What are you reading right now?

[KingGolem]

OT: Aside from this thread? The Wind-Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. That and White Dwarf 381.

Ooh! The Windup Girl! That's one of my all-time favorite books! How do you like it? I don't normally read science fiction, but what I loved about The Windup Girl is that Bacigalupi's vision of the 23rd century Bangkok is so complete and so exotic to my own realm of experience that it's just as compelling as a good fantasy. If you like it, try Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. It is less fantastic, but nevertheless it is the depth of the vision which makes it worth reading. Hehe, funny thing about Bacigalupi's writing is that he loves writing miserable stories of human suffering in apocalyptic-dystopian futures caused by our environmentally unsustainable practices. Did you know he was raised by hippies?

So, as for this thread topic, I am presently reading The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. I found it at Books-a-Million by serendipity, and as MLP has made me obsessed with unicorns recently, I thought it would do well to broaden my horizons. I, of course, of heard of this book and subsequent animated film, and if the former is good, I shall investigate the latter. I am pleased to say that it is thus far quite good, and hope that it continues in the same degree of quality.

 

[Brutal Peanut]

Found it while combing the huge book section at Costco.

 

[Elijah Ball]

just started 1984. so far so good.

 

[Zinaxos]

This thread? Nuklear Age (imagine a really, REALLY dumb superman in a 600pg book written as if it were a combination of a comic book and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) and the Anarchists Cookbook.

 

[instantbenz]

Standard Form of Agreement for Design Services

Brought to me by AIGA so I don't get my ass sued for designing something wrong and to get my ass some money of my client is a dickhole.

You didn't mean book did you?

 

[JohnnySex]

Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. It's pretty tight.

 

[fatal2704]

M.R. James collected ghost stories. Oh whistle and I'll come to you my lad is, in my opinion, one of the best stories ever written.

 

[Android2137]

I am reading this thread! BA DUM TISH!

*punched in the face*

 

[Vandenberg1]

BEOWULF... Wish I could edit out the trashy Christian banter some monk threw in so it wouldn't get burnt :/

 

[theamazingbean]

The Dresden Files, for like the sixth time. Specifically, White Night. Also, Flashman and the Redskins, for the first time.

 

[LiberalSquirrel]

I just finished up The Tempest. Yeah Shakespeare! But I haven't started anything new yet.

 

[Jaime_Wolf]

Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente.

That woman can fucking write.

I hadn't realised how seldom I read books with truly astounding writing just in the sense of diction and word-play. Certainly I read a lot by authors who are great story-tellers, but it's very rare to find people who write with anything even beginning to approach the style of Valente.

She also nails the modern-day fairy tale better than any author I've ever seen, including favourites like Gaiman. There's a description of a myth (the characters in the fairy tale are telling each other fairy tales...) about Japanese trains that will blow your fucking mind within the first few pages. She's the only author I've ever seen that manages to create fairy tales that sound as breathtaking and profound as the best real-world fairy tales always are. And these are not children's fairy tales, they're the good, real-world sort free of child-friendly sanitation. The sort that adults tell to each other and dream about rather than the sort that exist only to instill particular values in children.

(Palimpsest is a word for re-used manuscript pages where the old writing was scraped off or otherwise removed, it isn't some weird sex thing.)

 

[twistedmic]

I'm hopping between two books right now. 'The Neuromancer' by William Gibson and 'The Tyranny of the Night' by Glenn Cook. I just started those two the other day so I'm only about a chapter into each one.

 

[CyprisVeil]

"Twilight" by William Gay. It's actually pretty good. It's for one of my college classes.

So...yep. While it isn't something I'd pick up on my own volition...I ain't mad at it. Haha.

 

[CyprisVeil]

Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente.

That woman can fucking write.

I hadn't realised how seldom I read books with truly astounding writing just in the sense of diction and word-play. Certainly I read a lot by authors who are great story-tellers, but it's very rare to find people who write with anything even beginning to approach the style of Valente.

She also nails the modern-day fairy tale better than any author I've ever seen, including favourites like Gaiman. There's a description of a myth (the characters in the fairy tale are telling each other fairy tales...) about Japanese trains that will blow your fucking mind within the first few pages. She's the only author I've ever seen that manages to create fairy tales that sound as breathtaking and profound as the best real-world fairy tales always are. And these are not children's fairy tales, they're the good, real-world sort free of child-friendly sanitation. The sort that adults tell to each other and dream about rather than the sort that exist only to instill particular values in children.

(Palimpsest is a word for re-used manuscript pages where the old writing was scraped off or otherwise removed, it isn't some weird sex thing.)

I stumbled upon her "Girl who ..." yeah the one with the long title. She seems interesting. I'll have to check out Palimpsest.

 

[MaxwellEdison]

Nothing. As soon as I have money, "Red Years/Black Years: A Political History of Spanish Anarchism" and "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence."

 

[JoesshittyOs]

The Dresden Files, Changes I think it was. The one with Aztecs.

It's decent. Not the best. The author kinda pulled the "how much luck does this guy have" too many times.

 

[Joel Dawson]

I just finished One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest yesterday.

 

[Jaime_Wolf]

I recently finished To Kill a Mockingbird for school.

It was filled to the brim with irrelevant information that made me almost forget the point of the story. Little plot points and details sprung up from nowhere and stacked up until I wasn't sure which one would actually matter. There was only one part of the book that interested me(it involved a court room), and if the author stuck with it the whole time it could have been an amazing book. Another interesting part was the fact that Scout was so ambiguously gendered, and the author should have touched more upon that, as well.

It's hard to justify it as an "American Classic" when I want to kill myself the next time Scout describes some asshole's life story!

For books that I want to read next, The White Tiger is a big one. I picked it up and it almost made me pissed that I hadn't read a book so good. I only read the first chapter, so I need to buy it.

It always helps to remember that books don't necessarily hold their appeal over time and, much more importantly, that a book need not be enjoyable or even good to be important. And knowledge of important works is useful both in understanding where contemporary works and attitudes come from and in making people part of a shared society.

For instance, Citizen Kane is, by most estimations, trite and boring. But it's trite and boring because it paved the way for more or less every movie since then. It radically reinvented what movies were and did a lot to inform our present popular understanding of a very big social issue (the accumulation and effects of enormous wealth).

To Kill a Mockingbird isn't racy (lol) or interesting anymore for the most part. The issues it deals with seem commonplace or seem like common sense now, but that wasn't always the case and knowing how those ideas came into society is both useful in and of itself and interesting in that it gives you a better idea of what things were like before things changed.