What Are You Reading Now.

I'm listening to The Coddling of the American Mind.

I was worried it was going to be "oh, fragile/woke kids these days" or just "oh the left" ja-off material, but it's equally critical across generations and political spectrum. Insightful, direct, and of substantial content. I recommend it.

 

I just downloaded that book this past week. I really enjoy Jonathan Haidt. So much to learn. I've also read his The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis. Highly recommended.

 

3 recent books I'd mention.
Grapes of Wrath. I know people talk about reading like a writer. Just not possible when it's this good. Steinbeck literally could write a raindrop rolling down a window and make it compelling.
Ham on Rye by Bukowski. No-one writes unpleasant characters like Bukowski. Every one of them. No redeeming features. I've read Post Office and enjoyed the humour. I abandoned Women after 50 pages because it was just terrible. I finished Ham on Rye only because I was determined to finish it. Some humour but, jeez, everyone is just so horrible.
Dawn by Elie Wiesel. I know members here might chastise me for not knowing of him until I picked up this book in 2nd hand shop, he being Nobel prize winner and all. Except it was the Nobel prize for Peace in 1986. This slim novella contains so much within its 80 pages, just stunning, and I'm troubling this thread to mostly suggest to everyone to read it. I'll be looking out for his other works.

 

Dawn was amazing. I don't suppose they have to be read in order since they don't follow one narrative, but it's the second book in a trilogy. You really need to read Night. It's the first and, in my opinion, the best. Unlike Dawn and Day, it's nonfiction. It's about his real experience of the Holocaust. It's one that will stick with you, for sure.

 

+1. I had to read Night for a school assignment. And it did stay with me.

 

I couldn't finish Night. Not because it was DNF (far from it), but because the onion ninjas kept interrupting.

 

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. A history of world War I. A very revealing look at the events that led up to the war. There was a dramatic clash of culture with the advances of technology. Some of the ideas they accepted as gospel seem silly from a modern perspective.

 

Very much so. To paraphrase a quote form someone which I don't remember the name of: "In war truth is naked, in peace it wears a uniform."

 

How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Thomas C. Foster. It's written for readers but I highly recommend it for writers as well. It's nowhere nearly as dry as it sounds.

 

Slow month for February:

The Hobbit (1937) by J.R.R. Tolkien 4.25 Stars - I've been meaning to read this and LotR since I was a kid. I saw the cartoon when I was little, and I started it in the 3rd grade but never finished it for some reason. I never finished a lot of books at that age. While fairly kid-friendly, it wasn't as childish as I've always been lead to believe. I don't know what else I can say that hasn't been said. It was good. I heard the audiobook version performed by Andy Serkis (Golem.) He's fantastic... except when he sings. Do you know how much music there is in Tolkien!? Ugh. I just got to The Return of the King. Thank God the singing mostly tapered off after The Fellowship. It's still worth a listen. He's great; Tolkien's great. It's not a major problem, lol.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995) by Haruki Murakami 3 Stars - Is magical realism just lost on me? I totally didn't get One Hundred Years of Solitude. It just bored the crap out of me. This was better. I enjoyed it, but book of the century it is not, not for me, anyway. It was meandering and random and lacking in satisfactory resolutions, in my opinion.

I also finished book 10 of 12 in the How to Train Your Dragon series with the boy. Man, those have gotten good. We're halfway through book 11 of 12. I wonder what we'll get into next. Maybe Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Those look good.

I'm currently working on The Return of the King, Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales of Terror.

 

Lol, there sure is a lot. I took to just skipping the songs after a while.

 

Yeah, I usually have trouble paying attention to verse and song lyrics in the middle of novels anyway, but sung out loud badly, it's especially irksome. I don't even know where he's getting the tunes. Is there musical notation in the books, or is Serkis making it up for the audio version?

 

I've never seen any musical notation, only lyrics, with the tune left up to the reader's imagination.

Once I hung out with a friend and a friend of his who was an even bigger Tolkein fan than I am, and this guy talked us into walking around the streets of our town singing "We are the boys of (name of town here), the (name) boys are we," and other lyrics he made up on the spot, while basically imagining we were hobbits strolling around the Shire. We thought it was really dumb and embarrassing at first, but we all ended up having fun and a very memorable evening. He was one of those guys who can make imagination manifest in regular reality and make everyone have fun. If he hasn't become an actor or something similar, that would really be a shame.

 

The Mark of the Fool Series, by J.M. Clarke. It is a fantasy coming of age story, with a twist. The MC wants to become a wizard, and has been accepted into "The best school of magic in the world", but before he can start, his God marks him as one of the heroes, and the worst of the possible marks, of the kingdom destined to fight a recurring evil threat. The mark makes using magic difficult, and offensive magic nearly impossible. The world building is solid, and the MCs struggles to get around his limitations are engaging.

 

That's a pity. There's a lot of poetry in Tolkien, but although I agree it gets a little too much, it is, nevertheless, beautiful. It's even more beautiful when set to music.

The Tolkien Ensemble were the first people to set Tolkien's poetry to music and sing it. They had the approval of the Tolkien Estate, and were joined by Sir Christopher Lee, no less. Here they are on YouTube:



I think they've done a masterful job. Bravissimo, maestri!

 

I was wondering if the meandering was the point? I didn't get a lot out of it either. Well, okay, the premise hooked me. And even though I read it like five years ago, that one vet's story really stuck, what with the well and the dude getting flayed. Was there a woman survivor from Hiroshima, too, or am I just making things up now?

It's funny you brought it up because I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and have had a strong nagging feeling that I completely missed the point of the story. Not going to read it again, though. You had one chance, Murakami!

 

I'm reading She by H Rider Haggard.

It's good, prefer the film though.

The book is obviously from a different century entirely, can see that in the way a MC describes himself as ugly and how others think him ugly but in today's world he'd be quite attractive. Plus, it details killing animals for 'sport'. As it's a very old book I'm soldiering on, but usually I cannot stand that. In fact, when I saw the film 'The zookeeper's wife' it gave me nightmares for a month afterwards.

I'll finish the book, but I'll not read it again

 

Whatever you do, make sure you don't get hot-potted!! That really stands out in my memory.

 

lol we need a laughter reaction on here!

 

You mean this one?

 

One of my treasures is an old printing of She. Its leather-bound, but there's no title page with a date. Wish I knew just how old it is.

I rather liked the 1964 or 1965 movie with old Peter Cushing and Ursula Andress.

 

I probably started reading The Handmaid's Tale long before you did, and I too found it difficult to read. I finished it maybe a month or two ago. I have a lot of family commitments so I'm not a fast reader but I probably read 'Idoru' by William Gibson in 1/10th of the time. The pacing of The Handmaid's Tale was slow, but I'm wondering if it's intentional, the life of a Handmaid would be depressing and monotonous so the reader gets a dose of the experience.

I don't know if you got your copy new or used, but I bet it didn't come with its own book mark like my used copy did.

(I didn't realize that The Handmaid's Tale from 1990 had a theatrical release. I always assumed it was a made-for-tv movie).

 

I'm reading The Secret Garden, Black Beauty, and Venomous Snakes of the World by Mark Shea.