What Are You Currently Reading?

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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Lindvaettr » Sat Oct 14, 2017 10:46 pm

LunarTeaHouse wrote:The Bible, of all things. More for academic purposes than anything else, but if I happen to find particular passages meaningful or beautiful along the way, I wouldn't scoff at them.

I haven't made it out of Leviticus yet. I learned that we're not allowed to eat Thanksgiving leftovers! :lol:


I've always meant to read the Bible for academic purposes. Religion is fascinating to me, and I like seeing how the myths and ideas evolve. I'd also like to read the Qur'an and the Torah, but then I'd also have to read all the additional fan fiction that goes with them, and I wouldn't know where to start. Also, some Hindu stuff about many armed cow gods would be fun!

Personally, I'm reading The Count of Monte Cristo, at the moment. I've only read a few Dumas novels, but I've loved them all, and this one is no exception. It may be my favorite one yet.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby LunarTeaHouse » Sun Oct 15, 2017 7:25 am

The Count of Monte Cristo is my favorite book of all time!!! I absolutely love that one! God I love French lit. I also really love Verne and Hugo. I've always felt like American Lit is mostly about frontier exploration or revolutionary/civil war stories that don't really interest me as much.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby FaceTheCitizen » Sat Nov 11, 2017 9:42 pm

...
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby DoglovingJim » Sun Nov 12, 2017 1:39 am

Right now I intend to read "The Murder of Sonny Liston" by Shaun Assael.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Tue Nov 28, 2017 12:26 am

I've been going through a lot of classics lately to broaden the mind (and vocab) that I read before and a lot of ones I haven't ever read. Of the philosophers, I've read Tolstoy, works of Nietzsche, but the only philosopher that's really grabbed my attention is Henry David Thoreau. Perhaps it's simply fate, given that he's was a staunch abolitionist who praised guerilla attacks on plantation owners and I give no care to violence against white supremacists, but his are the only classical philosophical works that I think really carry forward well into the current day.

Walden was probably one of the best...Books? Essays?...that I've ever read in terms of philosophy (admittedly, I've said before that I don't care much for philosophy, like a proper American, so I haven't read that many), though I'm still working up to Civil Disobedience, which I understand to have had a heavy influence on Ghandi, MLK, and Tolstoy.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby cmsellers » Tue Nov 28, 2017 4:41 am

I just finished Where Song Began by Tim Low about an hour ago. It's a history of Australia's birds, their evolution, and their relationship with their environment and with humans. It's quite interesting, and also gave me new fodder for my critters thread. (I've got more posts coming.) The well of "wow this animal looks weird!" is running dry, but there's plenty of animals which are both cute and fascinating.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby ghijkmnop » Thu Nov 30, 2017 3:53 pm

Redacted
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Last edited by ghijkmnop on Thu Mar 14, 2019 4:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby IamNotCreepy » Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:26 pm

Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson. It's the third book in the Stormlight Archive series. I technically haven't started reading it yet because I am saving it for vacation next week.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby DoglovingJim » Sat Dec 02, 2017 2:18 pm

DoglovingJim wrote:Right now I intend to read "The Murder of Sonny Liston" by Shaun Assael.


Well I finished that book above (was very interesting, gave also a history of the mob in Las Vegas), and also I finished Lee Floren's most popular novel the raw action Western "Callahan rides alone" which also was a good book.

Although...
Spoiler: show
I'm a bit annoyed that the crazy old guy Zukerman who trained wild wolves and would ride with their pack hunting coyotes (and other things) turned out to be a junkie and got killed at the end by the bad and very dandy Roger Heywood though.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby jbobsully11 » Tue Dec 12, 2017 12:14 am

I finished Sex on the Brain and How to Read a Book (which I started almost a year ago but mostly forgot about), and read Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted in about a week. I’ve started reading V. S. Ramachandran's The Tell-Tale Brain again (I read the first chapter in the bookstore where I got it a while ago, and then basically ignored it until just recently). I'm pretty sure that's the last book I started a while ago but didn't finish.

I also decided to start something else that should go quickly, out of a desire to not be crushed by piles of unread books read more. So now I’m also reading The Psychopath Inside, by James Fallon.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby CarrieVS » Wed Dec 20, 2017 9:44 pm

I just finished re-reading the first two books of Victor Milan's Dinosaur Lords series (I hope to get #3 on Monday, or will probably buy it shortly afterwards if not.)

I can't remember if I've talked about that series here before. I love it. It's emphatically not great literature, or even, really, good literature. It's not bad but it leaves much room for improvement. But it's knights riding dinosaurs. If that gives you the same thrill of excitement it does me, then like me you'll probably forgive these books a lot of things.

There's an expression, of story-writing: "yes but; no and," meaning that you either have your protagonists succeed or achieve what they were trying to, but with a caveat, or you don't, and you heap some additional misfortune on them. The second book in this series, The Dinosaur Knights, kind of epitomises this towards the end.

slightly spoilery
I thought when I was first reading it, towards the end, that this was going to be a duology:
it seemed that the climax of the overall plot had been reached. And oh my, how!

rather more spoilery
Falk and Jaume fighting alongside one another, whatever their personal feelings. And just as it all seems lost, Karyl, fighting alongside all the engineers of his own downfall.


Every time all appears lost, some new card is played, raising the pitch every time. And then the battle's done, in such explosive fashion that it seems almost anticlimactic. And then it's over, and all the subplots appear to be wrapped up so pat that with only the epilogue remaining I still thought, the first time I read it, that this was the end of the series - and was disappointed with the ending, so saccharinely ever-after it was. Yes, yes yes yes!

But.

Wham. Right at the end of the epilogue, on the last page of the book, the biggest creators-damned but you could think of. Funnily enough it was a thing I'd suspected much earlier, but laid aside when the more obvious plot took over.


Hell of an ending. Book three didn't quite come out in time for my birthday, so I've been waiting eagerly for Christmas.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby jbobsully11 » Tue Dec 26, 2017 7:09 am

I got a few books today, and I expect to be getting more in a few days. I just finished The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus a few minutes ago (I started it this morning). I found it highly entertaining. I'm almost done with The Psychopath Inside.

Then I'll have to sort through the other books I have and decide which one(s) will be next.
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Crimson847 wrote:In other words, transgender-friendly privacy laws don't molest people, people molest people.

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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby KleinerKiller » Tue Dec 26, 2017 8:17 am

Just finished Jo Nesbo's The Snowman, in hopes that the generally well-regarded source material would be better than the legendarily inept movie. To my disappointment, while it has its moments, it's just a slightly above-average airport paperback thriller with a compelling protagonist and premise bogged down by pacing problems and a few too many fake-out twists.

I got Junji Ito's horror classic Uzumaki in hardcover for Christmas when I've only read the panels online before, so I'll probably go through that next. Then it's Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, because racism and cosmic horror are the perfect way to end 2017.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Tue Dec 26, 2017 10:45 pm

I'm currently reading David Byrne's "How Music Works". It's a collection of musings on the history of various elements of music as well as his experiences as part of The Talking Heads.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby 52xMax » Wed Dec 27, 2017 4:40 am

After inadvertently taking a break from reading this year, I decided to do something about it and finish at least one book before the year ended. The book I picked was Artemis by Andy Weir. Same dude who wrote The Martian, which I really enjoyed, and anyone who liked the movie should read as well.

Artemis is the follow-up to the Martian, and though it's not very clear whether both stories are part of the same continuity, it is not a sequel. The similarities are there, in that both stories take place in a not too distant future, with technological advancements not too unrealistic, and much of the plot relies on very technical knowledge about science and engineering, even though most of the technology has not yet been applied to aerospace innovations.

The story is about a girl, Jazz, who's a smuggler and a bit of a troublemaker, and how she ends up tangled in a heist that involves the largest figures on the scene, several world governments, conglomerates and even the mafia. It also reminded me of "the Moon is a harsh mistress" by Robert Heinlein, which I read not too long ago and I might have written about it on this thread.

Anyway, I gave Artemis 3.5/5 stars. It didn't capture me the same way the Martian did, and in parts it felt too much like a second serving of the same flavor of ice cream. Time to try something a bit different.
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