Wow, both of those sound really good. I will have to put them on my TBR list. I am reading (Dinner at Mr. Jefferson's) by ((Charles A. Cerami) for the beginning of May. Will see what the rest of the month holds.
Yeah, I'm a little behind with
Godel, Escher, Bach too. No excuse other than I have lots of demands on my time...
I'm working on
The Battle for New York. It's interesting so far, in part because it often ties where things happened to what the neighborhood (even the street sometimes) is known as now.
Long Way Down by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman. It's very good and entertaining, with some excellent pictures, and really captures the flavour of their journey.
I'll be finishing my ER book tonight then it's on to
History of the English Speaking Peoples vol. 1. I've read a couble of books recently that reference early English common law so it seems like a logical step. It might slow down my 50 books in 2008 pace though.
Just finished "
Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer.
Starting "Colonial Ste. Genevieve" by
Carl J. Ekberg. The book's about the first village founded about 1750 on the western side of the Mississippi. Established by French voyageurs, the men soon married the local Indian women and began to farm. The settlement persisted under nominal French, Spanish, English, and finally American rule.
I just started
Through the Narrow Gate by
Karen Armstrong. It's the story of how she entered the convent at seventeen. I'm fascinated by stories of the religious life. She's a very engaging writer, I've heard her other books are good as well. I'll probably have to pick up
A History of God when I'm done with this.
Message edited by its author, May 3, 2008, 8:49am.
#10 Do read
A History of God it's an excellent intro and contrast and comparison of the three western faiths.
About 1/3 of the way through
London, a Biography by Ackroyd, which I started in April. It's taking an effort, for some reason ~ perhaps his style of presenting information, which is different than what I expected ~ though it is very interesting and, of course, well-written.
Also reading
Riding the Hulahula to the Arctic Ocean, an Early Reviewers book, which I'm very much enjoying. It's not the kind of book you have to read straight through; I'm jumping from one chapter to another as the spirit moves me, reading first about the places that interest me most.
>14 motomama, I just read
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle a few weeks ago -- and echo your feelings about it. Wonderful book and has inspired me to change what I eat and where I buy it.
Started
The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman, the only one of her books I haven't read. Then my Er book arrived,
The Size of the World so I took a break & read that, now I'm back to France & Germany. When I was young I could read several books at the same time, but it's harder now.
I'm reading
How We Believe by Michael Shermer. Shermer is a very engaging author, and this book is an enlightening investigation into the processes of belief, the search for God, and what science and psychology can tell us about how and why we believe. It's a fascinating read.
>15 lindsacl : It really opened my eyes as well. It made me think about how great our backyard tomatoes taste as compared to the mealy pinkish ones we buy at the grocer on a regular basis - and how maybe we just aren't meant to eat fresh tomatoes in January.
The last part about how turkeys have forgotten how to mate is interesting - you tend to forget how mechanized and automated so much food processing is these days when you're shopping.
There's a new one called
Farm Sanctuary (wrong touchstone) that I just brought home from my library and my husband started it. He said it makes you want to give up meat...which I haven't yet, but I've considered it a lot.
Yesterday bought
Building Jerusalem by
Tristram Hunt. It is subtitled 'The rise and fall of the victorian city'.
After browsing through it, I think I am going to enjoy it.
Just got "
Colonial Ste. Genevieve" by
Carl J. Ekberg.
St. G~ was a small French/Indian village on the western shore of the Mississippi. Circa 1750.
============
have to edit this to say what a fine book this is. Ekberg is a meticulous researcher, but also a fine storyteller.
It absolutely amazes me to read about the Code Noir and how functionally different slavery was in St. G versus the South. The mode of slavery reminds me of that of classic times. Slaves frequently went armed, did not work on Sundays and holidays except if they hired themselves out. Thus they had money/property of their own, and not insignificant legal rights.
Message edited by its author, May 10, 2008, 2:31pm.
I'm on the Duff Cooper diaries, but I'm finding it a bit heavy going. Maybe a few too many mid-century diaries and letters in recent months...
I am
FINALLY making some good progress on
The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain. I am finding that although it is fascinating social history, it reads somewhat disjointedly - more like a series of vignettes that illustrate new developments than a single, coherent narrative. I am hoping that
Ben Wilson will draw the threads together more explicitly at some point. I am enjoying it a lot though. And perhaps the style is really a reflection of what history is, rather than what we think it should be - messy, rather than neat.
I started reading
The Elements of Moral Philosophy by James Rachels today. I have to teach with it this summer, so I thought actually reading it might be a good thing. It's actually looking like it will be a good text to teach from.
eta: although, I am disappointed with the shoddiness of the binding. Only four chapters in, and already pages are falling out. *sigh*
Message edited by its author, May 9, 2008, 2:56pm.
I'm reading
Learning to Bow which is an excellent book really getting into the nitty gritty of Japanese culture. Highly recommended. It's a BookCrossing bookring but Other Half is going to read it too if he can get it in before the month is up. It just seems to go deeper into cultural stuff than many other books I've read on Japan...
I'm two chapters into
The Great Warming. So far it's pretty good, although
Fagan's been a little repetitive in making his points.
This weekend I've been reading Real Food by
Nina Planck . Her tone is a little arrogant , but its still an interesting read . After this I'll be starting
The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs .
I just started Physics of the Impossible by
Michio Kaku. The copy I picked up is an eighth printing. It has a 2008 copyright date so I guess it's selling well.
>33,
I thought
The Know It All (wrong touchstone - refer to your message) by A.J. Jacobs was terrific. Reading the entire encylclopedia was quite a feat.
> 33 I really enjoyed
The Know It All, too, and am looking forward to his
The Year of Living Biblically. Not that I have it yet...
> me - I'm still struggling with
Duff Cooper which turns out to be a mix of affairs of state and affairs of the heart; I don't like the man and the endless European politics are a bit wearing... but I should finish it today with any luck!
I enjoyed both of A. J. Jacobs' books.
I am reading Dancing with a Ghost: Exploring Aboriginal Reality by
Rupert Ross which my son gave me for mothers' day.
Three Cups of Tea, which is quite gripping! His portrayal of the Pakistan-Afghan mountain regions fits with other books I've read about that area.
I'm working on
Vlad the Impaler at the moment, and doing it as a theme read with two fiction books:
Dracula and
The Historian. I am really enjoying the way that the three books interact with one another, I think reading them all together like this is far more valuable in this case than reading any one of them alone.
Just started reading Physics of the Impossible. I'm only a few pages in so can't really comment on it yet, but it's an interesting subject.
I read the last chapter of my Maimonides book last night. I gave a once through to
Poetry and Commitment by Adrienne Rich. Then I started
Physics of the Impossible getting about 80 pages into it.
The Adrienne Rich polemic will get me deeper into her prose.
Michio Kaku's book looks easy and interesting, although I wonder at how careful he was in fields outside his own and in talking down to us.
Moses Maimonides: the Man and his Works is commendable but may be a little too academic for the merely curious reader. It is leavened with some snideness.
I am still offering obedience to
Stoicism and Emotion.
Robert
Message edited by its author, May 12, 2008, 6:56pm.
Just finished the following article:
"Of Agues and Fevers: Malaria in the Early Chesapeake by the
Rutmans.
Message edited by its author, May 13, 2008, 9:36pm.
I finished Physics of the Impossible and was disappointed by its sloppiness. I have taken up
The Void by
Frank Close. I have to buy a new lamp for my bedroom before I resume
Stoicism and Emotion.
Robert
I just started
Hidden Agendas by John Pilger, a collection of the author's essays and other journalistic writing. A multi-awarded journalist and maker of documentary films, his is a very interesting perspective of news and global events --- he offers an alternative view to the one dished out by mainstream (Western) media. I'm also in the middle of an earlier book of his,
Distant Voices.
I got caught up in
A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca: The Extraordinary Tale of a Shipwrecked Spaniard Who Walked Across America in the Sixteenth Century by Andres Resendez, and finished it in a day and a half. It's only 229 pages without the footnotes. I didn't take time for the footnotes while reading the book but skimmed them afterwards.
Finished boring
Duff Cooper and the marvellous The Crossing by
James Cracknell and
Ben Fogle, and now I'm to
Can Any Mother Help Me which is a truly wonderful book about a correspondance magazine set up by a load of British housewives in the 1930s to share advice and thoughts. Marvellous stuff!
>3,
I was just wondering, were you able to get through
The Voyage of the Beagle? The geological descriptions were a bit tedious but I liked the book overall.
Right now I am reading "Stealing Lincoln's Body". So far, it is both fascinating and informative, and more humorous than I expected.
>56 - Travels With A Tangerine is excellent!
I don't often post in this thread as I usually read more fiction than anything, but right now I'm just past halfway in Rick Perlstein's
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and there hasn't been a dull page yet. Perlstein's history of American politics from 1964 to 1972 begins with the LBJ landslide over Goldwater in '64, and concludes with the Nixon re-election landslide over McGovern in 1972. Not just another psycho-history of Nixon, it's his premise that "between 1965 and 1972, America experienced no less than a second civil war, and out of its ashes, the political world we know now was born", the Nixon era laying the groundwork for the political divisiveness we're being forced to deal with today, and so far the evidence is pretty overwhelming. What makes
Nixonland such great cracklin' fun though, is Perlstein's gleefully sardonic style, always a shade shy of over-the-top, making it all about as entertaining, and as compulsively readable, as history can get. Perlstein sums it up well: "How does Nixonland end? It has not ended yet."
#47, VisibleGhost,
Cabeza's on my TBR although I haven't chosen a source. Where the footnotes useful in this version?
edited not deleted. dup.
Message edited by its author, May 17, 2008, 3:25pm.
Episodes of the Cuban Revoloutionary War 1956-58 by Che Guevara
#60- The footnotes are around 75 pages long and cover quite a few sources and commentary. There is also an Additional Reading section that mentions dozens of books and academic articles. Cabeza's exact route has been debated now for decades if not centuries.
A Land So Strange is a good starting point or refresher book which mentions some of the newer theories that older books don't. It also has maps and illustrations. It is not a definitive exhaustive work. Such a work would probably be done in volumes and take up 1500 or more pages. It depends on how deep one wants to go into Cabeza's life. The Resendez book is a good succinct overview.
Praying for Sheetrock. I'm 50 pages in, and so far it's excellent. Well-written, in-depth look through extensive personal interviews of how civil rights changed one small Georgia town. I just moved to Georgia a year ago from the Northwest, so I've been on a Southern reading kick to educate myself on the area.
I just completed
The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky. I enjoyed the book a lot, and thought it was well researched and well written, although I did have a few quibbles. I wish the final sections, about relatively modern Basque history, hadn't focused quite so much on the nationalist movement. Certainly, that's an important factor in Basque life over the recent decades, but there had to be other things going on, both politically and culturally. I thought Kurlansky gave these other factors short shrift. But, overall, a very rewarding read.
Since I just found this group (and thanks to fannyprice for steering me this way), I'll take a moment to mention a few of my other 2008 non-fiction reads:
Gettysburg: a Testing of Courage by Noah Andre Trudeau
The Birth of the United States by Jim Bishop
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
The Medici by G.F. Young
Felipe Alou . . . My Life and Baseball by Felipe Alou
The rest have been fiction and short stories.
I'm reading a novel right now, but my next non-fiction read will be
Plain Speaking: an oral biography of Harry S. Truman by Merle Miller.
#68 - That lines up pretty well with my opinion of
The Basque History of the World. The first 2/3 was fascinating, the ending was almost apologetic for ETA.
I'm just starting
Ad Infinitum: a biography of Latin. So far it's pretty good! I have very little knowledge of linguistics, but I'm following things pretty well, and it's whetting my appetite for more!
I've also started a linguistics book.
Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages by
Derek Bickerton. It's part memoir and part observations on Creole languages and pidgins.
I'm halfway through Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp That Would Be Human. Very interesting account of a scientific study in the 1970s that attempted to answer the question: Could a chimp raised in a human household acquire & use language? I first heard about this book in a recent article on salon.com.
#64, VisibleGhost,
Many thanks. This sounds exactly like what I was looking for, particularly as I value maps which sometimes seem in short supply.
Onto the Amazon cart it goes!
#66,
So Alcottacre... how are you finding Christian's book?
Not to prejudice you, but I found it a bit of a slog, which surprised me because the topic is fascinating.
#73 The Pam: I have not yet started it. It is on the agenda for the week, just have not had a chance to get to it yet. I will let you know.
I'm reading Multicultural Odysseys: navigating the new international politics of diversity by
Will KymlickaLast night, I started
The Case of Abraham Lincoln by Julie M. Fenster and was engrossed to the point I stayed up 2 hours past my bedtime to read more of it. It's a slimmish volume ~ only 226 pages ~ but it's quite substantive, I think, and was written in a way that is reminiscent of
Team of Rivals (which was, of course, much longer). It encompasses the period from March through early December 1856, though it brings in events and people from the past and future, and is about an apparently little-known case that Lincoln took on right around the time the Republican Party was being founded, while Lincoln was working as a successful lawyer in Illinois.
I just finished
A Brief History of Time: "From the Big Bang to Black Holes" by
Stephen Hawking. Although it was written for the lay person I still found it rather technical, but then I have never been a huge physics fan. However I quite enjoyed it overall.
Message edited by its author, May 20, 2008, 7:57pm.
margiek, I'm reading a biography of Einstein, and was having trouble understanding the science in it. So, I bought
Einstein for Dummies, which was right next to
Physics for Dummies on the book store shelf. I was very impressed with the Dummies book, it being the first I'd ever read. Very well written and easy to follow. So, if you have the urge to go a bit deeper into physics, I would recommend you try one of these books.
#73 ThePam: It is a bit of a slog. I keep feeling like I am being talked down to.
Still reading
Shades of Glory and am finding it tough going right now. It's my April ER book, though, so will continue.
ETA #77 margiek - I am listening to
A Brief History of Time - whew! Complicated concepts. I also have the book and have started looking at the pictures on some of the stranger concepts.
Message edited by its author, May 23, 2008, 1:14pm.
#79 Alcottacre,
Is that what it is?!? I couldn't quite put my finger on what was wrong, but after I got done reading about Auguste, I dropped her book and picked up Ekberg's fat little tome, "Colonial Ste. Genevieve" . Definitely much better (dare I say engaging) writing, although the book only touches on the family here and there.
Pity about the Chouteaus.
=======
edited for typu
Message edited by its author, May 23, 2008, 7:52pm.
Looking for Longleaf, which is excellent thus far. The southeastern longleaf forest ecosystem has been reduced by 98%, versus 87% of redwood forest, and it originally covered huge swaths of NC, SC, GA, FL, and extended into southern VA and southeast TX.
I am immersed in all things Einstein. I'm still reading
Walter Isaacson's biography of him; I've read Einstein for Dummies to help figure out the physics; just finished Relativity: the special and general theorty by the good Dr. himself; and am about to start a "trip across America with Einstein's brain" --
Driving Mr. Albert by
Michael PaternitiNeeding to distract myself from duty last night I read
There is a God by Anthony Flew. It is not conclusive, but it is helpful. The collaborator had the markings of an idiot.
Robert
I've just started A Life in Letters: F. Scott Fitzgerald. The advice he gives his 14 year-old sister for attracting boys is hilarious.
I'm re-reading Collapse: How Societies Choose To Lose Or Fail by Jared Diamond.
I read
Manhunt by James L Swanson
Message edited by its author, Jun 1, 2008, 4:24pm.
A quick question. I sense I may be on the wrong topic/group but someone may be able to help.
I am looking for a book about the UK Factoring market.
Websites such as
Factoring Quotes talk about the market and costing etc.. but I am struggling to find formal literature.
Any ideas.
My link did not work so I will try again.
The site I found useful was
Factoring QuotesHopefully this will prompt some advice.
Boy, has it been a while since I posted here! My current nonfiction reading is
Feminism and Suffrage, which was one of a very few books to emerge from the storage unit recently. (It happened to show up right around when I needed a new book, too.)
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