Unofficial What are you Reading Thread?

[Hoser McRhizzy]

Anathem - Neal Stephenson

Just a note - If you love sci-fi and wanted to read this, but were putting it off because of reviews saying it's difficult to figure out or get into?  IGNORE the reviewers!  It's fucking awesome.

[mid-way-through-the-book spoiler alert]

    "Give me an adventure."
    In the moment that followed, Cord realized that this sounded weird, and lost her nerve.  She held up her hands.  "I'm not talking about some massive adventure.  Just something that would make getting fired seem small.  Something I might remember when I'm old."
    Now for the first time I reviewed everything that had happened in the past twelve hours.  It made me a little dizzy.
    "Raz?" she said, after a while.
    "I can't predict the future," I said, "but based on what little I know so far, I'm afraid it has to be massive adventure or nothing."
    "Great!"
    "Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial."
    That quieted her down a bit.  But after a while, she said: "Do you need transportation?  Tools?  Stuff?"
    "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said.  "We have a protractor."
    "Okay, I'll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string."
    "That'd be great."

[LMNO]

I've read it.  I enthusiastically endorse it.

[Juana]

That sounds very funny and I might have to read it.


Re-reading Polgara the Sorceress for the umpteenth time.

[noir]

Just finished American Gods- Neil Gaiman
Fucking coolest novel i've read in a long time

[Jasper]

That sounds very funny and I might have to read it.


Re-reading Polgara the Sorceress for the umpteenth time.

I read that.  And some of the sequels. 

Kinda samey.  First one was fun, the rest were all sort of....  the same?

[the last yatto]

Let Your Mind Alone by James Thurber


dont know if i can look at a card table the same way again

[Freeky]

PDCOM

[bds]

I just finished Charlie Brooker's The Hell of It All and am now re-reading the 5 part Hitchhiker's Guide thingy.

[LMNO]

Dad gave me a copy of The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, by Simon Singh.  He's a good enough writer to keep the subject moving forward; plus, it's a pretty interesting subject.


Also, what I want to find next is a book called A Void, which is a translation of a French book called La Disparition.  The French book is a 200-page story that does not use the letter "E" in any way.

Amazingly enough, the english translation also doesn't use the letter "E".  I find this incredibly difficult to believe, and I have to see it for myself.  An excerpt:

Noon rings out. A wasp, making an ominous sound, a sound akin to a klaxon or a tocsin, flits about. Augustus, who has had a bad night, sits up blinking and purblind. Oh what was that word (is his thought) that ran through my brain all night, that idiotic word that, hard as I'd try to pun it down, was always just an inch or two out of my grasp - fowl or foul or Vow or Voyal? - a word which, by association, brought into play an incongruous mass and magma of nouns, idioms, slogans and sayings, a confusing, amorphous outpouring which I sought in vain to control or turn off but which wound around my mind a whirlwind of a cord, a whiplash of a cord, a cord that would split again and again, would knit again and again, of words without communication or any possibility of combination, words without pronunciation, signification or transcription but out of which, notwithstanding, was brought forth a flux, a continuous, compact and lucid flow: an intuition, a vacillating frisson of illumination as if caught in a flash of lightning or in a mist abruptly rising to unshroud an obvious sign - but a sign, alas, that would last an instant only to vanish for good.

[the dreadful hours]

the joy of cooking

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Persepolis. Pretty interesting.

[Cain]

Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-1960 by Christopher Simpson.

Been looking for this for forever, fills in certain interesting gaps in terrorism studies which might form a skeletal theory of state terrorism that I'm working on.

[Cain]

Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance by Alexander Zaitchik (former editor of The eXile and investigative reporter).

What kind of disc jockey would telephone the wife of a competitor and, over live radio, belittle her and her husband about her recent miscarriage? What kind of patriot would con his listeners into donating $450,000 to finance a series of Rally for America events that turned out to be nothing but a personal promotional tour? What kind of talk-radio host would falsely describe the president of the United States as a communist and black nationalist out to enslave Americans? The purveyor of such tactics—and worse—can only be America's newest household conservative name: Glenn Beck.

In Common Nonsense, investigative reporter Alexander Zaitchik traces Beck's personal history, from his troubled childhood through his years as a "morning zoo" DJ to his sudden and meteoric rise to the top of the conservative media heap. He pays special attention to Beck's transformation from alcoholic, cocaine-snorting, failed disc jockey without a political thought in his head to wealthy, bile-spewing, right-wing demagogue whose radio and television shows form the core of a multimillion-dollar media empire.

Drawing on interviews with Beck's childhood friends, radio coworkers, and TV colleagues as well as Beck's own published accounts of his life, Zaitchik reveals the cracks in Beck's personal creation myth. He pinpoints the moment when Beck, then working in Tampa and about to be fired from his first-ever talk-radio job, discovered right-wing rabble-rousing as his route to long-sought fame and fortune. He shows how Beck adapted the timeworn gags and manipulations of radio hucksterism—including the audience donation drive—into powerful tools for propaganda and personal enrichment. He also demonstrates how Beck's screeds about ACORN, czars, and socialists are carefully honed to intensify his listeners' fears and spur them to action at a time and place of his choosing.

Beck's manipulations are not aimed exclusively at conservative Tea Party activists. One of his favorite gambits, Zaitchik reveals, is to make outrageous statements—such as calling President Obama a racist—to provoke angry and overwrought reactions from the Left. He knows that nothing burnishes his reputation as a right-wing hero victimized by political correctness more effectively than a barrage of scoldings from the "liberal elite."

You can laugh at his crocodile tears, shake your head at the "facts" out of which he spins his wild theories, gape in wonder at his abrupt transitions from cheap sentiment to vicious attack and back again—but do not underestimate Glenn Beck. Read Common Nonsense and discover how this smart, ambitious self-promoter and his devoted flock poison our political discourse and weaken our democracy.

[LMNO]

That book wouldn't happen to be in a format of ones and zeroes, would it?

[Cain]