Physics of the Impossible, by Michio Kaku.

Biocentrism - Robert Lanza; Bob Berman
The Planets - Dava Sobel

and I just read The Time Traveler's Wife because my mom brought it home and I didn't want it to go to waste. It was horrible. I want my 16 hours from today back. :(

don't see the movie, not that any of you would anyways

michio kaku?!?!???!

you should know better, i'm disappointed in you

Dark Knight Returns.

It's, uh, bad.

"Always Looking Up" by Michael J Fox. Getting ready to read "Lucky Man" by the same author. "Lucky Man" was his first book. I didn't realize that until I started his second book.

[EDIT= It's not worth it]

"Always Lookin Up" is a bit slow but "Lucky Man" is reading pretty well.

I'm finally reading the watchmen, didn't see the movie yet. I know, trendy right?

You don't need to lose any sleep over it.

just finished Jane Eyre, about to re-read Middlemarch

Reading the following...
The Doomsday Conspiracy by Sydney Sheldon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Also checking out the following webcomics:
Sam & Fuzzy
Sword in Hand
Bob and George
Super Frat

Why should I? Those all have very gay titles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_an..._Magic_Kingdom

By Cory Doctorow!

I have a bunch of Sandman, Ghost Rider, Deadpool, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre comics to read. That should take quite a while.

As for standard non-pretty-picture books, I have about a quarter of The Color of Magic left to read, almost the entirety of The Illuminatus! Trilogy to read, then after that it's Atlas Shrugged.

the title is spelt colour g*d damn it

I'm starting to read a lot of Deadpool now. He's pretty entertaining, especially for someone who's not really into superheroes.

Also reading Maus I and II for my directed study next semester. I don't like the art that much, but the story's still good.

I'm pretty much always reading comic books, so I won't even mention those :( (but if I did, I'd mention how Sinister Spider-Man and the Hawkeye [Bullseye] limited series are great. So is Hellboy, as always.)

I bought "The Last Walk" on Saturday and finished it in the morning yesterday. It's one of the "Bachman Books," so it's essentially a King story, but the writing style and tone are different enough that it doesn't read like a cheap knock-off. Plus, I love stories set in a dystopia.

is the last walk like a sequel to the long walk

I AM STUPID AND GOT THE TITLE WRONG.

Yeah, it's the Long Walk. I don't think you could do a sequel to that. There's supposed to be a movie at some point though.

Batman: The Long Halloween

I read it couple of years ago and loved it so much that this time I bought it as trade paperback

Just started Pride and Prejudice and Zombies last night. :eek

I'm re-reading Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin because the first time I sped through it.

I'm reading a god damn fortune cookie.

Let me know how that is. I read a synopsis of it a few months ago and it sounded amazing. Read the synopsis right after watching Fido.

My mother is a big Jane Austin fan, so I bought her Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but she doesn't like the look fo it, so I will steal it back later on. Also got her The Time Traveller's Wife, which I have heard both good and bad reviews of.

I am still reading War and Peace, and have just started Consider Phlebas by Iain Banks, which is part of the Culture series.

noooooo, you're going to want to snatch that one back too before she gets a chance to read it. :( like half of the six hundred pages are made up of very detailed love scenes, and the other half is just as equally blech-worthy. strange coming from a son, i think.

you should've trusted my bad review!

Because a woman who has given birth might not just yet be able to understand sex. :rolleyes

Well I had heard good and bad reviews. Yours being the bad, and my ex accounting for the good. :\

She says she likes it so far, and yes, I can handle my mum reading love scenes. Thanks for the heads up though, I wont ask her any details.


While on that topic, I was lent a copy of The Unknown Terrorist by a female workmate, and there is a very detailed part where a man ejeculates into the face of the female protaginist. I felt very uncomfortable when the workmate asked me what part I was up to, and I was up to THAT PART. Pretty lousy book btw.

I don't think i emphasized how disgusting it actually is well enough. the book isn't just like a novel that contains gratuitous sex, it's full-on erotic literature with a crummy underlying story, and that's why i think it makes a strange son-to-mother gift.

but uh, the basic idea is nice, give your mom a top bestseller that someone you were close to recommended.

edit: it's a sugarcoated sappy porno

Well the someone I was close to didn't recommend it to ME so I could read it and get off :(

WHAT HAVE I DONE?

I finished All Quiet on the Western Front recently and it was pretty much the best thing I've ever read, so continuing on that theme I picked up Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger. Only read the introduction so far but it seems pretty good.

While I was at the book shop I also got The Art of War for £3 which isn't really something you can sit down and read for long periods of time but is very interesting none-the-less. Good coffee table/toilet book.

you should just trust me in the future :(

"On the day Germany declared war in 1914, 19-year-old Ernst Jünger enlisted. He fought with an infantry company -- the 73rd Hanoverians -- for the next four years and participated in some of the most famous and bloody battles of all time: the Somme, Cambrai, Passchendaele. "

Wow, he's lucky to have lived through that. Also, the Washington Post review of it sounds interesting enough, but to be completely honest the cover art and title already had me hooked.

Elx: I will, yes. I will just have to avoid talking to my mother for the next week or so.

One thing I love about books like this is how taken out of context parts of this book written by the evil baby-impaling Hun could've been written today by any young soldier heading out to Iraq or Afghanistan:

Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war. We had set out in a rain of flowers, in a drunken atmosphere of blood and roses. Surely the war has to supply us with what we wanted; the great, the overwhelming, the hallowed experience. We thought of it as manly, as action, a merry dulling party on flowered blood-bedewed meadows. ' No finer death in all the world than...' Anything to participate, not to have to stay at home!

But yeah, check it out. It's only <300 pages and should be available in most used book stores.

:lol

Yeah, your typical soldier heading out to Iraq or Afghanistan is going to know words like "enraptured" and "bedewed."

I believe he was talking about a British soldier, my good sir. :posh

Hey, I like the little hoppy red thing. What is it, an alien?

It's an emoticon, you just put in :cok and it works.

That changes everything :(

I finished reading Tortilla Flats and Cannery Row. I couldn't decide which one I liked more.

I've been working my way through some Nigel Cawthorne books. I just finished Public Executions. His stuff seems to be all over the board and I've already started spotting some recycled information that almost seems copypasted from book to book. So far the good material is really good and the bad material is really bad.

Public Executions has a lot of great information and illustrations, but the editing is shitty. And he's a writer/editor, pfft. But still, good coffee table book if you want people to wonder about you.

I'm currently working on Twilight.

I'm still trying to figure out the appeal.

I felt the same way about The Catcher and the Rye.

Tried to start "Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze", but the writing style is annoying me too much. I'll probably just end up skimming it.

They gave their lives for the defense of their homeland, and you can't even read their book properly. Nice.

I'm still reading Consider Phelbas, and I am absolutely loving it. I only get sparse time to really read in peace (less time on the internet maybe? Fool) and I often can't bring myself to stop.

Sci Fi how it should be done. It's fast paced, yet still intricate and descriptive, has interesting and varied characters and situations... plus, I'm loving the all powerful anarchists The Culture, as I do all futuristic utopian societies.

I finished Bonfire of the Vanities and am currently working through Ulysses and As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.

I'm glad I stuck it out with Bonfire of the Vanities past it's slower moments. Some of the creep characters got their come uppance, and not at the expense of the story's realism. VERY GOOD.

Zhukov...I'm hoping at this point that the sanctimonious thing is a joke.

There are plenty of good documentaries on the kamikaze out there. This particular one was written by a man who felt it was more important to write detailed character sketches of random people at a shrine than to provide a lot of actual content. It was reading more like a "gaijin in Japan" travel narrative than a book on the kamikaze. And I've already read more than enough "gaijin in Japan" travel narratives.

Of course.

Agreed, though at least with The Catcher in the Rye I occasionally felt sorry for the main character. Bella's just plain annoying and a complete Mary Sue. Probably doesn't help that the book's 80% description diahrrea, 18% shallow romance, and 2% actual plot.

You know, speaking of travel narratives and annoyance with them...

I like Paul Theroux. I really do. But...

YOU HATE WHITE PEOPLE. WE GET IT.

Over and over it crops up about how the evil caucasian tourists ruin "his" travels, "his" islands, "his" interactions with people. The fact that he's also caucasian and that perhaps he's being indulged by the locals is one he seems to completely miss.

Edit- I probably said all this before, but any time I pick up any of his stuff I get irritated at it all over again.

He gave a lecture at my university a few months ago. I was interested in going but it completely slipped my mind and I missed it. Oh well.

This is what I just read. :tear

http://www.destructoid.com/disney-ac...h-146880.phtml

I'm reading an autobiography called "My Lobotomy". It's fascinating. This 12 year old kid's psycho abusive stepmother basically told any lie she had to to make sure that the icepick-lobotomy happened, because she thought it would make him easier to control.

Comes complete with freaky photos that the doctor (the infamous Dr. Freeman, who spread the doctrine of the icepick lobotomy far and wide) snapped during the surgery to show off:

http://soundportraits.org/on-air/my_lobotomy/page4.php

Jesus Christ that sounds interesting, but also to scary for me to read.

*too damnit.


Now I look like an idiot in the BOOK forum. How come I don't have an edit button?

I'm reading Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, by the way. Second book in The Culture series. Good so far.

I'm re-reading "The Unwilling Vestal". I haven't had a copy in my hands since high school latin class, and I wanted to see if there was anything I'd missed.

Nope. Same stilted post-Edwardian "Latin Scholar" take I remembered.

the ZOMBIE survival guide by Max Brooks- should of bought this damn thing years ago, now I feel vindicated in zombie proofing my domicile.

OUTCAST, OMEN, ABYSS- STAR WARS: blah, blah, jedi, or force or something or other.
liking them better than I thought, lots of good Luke & Han action, but not at the same time.

STAR WARS: firefight. oh that X-7, can't kill Luke on his own, so he hires a bunch of mercs, shoots them up and sends the survivors after our favorite rebels. it may be a kids book, but at least Mighty Chewbacca is kicking some ass <burn in hell R.A. Salvatore> *****spoiler alert: Lune Divinian shows up pimping a firspray. OH YEAH!!!!*********

Owner's manual to a 1993 Honda Accord- I've read worse

My mom gave me "Punk: the Definitive Record of a Revolution" as a gift. I guess what I was hoping for was "Please Kill Me" with more pictures. I loved Please Kill Me.

There are lots of interesting pictures, yeah, but I was disappointed to find that the majority of the book is given over to kissing the asses of Malcolm McLaren/The Sex Pistols/Vivienne Westwood, like they defined all that is punk and that should be good enough for the likes of you. Really, they just made it cartoonish.

Still, good purchase for the pictures, even though the text (especially the captions) is annoyingly tiny.

I am re-reading "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostovo. I really can't recommend it enough; it's a wonderfully modern take on the Gothic genre of the 1800s.

I was going to buy Please kill me a while back, kind of wish I did now. Have you read "Our band could be your life" I want it bad.

I'm halfway through "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok, which isn't nearly as cool as I thought it would be from the title. It's about the friendship of two Jewish boys. What really bugs me is that in the book, all they ever do is either study the Talumnd or go to the library to read. I mean, haven't these guys ever heard of the park, or the movie theater?

http://www.amazon.com/Vice-Guide-Dru.../dp/0446692816

This is pretty damn hilarious at times.:lol

Nope, steve, haven't read that one but Please Kill Me is definitely worth it. Very balanced, I thought.

The Punk pictorial thing...well, as I said, some good photos but I definitely got tired of page after page of Johnny Rotten's face. You'd think everything began and ended with the damn Sex Pistols (I hated them anyway)...they take up a good 3/4 of the book.

They also spent too much time on Andy Warhol and gave him (I think) way too much credit.

I hate andy warhol and the sex pistols.

the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

I hate pretty much everything Malcolm McLaren has ever done. He strikes me as an egomaniac who tries to take credit for everyone else's success. I hate even seeing him in interviews, just that smug look on his face.

And I think that Andy Warhol just embodies that "it's art because it's trendy" thing. His paintings are one thing, but the films*? The happenings? The Exploding Plastic Inevitable? The fucking Velvet Underground with Nico droning away? Errrggghh.


*Having to watch "Empire" in an art course, beginning to end, should be the new vision of hell. Dante is outdated.

The Scarlet Pimpernell- it sucks, the whole book seems to be about lord percy and his wife. Someone please tell me it gets better.

Agreed. But I do have a certain love for the velvet underground.

Trying to finish Motley Crue's the dirt by next friday so I can read "The Ghost King".

whenever i think of andy warhol films i think of trash and then i think of hairy penises :(

oh and then that girl with thehuge fake boobs at thebegining :(

After what I've had to see in various art classes, I'm now convinced that I would chew my own leg off to get out of watching another lengthy warhol creation.

Transmetropolitan.

My favorite thing so far is the mention of an Ebola bomb in Spider's toilet.

I once broke into a cabin in the woods and used the toilet, but now I know to be more careful.

haha yea that's a really bad idea bruce campbell from evil dead part 1 :(

"The Lives They Left Behind"- nonfiction. a mental hospital was being torn down and historians were searching the grounds when they found an attic full of all the personal belongings that had been taken from the patients. It's a series of case studies tying their previous lives to what they became after being imprisoned in the hospital. It's really sad :(

I was wandering through the library the other day when I realized that all the books I've ever read in my life would only fill out about two or three shelves.

I finished Mao: A Life a few hours ago.

I just got this book in J-Town the other day. http://www.yokaiattack.com/ I like mythology and folklore a lot.

I actually found a copy of Ten Little N*ggers at a used book store and I bought it out of sheer vintage-tude; I've already got And Then There Were None hardcover.

My grandmother gave me a copy of Little Black Sambo when I was a kid. The weird thing is, for all the racism it implies, Little Black Sambo was from India, not Africa. The original illustrations make it very, very clear.

The encyclopedia....almost done.

Ghost King. Hopefully it will be better than the pirate and orc kings.

Just finished The Fountainhead a couple days ago. Haven't decided what to read next, but am leaning toward Soul Survivor

I just finished Use of Weapons, by Iain M. Banks. It was fantastic, my favourite of his so far. The twist at the end was a complete surprise, and I could only see it coming a few paragraphs before it happened. I had to keep myself from looking ahead by covering the offending passages with my hands. I kept saying to myself in my head "no, no no! Don't let THAT be the case!" Right up to the end.

Have now started his most recent sci fi The Algebraist. It's great so far. Some nut on the bus last night noticed I was reading his favourite author and proceded to annoy me with his views on metaphysics and Socrates. This is the second time this has happened.

Right now I'm reading two books currently. Right now I'm reading "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" and as well "Marshal Zhukov's Greatest Battles". Really enjoying the book by Ken Kesey and also really fond of Georgy Zhukov's book. A very interesting point of view of the battle of Stalingrad from the words the most decorated man in Soviet history (not just the battle of Stalingrad I might add).

Working on The Picture of Dorian Gray, Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland, and Dracula concurrently. It's amusing to see writers of the same era all referencing each other and using similar "in" words, like "picturesque".

You haven't read those 3 yet? Interesting. I'm in need of a big book. Maybe tales of 2 cities.

A Tale of Two Cities was interesting, but it was hard for me to stay with it because of the style. I hope you enjoy it :D (If you haven't read it already, I suggest The Count of Monte Cristo, if our tastes are by any chance similar.)

Ah! I haven't. Let's say I enjoyed reading Don Quixote, but can't get into Poe or Shakespeare. It's not the style that hurts me, it's my lack of comprehension.

Oh, okay. Yeah, with some authors... I'd imagine it's something like I don't mind reading them, but since they take more studying, so to say, than reading, that I need to be in the mood for it. It takes more effort.

So, on that front, I would heavily agree with Shakespeare, especially since his work is in middle English and requires knowing the time period to understand a lot of the moral (or immoral) and historical backing of some stuff.

For instance, Macbeth took a lot out of me because, although it is beautifully written, you cannot appreciate its intrinsic power until you understand the time frame it was written in and who it was targeted at. Needless to say I now love it now that I've already studied it and read it, and now when I re-read it I can enjoy it more than study it.

Poe, well... :D He more often takes a kind of... I want to say fantastical and romantic mindset, although romantic not being used in its current-day slaughtered definition. Does that kind of make sense? I felt that he isn't so much about context, as Shakespeare is, as style and approach, itself. It's kind of hard to explain.

Anyway, your avy is full of win. I thought I would share that.

I really shouldn't have gotten the unabridged version of Don Quixote. :(

I'm going to buy One-upmanship, I've decided. :posh

I tried really hard to read Macbeth. It came with all kinds of wonderful notes and explanations. I used to read it on the beach all day, but it really was taxing on me. I might try Poe again if it was on my girlfriends coffee table and she was in the shower.

Dante's Divine Comedy was a great read too. I also think I will be hard pressed to find a better Avatar.

you can always just watch throne of blood instead :O

i'm reading Warped Passages by Lisa Randall
she's so great :)

I am currently using this:


to get to this:

Catcher In The Rye.

I never had much trouble with Shakespeare but then I only really read it in my Lit classes with teachers who took time to point out the various dirty little jokes the Bard put in there (like the rape threats in Midsummer Night's Dream).

On the other hand, I really can't get into the historic Shakespeare stuff.

@ sspadowsky - If you finish that, you should consider Sense and Sensibility and Sea Serpents.

Thanks for the tip, ZQ. By the bye, I would like to state that I will gouge out my own eyes, stuff the sockets with hand grenades, and detonate them simultaneously before I EVER read another Jane Austen book.

The television adaptations of Jane Austen are always superior, I think.

http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazi...cusack?cnn=yes

:lol Who cares?

No problem. I'm surprised there aren't more like that written. It's inspired me to work on Hamlet and Werewolves.

But like Zhukov said, the movie and TV adaptations tend to be easier to follow.

About to start 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess by Stewart Home and Samuel Beckett's Trilogy.