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What book is everyone reading at the moment?

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I just read Penn Jillette's new book, Sock. It's good. Written from the point of view of a sock monkey, which is what caught my interest (naturally). It's a sort of philosophical thriller. I'd recommend it to people, but then I always try to get people to read things and they never do. Is it some kind of mental illness, that you constantly wish you could hand out a mandatory reading list and make people read and discuss things? Most of the read-ey people I know suffer the same compulsion.
 
Hydrogen Cyanide said:
I've got about 15 years of family photos to deal with.
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alfaniner said:
You can get a good scanner for about $150...
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Nah, all you need are a fireplace and a match. Take that, awkward stage of adolescence! No-one shall have proof that I once wore my hair that way!
 
This house has 3 scanners. I have over the past 3 months scanned over 500 images for another project.

And I am not about to torch the photos of the grandfather who was part of the Dutch resistence.

Actually, some family stories are more interesting and better than some books I have read recently (thankfully I checked out the book by Laurie Notaro --- along with the book on the WWII spies -- could he have MADE Operative, Spies, and Sabateurs more boring?).

By the way, I am the mom of the clumsy adolescents. I plan to save all those blackmail photos.
 
Hydrogen Cyanide said:
By the way, I am the mom of the clumsy adolescents. I plan to save all those blackmail photos.
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There's something about motherhood that brings out the evil in people, apparently. My mother keeps a framed 8x10 glossy of me at age 14 in the living room right where people can see it. Shudder. Fourteen! Braces, bad skin, and a goofy haircut. She's an evil woman.
 
Just finished American Taboo : A Murder in the Peace Corps by Philip Weiss. A true-crime page-turner, though it made me furious at times.

I find "true crime" really compelling, and devour Anne Rule's books as they appear.

On the scanner front: if you've got hundreds of photos to do in a limited time, a quick and dirty solution is to photograph them with a digital camera. As long as the light's set up right to eliminate any glare, the result is just about as good as with a scanner, and it takes a fraction of the time. I did all my mum's old photo albums in a couple of afternoons. It also saved wear and tear on the albums. Good alternative to photocopying, too.

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Actually my large scanning project is not photos. They are historical documents of an organization I belong to which is having a significant (divisible by 10 and 5) anniversary this year. It includes newspaper clippings, newsletters, letters and a scrap book and a photo album. For the photo album I did just scan each page... with Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop Elements I can crop out each individual picture.

The newest scanner is also the type you can pick up and lay over delicate books (I plan to use it to get family information from a 120 year old Bible my cousin sent to me). It is an HP 4600 See Through scanner (note: do not use around kittens, she bats at the moving bar). While my dad has photographed books back in the days before Xerox... none of our digital cameras are of any decent quality (the best is the memory still function of the digital video camera). On our home wish list is a digital camera with the lenses of our Canon EOS Rebel, and the memory capability with enough resolution to get a decent 8"x10" print.

One could be considered a book to read. I did an OCR scan of a Career Guidance workshop for women entering non-tradtional fields held in Henniker, NH. This includes personal experiences of several interesting women including the first woman to be an engineer in the Air Force, the first woman to do research in Antarctica and other fascinating women. It is not copyrigted, and I hope other members who were not even born then will find it interesting. While the Optical Character Reader works fairly well, it has trouble with edges, so additional letters have to be removed, plus the formatting has to be fixed.
 
Going to re-read Joe Haldeman's 'The Forever War' after I'm done with this one; I'm still amazed that a lot of people I've talked to, haven't even heard of it!
 
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
 
I'm rereading The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass. Before that I readed Perfume : The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind. I'm looking forward for the rest of Grass's 'Danzig trilogy'.
 
I just completed King's seventh and final in the series, The Dark Tower.

I'm now reading The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, by Steven Sherrill
 
I've finished the Court of the Red Tsar and I'm now reading The Cross and the Crescent by R Fletcher. It's an account of the earliest encounters between Muslims and Christians, not as good as his earlier work on an Anglo-Saxon blood feud.

Reading this book is a bit of a cheat really, as I've bought it for my mate's birthday present, but I couldn't give him something that I've not vetted, now could I? ;)

Jim Bowen (a huge fan of history books)
 
The Constant Gardener, by John Le Carre.

I haven't read Le Carre in many years, but my mother highly recommended this.
 
Last night started re-reading one of the best Ameircan novels of the last 60 years...Lolita. Wonderful.
 
sorgoth said:
I'm having a hard time getting through it... It's like there's these brilliant ideas and psychology and character development surrounded by incredibly boring, lengthy, irrelevant details.

Am I the only one who got the impression Dostoyevsky really needed an editor?
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I'm thinking thats a common occurence with 19th century "serialized" novels (I think C&P was originally in that format).

At least thats the impression I got when I read War & Peace. Jeez, Leo, burn down Moscow already!
 
I have never yet managed either Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. Perhaps it's a Russian problem. But then, Dickens can be deadly..............
I'm currently reading "Weighing the Soul - the Evolution of Scientific Thinking" by Len Fisher. It's not as heavy as it sounds and it's not without humour, either!
 
Right now I´m reading a book about the "Grundgesetz", the German constitution, written by my Public Law professor. It is very informational, and pretty light reading for a book on law.
 
I forgot to say what I was reading when I posted yesterday.

Undaunted Courage by the late, great Stephen Ambrose.
 
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