What book is everyone reading at the moment?

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I've finished it now, but I think the best book I've read in a long time was "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak. It's narrated by Death, set in WW2 Germany.

It took me forever to read, since I couldn't read it in public, because I cried almost all the way through.
 
Just finished "How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World" by Francis Wheen. Enjoyable but unmemorable. Makes great points but they are sometimes hard to extract from the general ranting.
 
. . . And just started "No Logo" by Naomi Klein. I don't expect to agree with much of it but am interested in how rational her anti-globalisation arguments are.
 
The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Synopsis: the Muslim world needs more f:Dking.
 
I just finished "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn." Just wonderful, especially since I grew up in North Brooklyn.

Michael
 
Just finished Jack McDevitt's "Seeker". I'm a big Sci-Fi fan, and I've enjoyed a number of McDevitt's books.
This one is actually a sequel to the earlier "Polaris", but it's a stand-alone.

Good solid blend of detective-adventure and hard science; best comparison might be some of Larry Niven's stuff.
The story is set some 9000 years in the future, and the protaganists are antiquities dealers. They come into possession of an artifact which rapidly leads to an involving mystery concerning a long-group of idealistic colonists.

Good enough so that I ordered the other one as well.
 
Book I am currently reading

Journey into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg. An 18 yr journey as witness & victim of Stalin's reign of terror. I keep putting this book aside due to its depressing nature. It is not surprising that "government" will do to its own populace that which an enemy wouldn't do.

A new book just out is Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar by Dorthy Fall. A French resistance fighter that received his Masters from Syracuse University, & while doing research on Indochina was killed in Vietnam. He spoke that the United States would show more wisdom through a negotiated peace.

It appears that things never change, do they.


 
Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition and Other Confusions of Our Time - Michael Shermer

I'm relatively knew to the whole "skeptic" thing. This book has been a lesson on critical thinking for me.
 
Charles Addams: A cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis

Always been a huge Addams fan, and this book is an excellent biography of him.

Highly recommended for anyone who likes his work.
 
I've just started Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (in the original French). I've already read Notre-Dame-de-Paris, plus a couple of other ponderous 19th century French novels in high school (La chartreuse de Parme, Le rouge et le noir). They bored and irritated me then, but I'm enjoying them a lot more now that I don't have to read them.
 
Just finished Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth. Fun, but not great liturature. A Middle-ages soap-opera. I thought the charachter's all sounded too modern in their expressions and thinking...but fun nonetheless.

Now reading a relatively new biography of the Emperor Augustus. So far enjoying it very much.
 
If you want a factual account of the Frankin (and other) expeditions to find the Northwest Passage, I would suggest "The Arctic Grail" by Canadian author Pierre Berton. Fact is often stranger than fiction.

(This was for the person who read a story about the Frankin Expedition)
 
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