OT: What are you reading?
seconding the rec for Devil in White City.
Loved Devil in the White City so much I kept on reading through Erik Larson's others:
- Dead Wake (last crossing of the Lusitania)
- In the Garden of Beasts (American ambassador to Berlin during Hitler's rise)
- Thunderstruck (Marconi's invention of wireless + murderer Hawley Crippen - a UM alum of all things)
- Isaac's Storm (great hurricane of Galveston)
Now finishing The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough, and have 1776 queued up next.
by UCLA chemistry professor Eric Scerri.
A Guid to the Good Life {the ancient art of stoic joy} by William Irvine.
A study of Germany's soldiers and citizens from 1939-1945. The 'shared secret' aspect of the final solution is just grim. I tend to look for lighter fare after this sort of thing.
I was all STEM at UMich and didn't have much space for liberal arts in the curriculum. I've been catching up ever since.
did you live in markley?
First Orwell non-fiction I've read and would strongly recommend.
I ordered a big pile of used books on Amazon that were recommended to me or deemed "great" somewhere. Pretty great spend if you prefer beating up a paperback to digital reading.
Unsolicited Orwell non-fiction recommendation: Down and Out in Paris and London
gone with the wind. stunningly well-written. (english major here)
highly recommend Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life to anyone, best book I've read in five years
Surprisingly, I had not read it in my 40+ years in existence. I grabbed it at the library spur of the moment. Loved it. What an amazing lens into the southern experience - I could feel the burning, smoldering hatred of a society gone awry.
I'm finding it fascinating how the reality of war slowly eroded southern culture and its fixation on keeping up appearances.
it's also a frequent jeopardy answer.
I recommend both.
we just finished one last night on the crusades. need to pick another.
historical fiction adventure novel. we haven't read one of those in a while. no offense to the 'little women' series which our daughters enjoy, but we've been blessed with too many sons to make that a family reader.
The girls and I enjoyed Little Women. The boys in the car for that road trip audiobook classified it as torture. We are getting ready to tackle Shakespeare.
for 'the ninth', a story about the lost roman legion in briton during the second century.
You have done nothing to deserve this attack (yet), but this post makes perfect sense to me.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell
(prior to that I read Ready Player One, which was great -- and is going to be a Spielberg movie in 2018)
Read that one about 8 years ago so I don't recall it that well, but in case you dind't know there is a Netflix adaptation that was pretty good (to be fair, I haven't finished watching it because the wife lost interest0
It was a BBC series -- although it's available on Netflix now -- and I liked it a lot. (I watched it prior to reading the book).
Typically I'm a sci-fi guy but right now I'm reading a book about the three women who were kidnapped by that crazy fuck in Cleveland. That's some fucked up shit right there...
Reading Grapes of Wrath again. A lot of experts say that Moby Dick is "the American novel" but I disagree. Steinbeck just has a way of describing places/events in his books that really speak to me like no author can.
I've re-read chapter 25 dozens of times. Only a few pages long, but some of the most powerful and poignant writing you can find.
If you hadn't read Moby Dick, give it a try. I read it last year on vacation. It's great.
I second this appreciation of Steinbeck. He is one of my favorite authors, up there with Tolstoy. I feel that Steinbeck captures the human condition in ways that really, as you put it, 'speak to me.' I love Cannery Row as well. This is more of an ethnographic novel, but chock full of wisdom and interesting observations and descriptions.
Also, I heard a story on NPR a few years ago about someone who actually remembered Steinbeck being present during the events described in the Grapes of Wrath. The person was a kid at that time, and obviously quite old when telling the story, but he described this man who was hanging around with his notebook and watching and talking to folks as they made their journey. So the story wasnt just out of his head.