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.

[tooge]

I'm in the middle of Jeff Shaara's A Rise to Rebellion. What a great book. If you haven't read him, he basically writes historically acurate fiction that is seen through the eyes of 4 characters in each book. This one follows George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams, and General Thomas Gage. Very interesting stuff. Highly recommend it.

[Delano]

So, ahem, has anyone read any of these books on the 2010 Man Booker Prize "shortlist?"

The six books, selected from the Man Booker Prize longlist of 13, are:
Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America

When my countrymen imagined America, they thought of savages and bears and presidents who would not wear wigs. Who among them could have conjured Miss Godefroy in all her beauty of form and elegance of mind, her wit, her delicacy, her slender ankles amid those mad red leaves?

An exploration of the great adventure of American democracy, it thrillingly brings to life two characters who, born on different sides of history, come together to share an extraordinary relationship. Olivier is a French aristocrat, sent to the New World ostensibly to study its prisons, but in reality to save his neck in a future revolution. Parrot is the son of an itinerant English printer, sent to spy and protect him. With the narrative shifting between the perspectives of master and servant, we see the adventure of American democracy, in theory and in practice, told with Carey’s dazzling wit and inventiveness

Emma Donoghue Room

Jack is five.
He lives in a single room with his Ma.
The room is locked.
Neither Jack nor Ma have a key.

The novel opens as Jack turns five. Jack has never been outside of Room, as he calls it, and although he and Ma have access to a TV, Jack believes that everything he sees on the screen is make-believe: as far as he’s concerned, Room is the entire world. He’s happy enough with his lot, however, because he doesn’t know any different; Ma keeps him entertained, and he has her undivided attention. Their days have a structure, with time to sleep, a time to eat, to play, to watch TV - even a time for lessons. (And at night, which is when ‘Old Nick’ sometimes visits, Ma keeps Jack hidden away.)

But now Jack is five, and Ma tries to explain to him that - contrary to everything she’s told him previously - there is a world beyond Room. Jack finds the concept impossible to grasp, but when Old Nick cuts the power supply to Room, Ma realizes their situation is even more precarious than she had previously thought. She decides they have to act, and comes up with a plan: she will tell Old Nick that Jack is dead and persuade him to dispose of the body. At an appropriate moment, Jack - still very much alive - will make a run for it.

Ma and Jack spend ages rehearsing exactly what Jack has to do, and - miraculously - their plan works: Jack manages to get out of Room, and away from Old Nick. He manages, too, to convince a bystander to alert the police, who subsequently rescue Ma.

For Jack, however, freedom is an alien concept, and he’s suddenly catapulted into a world that’s both unfamiliar and terrifying; for him, it’s escape, not being held captive, that is frightening. For Ma, too, life on the outside requires many adjustments; not least, the two have to learn how to live together in a world full of other people.

Damon Galgut In a Strange Room

There is a moment when any real journey begins. Sometimes it happens as you leave your house, sometimes it’s a long way from home…
A young man makes three journeys that take him through Greece, India and Africa. He travels lightly, simply. To those who travel with him and those whom he meets on the way - including a handsome, enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers and a woman on the edge - he is the Follower, the Lover and the Guardian. Yet, despite the man’s best intentions, each journey ends in disaster. Together, these three journeys will change his life.

A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, In a Strange Room is the hauntingly beautiful evocation of one man’s search for love and for a place to call home.

Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question

'He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one…’

Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czech always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results.

Now, both Libor and Sam are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor’s grand, central London apartment.
It’s a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you have less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends’ losses.

And it’s that very evening, at exactly 11:30, as Treslove, walking home, hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country, that he is attacked. And after this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.

The Finkler Question is a scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.

Andrea Levy The Long Song

The Long Song is Andrea Levy’s first novel in six years, following the critically acclaimed and award-winning Small Island.

Told by July, a slave girl born on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the nineteenth century, this is the story of her life during and after the last years of slavery:

‘You do not know me yet. My son Thomas, who is publishing this book, tells me it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages. As your storyteller, I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed.’

Tom McCarthy C

C follows the short, intense life of Serge Carrefax, a man who - as his name suggests - surges into the electric modernity of the early twentieth century, transfixed by the technologies that will obliterate him.

Born to the sound of one of the very earliest experimental wireless stations, Serge finds himself steeped in a weird world of transmissions, whose very air seems filled with cryptic and poetic signals of all kinds. When personal loss strikes him in his adolescence, this world takes on a darker and more morbid aspect. What follows is a stunning tour de force in which the eerily idyllic settings of pre-war Europe give way to the exhilarating flightpaths of the frontline aeroplane radio operator, then the prison camps of Germany, the drug-fuelled London of the roaring twenties and, finally, the ancient tombs of Egypt.

Reminiscent of Bolaño, Beckett and Pynchon, this is a remarkable novel - a compelling, sophisticated and sublimely imaginative book uncovering the hidden codes and dark rhythms that sustain life

[keg in kc]

Originally Posted by Braincase

Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet Series - listening on audiobooks during my commute, well narrated, and unabridged. Into the 5th book of the series now, should be through book 6 by the end of next week. I'm on a bit of a military science fiction kick right now, so if anybody has any suggestion, I'm open.

Have you read David Weber's Honor Harrington series? Really good stuff. The books are available online (for free - legally!) at this link (gotta love Baen Books...) and they're all available in audiobook format as well (not free - legally).

As for me, I'm still slogging through Glen Cook's Black Company. Up to the seventh now, She Is The Darkness. Really great dark fantasy series about a group of mercenaries.

[Pitt Gorilla]

Currently reading: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff

Really entertaining book with a good story mixed into the Biblical history.

[Amnorix]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

Betty: When little Dan was two minutes old I tattooed it on his head.

Yellowbeard: Does he know about this?

Betty: Oh, no no no, that's why I kept him in the cupboard for three years. That may be why he's a bit odd with all these books, and reading, and stuff like that.

God I love that stupid movie.

"Us Yellowbeards are never more dangerous than when we're dead."




"Been out rapin' lad? Good work."

"No I haven't raped her!"

"No, you wouldn't you stupid little git. You're not the fruit of my loins. Your mother's a liar. I couldn't be your father anyway, no woman ever slept with me and lived!"

[mlyonsd]

No Less Than Victory - Jeff Shaara. Pretty good fictional WWII book.

[Jenson71]

Interesting statement on Franzen's new book Freedom, and a bit on current literature as a whole:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...han-life/8212/

[NewChief]

Originally Posted by Jenson71

Interesting statement on Franzen's new book Freedom, and a bit on current literature as a whole:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...han-life/8212/

People are raving about it. I really liked the Corrections, so I'll be reading it.

[blaise]

Originally Posted by Jenson71

Interesting statement on Franzen's new book Freedom, and a bit on current literature as a whole:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...han-life/8212/

Yeah, that's interesting, and it makes me not want to read him. The only thing I've read from him is a short story (the name of it escapes me) that was included in The Best American Short Stories anthology a few years back.
I had been considering reading his book because I'd been hearing that he's a great novelist, but this write up makes me feel like reading him would be sort of like reading Updike's Rabbit novels, which I don't really care for. They're well written, but I just don't care about or like the characters. And I really don't care much about suburban malaise, which Franzen seems to write about from what I understand.
The impression I get from that article is that Franzen is sort of 50% Updike and 50% Unbearable Lightness of Being-Kundera, but that it doesn't work because he's not as talented a writer as Updike and he's not as imaginative or deep as Kundera. And actually, some of those passages he included were almost a little Stephen King-like.
Maybe it's unreasonable to come to that conclusion without reading Franzen's novel, but that's the impression I get and I doubt I'll read his stuff anytime soon. I know a lot of people like his stuff, it just sounds dull to me. The worst thing this critic says about the novel, in my opinion, isn't that he think's the writing is juvenile, but that he just didn't give a crap about the characters. That's the greater sin, to me. Boring is worse than bad.

[NewChief]

Originally Posted by blaise

Yeah, that's interesting, and it makes me not want to read him. The only thing I've read from him is a short story (the name of it escapes me) that was included in The Best American Short Stories anthology a few years back.
I had been considering reading his book because I'd been hearing that he's a great novelist, but this write up makes me feel like reading him would be sort of like reading Updike's Rabbit novels, which I don't really care for. They're well written, but I just don't care about or like the characters. And I really don't care much about suburban malaise, which Franzen seems to write about from what I understand.
The impression I get from that article is that Franzen is sort of 50% Updike and 50% Unbearable Lightness of Being-Kundera, but that it doesn't work because he's not as talented a writer as Updike and he's not as imaginative or deep as Kundera. And actually, some of those passages he included were almost a little Stephen King-like.
Maybe it's unreasonable to come to that conclusion without reading Franzen's novel, but that's the impression I get and I doubt I'll read his stuff anytime soon. I know a lot of people like his stuff, it just sounds dull to me. The worst thing this critic says about the novel, in my opinion, isn't that he think's the writing is juvenile, but that he just didn't give a crap about the characters. That's the greater sin, to me. Boring is worse than bad.

I'd compare the Corrections more to DeLillo or Wallace without quite the stylistic flair... but also more accessible as a result. The span and scope of the work reminds me of something like Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible or even East of Eden. The book has a "big" feel to it. I don't know... it's been a while since I've read it... but I really liked it.

[chiefs1111]

reading now

Children Of The Night by Dan Simmons

[Delano]

I've read 200 pages of Skippy Dies by Paul Murray and loved every one of them.

This is a very fun read.
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[yhf]

Originally Posted by NewPhin

People are raving about it. I really liked the Corrections, so I'll be reading it.

So have you had a chance to dig into Freedom yet? I have been meaning to pick it up but you know life and wasting time on the net kinda slows a fella down. At any rate I am getting mixed reviews from a few friends that have read it. What is your take (if you have one)?

[GloryDayz]

War and Peace..

[NewChief]

Originally Posted by yhf

So have you had a chance to dig into Freedom yet? I have been meaning to pick it up but you know life and wasting time on the net kinda slows a fella down. At any rate I am getting mixed reviews from a few friends that have read it. What is your take (if you have one)?

I haven't gotten it yet. Been a horribly lame reader lately.