So, What Are You Freakin' Well Reading Now?

My partner and I have recently gotten into Canadian author Kelley Armstrong.   I kept having people tell me to give them a chance and we both found them surprisingly fun even though we would usually never pick up anything from her genre.

I'm reading Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy with my daughters - we read some aloud every night and then talk about the themes, story, character, etc.  Great discussions coming out of it!

Hey Ze, that was quite cool. 

I find I swing between non-fiction and fiction binges, been on a bit of a novel kick as of late.

Read 'Warlock' by Oakley Hall, really enjoyed it.  A western which does an incredible job at building anticipation before each outbreak of violence and then frustrating your expectations while making the story increasingly complex and interesting. 

Also read 'Star Named Henry' by Roddy Doyle, thought it was pretty decent, I'm not an expert on Irish history but I got some of the satire and the narrator had a pretty engaging voice.  'Paddy Clarke Hahahaha' is one of my favorites.

And read 'Three Day Road', pretty dark book, I liked it but not sure how I feel about the 'message' which might be taken away from the story's resolution.

Reading 'The Jungle' the uncensored edition that was originally published in socialist magazines originally before being cut down by six chapters and given a more reformist style.  I spent half a year after highschool working in a hide plant in Alberta, which was by far the most awful job I've ever had, and while it clearly wasn't as bad as conditions in the novel, the essential character of the business hasn't changed much in my opinion.

I'm 2/3 of the way through Laxer's In search of a New Left. Just in the chapter on the Waffle.

Almost finished "In the Footsteps of Mr.Kurtz" by Michela Wrong. Fascinating account of one of Africa's most corrupt rulers, Mobutu. One of the things that is left open-ended for the reader to ruminate upon - is who was worse - the Belgian colonial masters of Congo or the new generation of post-independence African rulers whose rampant corruption, tribalism and nepotism destroyed whatever utopian ideals those nations initially desired.

The Gathering, by Anne Enright.

I finished "The Way the Crow Flies" by Ann-Marie  Macdonald.  A murder mystery/spy novel set in Centralia Ontario in the early 1960's.  The murder mystery being losely based on the Lynne Harper murder in Clinton, for which Steven Truscott was wrongfully convicted.  

An entertaining read for boomers, and particularly for boomers who live in S/W. Ontario.

I'm in the midst of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

I've read a lot of accounts of working class life in 19th-century England and France - literary and non-literary - and this book is right up there in describing the suffering wrought by industrialisation.  The Jungle has the added twist of being about immigrants, another thing it shares with those who populate the meat-packing houses of Fast Food Nation.

There's a corrupt politician in the novel named "Bush" Harper. 

I just read the part where a Socialist gives an eerily prescient speech about war.  He speaks about Manchuria (this was the 1905 Russo-Japanese War) but sounds as if he could be talking about the 14-18 war.

Thanks for the tips. I'm in really bad need of fresh reading material, especially good Canuck fiction.

Then "The Way the Crow Flies" might be what you are looking for, Farmpunk.   There's also "The View from Castle Rock" by Alice Munroe, though this one is non-fiction.   Both deal with our stomping grounds.

  But I steer clear of Munroe.  I've never been a fan.

I'm sympathetic to that point of view.  In fact, I'm not a fan of "Can Lit" in general, and Munroe is one of the icons of Can Lit.  However, "View from Castle Rock" is a blend of family history, autobiography and South Western Ontario History.  I don't have enough background in Munroe to say this isn't a typical "Alice Munroe" book, but I'm willing to bet that it is.

Tender is the Night, by Scott Fitzgerald.

"This western-front business couldn't be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn't. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren't any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather's whiskers."

I'm reading Scott Heim's "We Disappear" the same authour who did the amazing Mysterious Skin, which was make into a movie directed by Gregg Araki.

Just finished Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, by Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Freidman. Now I'm on to Revolutionary Road, so I can read it before I watch the movie.

I'm reading Ernie's War, which is a collection of Ernie Pyle's articles form the Second World War.  He loves the dogfaces, but by today's standards would be considered a thoroughgoing racist for his depictions of Arabs, Sicilians and Italians.

I just finished Revolutionary Road, which delves into the tragedy of suburbia, as shown in the recent film by the same name (which reunited Kate and Leo). Since then I've moved on to another book by Jessica Valenti called He's a Stud, She's a Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know About.

The latter is a quick read, but sadly I'm kind of bored of it. It's a well-written worthwhile read, but having read all of Jessica Valenti's books, I find it repetitive. Plus, being a young woman myself, I've come face to face with the majority of these double standards ("He's a bachelor/She's a Spinster; He's an Activist/She's a Pain in the Ass; He's Childless; She's Selfish). 

It's a quick, concise read revealing all the different forms of sexism women face daily.

A Case of Exploding Mangos

I gave the Twilight series a try, 500 Apples, but I gave up on the first book, about forty pages in. Everyone at work told me to keep going, it gets better from there, but my effort was less than valiant. It's not that I didn't enjoy it, there were just so many other things I wanted to read, so I put it aside.

I just finoished Foul Play by Joe Humphreys

http://threemonkeysonline.com/boston_to_berlin/2009/the-foul-play-that-h...

I've been meaning to read that book Unionist. I'll probably pull it off the shelve now. You might like the Humphreys book. Many of the issues you raised in the rugby manslaughter case are echoed in the book.

I'm reading "Sea Sick", by Alanna Mitchell. Having already read "Under a Green Sky" by Peter Ward (on mass extinctions), I'm not particularly optimistic for the future of higher life forms on Earth (I question whether there is truly intelligent life, based on the lack of action on climate change and the slowness to appreciate the changes in the oceans).

That sounds interesting.

The idea anyway, a few years ago I read The Wars and it was boring.

After sitting on my bookshelf for too long, I finally pulled down the first volume of The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell.  A brilliant man.  Troubled but brilliant.

So far, so good.  I'm looking forward to many good nights of reading.

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Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!!

I finally got around to reading Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road', and I highly recommend it. McCarthy's minimalist approach made for a quick (day-and-a-half) read, but was no less affecting. Now that I've finished that, I'm officially qualified to bitch about all the things done wrong/omitted when the film adaptation comes out later this year.

Also, wanted to mention, that I've recently started in on another that's been on my "Must Read" list for sometime: David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest'.

I'm only on page 83, and already I feel as if I've read two or three times that many pages of someone else's work; and this is the first time I've had to use two bookmarks for one novel. The man was a word savant.

Just getting into Gwynne Dyer's Climate Wars.  Took some time in opening it because his monotonal rendering of it on CBCs Ideas, recently, left one in less than optimistic mood. And I had heard the guy at a public lecture at U of W about three years back in whiich he told us how his military connections around the world had made him privy to ...well, pretty much what he says in Climate Wars.

The p;ublic lecture was more fun, because he did not let us down in presenting his persona, walking casually to the lecturn, dressed in the same brown leather  jacket that  TV viewers had recognized as trademark a couple of decades back. The voice was also the worse for wear, but the polished verbal performace, the careful timing in releasing statistics and confidential chats with unidentified military figures who had told such and such to government ministers and which explained..i.e. Britain's retention of the Trident program.  The starving millions to the south will want to come aboard the island nation where the surrounding sea has made agriculture possible, longer.

Like others, he is in long-time debt to James Lovelock, who, it seems, is listened to by social and military planners elsewhere.

Just a tiny bit more optimistic than Lovelock the scientist, perhaps, Dwyer ends with the thought: "How fortunate that we should be set such a test (of carbon emission and population controls) at a point in our history where we have at least some chance of passing it. And how interesting the long future that stretches out beyond it will be, if we do pass."

Lovelock would call that a bit anthropocentric, but we can't all chuck our opiates and our deniers and just go cold turkey overnight.

(And someone had left a "happy uncle's day" bookmark from A&W between the pages of this library book, offering a "FREE regular fries and regular A&W Root Beer if you bought an Uncle Burget at the regular price, by May 3, 2009.  An ironic reminder emblematic  of the difficulty of cultural transition that we face .) 

I'm re-reading Patrick O'Brian's The Mauritius Command.   Wonderful sense of the language, manners, customs and scientific knowledge in his sea-farin' yarns set in the time of Jane Austen, but dependent for action scenes on the war she and her characters largely ignored. O'Brian did a deep six in '99, unfortunately for his readers. ( Edited to correct spelling of the author's name. And I'm also sick of politics, religion, apocalyptic environmental stuff.)

I just finished working my way through an essay by Christopher Michael Langan, a bouncer who apparently has the highest IQ in the United States (between 195 and 210). Here's the essay:

http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/Langan_CTMU_092902.pdf

And here's a link that will take you to the primer for the theory (it's at the bottom of the page). For god's sake, if you're going to read the essay, read this first:

http://www.ctmu.org/

Spectrum, I have a suspicion you might enjoy this. Unionist, not so much.

I've just started reading Volume 1 of Capital by Karl Marx, well just part of the introduction by the translator thus far. It's 1000 pages. Since it's translated from German it'll probably feel like 4000 pages. There are three volumes so that makes 10,000 pages. I should be done by 2015.

After watching Paper Moon recently, I became interested in whatever happened to Tatum O'Neal, so I read her autobiography, Paper Life.  What a mess.  Hollywood is a sewer, by her description.

Speaking of Tinseltown, I'm reading Frank Zappa's autobiography again.  I saw his son Dweezil perform Zappa's music a week ago and am hence renewing my Zappa zealotry these days.

I am almost finished Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" which I am reading for the second time.  I wanted to re-read it because I have heard that her new fiction, "After The Flood" Is another futuristic speculative fiction.

O&C is about genetic engineering, personal alienation, and a new world in which humans and other animals are replaced by strange new genetically- engineered living beings. The title refers to Oryx, the child prostitute who becomes a creatrix-goddess to the strange new humanoids of the future, and Crake is the young genetic engineer who designs the new life forms and posthumously becomes the 'creator-god' to those beings.

I have heard that "After The Flood" is about a world devastated by floods and climate change. It's being released next month and I have reserved a copy for myself at the Toronto Public Library.

I've never read anything by Eden Robinson before.  I'm always looking around for interesting new things to read, books that I get into. Land, spirituality, death... I'll make a note of it and check it out sometime.

I used to go looking for Can Lit. Not so much anymore. 

I liked Nino Ricci's "Lives Of The Saints" and its 2 sequels but when I read his newest, "Origin Of Species" I didn't want to finish it. In one part of the book some of the characters are at a party making chit-chat. I felt like if I was at this party i would want to leave, so I did. I never found out what happened after that.

I'm currently reading Filthy Lucre, and The Appeal by John Grisham.

working on "Free Women of Spain".  I really need to stop leaving books on my desk if I am unprepared to explain the concept of an anarchist women's militia to coworkers.

But it is a really good book which gives a good understanding of working class anarchism and feminism in Spain during the revolution.

At some point, we became stupid.

On the other hand an article in Scientific American indicated that it's publication has become more difficult to read since the turn of the century.

Someone with an English lit degree can probably tell us why, but I've noticed that a lot of stuff from the late 1700's is pretty easy to read, but stuff written during the Victorian era not so easy. 

I'm not sure that the stuff from the 1800's into the early part of the last century was more intelligent, just, well, more verbose, with tangled subclauses, parenthetical diversions (interestingly enough, I eshchew the paranthetical trips Tolkien takes when I read "The Hobbit" to Snarfy the Wondergirl, made it easier to read aloud)  and what editors today would regard as fantasical run on sentences that never seem to end, going on and on forever, like a man sliding slowly down a roof surfaced with black welsh slate and applied by tradesmen whose skill no longer resides in this age of ashphalt shingles.

Stories serialized in the weeklies and monthlies were important when there were weeklies and monthlies.  And although we tend to talk about "we" in the language of politics, certainly the proletariat today would not turn out for a weekly go at Karl in the local library. A study of content analysis and reading habits of industrial workers in my undergrad years showed all read the daily, but only occasional magazines.

I would think there is even less reading today by those folks. At least, looking at newspaper distribution and library attendance. But then, maybe I'm behind the IT times, and that study was 35 years ago.

I'm taking another run at Victor Klemperer's diary of the Nazi years. It is an amazing look at the world, even outside Germany, and from memories of that world pre-1933, the year he began his diary.

Arthur Koestler wrote in a bio, Arrow in the Blue, that he could not understand how the nation with the greatest circulation of newspapers, per capita, could let itself be so totally deluded.  Although he did point to the economic screws being applied to publishers  by 1930.

(Hey, that's happening today, eh?)

Since he is the smartest guy in the US, does this mean that somebody in some other country determined this? Who and where? And how does the smartest person in the world determine who he or she is?  Do they get the second smartest to agree, or receive an endorsement from a universe that is obviously smarter than us?

Just wondering.

Of course, everyone knows that England caught the Enlightenment from the Scots...

Armaggedon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut. A posthumous collection of pieces on war and peace by a man who lived through the Dresden bombing.

Charles Stross, "Halting State", Penguin (Berkley) 2007.

Needed something for the bus ride home so I grabbed it off the remainders table at Chapters, based on my usual random technique of opening books to a middle page and I buy the first one where I can make it through two or three paragraphs without getting put off. It works very well for me, though it takes longer than you might think sometimes. I usually end up with non-fiction -- too much fake-sounding dialogue in most novels for my taste -- but this one is sci-fi.

A Scottish detective in 2018, post-independence, is called to a dot-com's offices in a former nuclear bunker, where a live-action internet role play game's virtual vault has been robbed. The characters are recognizable to me based on friends who have done gaming. The mundane technology of the day is super-cool, and that's a big part of the appeal. There are strong female characters, albeit androcentrically so and with some really bad ideology around relationships. But there are also some cool technical ideas from insurance and medicine -- turns out (from the flyleaf) the author is an accountant and pharmacist, as well as an established writer.

It's a quick read, fun, some enduring cautionary IT security ideas, and will be a perfect present for a friend who is a brilliant programmer (he hacked Microsoft) and inveterate gamer now working in the insurance industry. I will be interested to hear his take on it.

Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid

What can I do to support CAIA's boycott of Indigo Books and Music Inc?

The Hemingses of Monticello, by Annette Gordon Reed.

Just finished The Blindside Book.  Much better than the movie, more gritty and truthful.  If you are not a football fan (which I am not) there were a few chapters that leave you more confused than entertained but the rest of the book quickly makes up for it.

So many good books to read. Thanks everyone.

I read The Bonfire of the Vanities along time ago. I think I enjoyed it.

Currently I am hooked on White Oleander by Janet Fitch. 

George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London

Hmm if you had jas, I think you would remember. Hearing what George had to say about his fellow down and outer 'george' chills my bones

Be good to hear what you think of Jacoby's Age of American Unreason in light of Bageant's take on the unread in Deer Hunting, aQ.

Greg Mortenson's Stones into Schools (sequel to his Three Cups of Tea) is a good update on events within Afghanistan in the last 30 years, and the kids for whom he is making education a reality are so anxious to be educated...I'm reminded of my partner's Grade 2 classroom in a "United Nations"-like Mississauga. And Mortenson began building them way out in the mountainous extremities of northeast Afghanistan between the Hindu Kush and the Pamir Range where the old Mujahadeen can still defy the excresence of  Taliban suppression of girls and women. The agency that Mortenson is using to marshall funding and co-ordinate construction in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan has one requirement...that spaces for girls in the schools become equal to the number for boys. It is an eye-opener of a book, and as culturally revealing in some ways as Rory Stewart's The Places in Between.

I'm going through a bit of a Harry Turtledove period.  I can shut my brain off and just have fun.

Something Jacoby says in her introduction got me thinking about the great...read(?) of babble. She notes how there are now two camps that are poles apart and which refuse to listen to each other. According to Jacoby, this was not the case 40 years ago, when left and right-wingers would still despise each others' ideas, yet go to lectures in which they'd listen to someone in the opposite camp express these ideas.

babble has become something like the former; any newcomer suspected of harbouring rightist views is usually denounced on sight and summarily banned, which is unfortunate for a place that purports to be a forum for discussion. I'm pretty sure that conservatives don't have tails or horns, and that they might occasionally have something worthwhile to say, and maybe even help us sort out our own positions better.

You make an important point, aQ, but we need to define the line between acceptable and unacceptable, hereabouts, as NB makes clear...i.e. a Gallowglass would just be a pain in the ass.  Anyone who comes on as anti-intellectual/anti-science, would be difficult to correspond with.

Perhaps we could take discussion on this to an independent thread elsewhere?  Both Jacoby and NB point to an ideological line drawn some four decades back, and NB points to a specific period.  I would futher refine the line drawn to the appearance of the Chicago School and its political outcome (Naomi Klein underlines that in its violent international aspects, Robert Reich in Supercapitalism describes the gradual effect on class structure in the U.S.... which resulted in the world that Jacoby described in terms of intellectual interest.)

If someone enters babble country with an obviously open interest in our assumptions here - and can challenge them showing supporting published works - by all means, we should "throw wide the doors". It would greatly help if ALL were ready to roll up their sleeves in working at the challenges to a reasonable future facing our progeny...while also finding relief from that work in  the world of the mind, here in this thread.

Raj Patel's The Value of Nothing:Why Everything Costs So Much More Than We Think (2009) 

This is a primer on the history of economic thought as well as a revelation about the hidden environmental and social costs of everything in our market driven world...the true cost of that hamburger may approach $200. This reader was reminded that the labour theory of value more closely resembles the true cost of things, while learning that Adam Smith's idea of value was distorted by those who required a single, neat interpretation. Just as the "invisible hand" - really Smith's explanation for the way in which merchants/manufacturers buying from each other locally, gave a "hand up" to local industry - was mystified by the market economists who followed.

Patel's work is dependent on economic history, but he uses it to ask the big political questions of today, like a section on "Whence the Countermovement?":  "Governments don't float above market society - they're embedded in it, and the recent economic crisis demonstrated this amply. In one international survey, 63 per cent of people thought that their governments were run in the service of 'big interests' as opposed to the 30 per cent who thopught governments served the will of the people. In almost every country, those polled wanted their governments to behave in ways that were more responsive to the people. An international survey of more than 29,000 people undertaken by the BBC relealed that two out of three respondents said there there was a need to transform the internaional  and domestic economic systems. The world is ready for change.

"But here's the darker part of the story. The people under those governments, you and me, are also part of the market society. There is no position from which, untainted by the world around it, some everlasting truth can guide us to a brighter future...There can be 'community failure' just as there is market failure, in which minorities risk persecution or worse. The recent rise of far-right parties around the world - from India to Europe to the United States - can also be understood as the second part of a double movement. In the United States, Louis R.Andrews, chair of the National Policy Institute - an advocay group for white people - hoped to see 'the Republican Party destroyed, so it can be reborn as a party representing the interests of white people, and not entrenched corporate elites. Which, says Andrews, is why he voted for Obama."

I freakin' well read Freakonomics last week and am now reading Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb.

I'm re-reading E.P Thompson's, The Making of the English Working Class. I didn't finish the whole book last time around.  It's about 1,000 pages and I'm 1/4 through it. I'm also reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind which is rather more difficult. Heh.

Number 1 ladies detective agency,  a series. Anyone else read these?

Motorcycles and Sweetgrass by Drew Hayden Taylor.   A light-hearted take on life on an Ontario Res (Curve Lake, the author's starting point), it gives the reader a look at today's understanding of the Trickster in aboriginal lore...and Hayden thanks Thomas King (among others) for helping him to understand the central figure in First Nations' mythology. Taylor, noted for his humour as a playwright, brings a very humourous "spirit" to the pages of his newest novel.  He's also been appreciated for his non-fiction in works such as "Me Sexy". His scriptwriting goes back to The Beachcombers and North of 60. 

The reader also gets an account of what residential schooling meant to the Ojibway of central Ontario...the humour there is strained.

Continued here