Books

hutch wrote:
and Ratbastard..if you haven't read a book since 1981 this is the wrong thread for you man..

how about you start a thread for cruises or something?

Merely because I do not enjoy reading does not mean I am not interested in what books others find to be of value.

hutch wrote:
I've had copies of this book for years but finally got around to it…Ian McEwan's "Saturday"


boy..its a tour de force….

He wrote Atonement? That book made me angry!

K8teebug wrote:

hutch wrote:
I've had copies of this book for years but finally got around to it…Ian McEwan's "Saturday"


boy..its a tour de force….

He wrote Atonement? That book made me angry!

yeah he wrote that… it may be his most acclaimed book.. i couldn't stand it myself! that's why I didn't read Saturday til now..

Ben Lerner - Leaving The Atocha Station

Ostensibly about a spliff-smoking pill-popping post-grad poet on a fellowship in Madrid.  Really about language and art; the majestic inadequacy of the former and the fugitive profundity of the latter. Great stuff. 

ggw wrote:
Ostensibly about a spliff-smoking pill-popping post-grad poet on a fellowship in Madrid.  Really about language and art; the majestic inadequacy of the former and the fugitive profundity of the latter.

That's an excellent sentence.

i've been reading Flash Boys by Michael Lewis - its about the tech behind high frequency trading on wall street….and how its been exploited.  it's fascinating.

I've read three books by William Boyd the past few weeks…. a new discovery for me… A Good Man in Africa is perfect….Really reminds me of Maugham and Greene….two of my favorite authors…

I'm now reading Anthony Burgess' Napoleon Symphony…

I just learned that Boyd was one of the two people who delivered a eulogy at Burgess' funeral…..everything ties together

2014 was probably my best year yet as far as reading books.. I think I made it through about 40 including some magnificent ones (i.e., All the Kings Men)

I find it interesting how much I tend to prefer British to American writers….

I'm about 60 pages into the Alex Chilton bio…

Over the break I read Station Eleven (good, but had some issues with it), Martian (cool story and very science-y, worth it if you like space), Wild (I liked it, but been told it's a chick book), and started The Secret History of Wonder Woman (about 100 pages in, and it's good! very interesting!)

hutch wrote:I find it interesting how much I tend to prefer British to American writers….

and bands

I am about a hundred pages into this:



Fluency in patois is helpful but not required.  A steady soundtrack of Studio One comps is a prerequisite (Trojan will do in a pinch).

Just finishing this one.

http://www.amazon.com/Infidel-Ayaan-Hirsi-Ali/dp/0743289692/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420649185&sr=1-1&keywords=infidel

As someone who grew up under the spell of fundamentalist Christianity and eventually found my way, shed my religion, and understood the repressive lunacy of the doctrine, I totally understand this woman's journey. Fortunately, I was not a member of a religion which prescribes death to those who leave it. A real eye-opener by a boldly courageous, feminist woman.

reading several at once

Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance
Spalding Gray's Journal
Moby DIck
Cant' We Talk About Something More Pleasant (Roz Chast)

I was certain the AP announcement on my phone this morning was announcing her passing, but alas:

Harper Lee to Publish a New Novel

vansmack wrote:
I was certain the AP announcement on my phone this morning was announcing her passing,

That would be horrible. Someone else took her in my death pool.

Julian, wrote:
That would be horrible. Someone else took her in my death pool.

At 88, she can't be worth that many points.

vansmack wrote:
At 88, she can't be worth that many points.

You guys have a scoring system that rewards younger deaths? That's cool.

Ours is rotisserie draft style, and each celebrity can be selected up to 4 times. (First person to select them has them for 4 points, second person is only gets 3, third person gets 2…)

Don't believe the hype, the Miranda July novel is AWFUL.

Getting books from library book sales means reading books that may not exactly be current, but they still may be relevant and/or interesting.

I read this one recently:

The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn

by Diane Ravitch

The title is pretty self explanatory. This review sums it up nicely.


Diane Ravitch's The Language Police shines a light on a dark secret in k-12 education, namely the scandalous undermining of content standards in k-12 textbooks due to a collusion between textbook publishers and censors aimed at shielding children from anything that even remotely could be considered harmful or offensive to potential educational consumers. I had heard a few "Ripley's Believe It or Not" stories about this phenomenon – for example, a university colleague of mine who had written a widely used high school civics text told me recently how he was asked by a California textbook review board to eliminate a diagram depicting the classic "layer cake" model of American federalism, lest it encourage kids to eat junk food – but only after seeing Ravitch's book did I realize just how far this sort of lunacy had gone. The book meticulously documents its argument with an enormous amount of scholarly evidence, and equally meticulously tries to demonstrate that both liberals and conservatives are at fault for this problem. Ravitch has no ideological axe to grind here. She takes shots at both political correct feminists and others on the left as well as religious conservatives and others on the right, and anyone in-between who would deny our children a subtantively strong, academically sound education. It is a must-read for anyone concerned about the dumbing down of American education and the movement away from serious, free inquiry in our schools.

I'm currently reading:

The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest

by Anatoli Boukreev


which documents the tragic events on Mt Everest in May 1996. The same events were coverered in Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, which I've already read. It will be neat to go back in read that one again and compare the different writer/climber's versions.