Books: What are you reading tonight?

[BigPoppa]

The Cryptonomicon is the setup for Stephenson's magnum opus trilogy of Quicksilver, The Confusion, and System of the World. Each is 1000 or so pages and well worth the effort. Dude did a psychotic amount of research and tells a great story.


I never thought of The Game and The Making of a Poker Player in those terms, but you're spot on. I've always liked books on/by people who were really passionate about something. Tracy Kidder writes books about people like that, and I always find them very interesting.

[xxThe_Lebowskixx]

Catch Me if You Can

It goes into much more detail than the movie. Very inspiring. A really great read.

[Bartman387]

Just finished Breakfast of Champions, it was my first run-in with Vonnegut and I was really disappointed. There were moments here and there that were funny and intriguing, but the majority was dull, slow, and contained uninteresting asides. At the end there is a line, I think from the narrator, that gave me the idea that he purposely included these dull details throughout in response to other works, or to make the point that it's unimportant, but its a poor excuse and ruine dthe novel imo.

Also just finished God is Not Great by Chirstopher Hitchens. Fantastic, interesting read. Though Hitchens is Hitchens and goes on and on as he tends to do, but nonetheless I loved it.

Next up for non-fiction I'll be reading At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch. It's an exhaustive book about Martin Luther King's last years. I've been wanting to read it for a while now and am quite excited to finally get to it.

Not sure what fiction book I'll read next. I think it's between Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard, Catch-22, or something to coordinate with Halloween(Frankenstein, Dracula, The Invisible Man, etc.). Any thoughts?

[KilgoreTrout]

I started Foop last night. I picked it up because Christopher Moore and Tony Vigorito (two of my favorite authors) appeared on the jacket copy. So far, it's a pretty funny absurdist tale of a travel agent - a time travel agent - tasked with preventing villains from preventing the birth of the agent's boss. Clearly inspired by Vonnegut, pre-Katrina New Orleans plays a central role. Only got through 7 chapters last night before the sandman got me, but it's amusing enough.

Champs is my favorite KV book, btw. Don't give up on my boy yet. Slaughterhouse 5, Sirens of Titan, and Cat's Cradle are strange, but more accessible than Champs.

KV's naive narrators are brilliant, IMO. He coerces the reader to read between the lines. Rabo Karabekian - Bluebeard's narrator - busts me up.

I can appreciate that KV isn't for everyone. His humanism can slap the reader around at times, and if you're opposed to the tenets of that doctrine I'm sure it can leave a sour taste.

[Bartman387]

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Champs is my favorite KV book, btw. Don't give up on my boy yet. Slaughterhouse 5, Sirens of Titan, and Cat's Cradle are strange, but more accessible than Champs.

KV's naive narrators are brilliant, IMO. He coerces the reader to read between the lines. Rabo Karabekian - Bluebeard's narrator - busts me up.

I can appreciate that KV isn't for everyone. His humanism can slap the reader around at times, and if you're opposed to the tenets of that doctrine I'm sure it can leave a sour taste.

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His beliefs had nothing to do with my enjoyment, as I mostly agree with him, but can you explain some of the finer points of it that I may have missed. For example, I never read Bluebeard, so I missed that reference.

Also, what exactly was the point of telling everyone's penis size, and the asides that told of someone's family history to a documentary level?

[KilgoreTrout]

Penis size, like many other things, is an absurd concept. It's totally out of our control whether we're blessed with a big unit or cursed with a winky, yet males in our culture are always compensating and competing to see who has the bigger one (figuratively speaking). He's having fun with that concept, because the narrator, as a device, has access to "facts" that we the reader and other characters have no access to. I forget the character, but someone has a big one and the narrator says something like, "you never know" who's packing heat down yonder.

That's a fundamental problem we as humans face when confronted by others. We have no way of knowing the other's intentions, their penis size, their make-up. We make social judgements that are only half informed.

Note the narrative style of Champs. It's written as though the audience (the reader) is from another planet. We need illustrations to understand routine concepts (like


and wide open beavers, AJAX trucks, etc.). Signs, symbols, signifiers are all culturally contexted. The context is further mired in the individual versus the Other relationship - the battle of wills and agendas.

Think about the cross-dressing car salesman and how his expectations are crushed.

There;s obviously a lot more going on in Champs than these couple of issues, and I thoroughly enjoy the playfulness of the narration throughout.

[Wynton]

I'm in a non-fiction mode right now.

I just finished "The Island at the Center of the World," which is about the Dutch influence on New York City. Very interesting.

Now I'm reading "The Terror Presidency," which is a critical account from a conservative who worked at the Justice Dept for a few years.

Next up is a new biography of Thomas Paine, which is supposed to be quite good.

Then, I have to return to fiction for a while.

[maltaille]

I tend to read a few things at a time too, especially when they don't grip me, or when they're non-fiction.

Currently I'm part way through Mirror Worlds, by David Gerlernter. Now about 15 years old, it deals with a lot of his research on representing large-scale, complex data sets - such as cities, companies, hospitals, and similar - using computers. It's not particularly technical, more concerned with the philosophical reasons, the uses for them, and the big problems in their development. For any of you who have read Snow Crash, this is the research on which the Earth program was based. Despite being 15 years old, it's still far and away the most prescient and influential book about computers and networks I know of. I've read it more than 20 times so far.

Also part way through Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. Appreciation, rather than enjoyment, might be the best description for my feelings. Despite it being very short, I've taken almost a month to get halfway through, and I'm the fastest reader I know.

Also rereading Reuben & Ciaffone's Pot Limit & No Limit Poker, because I've been playing more Omaha lately, and Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Sun Over Breda, because I refuse to believe that the man who wrote The Fencing Master can continue to turn out unreadable dreck (unfortunately I'm wrong, he can).

Notable recent reads are The Grifters, by Jim Thompson, because Dominic reminded me how good it was, and Spook Country, by William Gibson. I'm not so much a fan of his cyberpunk stuff, but I've come to really like his stuff set today. Spook Country is as good as Pattern Recognition.

Bartman, are you limiting yourself to classics for Halloween? If not, check out Anno Dracula, by Kim Newman. Set a few years after Dracula finishes, it's premise is Dracula won, and proceeded on to effectively take over England, he and his get turning half the population, and thus gaining de facto acceptance. It's sort of an homage to the vampire genre, and lots of famous vampires make an appearance, either explicitly if out of copyright, or implicitly if not.

[SoloAJ]

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or something to coordinate with Halloween(Frankenstein, Dracula, The Invisible Man, etc.). Any thoughts?

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I found Frankenstein and Dracula to both be interesting reads on late nights. I was in high school though, so I don't know if I would still really enjoy them. I mean, I used to think Critters was a brilliant horror movie in high school (and uhhhh I still love them, but brilliant? Haha).

Anyway, I haven't read Invisible Man so I can't comment.

[wet work]

Right now I'm reading A Pickpockets Tale about the life of a NYC pickpocket during the mid to late 1800's. It's an interesting book.

I think the next book I'm going to read is A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. It's been recommended to me by a bunch of people, I think I've even seen it mentioned here in the forums several times.