What Book Are You Reading? Issue.8

[Smellincoffee]

Asimov's Guide to the Bible: Volume I, Isaac Asimov

 

[Phlegmak]

Current issue of Skeptic Magazine.

 

[El_Machinae]

A Magazine is not a Book, silly!

 

[Lockesdonkey]

Going back and reading Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. I've been going over his stuff again after he died in September...A lot of it seems more profound now than it did before.

 

[GuitarHero]

Going back and reading Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. I've been going over his stuff again after he died in September...A lot of it seems more profound now than it did before.

Yeah, isn't that weird how that happens? Like how if Heath Ledger hadn't died, all that Oscar buzz in July wouldn't have been there!

I, Claudius by Robert Graves
(I love pointing out his innacuracies and biases.)

 

[Agent327]

The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga & The Railway Journey by Wolfgang Schivelbusch.

Please share when you've finished this - I've never gotten around to reading it.

I'm still on Collapse by Jared Diamond, but I'm really enjoying it (I don't get much time for pleasure reading). Last night I picked up Ending Aging:The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime
by Aubrey de Grey & Michael Rae


It's by the guy who did this TED talk.
Aubrey de Grey: Why we age and how we can avoid it
as well as starting the Methuselah Mouse Prize.

Is it OK if I'm skeptic about it?

On topic of 'magazines': NY Review of Books is OK.

 

[Fifty]

Starting The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

 

[CCRunner]

Stranger in a Strange Land

 

[Japanrocks12]

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

 

[Ecofarm]

Starting The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

I'm surprised you haven't read it. Enjoy.

Stranger in a Strange Land

I tried a couple times and I just couldn't (I managed ~50pages each try). It's like Irving's 'Water Method Man' or 'Cider House'.. just too miserable. It's like Red Badge or Rye kinda, just yuck (but too long and not notable enough to plow through). Good luck though, I've had a couple friends who enjoyed it.

 

[Babbler]

Finished:

The Story of French by Jean-Benoît Nadeau & Julie Barlow

Fusion: The Energy of the Universe by Garry McCracken and Peter Stott

 

[Atticus]

The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga

Please share when you've finished this - I've never gotten around to reading it.

I read it once, and it felt like extremly poorly written. It could have been the translation though (which I doubt, because the translator was very good in his business). The text seemed to have no point at all, and I just couldn't take a hold of it.

 

[Agent327]

One of the most diffcult aspects to translate is style. I've read Huizinga's book on Erasmus (an earlier work) and judging by this I can't believe

The Autumn of the Middle Ages

is either "poorly written" or there being no point at all to the text.

 

[Ansar]

How to Ace the rest of Calculus

 

[RoboPig]

The First World War by John Keegan

 

[Shylock]

Dune by Frank Herbert. I finished Ulysses by James Joyce.

 

[El_Machinae]

Is it OK if I'm skeptic about it?

Yes, of course. It's just one of those things I should be knowledgeable about, since de Grey is a fairly popular immortalist.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Currently reading Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. Enjoyable, but I found the process of splicing cancer genes into a virus to make it tough and the idea of stopping aging by switching one gene off utterly ridiculous.

 

[Camikaze]

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (again), and just starting Dirt Music by Tim Winton.

 

[Ecofarm]

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (again), and just starting Dirt Music by Tim Winton.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is my favorite in the series.

You might also like Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse 5', it's similar (but Rosewater is better and, in a quirky insane way, similar as well). One of the best presents I ever got was a gf buying us tickets to a lecture by Vonnegut (if that statement doesn't qualify me as an intellectual, I don't know what does).