What are you reading?

Rum, beer, movies, nice websites, gaming, etc., without interrupting the flow of martial threads.

Re: What are you reading?

Postby Josealb on Thu Jun 05, 2008 6:31 am

Should have been reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness by now...Amazon keeps delaying stuff on me.
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Felipe Bidó on Thu Jun 05, 2008 9:11 am

I should be reading Dark Victory now, but Amazon is being a bitch to me, too.

I'm getting by with "Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft" by Sir Walter Scott. A beautiful 1830 edition. Thanks to Dio.
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Josealb on Thu Jun 05, 2008 12:52 pm

Ah, found something online.

"The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber". Best bunch of words put together that follow a storyline, ever.
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby chud on Wed Jun 11, 2008 4:52 pm

Post Office by Charles Bukowski
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Iskendar on Thu Jun 12, 2008 1:15 am

The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing
I.
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby fuga on Thu Jun 12, 2008 8:16 am

Little Criminals by Gene Kerrigan
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby TaoJoannes on Thu Jun 12, 2008 2:59 pm

chud wrote:Post Office by Charles Bukowski


Cool.

I breezed through fight club and just restarted "Notes of a dirty old man".
oh qué una tela enredada que tejemos cuando primero practicamos para engañar
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby fuga on Fri Jun 13, 2008 9:24 am

Now I am onto Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick. (Thank god for the library. Otherwise I would be broke.)
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby chud on Fri Jun 13, 2008 9:53 am

TaoJoannes wrote:I breezed through fight club and just restarted "Notes of a dirty old man".


Ya gotta love Bukowski. I'm reading some of his poetry too. I've never been a big poetry guy, but I like his a lot, it's very accessible (to me).
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby ninepalace on Fri Jun 13, 2008 12:02 pm

noam chomsky "what we say goes".

and i constantly re-read CMC's 3 books and all the yang family collections of stuff.

and i'm teaching myself korean from a book.
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby jasonf on Fri Jun 13, 2008 12:21 pm

White Tiger
Indian as in India writer really smart funny narration of going from the poor son of a rickshaw driver to a successful entrapanuer/murderer
The best book I've read in years
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby I-mon on Fri Jun 13, 2008 12:49 pm

One Hundred Years of Solitude
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby TaoJoannes on Fri Jun 13, 2008 1:45 pm

chud wrote:
TaoJoannes wrote:I breezed through fight club and just restarted "Notes of a dirty old man".


Ya gotta love Bukowski. I'm reading some of his poetry too. I've never been a big poetry guy, but I like his a lot, it's very accessible (to me).


Have you got "Love is a Dog From Hell" yet?

If not, dude, do it. Buk is like the patron saint of womanizing drunken creative types.
oh qué una tela enredada que tejemos cuando primero practicamos para engañar
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby bruce on Fri Jun 13, 2008 1:50 pm

i mostly read technical manuals ... lol ... i am a geek. i have been reading all of the digidesign d-show venue mixing platform manuals ... lol ...
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Wuyizidi on Sun Jun 15, 2008 10:18 am

Just finished reading Spook Country by William Gibson.

If you liked his previous work Pattern Recognition, you would have liked this one, but a bit less, because of diminishing returns. This book reuses extensively the structure and characters from Pattern Recognition. You feel like you're reading the same book.

In Ming Dynasty China, there was a very dominant calligrapher named Dong QiChang. He was heavily influenced by Daoist philosophies. So his brushwork has this light, clear, airy quality. He deliberately goes out and find the lightest ink possible. This is what reading William Gibson's current work feels like. As it is the usual problem with sci-fi, character development is really weak. None of them feels jumps-off-the-page vivid. There is actually not that much plot. The prose style is very sparse but elegant. Lots of thoughtful observation and analysis about culture. Again these are very brief, unlike Michael Crichton, who just drop entire lectures in middle of action.

And unlike say Tom Clancy or Anne Rice (two other extremely popular and enjoyable writers who have no technique), Gibson's language is very beautiful. But the one major attraction of these two books is that he brings you to this new world - this cosmopolitan, trans-national scene where unapologetically smart people are exploring the possibilities and of latest technology, and their implications for our everyday lives, whether it's something as shallow as our patterns of consumption, or as serious as war on terror.

Again, he does all of this in an effortless way - Chinese call it sheng ru qian chu (goes in deeply, exits at shallow angle). Meaning he can talk about very deep, complex subjects in a very accessible way that does not oversimplify things. Better still, you don't feel like you are cramming for quantum electrodynamics.

I finished reading the book (~260 pages) in a weekend. The next time I will try to do it over much longer period. You really do have to read it very carefully, lest you miss something minute but important. I know a week from now I won't remember half of the book. It will be like three hours after eating a Vietnamese meal - it was nutritious, tasty, beautiful, but very light. He makes you hunger for more. It feels like he's only telling you 5% of what he thinks about a subject, he's asking you to go the rest 95% on your own. Here's an example: "in this country, the government has done such a successful job of propagandize the 'war on terror', it makes the average person feel as if terrorism, like winning lottery, happens very often, and can happen to them. But statistically, virtually no one wins the lottery. The same is true for incidents of terrorism in this country...."


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Last edited by Wuyizidi on Sun Jun 15, 2008 10:28 am, edited 5 times in total.
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