what are you reading right now?

[darrow]

Hmmmm. Nope, I haven't. I just read a description of it thoughs. Sounds interesting!

[BrazenMuse]

Hmmmm. Nope, I haven't. I just read a description of it thoughs. Sounds interesting!

It provides a useful and interesting vocabulary for discussing the cultural and aesthetic configurations of cities...contrasting, for instance, NY to Chicago...becomes easier.

I'm going to look up the one you mentioned however...

[C hristian]

The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time

[Monny JcIntosh]

Dino Buzatti's The Tartar Step which, thus far, is an excellent, tense psychological allegory, like a Kafka. Last of three holiday books, the previous two of which were a bit disappointing: first, Steinberg's Log from the Sea of Cortez, which was a great travel book and hymn to the urge to know about nature, padded out with too much inane philosophical musing about the oneness of life, the otherness of Mexican Indians, and other drivel, and second, Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, which was a 50s American Madame Bovary - terrifying and very depressing.

[ngeso]

I'm on a bit of a Tales of the Gold Monkey trip. Bad case of South Pacific Bora Bora fever.

In other words: I'm parallel-reading In The South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson, South Sea Tales by Jack London and Typee by Hermann Melville. Installed a view of Nuku Hiva, the main Marquesas Island as my wallpaper du jour.

[Breakadawn]

I'm reading Last Night a DJ Saved my Life - it's a history of the DJ, pretty interesting.
Also the Dice Man - my friend gave it to me, it's a little sick, not sure if I can finish it.
Also The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding
and Advertising Media Planning

Just finished Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer, and the Girls Guide to Power and Success

[Stef]

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

[kara]

so good

[C hristian]

....even better!

[Bernie]

Currently reading Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States".

Just finished reading the short pamphlet "Propaganda" by Edward L. Bernays, consider the "father of public relations". It's his delusional viewpoint of having a select few "enlightened" people interpret how things should be viewed by others, i.e. Engineering Consent.

Also recently finished reading Norman Finkelstein's book "The Holocaust Industry".

[kara]

in short, it's about these really brilliant, resilient kids who grow up with an alcholic father and freespirited mother (they basically live place to place, then later in life the parents are homeless) and live dirt poor - but the kids are like, super smart. every school they enroll in, they're way above everyone else. it's a really touching book. it shows how they made it thru the craziness of the lifestyle their parents raised them in, to achieve their own successful lives one by one.
i recommend it

[12th house]

Just started Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. He's a good, funny writer and the anecdotes about the restaurant business are hilarious!

[kara]

Just started Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. He's a good, funny writer and the anecdotes about the restaurant business are hilarious!

i think i have that at home, but not read it yet - yay, a good one in my own library waiting for me

i just started The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud - I dont know if its any good though, i'm only on page 10 or something ... but I'll pull out Kitchen Confidential for next up. thanks for posting.

[ngeso]

Just started Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. He's a good, funny writer and the anecdotes about the restaurant business are hilarious!

Bourdain is great.

I'm definitly a bit of a 'foodie', and a big traveller (active or armchair). 'Chef' has always complemented 'pilot' and 'writer' to form my trio of dream careers. I've always fancied and admired cooks and their creations, if simply for the fact that I am an enthusiastic, adventurous eater myself (I'll eat anything once or on a dare). Plus I'm into all kinds of full-bodied, red-meaty, boisterous, bacchanalian, back-slapping, testosterone-drunk, reckless carefreeness. Real guy stuff all the way!

So Bourdain is someone I want to identify with(*). I'd kill for the life he has right now - he gets to fly around the world, meets strange mountain forest people, eats the most outlandish porcupine dishes, and invariably washes it down with strange hallucinogenic beers made from bugs and snake skin and fermented frog piss. The guy is an absolute PIRATE.

Read his books, they're a laugh a minute. And watch his telly-show - that's where you see the forest people, gerbil satés and the frog piss schnaps.


(* unlike Jamie Oliver, who is a total wuss, basically only knows Italian food, uses too much tin-foil, and has not one tenth of Bourdain's swashbuckling worldliness)

[Lloyd Dev]

I'm currently reading Soul On Ice by Eldrige Cleaver. I haven't been able to put it down.

Also I'm taking a look at some of Hegel's works, as I'm a fond lover of philosophy.

[Lloyd Dev]

I'm reading "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn again. The stuff on Columbus in that book makes anyone who celebrates Columbus Day seem like a supporter of genicide. And thats just the first 10 pages.

I'll be looking out for this one. This is one timely subject.

[Monny JcIntosh]

I'm about to read some D. W. Winnicott, as I'm a new parent but an old pseud.

[LadyA. Acacia]

white priviledge....good one

[kara]

From Publishers Weekly
Gilbert grafts the structure of romantic fiction upon the inquiries of reporting in this sprawling yet methodical travelogue of soul-searching and self-discovery. Plagued with despair after a nasty divorce, the author, in her early 30s, divides a year equally among three dissimilar countries, exploring her competing urges for earthly delights and divine transcendence. First, pleasure: savoring Italy's buffet of delights--the world's best pizza, free-flowing wine and dashing conversation partners--Gilbert consumes la dolce vita as spiritual succor. "I came to Italy pinched and thin," she writes, but soon fills out in waist and soul. Then, prayer and ascetic rigor: seeking communion with the divine at a sacred ashram in India, Gilbert emulates the ways of yogis in grueling hours of meditation, struggling to still her churning mind. Finally, a balancing act in Bali, where Gilbert tries for equipoise "betwixt and between" realms, studies with a merry medicine man and plunges into a charged love affair. Sustaining a chatty, conspiratorial tone, Gilbert fully engages readers in the year's cultural and emotional tapestry--conveying rapture with infectious brio, recalling anguish with touching candor--as she details her exotic tableau with history, anecdote and impression.

[old disco jock]

i just finished a david lynch book catch the big fish

creativity,consciousness and meditation

around a 150 pages he is a very positive individual

[Myron]

I just finished Middlemarch this morning. That book was a part of my life for the last three weeks or so. Goodbye Dorthea, Lydgate, and Rosamond, I'll miss you guys.

Most likely I'll probably read Another Country by James Baldwin next.

Myron

[12th house]

just finished Amy Bloom's collection of short stories A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (fantastic writer; she's also a psychotherapist), now onto Elegy for Iris by John Bayley.



From Publishers Weekly
It is seldom that someone at once so brilliant and so visible as novelist Iris Murdoch develops Alzheimer's disease in full public view; seldom, also, that a sufferer from this dreadful malady has so skilled and loving an interpreter by her side. Bayley, a noted literary critic (and, recently, novelist) in his own right, has been married to Murdoch for 40 years, and part of the charm of this enormously affecting memoir lies in the ways in which he shows the affections of old age as in no way slower than the passions of youth. Murdoch was already a dashing and rather mysterious figure when she and Bayley met in the Oxford of the 1950s; she was a philosophy don at a women's college who had just written a much-admired first novel; he was a bright, rather naive graduate student.

Something mutually childlike clicked between them, however, and a naked swim in the River Isis (which later became a fond habit lasting even into Iris's illness) cemented their loving friendship. Writing with great tenderness and grace, Bayley evokes their long, warm, mutually trusting marriage, and introduces in the gentlest way the moments, four years ago, when he realized that his wife's sense of reality and of herself were slipping away. She is now anxious, repetitious and often nonsensical in her speech, but still suffused with the same quizzical sweetness and absolute trust he loved in her from the start. Few people afflicted with an Alzheimer's partner can be as self-effacing and endlessly patient as Bayley, but in a way almost as mysterious as the creation of a Murdoch novel, he evokes depths of understanding and warmth that seem scarcely ruffled by the breezes of the conscious mind. This beautiful book could hardly help being deeply consoling to anyone thus afflicted; it is also a compelling study of the overthrow of a remarkable spirit. First serial to the New Yorker.

[Monny JcIntosh]

I just finished Middlemarch this morning. That book was a part of my life for the last three weeks or so. Goodbye Dorthea, Lydgate, and Rosamond, I'll miss you guys.

"the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life..."

A great line at a funeral for a quietly great man I once knew.

I'm insanely busy writing about things that I find mind bendingly difficult, and so don't have much time for reading for pleasure. I started reading Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" again, having never previously finished it, but I can only manage one of the short chapters a night. Next time I get a stretch of time, I'm going to give Grossman's "Life and Fate" a go.

[kara]

I just finished Middlemarch this morning. That book was a part of my life for the last three weeks or so. Goodbye Dorthea, Lydgate, and Rosamond, I'll miss you guys.

Most likely I'll probably read Another Country by James Baldwin next.

Myron

did you like Middlemarch? it's one of the many books i half remember reading, probably for school or college or something, but didnt really take the time to process. i was thinking of getting it and trying it again.

"[Middlemarch is] one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" -virginia woolf

[Monny JcIntosh]

I started reading Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" again, having never previously finished it, but I can only manage one of the short chapters a night.

I'm not going to finish it this time, either. It's initially quite promising: three bored editors at a Milanese publishing house slowly start turning into learned versions of Alvin, but by the time things start going, it transforms into a series of sketches of Eco's research. It's supposed to come across as the mad ranting of a crazed conspiracy theorist, but it's all quite dull. The nonsense that it parodies is far more entertaining. With only 100 pages to go, I can't take any more.