Unofficial What are you Reading Thread?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I finally finished reading "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" (it was excellent!) and started "Black Like Me".

[MMMW]

This thread is huge. I have a lot of reading to do. I just read Lynda Barry's "What It Is" and loved it. It's about finding your own inner creativity and tapping into the place where stories come from. She touches on unconscious creativity, memories, imagination, play and all that good stuff in a free-spirited yet focused kind of way. I recommend it to anyone who wants to stir up their creative juices. Here's a taste...

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

I just finished "Hard Work" by Polly Toynbee, in which affluent Guardian journalist lived on the Minimum Wage for Lent, back in the early 2000's. It was a pretty accurate reflection of living in a bad area on shitty wages, I would recommend it to anyone.

I was also wondering if Cain had read it and to get his opinions of the book.

[Cain]

I unfortunately have a strong aversion to Polly Toynbee - she's probably fine on anything which doesnt directly have to do with party politics, but on the latter...eurgh.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Now reading Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth  by Norman O. Brown. It's surprisingly readable for a 1947 work on Greek mythology. The thesis seems to be that Hermes (and by analogy, other trickster deities) has within his domain commerce, theft, technology, and magic as a direct result of the changing patterns of social interaction that emerge from a shift from a widely distributed pastoral society dominated by families of small farmers to a society of large cities dominated by independent merchants. I'm not sure I'm necessarily convinced by the etymological arguments, though they are far superior to those used in The Sirius Mystery.

Next up is a book by Samuel Noah Kramer on Sumerian mythology -- because my knowledge of it is dominated by reading the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) and so I lack the broad view that comes out of reading summaries. After that, I have a book about John Dee in the queue, with a nice 8-pointed star gilded on the spine.

[Cain]

That is pretty much accepted to be the case in Classical circles, nowadays.  The evolution and social reasons behind it, probably not the etymological arguments

[Prince Glittersnatch III]

Just started "The Anglo-American Establishment".

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I finally finished reading "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" (it was excellent!) and started "Black Like Me".

I googled "Black Like Me" to make sure it was the book I was thinking of, where the white guy takes the vitiligo pills and found this on wikipedia:
"Griffin became a national celebrity for a time. In a 1975 essay included in later editions of the book, he described the hostility and threats to him and his family which emerged in his Texas hometown. He was forced to move to Mexico for a number of years." 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I finally finished reading "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" (it was excellent!) and started "Black Like Me".

I googled "Black Like Me" to make sure it was the book I was thinking of, where the white guy takes the vitiligo pills and found this on wikipedia:
"Griffin became a national celebrity for a time. In a 1975 essay included in later editions of the book, he described the hostility and threats to him and his family which emerged in his Texas hometown. He was forced to move to Mexico for a number of years." 

Yeah, I'm almost done with it and it's an excellent book.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I finally finished reading "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" (it was excellent!) and started "Black Like Me".

I googled "Black Like Me" to make sure it was the book I was thinking of, where the white guy takes the vitiligo pills and found this on wikipedia:
"Griffin became a national celebrity for a time. In a 1975 essay included in later editions of the book, he described the hostility and threats to him and his family which emerged in his Texas hometown. He was forced to move to Mexico for a number of years." 

Yeah, I'm almost done with it and it's an excellent book.

Yes, it is, or I wouldn't have remembered it all these years. Now I want to read it again.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Just finished The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner's history of Bell Labs. I recommend it, despite the fact that it seems to be a late entry in the boom on books about mathematical history that birthed some much superior books (The Information by Gleick, and Stephen Johnson's Where Do Good Ideas Come From) and some much inferior books (Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants). My only major complaint about it is that it glossed over all of the software end entirely. The author goes into great detail about the mechanism of action of vacuum tubes, junction transistors, and waveguides, and then mentions UNIX all of twice (and in one of those two instances refers to it as "a programming language"). Nevertheless, it provides biographical details of people like Claude Shannon conspicuously missing from the other accounts I've read.

I also finished You Know Nothing of My Work, Douglas Coupland's biography of McLuhan. It's very much in the Coupland style, and it has an odd focus on neurology. It's very short (about 120 pages) and although it's worth reading, I wouldn't argue that it's worth dishing out $20 for a hardback.

I got through The Mad Professor, an anthology of short stories written by Rudy Rucker that have not been published elsewhere (ostensibly). I was pleasantly surprised. Everything I had read about Rucker made me expect him to write like a more hippie-ish Bruce Sterling. Instead, he seems more like what would happen if Jonathan Lethem tried to write stories based on Cory Doctorow plots (and had something resembling WSB's sense of humour). His writing is much weirder than I expected, and he has this kind of rambling morbid whimsy. One story, for instance, revolves around a man's penis turning into Edgar Allan Poe, and then giving birth to sea cucumbers. Another revolves around a thought experiment wherein a weird pseudo-christian UFO cult ends up being entirely correct about their eschatology.

[Placid Dingo]

Finished 'Think and Grow Rich', 'Game of Thrones' and 'Sense and Sensibility' recently.

Loved Thrones. TAGR was good but a bit new-agey at points. S&S was a bit painful at points but was decent for a Jane Austin work (unlike say, Emma.)

[Juana]

"The Late Homecomer" by Kao Kalia Yang, which a memoir of a Hmong woman and her family's life in Thailand and America (though it starts with her parents meeting in the jungles of Laos and their flight to one of the refugee camps in Thailand). Gorgeously written and sad so far.

[EK WAFFLR]

Just finished Down Under by Bill Bryson. Excellent as always. I have a man-crush on the man.

Next on my list: a rereading of Victoria by Knut Hamsun and Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Just finished Down Under by Bill Bryson. Excellent as always. I have a man-crush on the man.

Next on my list: a rereading of Victoria by Knut Hamsun and Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.

Bryson is awesome!

I just started "Garbage Land" by Royte.