What book is everyone reading at the moment?

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Just finished reading "Never Let Me Go" - Kazuo Ishiguro.

Odd story. It's a bit hard to say too much without spoiling, but I quite enjoyed it. As usual with Ishiguro, it's very understated. Even though he writes in English about English people in English settings, I find his stories very Japanese thematically.

I've read "Remains of the Day" and "When We Were Orphans" and enjoyed them both. Haven't read "The Unconsoled" yet and I keep hearing not-good things about it so I'm not sure.

Now reading "The Island at the Centre of the World". I'm a sucker for that sort of pop-history.

Winny
 
Meet You In Hell
Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America by Les Standiford.

Gotta love those early industrialists!
 
Everytime I read that somebody wants to learn Greek I have mixed feelings of admiration and horror because Greek is REALLY difficult, no kidding. :) BUT one of my closest friends who publishes The Classics has developed a methods for people to learn ancient greek. I will have to ask his if it's available in English.

I would LOVE to try his method if it's available anywhere (amazon?). Let me explain, perhaps, why I want to read the original.

I've read the Illiad in Alexander Pope's translation (an 1821 edition... with copper engravings because photography wasn't invented yet...which the library actually let me borrow. Go figure...) and it was wonderful. But it really isn't the ILLIAD--it was Pope's Illiad, which is something else. Then I started to read one of the modern, academic translations--praised by everybody as amazingly accurate--and I trust that it is. But the accuracy destroys the "feel" of the work completely, making it dry-as-dust reading. If I could read the original, I could have the wonderful poetry without losing any meaning.

I read Thucidedes in the prototype. It's the definition of perfection.

Even in English translation, I have to say that his book about the Peneponesian wars hit me right between the eyes.

It's more difficult to read the Tragedies because it's the metre involved but reading Thucidedes or Plato ( Plato is more difficult because he uses a lot of antonyms)in the prototype is a pleasure.

I imagine that the relation is a bit like the relation between the OT original in the King James translation. It is an EXCELLENT translation, from the literary point of view, but still, "The Lord is my shepard, I shall not want"--very beautiful English--does not do justice to Adon'ai Ro'i Lo Echsar...

P.S.

Speaking of the King James translation and that period (and earlier) in England: I had an interesting conversation with one of those wise@$$es in the English department who tried to convince me that Shakespeare's "dead" blank verse--unrhyming iambic pentameter--does not say anything "relevant" since it's "unnatural" to everyday speech.

I shrugged and said, "I'll have the special and a glass of milk."

She staggered back for a minute, and said, victorious, "But if you want to express deep philosophical points, who cares about this sort of thing?"

So I replied, "The world is everything that is the case."

She isn't speaking to me anymore.
 
Currently reading The Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan
Recently finished The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien for the second time.
 
Just finished Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Good stuff. Working on something by Michael Chabon next.
 
Anon, South Vietnam on the Road to Victory, 1965.

I'm a long-time fan of blatant propaganda so when I saw this one on the lists of an online 2nd hand book store I had to order it. And it was almost just as I expected. The main difference was that I expected it to be a propaganda book where the South Vietnam government explains why they are going to win but it was actually written from the Vietcong viewpoint.

It is mostly a photo book with only small pieces of text in addition of the photo captions. The captions are generally of the form "Place X. Some date. YY planes shot down, and ZZZ US aggressors killed." Just out of curiosity I googled for a couple of place names for the American account, and as you might well have suppposed, those give a rather diffirent picture.

But I have to admit that the anonymous editors of the book have managed to find a couple of very powerful pictures, like one where an American soldier laughs at a Vietnamese corpse. (The caption doesn't hint where and when the photo was taken).

The final part of the book is a series of demonstration photos taken all over the world. The very last one is taken somewhere in Finland (the texts of the signs can be seen clearly). But the caption places it in Switzerland ...
 
Just finished The Orientalist by Reiss. Very intersting book and a good read. Now The Tale of Genji -- an ancient Japanese novel by a lady of the 11th Century imperial court. So far, very good.
 
Just started The Fortress of Solitude, by Johnathan Lethem. Looks like it'll be a good one.
 
With Lawrence In Arabia, my original ~1920's edition by Lowell Thomas. A bit watermarked, battered and torn when I got, but the pages and photo plates are still in perfect condition.

Reading it again for the shear and blatant propaganda effort, plus Lowell's remarkable effort at brown-nosing and living vicariously.
 
Well, I was rummaging around at the back of our local bookstore and found this book called Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.......

Anyway, done that (not bad IMHO) and last night finished " A History of God" by Karen Armstrong. A good introduction to the development of the concept of god in the monotheistic faiths and a fairly easy read to boot. (No pictures though :( )
 
I recently read Hoot by Carl Hiaasen which was delightful.

After slogging through a couple of dreadfully written academically proper histories of the Buffalo Soldiers, I am now actually enjoying a memoir by a woman who died in 1932. She was the very young daughter of a white officer of the Tenth Cavalry, one of the units of Buffalo Soldiers in the West after the Civil war:
Child of the Fighting Tenth: On the Frontier With the Buffalo Soldiers .
 
No book at the moment, but the last one I read was, surprise surprise, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
 
It's normal for me to be reading multiple books at once, because it is almost always non-fiction. Unfortunately, I rarely have time to squeeze in fiction reading. :(

I am reading 3 books now, off and on:
- The Shellcoder's Handbook
- Exploiting Software: How to Break Code
- The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
 
I have just finished reading " The mysterious Flame of Queen Loana", the last book of Umberto Eco.

It's quite a book and far away from Eco's typical mania to demonstrate his knowledge about ...everything. I believe that people in their 50ies who have been in contact with the european pop culture of the 40ies and 50ies will enjoy this book very much. The book is written with sensitivity and this old european sense of humor which I find adorable maybe because I am familiar with it.

Since last month I re-read in English " Justine" the first out of four books of the "Alexandrian Quartet" of Durrel. I was very much captivated by the language. English can be an amazing language sometimes. :)

I also read for the first time in my life a book of John Le Carre.:D The style seems more like a case of rather professed elegance but it's very amusing.

I wonder if I must read " The Da Vinci code"...
 
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