What is everyone reading?

[Mogaar]

I'm always interested in this. I'm currently reading Michel de Montaigne's Essays and 30 Satires by Lewis Lapham.

[xEik]

After finishing 'Crime and Punishment' by Fyodor Dostoievsky this weekend, I'm now reading 'Out' by Natsuo Kirino.

[Space Cowboy]

'It must be beautiful: Great equations of modern science' various authors. Im also reading 'Cosmos' by Carl Sagan (for the 400th time). :)

[Shem]

ATM i'm reading 'Dissecting Marylin Manson' by Gavin Baddeley, and later on i'll be reading 'Long Hard Road Out of Hell' by Brian Warner (or Marylin Manson himself if you wish to call him that way).

[Rouni Kenshin#1]

currently-The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

soon-Hitichickers Guide to the Galaxy and War of the Worlds

as soon as i can- Lords of Chaos (wheel of time)

[Rapier Racer]

I'm currentl reading this forum :D

[stin]

I`m currently reading "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown for the second time but it`s special illustrated collector`s edition. :D

Also had read "Angels and Demons" and "Deception Point".

I have another book called "The Digital Fortress" but I will not read it yet and saving it for my golfing holiday in Portugal on the beginnig of October!

stevie :D

[Task]

I'm currently reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foundation_Series, I'm on Caliban.

[Space Cowboy]

I love the foundation series :) I also love the Ringworld series by Larry Niven. Great sci-fi!

[Roger]

"The map that changed the world" (http://www.goodreports.net/reviews/themapthatchangedtheworld.htm) by Simon Winchester.

[Mogaar]

That Winchester book sounds really interesting!

[Sumimasen]

After finally finishing the 'New Jedi Order' Star Wars series, I've started on Long Way Round by Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman.

Then I've got the other four books in my H.G. Wells collection to read (Island of Dr. Moreau/Time Machine/Invisible man/First Men in the Moon)

[Rouni Kenshin#1]

Dan Brown is one of my favorites. I have The Divinci Code, Digital Fortress, and Angles and Deamons. Looking for Deseption point and i thnk that Angles and Deamons is the best. What do you think?

[Task]

Yes, Angels & Demons is easily the best Dan Brown novel.

Not that his others aren't up to snuff or anything, they're all great, but those illustrations just give Angels & Demons that little bit extra awesomeness.

The next book is based in Redmond AFAIK. I can't imagine how Robert Langdon is going to topple the evil empire, but I also can't imagine what else he'd got to Redmond for. 8 )

[stin]

Yes it is so compelling reading but I did thought "Deception Point" was the best I have had ever read.

That I didn`t realised "Angels and Demons" actually the first one then "Da Vinci Code" the second one! 8O

stevie :D

[jospicy]

ahh well i just got sucked into the Helsing Manga series been reading those along with some books i found lying round the house: Sabriel (http://www.garthnix.co.uk/oldkingdom/default.asp)

[Axel]

I'm kinda reading dan Brown's books as well. Angels and Demons is one hell of a book. Gonna read the Da Vinci Code and maybe digital fortress. Deception point was very good IMO.

[Drakkenmensch]

"Breaking Open the Head" by Daniel Pinchbeck.

Massively thought provoking and subversive to the current materialistic worldview.

[element42]

'materialistic' is a seriously misused word. what modern man craves is not 'material' in itself but new material, the constant seeking after a pleasurable tommorrow that will never come - when I buy this car then I will be happy; When I have this psp then I will be happy.
Of course, for me it's different :roll: When I get this psp I will be happy. :wink:

[Rouni Kenshin#1]

Such pleasure seeking began in the Renissance.

So since i peronially consider the Renissance an unending event It has helped shape our world today.

[xEik]

'Nausea' by Jean-Paul Sartre

[Childlikecake]

Such pleasure seeking began in the Renissance.

I'm not sure I would say it started at any given time. I think the desire to have more is a common feature we all share by being human. In the days of cave dwelling they probably tried to outdo each other by having more firewood. In the Renissance it probably just became easier (for the middleclasses) to gain wealth and it became easier to measure it. On the readin note, I'm reading David Lange's 'My Life'. Lange was a New Zealand Prime Minister that died recently and he did some pretty fantastic things for the country. He is also blamed for New Zealand selling a lot of it's core state owned enterprises, a move which has bearly been forgiven even now.

[element42]

I suspect the desire to have more is something we share by being animal! It's part of the problem with obesity, isn't it (?) - in times of plenty, stuff yourself, so you'll survive winter. In this time of constant plenty, we must learn to curb our rapacious desire for more or we will destroy ourselves. IMHO :)

[Daylight]

I'm reading Anthony Summer's Official And Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover


I have another book called "The Digital Fortress" but I will not read it yet and saving it for my golfing holiday in Portugal on the beginnig of October!

Have loads of fun over here Stevie :D just careful when you're on the road, we portuguese are nice except when inside a moving car :P

[Thruster2097]

"The Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews - Golf Rules (illustrated)"

..is what I am reading.

A) because I need some guidance with ball in play - not in play situations
and
B) because it has those silly diagrams you always used to find in school exercise books. Classic!

[stin]

8O You play golf?!!!

stevie :pc

[Lance]

.
kinda surprised me, too, Thrusty; somehow you didn't seem the golfing sort, but then Greg Norman doesn't either and he was one of the best, and certainly one of my faves
.

[Lulolwen]

I'm actually rereading 1984 by George Orwell. Dystopian classic.

[xEik]

1984 is doubleplusgood! :D

[X]

Koji Suzuki's Ring
Very different from the movies.[/b]

[Drakkenmensch]

I read "Spiral", the sequel of "Ring", and if you wonder why it's so different from "Ring 2", there's a reason.

The true sequel to "Ringu" in Japan was "Raisen" ("Spiral") and follows the novel closely, but that movie bombed big time. To try and salvage the franchise, they created an ALTERNATE sequel, "Ringu 2", on which the american "Ring 2" is based.

[lunar]

currently reading "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss.

[Thruster2097]

Well, don't really play golf in the competitive sense of the word....
more like swing a club around and spend hours looking in the rough for the ball.

I'm learning and getting better for my efforts.

So there. :wink:

:back to topic:

[Daylight]

I used to learn how to play golf....but then i discovered the joys of horseriding :D

[infoxicated]

Is that actual riding around, clippity-clop, jumping hedges and fences, or is it like that horse parking that, for some reason best known to the upper classes, they do in the Olympics?

Because the horse parking thing is just, well, it's not a sport. The horse does all the work, and some snooty smegger with a double barrelled surname collects a medal.

Actually, forget that... it has nothing to do with books... ;)

[Daylight]

it's riding around, clippity clop, yea. actually something funny happened to me once. I was galloping around but suddenly the horse decided to hit the breaks. so i was catapulted over her neck, did some sort of weird flip in the air, and landed on my feet, looking a bit shaken. >.O

[infoxicated]

Done that myself when I was little. Even so, I much prefered the clippity-clop stuff to the horse parking. :)

[Daylight]

if i wanted to park something i would have bought a car :P

[Ally Graham]

At the moment I have just finished reading:
Yes Man - Danny Wallace

[X]

Now reading: Church of the divine psychopath by Scott Phillips. A Friday The 13th novel in which a church community starts to worship Jason Voorhees.

[MissileStrike]

Matthew Reiley's Scarecrow. Right now I am up to the bit where he (dont read this if you're reading it) blows up a warship. VERY good, fast read (but it's a long book 8O )

[Rouni Kenshin#1]

Update!



I have begun reading We Were Soldiers Once... And Young.

[ACE-FLO]

there was another thread like this, can't they be merged together? I couldn't find the most recent thread and don't want to post in this one because I liked the other one better as I know the peeps there... :?

Anyhow, I'm reading "The men who stare at goats" by Jon Ronson.

This story is about what happened when a small group of men - highly placed within the US military, the govt andthe intelligence services - began to believe in very strange things....

Dead funny and horrific at the same time. You've never known anything like this man :D worth the paper its printed on ;)

[Dark_Phantom_89]

Wow, a super bump there ACE - 4 years ;)

[Motorsagmannen]

just finished "the dark tower" series by stephen king. hard to describe but its kinda like an epic tale like lord of the rings but mostly its set in an western movie enviroment, with a bit of sci fi. it is pretty awesome.
all in all about 3-4000 pages.

[Mr Phlanj]

im reading 'snow' by Adam Roberts.

its set in london when snow has started falling and it wont stop, day after day it keeps snowing and the book follows a woman whos trying to suvive during it. She now cant use rooftops as a path anymore because the snow has piled up to 3 stories now.

its good and im only a few chapters in.

[Kyonshi]

- Shadowrun Core Book 4th Edition
- Runner's Companion 4th Edition
- Street Magic 4th Edition

I'm a DM for a game right now, and i'm trying to assimilate most rules to operate correctly the process. Its kinda heavy at start. Fortunately i got the story-telling duty right :)

[SaturnReturn]

I was never big on reading. It's something I've always struggled with at the best of times. I was laughed at by my own parents when I was younger for saying that I struggled because it always looked like the words were kind of shifting around on the page. I suppose they just didn't believe me because my school put us into groups based on reading ability, and I was in the top group. But that was based on punctuation and clarity rather than reading speed. I have no idea what it was, as it was never like anything was out of focus, but I just couldn't seem to track the lines of text as I read them. I don't think I'm dyslexic or anything, as I understand that's more about letters appearing in the wrong order, whereas my issue is more to do with whole lines of text kind of drifting into one another, but nonetheless it's an issue for me. As a result, I was only ever able to read things very slowly. Because of how slow I would read things I used to get distracted and give up quite quickly, so have never read much, whether for entertainment or information. Some things I was determined to read, but they took me a long time. For example, I read through Lord of the Rings, but I think it took me about two years, partly because I'm slow and partly because I kept having to repeat parts as I completely lost track or lost momentum. The problem subsided a little over time and I can easily read short paragraphs of information on the internet and such, but pages of text in a book are still something I can't really deal with easily.

Anyway, I recently got a new MP3 player and it has a txt reader on it. I was looking to see if I could get some free eBooks to try out, more to see how well it works than actually use it, and I found this website:
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

The plain txt file format that my MP3 player accepts doesn't allow me to go to a particular page, or even view things as a single page (just continuous text), and it is a bit frustrating if I accidentally touch the screen in the wrong region and it skips to the end, but despite all that, the white text on a black screen is very easy to read and not having the kind of issues I would have with a page of text in a book. I'm finding it very liberating actually.:D

Anyway, the point is, I now have a load of books at my fingertips wherever I go, that I can read without struggle.

I'm currently reading about Greek and Roman mythology (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22381), and will be moving on to some of the classics available once I'm done with that.

Just thought I'd relay my weirdness and the link to that site, either of which might be found interesting by one or two people here.

[stin]

Sat!, cheers for that link cos, I`m do really interested in that stuff!.

I love history stuff and I read alot of books for the last two months, I must have gone through five or maybe six books!, similar to Da Vinci Code type.

You know, I love reading and now, I must take a break while I can do other things!

stevie8)

[OBH]

A damn bill!! :beer
Enough of that rubbish *in the bit it goes!*

[guillaume]

Good for you, Sat!

I'm not a big reader myself, but I can recommend two books I read in the last two years and really enjoyed:
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel GarcÃ*a Márquez
What a Carve Up!, by Jonathan Coe

Let me quote Wikipedia:
The first one is "the multi-generational story of the BuendÃ*a Family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio BuendÃ*a, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia. The non-linear story is narrated via different time frames."
I think it better be read in a fairly short amount of time. I read it over 8 months, but there are so many characters over so many years, I should have read it quicker to avoid losing momentum, as you said Sat.

The second one is "a satirical novel, published in 1994, that concerns the greed prevalent during 1980s Britain."

Two very good books, hope some members can enjoy reading them, as I'm sure some other members already have!

[Mr Phlanj]

@sat: that link is great :+ enjoy!

@stevie:........hate.....dan brown.....soo......mutch......:D

on topic: just read 'a clockwork orange' and it was fun having to decode the slang he made

[Lance]

Lately I'm only reading the poets on deviantART.com. There are some pretty good writers there. I rarely read the prose writings, though; my current attention span is pretty short. I started Life on the Mississippi and Tom Sawyer, both by Mark Twain, this week, and have barely got through a few chapters. I already read them a long time ago, but just wanted to read them again for a fresh look with my current mind.

[lunar]

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel GarcÃ*a Márquez

That`s my favourite book ever, good stuff.

I`m currently reading "A Time Travellers Guide To Medieval England," by Ian Mortimer. I could just visit certain parts of Swindon instead, but this is safer. Really it`s a very informative and funny book, worth a read to understand what the past was like.... to actually live it rather than just reading about dates, facts and figures and treaties.

[DJ Techno]

reading...

Getting the Gorilla off my back.