Ok for the high brow crowd what books you are reading

[big nasty kcnut]

I'm reading The New American Revolution by tammy bruce. She is a great thinker and funny.

[PhillyChiefFan]

The Blind Side : Evolution of the Game. For anyone interested, its about Michael Oher who is a **cking huge LT for Ole Miss and possibly up for draft for 2008. Really good book

[JohninGpt]

I just finished an alternate history series by Harry Turtledove. The series is based on the premise that the Battle of Antietam never happened, so there was no Emancipation Proclaimation, allowing the British and the French to enter the war and force Lincoln to negotiate peace.
The series starts with the Second Mexican War ("How Few Remain"), continues through WWI, and ends at the conclusion of his version of WWII.
Very entertaining and completely believable.

[NewChief]

Just finished The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. It's tagged as Young Adult fiction, but that's completely misleading in my opinion. This book is absolutely excellent.

Here's a good review of it off of goodreads.com

Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief has one of the most original and striking narrators since Julian Barnes introduced us to the canny perspective of a woodlice in History of the World in 10½ Chapters. There’s no caginess about it. The first word of the first chapter’s title makes it clear that the narrator is a personified Death: the not so grim reaper. Having Death as the narrator for a book set in Germany at the start of World War II starts the book on exactly the right blackly humorous tone which continues throughout. It’s a very Jewish type of humour. I’m thinking of the classic Borsch belt comedians like Sholem Aleichem, Milton Berle or perhaps even later comedians like Billy Crystal or Woody Allen. As Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse quoted in her Radio National piece on Jewish Humour, Saul Bellow calls “characteristically Jewish” a story in which laughter and trembling are so curiously mingled that it is not easy to determine the relations between the two, or as Death puts it: “A final dirty joke. Another human punchline.” (12) This is part of the power of what Zusak does in The Book Thief.

Although The Book Thief succeeds on the most post-modern of levels, its impact on the reader is as much due to superb old fashioned plot and characterisation as anything else. It is, afterall, simply a beautiful and painful story of a young girl as she deals with an important and tragic point in history. Liesel is nine and her younger brother six, when her mother takes her and her brother to Munich to be given to foster parents. En route her brother dies: “When the coughing stopped, there was nothing but the nothingness of life moving on with a shuffle, or a near-silent twitch. A suddenness found its way onto his lips then, which were a corroded brown colour, and peeling, like old paint.” (20) Liesel is then thrust into a nightmare/dream existance which involves the thieving of a book, the development of a relationship with her foster parents, Rosa and Hans Huberman, and her growing sense of self as she ages during this period. Liesel’s coming of age is a key part of the plot, and it is possible to read the book as simply the story of Liesel. Certainly Liesel’s characterisation is enough to carry the story. When Liesel arrives at the Hubermans she is scared, almost mute, and refuses to get out of the car or into a bath, but we have already begun to love her through the lens of Death’s sympathy

Death’s own role as a character is a strong one, and he hints at a conflicted inner life. In some ways he makes himself a slave of humans – dealing with the impact of their wars and atrocities: “The boss, however, does not thank you. He asks for more.” An afterlife is hinted at very subtly, but never clarified – bodies go cold and melt and sometimes warm again as their souls are gently removed. That’s all the reader gets. The rest is left open to imagination, as is the direction that Death as character might be moving in. He’s allegorical in one sense, but so real in his sensations, longings and emotions, that it isn’t hard to imagine some kind of progression for him. As character, he may not be nice, but he has his charms, as typified by the last line in the book. Death’s most striking punchline is delivered at the very end. And like the best Jewish humour, it works by turning both fear and convention on its head, in this case, making humans the ‘other’ haunting entity. It also places the final spotlight directly on life, and the celebration and triumph of it, even in the face of man-made hatred and horror. The Book Thief is a wonderful book, full of beauty, pain, longing, joy, and sensuality. It never skirts the horror of war, death, or pain, nor does it flinch at the very real tragedy it immerses itself, sometimes graphically, in. But even at its ugliest, this is a story of the beauty and celebration, however fleeting, of human life.

[NewChief]

I started Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude a day or so ago, and I can't put it down. Awesome coming of age story set in NYC with kids that grew up in the 70s and 80s.

Publisher's weekly note from amazon:

If there still remains any doubt, this novel confirms Lethem's status as the poet of Brooklyn and of motherless boys. Projected through the prism of race relations, black music and pop art, Lethem's stunning, disturbing and authoritatively observed narrative covers three decades of turbulent events on Dean Street, Brooklyn. When Abraham and Rachel Ebdus arrive there in the early 1970s, they are among the first whites to venture into a mainly black neighborhood that is just beginning to be called Boerum Hill. Abraham is a painter who abandons his craft to construct tiny, virtually indistinguishable movie frames in which nothing happens. Ex-hippie Rachel, a misguided liberal who will soon abandon her family, insists on sending their son, Dylan, to public school, where he stands out like a white flag. Desperately lonely, regularly attacked and abused by the black kids ("yoked," in the parlance), Dylan is saved by his unlikely friendship with his neighbor Mingus Rude, the son of a once-famous black singer, Barnett Rude Jr., who is now into cocaine and rage at the world. The story of Dylan and Mingus, both motherless boys, is one of loyalty and betrayal, and eventually different paths in life. Dylan will become a music journalist, and Mingus, for all his intelligence, kindness, verbal virtuosity and courage, will wind up behind bars. Meanwhile, the plot manages to encompass pop music from punk rock to rap, avant-garde art, graffiti, drug use, gentrification, the New York prison system-and to sing a vibrant, sometimes heartbreaking ballad of Brooklyn throughout. Lethem seems to have devoured the '70s, '80s and '90s-inhaled them whole-and he reproduces them faithfully on the page, in prose as supple as silk and as bright, explosive and illuminating as fireworks. Scary and funny and seriously surreal, the novel hurtles on a trajectory that feels inevitable. By the time Dylan begins to break out of the fortress of solitude that has been his life, readers have shared his pain and understood his dreams.

[DenverChief]

The Process is the Punishment - Feeley

Courtroom 302 - Bogira

Lucky - Sebold

Becoming Anna - Michener

[Frazod]

I was reading Kagan's History of the Peloponnesian War, but I kind of burned out on it towards the end. Very depressing story.

[Zeke Ziggle]

I just started reading the god delusion by richard dawkins. Probably not a book for everyone but an interesting read for anyone with questions about god.

[chappy]

Fatherland by Robert Harris

[NewChief]

Originally Posted by NewPhin

For anyone who hasn't seen it yet:

www.goodreads.com

It's like myspace, but it's based on books. It's a pretty cool way to keep track of what you've read, what you're going to read, and what your friends are reading.

I've been reading absolutely tons of Young Adult fiction. I've probably cranked through 30 books in the last two months.

Just curious if anyone has signed up for goodreads.com? If you do, send me a PM and I'll tell add you as a friend.

[Hydrae]

The latest "heavy" book I read was recommended to me by BigDaddy. The Monster from Jekyll Island was a good read. It was heavily footnoted which lead me to give it more credence than I might have otherwise. While it is pretty heavy on the conspiracy theory side of things, it is still an interesting look at how the Federal Reserve came to be and some of the results of us going off the gold standard.

I picked it up because I have never had any college level economics courses and thought it would be good to know more about it. If anyone else has any recommendations of decent (not too heavy or it will just put me to sleep) books that deal with macro-economics, I would love to look into them.

[Adept Havelock]

Originally Posted by JohninGpt

I just finished an alternate history series by Harry Turtledove. The series is based on the premise that the Battle of Antietam never happened, so there was no Emancipation Proclaimation, allowing the British and the French to enter the war and force Lincoln to negotiate peace.
The series starts with the Second Mexican War ("How Few Remain"), continues through WWI, and ends at the conclusion of his version of WWII.
Very entertaining and completely believable.

I really enjoyed that as well. Have you read "The Guns of the South" or his "Worldwar/Colonization" series? The "Darkness" books by him are kind of fun too. Kind of a J.R.R. Tolkien meets the Second World War.

Another Alt. History series I'm really enjoying is Stephen Baxter's "Time's Tapestry".

http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-Times-...3270531&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Conqueror-Time...3270531&sr=8-2

[Easy 6]

I'm about 3 chapters into "Black Elk Speaks", the story of an Oglala Sioux who witnessed the Little Big Horn & Wounded Knee.

Indian culture & the Wild West in general are some of my very favorite subjects...so far its a very interesting read, i recommend it for anyone with similar interests.

[Buehler445]

I am reading "IKE: An American Hero".

It is a pretty good read. I got it at an airport so I would have something to read on the plane (wallet took it pretty hard).

It takes an in depth look at Ike's decision making and his leadership during WWII and his presidency. Very interesting.

[OnTheWarpath15]

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein.

http://www.amazon.com/Shock-Doctrine...3277831&sr=8-1

[pikesome]

I've been hitting audio books lately since they fit in with my daily routine better. I've listened to the three Dexter books by Jeff Lindsay, part of Skin Tight by Chris Hiaasen (I need to re-check it out from the library) and I'm currently listening to Nostradamus Ate My Hamster by Robert Rankin. The Dexter books are great even though the third one's a bit different, not quite in keeping with the other two. Skin Tight was interesting, a crime story set in Miami with a bit of a different feel from what you'd expect. It's not humorous but definitely not following the formula. Nostradamus makes me think of The Hitchhiker books only weirder (yea, I know, but it is so far). I've also got Knots & Crosses by Ian Rankin (I found it looking for info about the other one) which is an apparently well regarded detective series from Scotland.