I recently started reading Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart. So now I am reading that and also casually looking through/reading Louis Wain's Catland and A Catland Companion: Classic cats by Louis Wain & many others.
I have a huge stack of books that I need to read so I still have no clue what I will be reading next.
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Joey Zasa2004-12-27 15:53
I am in the same situation, but first I must read my favourite: The Dark Tover V. (later the VI. and the VII.) - the Wolves of the Calla from Stephen King.
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Anonymous2004-12-27 20:46 (sage)
The Separation, y Christoper Priest is at the top of my list at the moment, followed by Under an English Heaven. I love war literature...should really read a wider range of novels.
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h-cube2004-12-28 0:29
I'm winding down my Nicholson Baker kick with "Box of Matches". Like "Mezzanine", it's not got much plot, more of a series of observations, but his hyperobservant-ness about the mundaneness of everyday life has opened my eyes.
"Fermata" is my favorite though - fun and raunchy, and who amongst us hasn't wished to be able to stop time?
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Jeffrey2004-12-28 9:49
darkness over sethamon from Raymond E.Feist
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Anonymous2004-12-28 20:17
Battle Royale.
The book is tons better than the movie, despite the occasional engrish.
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Anonymous2004-12-29 14:26
Just finished Exile's Return, by Raymond E Feist... moving onto some book I've forgotten the title of (and too gorged to go find out), by Terry Brooks.
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Anonymous2004-12-29 20:31
沈める滝 (Shizumeru Taki) by 三島由紀夫 (Yukio Mishima)
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lolocaust!rsvcwx6Axc2004-12-29 22:26 (sage)
Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
(again)
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Anonymous2004-12-30 3:42
Umberto Eco - Baudolino
So far, there have been about 7 fake heads of John the Baptist, one fake Gradalis(Holy Grail, in fact, a wooden cup of a north-italian farmer) and some fake letters from John the Presbyterian to both Frederick Barbarossa and what's-his-name Basileus of Constantinople and the Pope too, IIRC.
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Anonymous2004-12-30 9:53
William Gibson - Neuromancer
I finished reading Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland and The End of the World recently. Good Book.
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Anonymous2004-12-30 16:23
The Humane Interface, by Jeff Raskin.
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Anonymous2004-12-30 20:58
Currently reading: Battle Royale
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Anonymous2004-12-31 1:29
>>11
It was hard for me to not think about how much the Matrix 'payed homage' to that when I read it.
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Anonymous2004-12-31 2:29
The Vampire Armand - Anne rice.
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5!tct.RRw5wc2004-12-31 15:25
Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus!" Trilogy.
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Anonymous2004-12-31 18:29
>>16
Enjoying it? For the sillies, I'd rather read something else, personally.
I am, though partially as a semi-religious text. Discordian, you know.
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nenn2004-12-31 21:26
Culture Jamming (i dont remmeber who its from at the moment)
great book everyone should read it. :D
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Anonymous2005-01-01 10:11
Pattern Recognition isn't that bad. Isn't that bad!
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Anonymous2005-01-01 10:48
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Children of God by Mary Doria Russell (sequel)
just finished reading those. i thought they were very good. the first one sort of tears christianity apart, and then the second one puts the pieces back together. warning, these books are very sci-fi. they're not very long, you could read each of them in a couple of days. basic plot: radio signals containing music from an alien planet are recieved on earth, Jesuit Missionaries make first contact. christians and people interested in christianity (at a sort of philosophical level) should enjoy these.
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Anonymous2005-01-02 10:02
The Neverending Story by Micheal Ende.
Loved to movies when I was a kid and got this as an xmas gift, I just cant put it down.
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Anonymous2005-01-02 11:28
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
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Anonymous2005-01-03 16:48
A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe
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Anonymous2005-01-06 20:06
"Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson. A very exciting book about the overwhelming poignancy of product branding and the fascination with the modern mysteries of the internet.
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Anonymous2005-01-07 6:39
_Refactoring to Patterns_, if you've tried one of the vaunted design patterns books and couldn't get into it try this one instead. Very nice examples, explanations, and introduction chapters (code smells, etc.). The author isn't afraid to build on the work of others instead of just repeat it and he makes it much easier to get your hands on things. I've been going through a personal project while reading and I think I've improved it a lot.
_Through so Many Dangers_, memoirs of a common soldier in the French and Indian war, but with very well done annotations filling in all the details with facts and giving excerpts of officers' journals and what not, checking veracity, and noting plagiarized passages, etc..
I never realized just how valuable the country's waterways were back then. The soldiers were constantly going up and down rivers and then portaging for miles just to get to another one. Rapids could be deadly in some cases taking out boats full of men and artillery and still the waterways were constantly used. Some forts were built right in the middle of rivers they were considered so important.
There are also action scenes, of course: Indians cutting open someone's stomach, pulling out the entrails, tying them to a tree, and making the person run around the tree. a French fort commander treating with some Indians after a battle to try and rescue enemy soldiers from terrible deaths, and other French joining in with the Indians. Expeditions going wrong because someone sneaked off and alerted the enemy (or so the soldier claims).
Some interesting other details about war, like just how much a common soldier was told. For example he'd write that they were charged with attacking the outbuildings of a fort and killing everyone within, but the general in his log had really planned his group as just a diversion to draw out the enemy. Details about how weather or long marches or building forts as you go or strength and concentration affecting a battle, all very interesting stuff you often don't see in fiction books.
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Anonymous2005-01-14 7:09
Last night I finished Sputnik Sweetheart.
Next up is Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human.
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Anonymous2005-01-16 11:48 (sage)
Now I read "The Death in Venice" by Thomas Mann in original.
I write here for the first time.
I am glad to know that Ni-Channel is famous worldwide.
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Anonymous2005-01-16 17:50
A very, very bad translation of Star Fraction by everybody's favorite anarchist, Ken MacLeod.
As a part of my new year's resolution to become more well read I recently finished Borge's "The Aleph" and I'll soon be starting on Eco's "Foucault's Pendulumn". Also a friend of mine gave me a copy of Boris Vian's "Blues for a Black Cat" and J.G.Ballard's "War Fever".
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Anonymous2005-01-18 23:40
Finished up Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale (excellent) and started on Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (a bit dull so far).
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Anonymous2005-01-19 10:41
just finished "Jonathan Strange& Mr Norell" by some english lady,
now i read "Quicksilver" by Neal Stephenson and a Howard Hughes biography. 28> i recommend "der zauberberg" and "doktor faustus"
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Anonymous2005-01-19 20:49
I really loved Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel... but to be honest, the last 3rd reiterates the first 2/3rds. If you don't enjoy it already, I doubt you'll find it any better.
If you enjoy books _like_ G,G,&,S but simply not the style of prose therein, I recommend Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan, and Sex, Time, and Power by Leonard Shlain.
S,T,&,P suggests that human sentience, or introspection, or whatever it is that sets us apart from other animals, is the result of our appreciation for the passage of time, and that a highly probable explanation for why we appreciate the passage of time but no other animal does, is because the period is so much more pronounced in human females than in any other species. Only in human females can the loss of iron be life threatening, and according to Shlain anemia was the #1 cause of death for pre-modern human females.
Botany of Desire is a book heavily influenced by Dawkin's thoughts on evolution, especially those from The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene. It talks about how plants and agriculture affected human culture and evolution, and vice versa. The focus is on the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and umm... one other that escapes me. :P
Personally, right now, I'm reading Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I love the way he applies economic theory to situations that people complain are too complex to understand. He makes it feel like all the hatred that motivates violence and slaughter and racism in the world is just a facade, a naive explanation for the fact that violence is often the quickest way out of poverty, be it at the individual level, or that national level.
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Anonymous2005-01-23 22:25
I'm re-reading a Poul Anderson science fiction novel from around 1970 called "The Avatar." If you like his work, this is one of his lesser-known novels and it's worth your time to find.
He kicked so much ass he had to have been born with eight legs. Is any of the current crop of science fiction authors in his league? Not just for plotting and characterization, but for prose, dialogue, and all-around l33t wr1ting sk1llz?
erm, collapse, I don't like jared diamond. His work is more or less built for debate. He makes a case, it's just that all the evidence isn't really interesting.
Dad ran off with kafka on the shore, I did Mishima's After the Banquet a while ago. Trying Taiwanese literature, but this isn't working.
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Anonymous2005-02-13 12:18
Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" and Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day", but I'm almost finished with that.