What Books Are You Reading?

I’m reading Winnie-the-Pooh. :bouncy:

Nightly readings of Spongebob Square-pants here.

Just finished a fantastic travelogue called A Traveller in China by Christina Dodwell. It’s an account of her journey throuh the western regions of the country after the Cultural Revolution but before the economic rise (1983ish?).

Good book, but I had to share this little tidbit from the narrative. It’s Dodwell complaining about another Western tourist on the same bus as her…

“The girl was wearing short shorts, which many of the younger Western travelers in China seem to wear, not realizing how this offends the local people’s customs. What kind of Chinese woman would walk with bare thighs in public?”

Ahahahahaha!!!

I wrote a longer blog post about the book at the link below…

marine sniper by charles henderson… and the dr. seuss collection.

Is she the maniac who paddled down remote rivers in a collapsible canoe? If so, I read this years ago - I remember the prose being—how shall we say—a little stilted, but the story was great.

Is she the maniac who paddled down remote rivers in a collapsible canoe? If so, I read this years ago - I remember the prose being—how shall we say—a little stilted, but the story was great.[/quote]

That’s the one!

It occurred to me after I finished it that he didn’t write it with publication in mind. It was some sort of personal catharsis, and he hid it in his desk for the same reason you hide a diary in a desk - you don’t want people to read it. He’d probably be mortified to discover people have been reading his private scribblings.[/quote]
My understanding was that he did actually send them to a publisher, then couldn’t be bothered to get together for editing. The first one was apparently heavily edited (and therefore slightly better written) but then people were in an uproar over editing the work of the dead, so the 10 page narration of what the main character bought in Ikea stayed firmly in place in book 2. Yikes!
The Lisbeth character was interesting, but the main dude was clearly a super-heroized version of the author himself. I guess all writers do that to some degree :laughing:

[quote=“finley”]
Being in a Jerome K Jerome phase at the moment, I can recommend Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow which is a collection of (mostly very well-written) essays. It’s free if you’ve got a Kindle. If you haven’t, get one: there a lot of short-story anthologies on Amazon for just a couple of $. You’re sure to find something you like, and if you don’t, you haven’t wasted much.[/quote]
I downloaded Jerome, look forward to reading it!

Well put. I find myself treading that fine line often. Generally I think I err on the side of philistine though :wink:

[quote=“guy”]
Can’t recommend any proper short stories off the top of my head. However, there is plenty of sci-fi that is fairly short/quick that’s good. I really liked The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, and also Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. Actually, I just thought of Jorge Luis Borges. His short stories are good. At times, I had no idea what he was talking about, but they were still good. His stories are dreamlike: very weird, but the imagery is amazing.

I just read The Road this weekend. That was an extremely quick read and I literally couldn’t put it down. It was certainly very good, but I think I liked Blood Meridian more, even though I understood it less. I’m now working on The Hobbit, not having touched it since I was twelve. I vaguely remember hearing that it was written for kids and LoTR was written in a darker, more mature fashion, but it’s actually really noticeable now. The tone is really different.

I should note that my reading choices are usually based upon what I can get for free online or borrow from friends, so they’re a bit over the place.[/quote]
I’m in the same boat with books- I don’t have a credit card so can’t buy for my kindle, and paper books are so damned expensive. Reading this thread doesn’t help, I now want to read every book mentioned. I did get ahold of a copy of the master and marguerite, hoping that one will be good.

[quote=“NonTocareLeTete”][quote=“guy”]Can’t recommend any proper short stories off the top of my head. However, there is plenty of sci-fi that is fairly short/quick that’s good. I really liked The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, and also Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon…

I should note that my reading choices are usually based upon what I can get for free online or borrow from friends, so they’re a bit over the place.[/quote]
I’m in the same boat with books- I don’t have a credit card so can’t buy for my kindle, and paper books are so damned expensive. Reading this thread doesn’t help, I now want to read every book mentioned. I did get ahold of a copy of the master and marguerite, hoping that one will be good.[/quote]
Just a reminder that there are tens of thousands of books available for free legitimate download from Project Gutenberg and other sources. (Sometimes their formatting leaves something to be desired. But that can be fixed.) It’s also worth checking some of the PG sites elsewhere. For example, PG Australia – but not PG USA – has Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, which I’ve just now converted to Kindle format. :discodance:

Kafka. I’m reading Kafka. And every sentence is a mothertrucking micro-poem.

Could only read this book while commuting " The broker" by John Grisham borrowed from my boss. Hope could finish in a week without blinking :grin: but seems not possible will take 2wks.

I’ve been a Michener fan for a long time, but only now getting around to an early effort, The Source, about Isreal. He was already in full form at this stage, impressive. Gripping stuff, up with his best.

Antony Beevor’s WWII histories. Just finished Ardennes 1944, now reading The Fall of Berlin 1945. A British military historian, Beevor has sifted through an enormous amount of source material and in both books he found a way to present a highly readable version of events.

Beevor does an excellent job laying out the skeletal anatomy of the Cold War 1945-1990 in the latter. Harrowing stuff.

ETA: Couple examples from Ardennes 1944.

The Battle of the Bulge was over - or the growth of the bulge halted - on Christmas Day 1944 in a number of ferocious battles fought around Bastogne. It took another 44 days to flatten the bulge, and Beevor finds a number of stories that, if you are a fan of HBO’s Band of Brothers, you will like.

In one he relates how two soldiers in the 101st Airborne, a Sgt. Earl Hale and Private Joe Liebgott (yes, that Liebgott) had cornered 6 SS officers in a barn in a small town near Bastogne. The soldiers told the SS not to move or they’d be shot. Just then an artillery round exploded near the barn and Hale, wounded, sagged to the ground. The nearest SS officer fished a knife out of his boot and in the same motion slashed Hale’s throat. Hale survived but Liebgott shot all 6 SS officers.

In another building a Sergeant in the 101st was processing a room filled with Nazi prisoners who’d surrendered. The light was bad. One prisoner in particular would not stop grinning, and it irritated the US sergeant to no end. After many warnings he finally raised his rifle, but a nearby soldier shouted stop, he’s not grinning, the German has no lips. He’d lost both lips and his eyelids to frostbite on the Eastern front.

Beevor’s books are filled with these kinds of anecdotes.

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Some time in 1972, after getting a little ways into Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, I stopped. Tonight I began reading it again on Kindle for PC.

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New book from favorite author.

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Not reading, but recently listening to a lot of LITRPG, my new favorite genre

I find audiobooks are a nice break for the eyes and can set the sleep timer so I can listen to them as bedtime stories. Some of my top picks:

Ascend Online

Awaken online

Speedrunner

Otherlife

Delvers LLC

All of these are series, I get soem form Audible, but most are available somewhere on the interwebs

Finally, he’s back on track with this one. I wrote him a letter a few books back and told him that we had unfortunately grown apart. lol Then I read that he sorts through the vinyl records stacks in NYC and I didn’t want to blow a chance to run into him and chat, so didn’t send it.

I have a Japanese friend and his wife is a fan as well. I was going on about him being sad and just too morose, this was three years back, and she said that was when she read or re-read him. She said I was too happy to enjoy the sadness. I thought that was very interesting. When I’m really sad I listen to Joy Division. Never spin it when I’m feeling good.

My summer break is nearly done. Didn’t read as much as I wanted but this is what I got done:
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And some graphic novels, the old fashioned way, month by month via comic book store.
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Taking a break from a burst through Michael Crichton’s fiction. That guy had some seriously interesting ideas. I like his fiction for the amount of gratuitous science exposition he throws in, and the way he suddenly hangs a left from some super interesting idea into the story he wants to tell. His imagination far outstripped his abilities as a writer … but I really like reading his fiction.

Reading Ron Chernow’s Grant at the same time, which is terrific.

Also found a cheap German novel on Amazon by Oliver Pötzsch, a television writer in Bavaria. It’s actually a series of novels, translated into English. Formulaic (very) novels but another guy who throws in tons of exposition about everyday life in late 17th-century Bavaria. Who knew that hangmen were a guild that was ostracized by polite society, and that their medical skills were better than those of physicians of their time because they were also charged with torturing wayward citizens? His novels read like bad soap opera that I can’t not read.

Currently rereading the Ayn Rand novel "Atlas Shrugged ". Have you read this novel, what do you think about it?

Phillip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series. What an amazing writer. Rarely do I find a book that I want to reread. I’ve reread a numbe of his works. Brilliant. Taipei public library has a bunch of them.