Which book are you reading now? Volume XI

[sophie]

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which may begin a series of reading for me (to last a few years) to read through a good sampling of classic American literature.

You mean Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.?

 

[Traitorfish]

Fiction wise, finished Look to Windward and finishing The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks. Windward is probably the best of the Culture books I've read so far, maybe tying with Use of Weapons, in part because it avoids the temptation to devolve in to space battles. (Banks has admitted that he treats his sci-fi as a chance to indulge in pew-pew, which is fine, but sometimes he lets it go a bit too far.) Sonata is also good, and even though it has more action it all works in context, so I'm hoping the last few chapters show the same reserve.

Non-fiction wise, starting on From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers by Allan Kulikoff. Dry, but interesting, which is generally the best you can hope from this sort of long-term social history.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Currently sorting through two books at once:

M. V. Frunze, избранные произведениа (Selected Works)

V. I. Lenin, польное собрание соченении (Collected Works)

Lining up what one person is saying with what the other person is responding with, from mid-1919 to late 1920. It's tedious, but very informative.

 

[Smellincoffee]

You mean Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.?

That appears to be a collection; my library had a very slim version of the story itself. I also have a larger collection of Irving's stories checked out so I can read "Rip Vank Winkle".

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Human Trafficking is a collection of "Interdisciplinary Perspectives" on the topic edited by Mary C. Burke. Some approaches have caused me to learn some surprising facts, such as previous victims of trafficking becoming recruiters of more victims and the higher mobility of West African children even in non-trafficking situations. The human security and development studies approach is my favorite so far, linking human trafficking to the expanding global population. The weakest so far has to be the gender studies approach, defining new terms and concepts that aren't proved to exist or used to study human trafficking in a new way by the author. For example, the author of that section talks about the "feminization of migration" without showing any statistics to back up such a concept. Almost finished up, having reached neurobiological and medical examinations of human trafficking. I was very pleasantly surprised at seeing explanations of brain structures in this book.

 

[Mouthwash]

Oceanic, by Greg Egan. About halfway through, it's his best story collection so far (with the exception of Lost Continent, which seemed to be making some ill-placed political statement about Australian refugees).

Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization- kind of rambly and ill-paced, and it happens to be my first book on the topic, but it has some shrewd insights when it dips into metahistory.

Fiction wise, finished Look to Windward and finishing The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks. Windward is probably the best of the Culture books I've read so far, maybe tying with Use of Weapons, in part because it avoids the temptation to devolve in to space battles. (Banks has admitted that he treats his sci-fi as a chance to indulge in pew-pew, which is fine, but sometimes he lets it go a bit too far.) Sonata is also good, and even though it has more action it all works in context, so I'm hoping the last few chapters show the same reserve.

I know I have issues, but let's just say that Banks refused to allow his books to be sold in any country that had a communist party member with a seat in government. Just on "principle." Or any country that recognized gay marriage, if you can relate to that better. So, rather than actively targeting individual Zionists (or reds/gays), he simply thought that anyone living in the State of Israel didn't really deserve to read his books. How can that not be defined as bigoted?

 

[Smellincoffee]

I'm starting on American Sphinx, a biography of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph Ellis.

 

[Flying Pig]

For a rare spout of fiction, I'm a chapter or so into Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. It's one of those fictional autobiographies like Any Human Heart, following an Asiatic-Greek-American hermaphrodite born Calliope and since become Cal. It reminds me somewhat of The God of Small Things and is similar to One Hundred Years of Solitude in that it follows a somewhat bizarre (and already incestuous) family, though so far without the undercurrent of the truly paranormal.

 

[Traitorfish]

I know I have issues, but let's just say that Banks refused to allow his books to be sold in any country that had a communist party member with a seat in government. Just on "principle." Or any country that recognized gay marriage, if you can relate to that better. So, rather than actively targeting individual Zionists (or reds/gays), he simply thought that anyone living in the State of Israel didn't really deserve to read his books. How can that not be defined as bigoted?

This really isn't the thread for this discussion.

 

[Mouthwash]

This really isn't the thread for this discussion.

Would you prefer I make a thread?

 

[Traitorfish]

I can't imagine we'd say anything that hasn't been said already.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

China Into Africa is a series of essays on China's "Trade, Aid, and Influence" in Africa edited by Robert I. Rotberg. Already learned quite a few things: the main objective is the flow of resouces, one secondary objective is marginalizing the renegade province, China respects sovereignty (mostly good, except when human rights abuses are tolerated), its aid mostly consists of concessional loans, this aid allows for the expansion of both infrastructure and industry, there is a small but rapidly growing export of Uncle Sam effigies to Africa, China prefers hiring Chinese, Chinese goods may be hurting local industries, there is both admiration and mistrust on both sides. Overall though, it's a positive thing for Africa.

 

[Borachio]

Limitless Sky: Life lessons from the Himalayas David Charles Manners

In his twenties, David Manners travels to the Himalayas to fulfill a promise and seek out his relatives.

This is the remarkable true story of David's initiation into the Tradition, a life-affirming path that is many centuries old.

Through a challenging series of tests, Kushal Magar teaches David how to concentrate the mind and focus the will, how to live fully, fearlessly and joyfully - with purpose - and how to acquire self-knowledge without self-interest.

The first 3/4 of this book are tremendous. I really enjoyed it. And then the author seems to lose his way somehow and goes on endlessly, for me, about "male, female and other" and lingam this, lingam that.

I'm even beginning to doubt the veracity of his account, now. A lot of it is just too slick, to my mind.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I just finished The Last of the Mohicans (glory, hallelujah, I will never go near Fenmore Cooper again). I've decided to work through the dozen or so classics of American literature I've never read, and next up will be The Scarlet Letter. I'm trying to work through in chronological order. After that will come fun stuff, Mark Twain and the like. I'm not starting on Hawthorn immediately, though, as I've a book on chimpanzee behavior to consider first.

 

[Azale]

China and Socialism - Martin-Hart Landsberg & Paul Burkett
The Economics of Global Turbulence - Robert Brenner [at a much slower pace]
Major Problems in the Gilded Age & Progressive Era - Robert Fink & some other fellas
The Mexico Reader: History, Politics, Culture

finished most of what I posted last time, was very pleased all around. Gotta kick up my China reading a bit before the semester starts though, so I quickly refreshed with How Asia Works (one of my favorite nonfiction books) and Understanding China (thoroughly mediocre and boring).

It seems like I read a lot, but I'm only reading the first one intensely. The other three I'll pick out one essay/reading/handful of pages in a given day. It's a nice system when I have time in the summer to do it.

 

[Borachio]

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou

Truly excellent. Magnificient. Superlatively and compassionately human.

Spoiler :

I quite enjoyed it. Honestly.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Basmachestvo v Lokae, by F. Ilyutko. A useful late-20s look back at the Red Army's fight against the Basmachi on the home turf (SW Tajikistan) of one of its ringleaders: Ibrahim Bek.

To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941, by Shoshana Keller. Useful to me for the give-and-take dynamic between communist power and traditional Muslim society, particularly in the pre-1928 period, before the Bolsheviks took off the leather gloves. English-language, too, for a welcome change of pace.

Pamyatnye Zapiski: Rabochego, Kommunista-Bolshevika, Profsoyuznogo, Partijnogo i Sovetsko-Gosudarstvennogo Rabotnika, by Lazar Kaganovich. An extremely boring collection of personal writings by Kaganovich, but useful for my research.

Looking forward to when I can read what I want to for a change.

 

[Flying Pig]

I finished Middlesex. If the first half was akin to One Hundred Years of Solitude, the second was far closer to The Catcher in the Rye, and the weaker for it. The grand scope, the mixture of large-scale history with tiny personal detail and the brilliant characterisation diminished in favour of a story of youthful flight and middle-class fall from grace in which the protagonist's hermaphroditism - supposedly the main theme of the book - seemed rather incidental. I still enjoyed the book immensely, but I won't be reading any more Eugenides: his other books seem like far more of the second half than the first, which formed a somewhat disappointing conclusion to what was a brilliantly begun book, though the critics' comparisons with Joyce and Melville are perhaps a little too far.

Started on Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.

 

[Masada]

Skin Game - Jim Butcher: One of my few guilty pleasures.
Year Zero - Ian Buruma: Fantastic.

 

[Paul in Saudi]

I enjoyed Year Zero too.