chuck]

Heavenly Errors by Neil F Comins. Covers peoples' misconceptions about astronomy. Not bad, but he does claim that the distance from the earth to the sun is almost 400,000 times the distance from the earth to the moon. Errors in a book about errors seem ironic to me.

[jokergirl]

*sigh* The Silmarillion. Because I need more material for my comic.
I'd rather read the bible in terms of riveting writing... :P (it's that slow)

[Buttercup]

The Red Book (Carl Jung's personal diary regarding his "confrontations with the unconscious" from 1914 to 1930) has arrived. His accompanying artwork is lovely.

The book is HUGE. Is 15.5 inches long, 11.5 inches wide, 2 inches thick, and probably weighs 10 pounds.

I've begun reading the introduction and translated material.

Totally worth the $$$.

I'm grateful to his family for allowing publication.

[Paul Beardsley]

*sigh* The Silmarillion. Because I need more material for my comic.
I'd rather read the bible in terms of riveting writing... :P (it's that slow)

Philistine!

I love it. I prefer it to Lord of the Rings. I've read it twice and listened to chunks of it on tape.

[HenrikOlsen]

*sigh* The Silmarillion. Because I need more material for my comic.
I'd rather read the bible in terms of riveting writing... :P (it's that slow)

You've either been reading the wrong parts or the wrong translation if you think that's a putdown.

[starcanuck64]

*sigh* The Silmarillion. Because I need more material for my comic.
I'd rather read the bible in terms of riveting writing... :P (it's that slow)

I'd love to see your version of Luthien and Beren.

I've decided to go old school and I'm reading Mote in God's Eye again, it's been a couple of decades since my last read of the Niven-Pournelle classic.

[Gillianren]

You've either been reading the wrong parts or the wrong translation if you think that's a putdown.

Exactly what I was thinking. There's the begats, and then there's a story where a woman offers a man hospitality greater than is necessary and proceeds to drive a tent peg through his head.

[jokergirl]

Exactly what I was thinking. There's the begats, and then there's a story where a woman offers a man hospitality greater than is necessary and proceeds to drive a tent peg through his head.

Are we talking Silmarillion or bible now?;-)
The Bible has quite a few good parts. I may not agree with organized religion but I like me a good mythology.

;-)

[Paul Beardsley]

Well Sil has an "oops, I've married my own sister!" moment.

[Gillianren]

Are we talking Silmarillion or bible now?;-)
The Bible has quite a few good parts. I may not agree with organized religion but I like me a good mythology.

I've never read the former. Dad had all the Tolkien which had been published by 1983 (when he died), but the only one I inherited was The Hobbit. My older sister can get through the rest of 'em, so she kept them. No, the tent peg story is in Judges, I believe. Somewhere in there.

[HenrikOlsen]

Just started on Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? by Max G. Gergel.
Available as a pdf here, it's the hilarious memoirs of the founder of Columbia Organic Chemicals.

I've just gotten to the point where, after no longer having any wartime orders they turned to making soap powder which is sold to restaurants through well-coordinated timing of a health inspector failing the restaurant for lack of cleanliness, a soap salesman showing up and demonstrating how his soap cleans and disinfects better and cheaper than the competition, followed by the inspector checking and giving them a pass. Followed shortly by the production and sale of rat poison, also to restaurants, with the help of a trained rat and the aforementioned health inspector.

[jokergirl]

Well Sil has an "oops, I've married my own sister!" moment.

I thought that was in Children of Hurin.

[ToSeek]

Just finished reading Tess Gerritsen's Gravity, the only novel I know of with scenes aboard the ISS. It was a real page-turner but some people might be turned off by some really gross medical stuff in there. (Gerritsen and a bunch of other writers for Tor/Forge Books visited Goddard a couple of weeks ago with the goal of inspiring them to write some NASA-based novels. I talked with Tess and some of the others and promised her - after she told me about it - that I'd read Gravity and let her know what I thought from my NASA insider's point-of-view.)

[Paul Beardsley]

I thought that was in Children of Hurin.

Children of Hurin is the full-length version of the story; Sil contains the condensed version.

[geonuc]

*sigh* The Silmarillion. Because I need more material for my comic.
I'd rather read the bible in terms of riveting writing... :P (it's that slow)

I have a copy of The Silmarillion that I bought when it first came out in 1977, and have yet to read it all the way through. And I'm a big LOTR fan. It's a good reference book, I suppose.

[snowcelt]

THE SILMARILLION is one of my favorite books of all time. I read it when I was in the army on exercise in Germany back in 1979. I had the only book in my section. I lent the book to another, then another etc. Got in a fist fight to get it back a couple weeks later because I needed to read it again. Wrong! I forgot. Another fellow had the SWORD OF SHANNARA. Every time someone thought another had "bladed" him, he would say he was stabbed in the back by the Sword of Shannara.

[Gillianren]

My mother gave me V Is For Vengeance for Christmas, this year's Sue Grafton offering. Just four more left. (Her answer to "what are you going to do after 'z'?" is "Stop asking me that!") She's experimenting with format in the recent efforts, and this is another one which plays with time, place, and character. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me to know that she's getting kind of bored with Kinsey.

[Scriitor]

Just After Sunset, Stephen King. I generally enjoy his short stories the most.

[Gillianren]

I like that one, but it's a terrible cover.

[Romanus]

Good to run into some other Silmarillion fans; it's by far my favorite part of the canon, and I've reread it many times.

Just finished Romm's The Ghost on the Throne, about the wars of the Diadochi immediately after Alexander the Great's death, from 323-308 B.C.; they continued for over 30 years after that, by the by. One of the best history books I've ever read, with the pacing and nuance of a novel. Since it was a library copy, I'll probably buy one myself to add my collection.

[TJMac]

OK, so, I gave up on Martina Cole. I really couldn't stomach her writing style.

Polished off the latest Lee Childs novel, The Affair. Started on Billy Bathgate, by E.L. Doctorow.

Discovered a sequel to Long Way Round, by Ewan Mcgregor (yes, THE E.M.) and Charley Boorman, titled Long Way Down, that chronicles their motorcycle ride through Africa. So, started on that too.

Still waiting for library to get S.K. to me.

TJ

[Parrothead]

Currently reading The Ambler Warning by whoever the ghostwriter is chosen by Ludlum's estate.

Awaiting holds at the local library, english language translations of The Snowman by Jo Nesbo and The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler.

[LookingSkyward]

Lee Childs "Jack Reacher' novels, and Thunder over the Ochocos - a history of Oregons Great Basin

[Solfe]

Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds.

[Romanus]

Well into George R.R. Martin's A Dance of Dragons, the latest (and last) entry in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. What's after that is wide open; either Bowden's Murder City, or Dr. Martin's Twilight of the Mammoths, both nonfiction.

[TJMac]

Just got Stephen King's latest from the library. Everything else put on hold. (4 other books actually)

/rant on/
While I know I should try be nice, I cant. Some brain dead non-human twit, who apparently has never been given any sort of education at all, (Im frankly amazed they are capable of reading) decided that it would be lovely to read this book, and about every fourth page, turn the corner down to mark the spot. I am at this time busy hacking the Library database to find the list of people who had it previous to me, so I can look them up and administer a good thrashing. Never mind that stack of bookmarks on the counter as you check the book out, S U R E L Y you wont need one, because you will just read through the book in one sitting!
*insert words forbidden by BAUT here*

/rant off/

Hoping to put a mighty dent in it by the end of the year.

TJ

[Scriitor]

Foundation and Empire.

[Gillianren]

TJMac, that's terrible. One of my best friends works in a library and has most of the time I've known her, and she has some terrible stories about things people have used as bookmarks. At our college's library, I discovered that someone had checked out the William Safire On Language books and "corrected" his grammar. In pen, as I recall. And of course their "corrections" were almost always wrong. And, yes, one of my friend's coworkers did according to her once discover that a book had been returned with a strip of raw bacon serving as a bookmark.

I am reading Twin Tracks: The Unexpected Origins of the Modern World, by James Burke. It's a neat concept--each chapter starts in one place and ends in one place, and you read first the left-hand pages and then the right-hand pages, each of which tells a different progression from your starting point, and then the last page in the chapter connects the stories again. But it's not always at the front of your mind that you're reading the book in a different way from all the thousands of other books you've read, and when the left-hand page ends with a paragraph break and the right-hand one starts with one, it can be just a natural progression to start reading the next page instead of going the way you're supposed to. The material covered is pretty interesting, though, if you like James Burke.

[Solfe]

I never turn down the corners of library books. But one time I used 3x5 cards to jot down citation information and had them stuck in the proper pages of each book. I then proceeded to return the books without removing the 3x5 cards. It was such a good idea, but I executed it in the worst fashion imaginable. I had to wait until Monday morning to get my hands on the books and the cards again.