What book is everyone reading at the moment?

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American said:
Oh my GOD - you PAY for your porno!!!!!! What kind of a moron are you!! There's whole feature films on the internet for FREE.

Oh that's right, you're not into hardcore. You like stupid boring pictures of women wrapped in beach sea weed, or laughing like little girls while they wash a rich man's Cadillac in bikinis.

That's why you never get any action, 'cause you don't know what chicks want, or 'cause you're not man enough to gve it to them!
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So, you're saying that hot chicks prefer not to wear beach seaweed and get sand in various cracks, crevices and orfices while smiling idiotically into a sunset? You're saying hot chicks don't like undoing each others bikinis while washing an enormous black caddy limousine on the lawn of the Playboy Mansion on a hot summer day?

Man. You got your ideas about chicks all wrong. Hugh Hefner has no problems getting 'em like that. So 'splain how chicks don't dig photographic degradation and demeaning? They LOVE it!
 
Have just finished reading Bart D. Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus and Lost Christianities back-to-back. Really fascinating - should be required reading for biblical literalists.

And a treat in store! I found L. Sprague de Camp's biography of HP Lovecraft in a flea market last week, and have just begun. Great stuff so far. In the same treasure trove was Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony by David C. Woodman, which looks heavy but gripping. I had trouble deciding which to go for first, but the HPL/LSdC combination proved irresistible. :)
 
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Evolution in Action by Julian Huxley. I must say Huxley is as good, or better, a writer than any of the popular science writers of today. From the opening page this book is a cornucopia of quotable words. Probably the best $2.50 I have ever spent! :D :D :D
 
"Chesapeake," by James Michener. Never before have I plowed through 250 pages of a book inside of a week then thought to myself, "I've got to speed this up; I've hardly cracked this thing."
 
Just finished A Soldier's Embrace, by Nadine Gordimer. This is a collection of short stoires, and only a "book" by virtue of being a single volume, but what the heck.

Some of the stories date back to 1975. One, "City and Country Lovers," is about the Immorality Laws in the old South Africa, and it's a bit lurid -- but in 1975, readers needed a jolt to make them understand what the apartheit government was really like.

She's always a good read. She can make you see things.
 
I'm about 50 pages into The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. I know a lot about bats now.
 
The Quest by Wilbur Smith. I'm only about thirty pages into it, but it's already disappointing. River God is my all-time favourite book, but this is no River God. I should probably withold judgement until I finish it, but so far, it's not looking great...

If anybody else has followed the Egyptian books by Wilbur Smith, here's a spoiler... Although Taita was described as unable to grow facial hair (being 'eunuched' at 16 and all), for some reason, he sports a silvery beard. Hope that didn't ruin it for anybody.
 
Farm-Fresh Cats, by Scott Santoro.

This is a well-written account of a little-known paranormal event which occurred in a rural area of the USA. As far as I know, there has been no successful effort to debunk the incident about which Santoro writes.

It is an amazing story, and Santoro tells it well. He has an extraordinary eye for detail; even people who are inclined to be skeptical of the events Santoro describes are likely to enjoy this book.

One does need to pay careful attention when reading this. And it's good to go back and re-read it at least once after finishing it; there are intriguing points which one can easily miss the first time through.

A friend of mine in her late 50s discovered and recommended this book to me, but I think even some young people might enjoy reading this.
 
The Room by Ray Melnik.

It's an existential novel where the main character is atheist and at times, he rips religion. It has a twist that uses string theory as an explanation for an extraordinary event.
 
Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, & The Death Of ENRON, by Robert Bryce

This book had me shaking my head at almost every page; the blatant way these guys (Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, etc) just ripped this company off, all the while acting like they didn't know what was happening, is just sickening.

They went from dealing in oil, electricity, liquid (natural) gas, and the like, under Rich Kinder, and after he was forced out, went into mainly trading under Skilling. One of his brainchilds---that helped kill the company---was going from actual ('accrual') accounting (registering REAL cash on hand), to using 'mark-to-market' accounting, which meant that they were registering projected profit, not actual profit.

Of course, they'd then pay themselves huge bonuses, based on the 'profit' they'd made for the company, which made them go and 'make bigger deals', etc. etc.

Trust me, this is WAY boiled down from the book!
 
I'm reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman right now. More like savouring it in small pieces. It is delicious.

His writing style appeals to me on so many levels it is distracting me from the story. I keep having to pause and reread as I delight in the way he crafted sentences, phrases and descriptions with dark humour and insight into humanity that are spiced with a few fun words that one seldom sees any more.
 
I'm into A History of the End of the World, actually a history of the Apocalypse of St. John. Very, very, very good.

Also, I'm dipping into Dawkin's God Delusion. And sometime in this next decade, Ulysses will be read.
 
Just finished Feynman's "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman" and it's sequel "What do you care what other people think?". These are absolutely fantastic books, the most entertaining and interesting biographic-type books I have ever read. A must read.

Also just finished Richard Dawkins "Climbing Mount Improbable". Typical Dawkins, very enjoyable to read - although having seen so much Dawkins material most of it was stuff I had encountered before. Worth reading though.

Now I am tackling Murray Gell-Mann's "The Quark and the Jaguar" and then I'm going to dive into Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man".
 
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