The Official What Are You Reading Thread

[Fuzzy]

towers of midnight - i'll finally be caught up with the wheel of time! just in time for the last book to come out.

[nippletwister]

Working through You Only Live Twice - the 2nd to final novel in Ian Fleming's Bond series.

Have a HUGE stack of books piling up because I've focused on what rounds out to be a ~3000 pg novel of varying degrees of quality.

[nippletwister]

Just finished the final novel in the Bond series. Now time to watch all those movies. WOOOO!!!!

[violet]

Uncle Tungsten-Oliver Sacks

[Fuzzy]

finally caught up with wheel of time, waiting until next year for the final book.

time to read game of thrones.

[Dr. Faustus]

Daniel Paul Schreber - Memoirs of My Nervous Illness


This book is solid gold. He was a German judge who had two severe mental breakdowns in the late 19th century. He mixes his delusions with Christian theology. God has rays which communicate through his nerves, his shrink is attempting "soul-murder," and the afterlife consists of a "State of Blessedness." He also talks at length about his desire to experience submitting to sex as a woman.

This book is mentioned a lot in Delueze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and the Lacan essay in Ecrits I just made it to called "On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis." Freud wrote about his case as well. I'll have to get to that sometime too.

There is also an out of print book written in 1974 about him called Soul Murder which will probably be too hard to track down. I guess I could check the Brooklyn Public Library.

[Dr. Faustus]

I'm in the preliminary stages of putting together a reading group to go through Alain Badiou's Being and Event.



The basic project of the book, as near as I can tell is to synthesize Lacan, Heidegger, and the turn towards mathematic-style logic in the analytic tradition. He considers math to be the "language of being" and thus tries to formulate some kind of ontology out of Set Theory. Some of it deals with trying to arrive at a new model of the subject.

It'll be hard, but I've already read Being and Time, a good bit of Lacan, and several of the other people he references. I'm assuming I can pick up what I need to know about Set Theory on the fly.

http://www.amazon.com/Being-Event-Alain-Badiou/dp/0826458319

[nippletwister]

The Crying of Lot 49 is an amazing book and everybody should read it.

[nippletwister]

I'm starting Franzen's The Corrections, somewhat under protest.

[Fuzzy]

finally caught up with wheel of time, waiting until next year for the final book.

time to read game of thrones.

done with game of thrones, clash of swords time

[bith]

balls deep in a dance with dragons after starting game of thrones earlier this summer.

[MarcusAurelius]

haven't read a fiction book in probably a decade, but now a good way into The Postmortal

[nippletwister]

I just bought that on Amazon last night.

[Dr. Faustus]

I read three other books to get ready for Being and Event: Plato's Parmenides, Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, and a primer on Set Theory called Stories About Sets by N. Ya. Vilenkin.

The Badiou was rough in spite of this, but it's slowly starting to make sense.

[nippletwister]

Just got two Gary Vaynerchuck books today. Reading them for work.

[TeleportThis]

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. Already read the comic version, now reading the book.

[Gretyl]

I'm up to the last 65 pages of A Wise Man's Fear. After that, I don't know if I want to go for Rule 34 or Feast of Crows. Probably the former first.

[Uncle Sherm]

haven't read a fiction book in probably a decade, but now a good way into The Postmortal

I got about halfway through this last night. This will be made into a movie someday.

[MarcusAurelius]

haven't read a fiction book in probably a decade, but now a good way into The Postmortal

I got about halfway through this last night. This will be made into a movie someday.

The somewhat subtle touches of how society reacts to the premise make it pretty gritty/scary. Not a spoiler if you're halfway through, and minor anyway: the "cycle marriage" concept and the "trolls" with the lye are pretty neat ideas

[Uncle Sherm]

I burned through that book in 2 days. It is hard to put down, even between sections.

[Smallz]

Started The Black Company by Glen Cook after reading GRRM and enjoying it so much. Had this series as well as Malazan (by Erikson) recommended by other ASOIAF fans.

I'm only a couple hundred pages in but it's been pretty great so far. Not a whole ton of depth, at least not yet, but very enjoyable. Anyone else read this series or the Malazan books for that matter?

[nippletwister]

haven't read a fiction book in probably a decade, but now a good way into The Postmortal

I got about halfway through this last night. This will be made into a movie someday.

The somewhat subtle touches of how society reacts to the premise make it pretty gritty/scary. Not a spoiler if you're halfway through, and minor anyway: the "cycle marriage" concept and the "trolls" with the lye are pretty neat ideas

I'm about halfway through this one as well. It's a page turner for sure. Very fun, very interesting.

Sherm: it will not be made into a movie, or if it is, it will lose one of the central ideas in the book.

Sorry to make the really obvious observation about this book, but here it is anyway: one of the central themes of this book is how the character thinks in media. What we are reading is literally somebody's blog, or some form of journal that was or was not published online. It not only reads like a blog, but it reads like the blog of a guy who is tapped into modern media so much that a huge chunk of the book is written by other people and simply collected by our narrator. It's not unique in this approach, sure, but for a book with a title that might be a play on "postmodern" the role of the voice is an important observation in how people read, write and think now and in the future. In terms of news sources, social media, personal conversations that can be recorded and revisited, and so on.

/obviousobservation

[MarcusAurelius]

but for a book with a title that might be a play on "postmodern"

thanks, you just turned the first fiction book i picked up in ages into a piece of hipster trash. see you in another decade, reading.

[nippletwister]

hahaha yeah any meaning deeper than "things are happening" is both stupid and hipster

[MarcusAurelius]

couldn't agree more

[nippletwister]

Is that ignorance or philistinism?

[MarcusAurelius]

option 3: it's a joke

[nippletwister]

[Uncle Sherm]

haven't read a fiction book in probably a decade, but now a good way into The Postmortal

I got about halfway through this last night. This will be made into a movie someday.

The somewhat subtle touches of how society reacts to the premise make it pretty gritty/scary. Not a spoiler if you're halfway through, and minor anyway: the "cycle marriage" concept and the "trolls" with the lye are pretty neat ideas

I'm about halfway through this one as well. It's a page turner for sure. Very fun, very interesting.

Sherm: it will not be made into a movie, or if it is, it will lose one of the central ideas in the book.

Sorry to make the really obvious observation about this book, but here it is anyway: one of the central themes of this book is how the character thinks in media. What we are reading is literally somebody's blog, or some form of journal that was or was not published online. It not only reads like a blog, but it reads like the blog of a guy who is tapped into modern media so much that a huge chunk of the book is written by other people and simply collected by our narrator. It's not unique in this approach, sure, but for a book with a title that might be a play on "postmodern" the role of the voice is an important observation in how people read, write and think now and in the future. In terms of news sources, social media, personal conversations that can be recorded and revisited, and so on.

/obviousobservation

I doubt the character was recording the events of the book for a public audience. I found it read more like a diary, especially considering the fact that it opens up with him getting the cure, which was illegal at the time. Also, there are a lot of personal thoughts that would not be appealling in a blog written by anyone that wasn't an emo douchebag, which the character didn't seem to be

[nippletwister]

And the first chapter says "The text files appear to have been written as posts for a blog or online journal. It's impossible to know which of these files Farrell actually published in a public forum, as all mentions of his name in the cloud as it now exists lead to sites whose servers were destroyed during the Great Correction."

My point isn't that it may or may not have been public info. My point is that the work itself is aware that it is written in a format that exists now in social media unlike at any other point in history. It's not groundbreaking, but it sci-fi written using modern social media formats.

[Little Bobby Tables]

1Q84 and The Visible Man and Infinite Jest. Hoo boy.

[Fuzzy]

finished dance with dragons, now the picture of dorian gray!

[Talenos]

That book is so gay.

[nippletwister]

I'm reading Gravity's Rainbow and I'm slow.

[Dr. Faustus]

I found a PDF containing the complete works of Freud on the internet, converted it into a .txt file, and then separated each individual essay or book into its own file with the date it was published in the filename(for my kindle). I'm slowly working my way through most of them. I never realized how prolific a writer he was.

Anyhow, right now I'm about halfway through Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

[nippletwister]

Got Chuck P's newest in the mail.


Not expecting a lot, but as of chapter 1 it seems better than the last 2 combined.

[nithos]

Currently reading Maus. I am about 80 pages in, but damn, why didn't I read this sooner?

[Fuzzy]

congrats, man. that book is amazing. i try to read it every year or so.

[violet]

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex and I'm still reading Uncle Tungsten. I really like Uncle Tungsten, but I keep getting side-tracked.

[nithos]

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Basically, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for MMORPers. Fun and fast paced read. Kind of fizzles out in the last couple pages to a movie ending where everything gets wrapped up into a neat "to be continued" package.

[Little Bobby Tables]

Just finished A Confederacy of Dunces. Now splitting my time among Ready Player One, Guns Germs and Steel, and Speaking American.

[bith]

most of the way through dune.

it's amazing to me how much the movie and scifi mini series missed.

[Talenos]

Finished the first two Hunger Games books this weekend. Kind of annoying that it is written in first person, but the story was pretty decent even for the kind of played out government is bad, dystopian future genre.

[Dr. Faustus]

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Basically, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for MMORPers. Fun and fast paced read. Kind of fizzles out in the last couple pages to a movie ending where everything gets wrapped up into a neat "to be continued" package.

I read this for a book club. It was pretty good. Not a literary masterpiece, but I don't feel like it was a waste of my time to read it. Most of the book is about 1980s nostalgia, almost to the point where it's a kind of religious observance.

[Dr. Faustus]

Also, I've been reading:

Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy - Paul Virilio
French professor who lectures at the European Graduate School and the Architecture part of the Eccole Normale Superior. The entire book is about technology and speed violently reshaping society. Very good, but a little too dystopian.

Adorno's lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
These lectures are fantastic. I feel like I understand Kant for the first time after reading them.

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis - Jacques Lacan


------------

Also, I managed to finish Badiou's Being and Event. It was rough, harder to get through than anything I've read in a long time. I wish I'd known more about Zermlo-Frankel Set Theory going into it. I read the parts about "forcing" towards the end twice and I'm still not sure I get it. I know forcing isn't something Badiou came up with, but it doesn't make it any easier to grasp.

[violet]

The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket-John Weir

[Little Bobby Tables]

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Basically, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for MMORPers. Fun and fast paced read. Kind of fizzles out in the last couple pages to a movie ending where everything gets wrapped up into a neat "to be continued" package.

I read this for a book club. It was pretty good. Not a literary masterpiece, but I don't feel like it was a waste of my time to read it. Most of the book is about 1980s nostalgia, almost to the point where it's a kind of religious observance.

I really enjoyed this one.

I recently finished all the hunger games books and books 1-3 of ASOIAF. Taking a break for some non-fiction:
Rachel Maddow - Drift
Susan Cain - Quiet

[Fuzzy]

Into Thin Air

[nippletwister]

I'm reading all the Raymond Chandler novels. Two and a half to go. Go Marlowe!

[nippletwister]

Oh and after that comes all the Dashiel Hammett novels. Kinda in a Hardboiled mood lately.

[Talenos]

Reading Red Shirts, and it's pretty good so far.

[Fuzzy]

Into Thin Air

just finished. that was intense.

autobiography of malcolm x

[violet]

Drive-Daniel H. Pink

[Little Bobby Tables]

Just finished Among the Thugs. It's kind of insane. Not sure what I will pick up next.

[bith]

Starting Neal Stephenson's cryptonomicon. It's a biggun.

[nippletwister]

Yeah. That one was where I stopped reading him.

[Fuzzy]

neuromancer

[MarcusAurelius]

the gods themselves

[Alice Ayers]

"Gone, Girl."
Just another best-seller thriller--but it's good enough to make you pick it up and keep going. I read it in one (long) day and would recommend to anyone who has an airplane flight or long drive. Mysteries dont usually hold my interest, but this one did.

[violet]

hypocrite in a pouffy white dress: tales of growing up groovy and clueless

[Alice Ayers]

Just finished "The Marriage Plot"--third novel of Eugenides (after Middlesex)
I enjoyed the discussion of literature, religion and European/Indian coming of age trips in the 1980s. But it was pretty easy to see what was going to happen in it, too--it's definitely a 2012 ending more than a 1980s ending, though the ending happens in 1984-85.

I thought this piece of the Times' Review was the most accurate:

By the end of “The Marriage Plot,” neither Leonard nor Mitchell has any evident direction into grown-up life, and Madeleine’s is treated almost as if it didn’t exist. Among the major male writers of Eugenides’s generation — he was born in 1960, the year after Jonathan Franzen and two years before David Foster Wallace — becoming an adult is possible to imagine happening, at best, at excruciating cost, and often not at all. Which makes them pretty representative.

[violet]

I'm starting Fiasco by Coskin Buktel.

[violet]

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson.

[Fuzzy]

neuromancer

yeah, this didn't do it for me.

just about done with moneyball though. fucking awesome.

[Turbo]

I read Catcher in the Rye today. not sure what to think. certainly not the best book i've read