What swanky things are you reading?

[TheatreTech]

I just finished reading Sarah by J.T. LeRoy.
I highly suggest it.

Now, I'm starting The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things also by J.T. LeRoy.

[Eliza Hodgkins 1812]

Everyone Into the Pool by Beth Lisick

Just finished Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen.

I highly recommend them both.

[Prudence]

I'm reading "The Beekeeper's Apprentice." I've read the other books in the series and I'm only just now getting around to the first one. It's of the Sherlock Holmes genre -- what if Holmes, in his later years, partnered with a young woman of similar skill that he eventually married? And it's much less lame than that description sounds. They're written from the perspective of the woman and they're really quite entertaining.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Just finished Freakonomics by Steven Levitt. Awesome, awesome book. Really opens your head up. Recommended for Liberals and Conservatives alike, because it's numbers, not politics.

[Not Afraid]

I was talking with a friend about Vampires last night and I just got a hankering for some good blood sucking. I picked up a copy of The Historian. I've both read and heard good things, but I'm going in with my eyes wide open (and garlic around my neck - to attract the vampires, of course). We'll see.

[Boss Angeles]

black dahlia avenger and disneywar. The pictures in disneywar were more gruesome for sure.

[€uroMeinke]

I won't catch up entirely - but I recently finished a couple noteworthy titles:

The Flash of LIghtening Behind the Mountains: New Poems by Charles Bukowski - I've always been a bukowski fan, but when I picked up this "new" book, I was pleased to discover that while Bukowski was alive, he'd sit with his editor selecting his best poems - only to put them away to publish only after his death. Apparently, Bukowski was more prolific than imagined as there apparently is several books worth waiting to be published - and in many ways this really is some of his best stuff and perfect reading for riding the LA Metro.

Magical Thinking: True Stories by Agusten Burroughs - cool little twisted vingnets a la David Sedaris, only a bit darker and sometimes cring-inducing. also made for a quick fun read especially if you like this genre.

At the moment I took on another Murakami - this time Kafka on the Shore, which had me a bit suspicious to begin with, but now that I'm dealing with Picnic at Hanging Rock type experiences and a man who talks to cats, I am once again possessed.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Well, having finally finished reading Goedel, Escher, Bach (yeah it took like 8 months. In my defense I did read several other books long the way, but mostly I'm slow and it's a dense book), I wanted to stay in the realm of discussing AI/human though. I considered picking up a collection of writings by the same author, but a quick glance showed that, while updated by a few decades, it covered the same basic themes and would probably be pretty repetative.

So instead I grabbed The Cambridge Quintet by John Casti. It's a work of what he calls "scientific fiction." It's in the style of Plato's Symposium. It's an account of an imagined dinner party attended by very real scientists, mathemeticians, philosophers. A "what would happen if..." The 5 players are C.P. Snow (physcist who worked to unite the humanities and the sciences), J.B.S. Holdane (genetecist), Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosopher who within his lifetime fathered 2 completely conflicting philosophies regarding human thought), Alan Turing (father of computing as we know it and a pioneer in the theoretical side of AI), and Erwin Schrödinger (yes, that Schrödinger).

It's short, at seems to not probe particularly deeply, especially considering the thurough dismantling of many of these concepts I just got through with GEB. But it is entertaining so far.

[blueerica]

Due to my coursework this year, I'm being afforded the opportunity to read a lot of books I've either read before, or have had some interest in reading.

Just read Conquest of America, by Tzevetan Todorov, a compelling case for the sense of otherness, in terms of ethnicity and actually, racism, and what role communication (and definition of communication) played for Columbus, Cortez and Las Casas in the discovery and conquest of the Americas..

I just started reading Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (the guy who wrote All The Pretty Horses, a book I never read, but remember something about a movie made after it...). Only a chapter in, and there are countless acts of brutal violence, though it seems intriguing, this tale of the Kid, and what I know is to come in the book, a tale of Americas' westward expansion.

I'm pretty stoked about the other books for my Ethnic Literature in America class, though they're all super heavy.

In another class, the Comic Spirit, I'm reading Lysistrata, Aristophanes comedy of acheiving peace for warring Greece through the women's movement to not give the warriors any nookie. Nookie for the win!

I'll also soon be reading Waiting for Godot, and Candide...

Such a happy girl, am I! However, it has made me stop reading the Wind Up Bird Chronicle. I'll have to pick that back up over Spring Break, or after the semester's over...

[Not Afraid]

After Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, I sped through the latest collection of short stories by favorite T. C. Boyle and now I'm on to the latest Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel - his first work of fiction in over 10 years. I so love his writing, but it makes me want to read One Hundred Years of Sollitude for the umteenth time.