What are you reading?

[misterpat]

I'm reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and The Gaze of Orpheus by Maurice Blanchot. I'm a huge fan of the former and kind of lukewarm on the latter: Blanchot seems to have only one idea, which he repeats continuously in page after page of turgid prose.

Yes, I'm a huge nerd.

Damn. I enjoy reading other philosophers explain Kant's ideas, but I always found his writing to be horribly unreadable.

[Genghis]

There is only one possible answer to the written question "What are you reading?" and that is "What are you reading?"

[Gryphon]

i've just finished the Jungle Book. reading Buried Alive now, nice story.

[Gryphon]

Damn. I enjoy reading other philosophers explain Kant's ideas, but I always found his writing to be horribly unreadable.

seems like i have company.

[fenderpete]

For fun:

Stephen King - Duma Key

For work:

Ahmad Nizar Hamzeh - In the Path of Hizbullah

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb - Hizbullah Politics and Religion

Louise Richardson - What Terrorists Want

David Whittaker - The Terrorist Reader

Daniel Byman - The Five Front War

No prizes for guessing what I'm working on...

[synthla]

For fun:

Stephen King - Duma Key

How is Duma Key? I have it, but haven't read it - heard it was one of his best. I have mixed feelings on King - I enjoy some of his stuff, but feel like I'm slumming it from a literary standpoint. :wink: Doesn't stop me though...

[misterpat]

How is Duma Key? I have it, but haven't read it - heard it was one of his best. I have mixed feelings on King - I enjoy some of his stuff, but feel like I'm slumming it from a literary standpoint. :wink: Doesn't stop me though...

I never really read King. I read some fantasy novel he wrote, Through the Eyes of the Dragon, when I was 15. I also read Misery, when I was 15 (and didn't even like it much then). I have heard his non-fiction work On Writing, is excellent though.

I give him credit for having the balls to say the Twilight author "can't write worth a darn," even if that is quite possibly the lamest way to articulate that thought I've ever heard. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29001524/

[fenderpete]

Duma Key is really good. I know King gets trashed a lot but I think he's got a great command of the English language and I've read probably about 90% of his work. I think this is right up there with my favourites (Salem's Lot, Dark Tower, the Bachman books) and I'd recommend it. I bought his most recent short story anthology and it's less good, in fact I read the first couple and then got bored and moved on to Duma.

[psycholinguist]

What am I reading? Various things, as always. One book by a journalist on offbeat states of consciousness (trances, lucid dreams, deep meditation, etc.); another on Canadian history; and a third, a YA fantasy collection. Oh, and also a textbook about the premieres of a few notable works for my class on Western music-history. It's so interesting that I'm actually reading it through.

Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep There Are Snakes. It came out pretty recently and it's all about his experiences living with the Piraha tribe in Brazil. Highly recommended, esp if youre into anthropology, linguistics and/or philosophy of language.

It's really weird; I have copies of so many of the original scientific papers on the Piraha that I'm not really finding myself nearly as drawn to the book as I would have expected. Has my decision to major in linguistics undermined any potential for casual interest in linguistics? * laughs *

I'm thinking of reading The City of Ember trilogy. Really curious to see how good the books are after watching the horrible movie rendition.

Haven't seen the movie, but I semi-accidentally picked up the first two books back a few years ago. The first one is wonderful: well-plotted and compelling. The second is interesting as well, but with a very different theme and focus (albeit as a necessary result of the changing plot). Haven't really read the other two; the third (set a couple of centuries earlier) has almost nothing to do with Ember at all except at the very end, and the fourth I just haven't given any attention to. But I'd recommend the earlier books, the first one especially.

[BCHistory]

Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, by Eugene Genovese

and

Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North, by John McGreevy

[hubris]

Currently reading: GOING ROUGE: Sarah Palin – An American Nightmare

[jacib]

Currently reading: GOING ROUGE: Sarah Palin – An American Nightmare

Well this thread was seamlessly revived after a year....

I'm reading Geoffrey Lewis's book The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success, which is particularly fun because I get to point out to my students how artificial their "purified" language is... and how most of the words she thinks are Turkish are really Arabic or Farsi (or occasionally French/Italian), and how absolutely ugly and arbitrary most of the neologisms are. I made a series of about 20 bets with one of my students about whether words were loan words or not... and she lost every single one of them.

[LateAntique]

I'm trying to bang out my senior thesis over break, so I'm reading a giant stack of books on Roman pagan and Christian funerary practices in the late antique. I'm also reading Smyth's "Greek Grammar" and Pliny the Younger's letters in Latin. I read approx. 1 modern-ish fiction book per year and it doesn't look like that's happening over this break.

[ScreamingHairyArmadillo]

A revived thread, hmm?

My current reads are:

Genesis: The Evolution of Biology by Jan Sapp (I love love love reading about the history of science)

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum

I'd like to pick up a novel after finishing one of these. I used to plow through some fantastic sci fi, but have read mostly nonfic the past few years.

[AlexM451]

Currently 500 pages into The Stand by Stephen King. I love how most people in this thread are reading material pertinent to their respective fields. I'm applying to microbiology programs, and The Stand is about an epidemic superflu...

[ScreamingHairyArmadillo]

Currently 500 pages into The Stand by Stephen King. I love how most people in this thread are reading material pertinent to their respective fields. I'm applying to microbiology programs, and The Stand is about an epidemic superflu...

Haha, that's why we're applying to grad school, I suppose.

I'd love to reread The Stand. As mentioned by last year's cohort, King writes incredibly well - just so entirely readable.

[johndiligent]

Just finished Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity. It wasn't all I was hoping, but worth a gander.

Tomorrow morning, I should be unwrapping some curatorial reports by the Israel Antiquities Authority! Thanks, Santa!

[Serric]

I'm currently going through all the works of Carl Sagan; finished reading, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" two weeks ago, "Pale Blue Dot" last week (hardcover, WITH the pictures), and I'm currently working on, "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors."

[alexis]

Wow you guys reading books related to your field are seriously dedicated...over break, I like to zone out a bit before I get back to it

Sadly I'm not even reading a book at the moment. I'm behind on my Newsweeks. Hopefully I'll get some good books though on xmas day (probably fiction) that I can get into before delving back into my research...

[melusine]

Swann's Way, the first tome of Marcel Proust's "Rememberence of things past" (I believe that's what it's called in English), which i'm reading in the original as my french is still, sadly better than my english.

As for "zoning out" during the holidays, thankfully the books i get to read as part of my research are all equally pleasurable.. Well, except for Woolf's Orlando, maybe. But that's another story!

[coyabean]

Ok, my comment was eaten. It was all "i love you dorks blah, blah, blah, why i'm going to grad school blah, blah, blah"

Lisa Dodson's "The Moral Underground", Malcolm Gladwell's new collection of his New Yorker articles, Paulo Friere (online) and really awesomely bad erotic romance novels with vamps and werevolves and crap. And I hate Twilight.

[LateAntique]

Now I'm reading the user guide to my new SLR camera. Thanks, Santa!

[jlee306]

"Devil Wears Prada" - don't judge! I work as technical writer, so I need some fluffy reading to relax. Before it was Neil Gaiman's "Graveyard Book".

I LOVED "Devil Wears Prada!" The movie didn't live up to the book however.

[jlee306]

I loved that book! Read it when I moved up to DC right after college. Found it pretty comforting (and hilarious) as I was starting a new job and all

I'm currently reading Atonement even though I know it's going to make me really angry. I LOVED the movie.

I loved the devil wears prada as well! Atonement was a book I could not put down until I finished it! It was soooooo great! I watched the movie after I read the book and even though the movie followed the book more closely than any other book/movie I have seen before did, I still LOVED the book a million times more!! I don't think it will make you angry...stop ready here if you don't want a super minor spoiler...the movie and book have two different endings!

[jlee306]

I finished reading The Lovely Bones a couple of days ago! I LOVED it!!! I didn't want to put it down! I can't wait until the movie comes out in January! I always like the books better than the movie but I still can't wait! I just start a book called Cold River, so far I am really enjoying it!