mjmooney Posted May 19, 2008 VT Supporter Share Posted May 19, 2008 I've just started to read "1984" by George Orwell. It has started pretty promising. Anyone read it? Anyone NOT read it? Still a classic. The traditional procedure is to read Huxley's "Brave New World" next, and compare and contrast. In the whole dystopia genre, my wife raves about Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake", but I haven't got around to it yet. I've just finished Joe Haldeman's "Forever War" (excellent) and "Forever Free" (so-so), and James Holland's "A Pair Of Silver Wings" (also excellent). Currently reading: Norman Mailer "The Naked and the Dead" Ian Clayton "Bringing It All Back Home" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Condimentalist Posted May 19, 2008 Share Posted May 19, 2008 I'm not much of reader at home but I've just finished reading 'A Fine Balance' by Rohinton Mistry which I thought was excellent, and particualrly poignant as I'm in India at the moment (where the entire book is set). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
metalhead_villain Posted May 19, 2008 Share Posted May 19, 2008 May I ask why? :shock: Its just an interest of mine the storys in the edda are amazing I am also a pagan. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rodders Posted May 19, 2008 Share Posted May 19, 2008 I haven't read anything in a while I must admit, unless Tacitus counts as part of revision. Currently on to kill a mockingbird and picked up a couple of non fiction books today: mark thomas' "as used on nelson mandela" and christopher hitchins " god is not great", should be good fun. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Designer1 Posted May 19, 2008 VT Supporter Share Posted May 19, 2008 Just finished Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith. Very well written crime thriller imo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Super-Villan Posted May 19, 2008 Share Posted May 19, 2008 I've just started to read "1984" by George Orwell. It has started pretty promising. Anyone read it? Anyone NOT read it? Still a classic. The traditional procedure is to read Huxley's "Brave New World" next, and compare and contrast. In the whole dystopia genre, my wife raves about Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake", but I haven't got around to it yet. I've just finished Joe Haldeman's "Forever War" (excellent) and "Forever Free" (so-so), and James Holland's "A Pair Of Silver Wings" (also excellent). Currently reading: Norman Mailer "The Naked and the Dead" Ian Clayton "Bringing It All Back Home" Oryx and Crake is indeed wonderful. But if we're talking Margaret Atwood and dystopias, The Handmaid's Tale is pretty hard to beat. Will get round to reading some Norman Mailer myself one day, I think. Currently I'm on James Joyce's Dubliners, which is thoroughly enjoyable and something of a relief after struggling through Ulysses without much pleasure a few years ago. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thetrees Posted May 26, 2008 Share Posted May 26, 2008 Just finished 'Sovereign' by C.J.Sansom, a murder/mystery/conspiracy thing set around the court of Henry VIII. A thoroughly enjoyable read. I'm getting into reading history based fiction, perhaps it's the only way I can learn something. Hope it's close to the truth :winkold: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjmooney Posted May 26, 2008 VT Supporter Share Posted May 26, 2008 Oryx and Crake is indeed wonderful. But if we're talking Margaret Atwood and dystopias, The Handmaid's Tale is pretty hard to beat. Yeah, read it some years ago. Her indoors reckons Oryx is better, so I'll probably give it a shot. Will get round to reading some Norman Mailer myself one day, I think.He seemed like a bit of an oaf TBH, but TNATD is pretty impressive as a "mud, blood and guts, grunts in combat" type novel. I finished the Ian Clayton book, it's very good, but a real (literal) tear-jerker in the last chapter. Now on This Is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjmooney Posted May 26, 2008 VT Supporter Share Posted May 26, 2008 Just finished 'Sovereign' by C.J.Sansom, a murder/mystery/conspiracy thing set around the court of Henry VIII. A thoroughly enjoyable read. I'm getting into reading history based fiction, perhaps it's the only way I can learn something. Hope it's close to the truth :winkold:Not read him (not really "my" period), but I believe Sansom has quite a good reputation. I find that reading good historical novels sends me back to the non-fiction to find out more about the period, and vice-versa, it's a win-win. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xann Posted May 26, 2008 Share Posted May 26, 2008 I've just finished Joe Haldeman's "Forever War" (excellent) I loved that book - Is it still in print? Time dilation - it's effects on a protracted confrontation - and massive social changes between tours. At one point our hero returns to Earth and finds everyone's gay IIRC. Ever read 'Enders' Game' by Orson Scott Card I think? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted June 23, 2008 VT Supporter Share Posted June 23, 2008 I was sorely tempted to buying a rather thick trade paperback history of football (even more so when I happened upon a passage saying that Villa could have ended up as a rugby club...), but I wasn't even planning to buy any books on this expedition and was thus somewhat over budget already... I purchased said book... the foreword is definitely a sharp take on why soccer is likely to never break the stranglehold of the top 3 US sports, forever consigned to second-class status with ice hockey (and lacrosse looks set to join that status... one obvious point that I think Goldblatt missed in his foreword, perhaps because he might never have seen lacrosse, is that ice hockey, soccer, and lacrosse are all fundamentally the same sport... while basketball is at the most basic level the same as those three, the prohibition on goaltending makes it altogether a different sport): The central pillars of American sports culture -- American football, baseball, and basketball, along with ice hockey -- have enjoyed a limited global embrace, which has, I believe, entrenched their American rather than universal characteristics. This in turn has helped consolidate an American sports culture that finds soccer not merely foreign, but alien, both incomprehensible and reprehensible. The private and mysterious timekeeping of the referee in soccer is contrasted with the open, public, and democratic clock in American football, basketball, and hockey. The draw is considered nonsense at best, an outrage at worst. The rarity of not only goals, but clear scoring opportunities, is anathema not merely because it appears, at first sight, tedious, but more profoundly because it allocates such a large role to chance in determining the outcome of the game. The enormous number of scoring chances in basketball and the immense length of the baseball situation are two devices that ensure that ensure, over individual games and entire seasons, that luck evens out and other factors thus prevail. It is the same distaste for unaccountability and chance that finds the diving, faking, gamesmanship, and chicanery of soccer unbearable. Perhaps most fundamentally of all, soccer offers modes of storytelling and narrative structures that the American sporting public finds unsatisfactory. You have had, after all, a century of extraordinary and compelling sporting stories to savor and reflect upon. America possesses a literary culture that has, like no other, risen to the challenge of expressing them -- a dual heritage I found condensed in Red Smith's homage to the "Shot Heard 'Round the World," Bobby Thompson's home run that clinched the 1951 National League pennant race for the New York Giants after an epic chasing down of the Brooklyn Dodgers: "Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again." I now see that when this type of performance is on offer, soccer, both domestic and international, appears to many as, at best, a distraction. Soccer can match the epic quality of the 1951 pennant race -- European leagues have often featured season-long slugging matches between two or three top teams only resolved on the final day in the final minutes of multiple games. It can also offer the condensed moments of brilliance, beauty, and meaning that Thompson's homer exemplifies: Maradona's Hand of God, anyone? However, on a day-to-day basis, the level of narrative quality control is lower. Although soccer can do fantastical last-minute comebacks, collapses, turnovers, winners, and equalizers, there are less than in American sports. For all the really compelling 0-0 draws, there are awful lot of excruciating ones. For all the simple 5-0 routs and unjust 1-0 victories for the poorer team, there are reams and reams of confusing, avant-garde, and just plain boring scripts. Ultimately the entire logic of American sports culture chaffs at soccer's draws and low scores. One could argue that American sports exceptionalism, its sense of glorious self-isolation, is in fact a perfect expression of the only superpower left standing and its willful unilateralism. However, American power has always rested on more than free agency. Its global hegemony has rested on the capacity to shape global institutions in its own image, determine the rules of the game to its own advantage, to force, cajole, and pressure others into accepting them and adapting to them. So it is, in reverse, in soccer. You will excuse me, I hope, if I express a preference for a multilateral world in which the United States is on occasion bound by collective agreements and meanings that are not entirely of its own making, and that is an America that plays and understands soccer. Soccer's mission in the United States is not, I think, to supplement or challenge American football, baseball, or basketball, but to offer a conduit to the rest of the world; a sporting antidote to the excesses of isolationism, a prism for understanding the world that the United States may shape but will be increasingly shaped by. A year with American sport [the author, after the 2006 World Cup final, spent nearly a year not watching association football; the only sports he watched were on NASN --LR] has taught me more about America than I had ever learned before, opened my eyes and heart to America's genius and to its tragedies. I have been enlightened and entertained. I offer The Ball Is Round as one route to the genius and tragedies of the rest of us. Continuing with the tradition, there was another book in the soccer section for me to flip through and put aside for a future expedition... don't remember the title offhand, but it was a history of the sport in the USA written by a gentleman who, according to the blurb, "moved to England partially to be closer to his beloved Aston Villa" (something that, suffice to say, has a certain resonance to me...). A few days ago, at the supermarket, I picked up Devil May Care, the new Bond book; I finished it mere hours ago. Verdict: probably the best of the continuation novels. Faulks does a decent job of channeling Fleming in some parts, but he's a little too keen to reference the earlier adventures. Additionally, there are some anachronistic touches (most notably involving a new Double-O agent... in the interests of spoiler protection, I shall refrain from saying anything more) that I don't think fit in with the book's setting (roughly 1967-68). The overall story, IMO, is great, and I believe that the Bond at the beginning of the story is where Fleming probably would have gone had he lived to write a followup to The Man With the Golden Gun. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YLN Posted June 23, 2008 Share Posted June 23, 2008 Read? If a video on YouTube is more than 4 minutes, i won't watch it. No point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
briggaman Posted June 23, 2008 Share Posted June 23, 2008 Good thread. I'm intrigued by some of the things people have been reading, and may give some of them a try. I have so many favourite books that to make a list would take me forever, although I will try to list some. My favourite genre is Crime, followed behind by any general fiction (ranging all the way to fantasy). My favourite authors in the Crime genre include Ian Rankin, George Pelecanos, and Lawrence Block. Has anybody else read any of their books, or into the whole Crime scene? I think each of these authors are great in their own way. Original stories with plenty of grit, and great characters to boot. When it comes to other books some of my favourites include the following: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 1984 by George Orwell Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck The Lord of The Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien Lord of the Flies by William Golding To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling (I love all of this collection) Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard The Shakespeare Secret by J.L. Carrell Those are some of my favourite books. Each of them I enjoyed for different reasons. I recommend any of them to anyone that has the time to read them. I am currently reading Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, and am finding it to be really good so far. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nrogers Posted June 23, 2008 Share Posted June 23, 2008 Anyone else read this yet? The Kite Runner By Khaled Hosseini... there is a great follow up too. A Thousand Splendid Suns... highly recommended... Also, Between a Rock and A hard Place, is fantastic it's about a guy that got trapped under a rock and cut his own arm off with his pocket knife Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillyShears Posted June 23, 2008 Share Posted June 23, 2008 Also, Between a Rock and A hard Place, is fantastic it's about a guy that got trapped under a rock and cut his own arm off with his pocket knife Yes I read this. Aaron Ralston; a unique blend of complete dickhead and hero. He is medically trained as a mountain rescuer so he knew what was happening to his body, highly interesting stuff. The raven bit was spooky. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Troglodyte Posted June 23, 2008 VT Supporter Share Posted June 23, 2008 I'm studying English Lit as of September so will need to start reading much more often. Saw Oryx and Crake and Handmaid's Tale mentioned, both of which I thought were brilliant. I've been advised to read Shantaram next, any good? This will be followed by 1984 (apparently it's shocking that I haven't read it yet!). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rodders Posted June 23, 2008 Share Posted June 23, 2008 finihsed To Kill A Mockingbird a couple of weeks back, without doubt possibly my favourite book i've read in a long time, written so beautifully. I hear there's a film version of it though, and I'm in two minds as to whether I should watch it Reading 'White Jazz' now ny Ellroy now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chindie Posted June 23, 2008 VT Supporter Share Posted June 23, 2008 1984 is an incredible book. Orwells style at times makes it a bit of a slog but what he is describing is brilliant. An awful lot of what he came up with in the book has, in one way or another, started to appear in the modern world. I'd also recommend looking at Brave New World after 1984, the books generally get compared with each other for their different portayals of dystopia. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
b23avfc Posted June 23, 2008 Share Posted June 23, 2008 I'm just nearing the end of Bill Bryson's Down Under... good read. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted June 23, 2008 VT Supporter Share Posted June 23, 2008 finihsed To Kill A Mockingbird a couple of weeks back, without doubt possibly my favourite book i've read in a long time, written so beautifully. I hear there's a film version of it though, and I'm in two minds as to whether I should watch it Atticus Finch, the Greatest Hero of American Film Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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