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"Oryx and Crake" gave me nightmares, which is a testimony to its power, I guess. Thanks for the tip on her next read.. if I can handle it.
I finally read "Monkey Beach" by Eden Robinson. Set in Kitamaat/ Haisla Nation territory, I picked it up because I lived on the northern West Coast years ago. It took me right back... but more than that it's a haunting description of land, spirituality and death. Hard to summarise. I am not sure if she wrote another but I hope so as this one was short listed for the GG Prize.
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 read Oryx and Crake a while back. Quite enjoyed it.
For someone with a professed fear and laothing of CanLit, I seem to end up reading and enjoying a lot of CanLit.
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 am reading The Family by Jeff Sharlet. It is a tough slog and I must admit I skipped a bit of it but it is necessary to know the influence the false Christians have on the US and other governments. It is extremely well researched and very scary. I say false Christians because they have interpreted Christs's teaching in such as way as to benefit themselves totally and to firmly believe they are right while ignoring anything Christ said that goes against their best interests.
I'm currently reading Filthy Lucre, and The Appeal by John Grisham.
I'm trying to wrap up both Taras Grescoe's "Bottomfeeder: How to eat ethically in a world of vanishing seafood" and Judy Rebick's "Transforming Power".
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.
Took a break last night to read the Communist Manifesto. Pamphlets were clearly more literary and sophisticated in the 1800s when literacy rates were lower. Nowadays the universe gets reduced to some meaningless point form arguments. At some point, we became stupid.
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.
"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..."
Many of the English novels of the 19th century were serialised in before becoming books, so it was in the interest of the authors to drag out the stories. They were paid by the word or by the installment.
Mind you, that dosn't explain Tolstoy, although I don't know what parts of War and Peace I'd cut out.
I'm reading Robert Hughes' Culture of Complaint again.
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?)
I hate websites with light-coloured fonts on dark backgrounds - at least, ones which actually are meant to be read. So your suspicion is correct, Michael, at least until I get past appearances...
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.
Speaking of "smartest guys", Roger Pearson's Voltaire Almighty: a life in pursuit of freedom, is worth reading if only as an example of what the "freethinker" can accomplish in a society like that of France in the early middle 18th century. This is one VERY enjoyable look at the fellow who brought "the Enlightenment" to France (from England) in 1733, and one Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Chatelet. Emilie, who was the first woman "scientist" of France (she translated Newton's Principia into french, the common language of Europe at the time), lived with Voltaire in a country estate for more than a decade (visited occasionally by her husband) , studying and writing with Voltaire, her lover.
The book introduces us to the leading thinkers in arts, science and theology at the time. And reads almost like a novel, "with chapters promising sensational changes of fortune...or salacious tattle. " (Observer)
Of course, everyone knows that England caught the Enlightenment from the Scots...
Yeah, yeah. "How the Scots Invented the Moden World" etc. But the Scot materialists like Hume were only "developing" when Voltaire visited England in the middle 1720s. There were the poets like Pope, and there was the science of Newton (not a Scot). Empiricism to replace Descartes and his fuzzy ideas in France (and it was one helluva struggle). There was Locke, in England. And not a helluva lot else.
Armaggedon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut. A posthumous collection of pieces on war and peace by a man who lived through the Dresden bombing.
I finished the Twilight books.
Entertaining, though the ending was a bit rushed. It's a nice love story and I think the people who decry the book as anti-feminist should read it more carefully. Bella changes a lot as a character.
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.
Mirrors, by Eduardo Galeano.
Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid
What can I do to support CAIA's boycott of Indigo Books and Music Inc?
Yann Martel hss written What is the Prime Minister Reading, a collection of the letter essays he has mailed along with a book every two weeks since April 2007. A pice from the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix says:
"The choices Martel has mailed range from To Kill a Mockingbird to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The latter includes one of Martel's most pointed letters, written in reaction to a potential cut to small literary journals and an increase in funding for business degrees.
"But you're an honourable man and you must know what you're doing," Martel writes and repeats, using the same sarcastic words that Antony uses in the play to turn the crowd against Brutus."
The library must have a copy of this one.
It did, and the true title is What is Stephen Harper Reading? And Martel explains his project is validated by the fact that "once a citizen is elected to public office, then their finances do become our business, and politicians routinely have to account for their financial dealings. It's the same with their imaginative dealings. Once someone has power over me, I have the right to probe the nature and quality of their imagination, because their dreams may become my nightmares....'
"An up-to-date public record : www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca and www.quelitstephenharper.ca
The Hemingses of Monticello, by Annette Gordon Reed.
Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean. I just have to see what whe does with this period in the life of Aristotle - from the eyes of the philosopher in the first person. She has certainly done her homework about life at the time. So far so good, anyway.
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.
Just finished up Spook Country by William Gibson. I did that in a single sitting - freakin' amazing. I cannot say how good that book was and recommend it to everyone and anyone.
Right now, though, I am reading The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. Less exciting.
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.
People who enjoyed Ronald Wright's What is America are going to see his sketches of life in the wesgtern hemisphere fleshed out by a guy who really goes into anthropological detail : Charles C.Mann's 1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus. Sumer was so nouveau by comparison with the not so new world.
George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London