What BOOK are you reading right now?

Well, that was repetitive. I beg your pardons. You can tell I felt strongly about this piece of work..

Slaps book to floor. Picks it up again, puts it on shelf.

Kind of mildly disappointed in Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries. A little too gossipy for my taste and not as personal and noteworthy as her graphic memoirs Persepolis.

I'm also starting the science fiction novel Starfish by Peter Watts though I'm not sure if I read it already or not. Still seems pretty exciting to me.

Corporate/global pioneers working on the next great frontier that is the bottom of the ocean until some bad stuff is expected to happen. Too early in the story to tell.

Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers.

focus issues...having to read each page at least twice. Lots of white noise days lately.

Tsars wrote:


That sounds like it might be exciting.

I think you will enjoy it: I did.

yeah I hate everything I read but I enjoyed it as well. If I remember correctly GeorgeO and I are the only one's that read and enjoyed Darkness at Noon by Koestler.

This is encouraging. I have been reading today and have actually enjoyed it.

Not so. That book's a particular fave of mine.

looking at the date it was published, i must have read it when it came out, since then i've also read the seekers and the creators

I read Darkness at Noon when very young. Consequently, I don't recall much about it.

It's taken me a while to reply to your very moving post Garg. I wanted to mention a book I finished last month that illustrated the point you made.(Not sure if I already did)

The book is called " The Last Days Of The Jerusalem Of Lithuania" and it consists of a diary kept by a ghetto inhabitant named Herman Kruk who survived until 1944.

The horror of the Holocaust I now understand is not the piles of bodies or the millions of victims, it's the total degradation day after day of the human spirit. It's the murderous struggle to eke out another 24 hours of existence. It's the grotesque situation where Jews were forced to give each other up for liquidation in order to squeeze out one more day of life in an inhuman ghetto. This book is heartbreaking and rarely heartwarming and though it was painful, I had to finish it.

Seeing as I just got a job at Books A Million and can check out any book for free and read, what do you guys sugguest I get first?

Steal This Book, by Abbie Hoffman.

Fantasy baseball for dummies...

You know they have one of those. I just might pick it up and give it a gander... then again, I don't want to put the rest at a dis-advantage you know.

Alex is off to buy a book...

you're not going to worry me, one way or the other.

congrats on the job, and welcome to a2k baseball...

Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman.
Autobiography, Benvenuto Cellini.

Thanks, Pan. I'm putting that book on my list.

In spite of what Dys said about hating every book you love (?) I put a book down the minute I realize I don't like it and wonder why I'm reading it.

Just finished a most extraordinary book "We Die Alone," forgotten the author's name but will be back with it. It was written in 1955 about a Brit/Norwegian agent in WWII who took a group of men to infiltrate occupied Norway and set up a resistance group. The sole survivor of this group, Jan Baalstrud, lived (somehow) to tell his tale.

Now I'm reading Ron Rash's "Serena," a pretty good read so far.

This is part of a comment from one reader:
'We Die Alone' was written by David Howarth in the mid-1950s, drawing on his Second World War experience of running espionage operations sent into German occupied Europe. The book recounts the experience of Norwegian Jan Baalsrud, the sole survivor from an abortive attempt to land a commando team on the coast of northern Norway. Baalsrud made his way across Norway in the depths of winter, eventually to find safety in neutral Sweden. ...The writing is unadorned and spare. It perfectly suits the context, describing in a matter-of-fact way Baalsrud's incredible survival story. Here is a man who amputated nine of his own toes to prevent the spread of gangrene as he lay alone for three weeks in a shallow snow cave waiting for his rescuers to organise an escape to Sweden. ....

Hi, Kara et al..

Re the book I was recently annoyed by repeatedly as it took me about five days (unusual) to work my way through, as I described, slapping it down on the floor (really the book table) and picking it up again, slapping it down again, the Man Booker Prize nominee, Cooking with Fernet Branca: it has stuck with me, like glue. Or lard, as the case may be - a sly reference on my part to the miserable recipes the protagonist concocts every few pages. The two main characters are outsized. The tone of the characters, hence the book, was, to me, hysteric, thus the read was like seeing the words on the page yelling up to me. However, this quality made them last in my mind, at least until now. I may be forced to recommend the damned book!

I'm giving it back to Diane - we talked today about it. She didn't finish it.. but still wants to go through and mark the sentences, paragraphs, she thought were so brilliantly put. Which gives you an idea of the push-pull of the book for us two readers.

I'll be very interested in what you think when you read it, Msolga.

Plainoldme, if you are reading this, I wonder what you'd think as well - and any others here interesting in cooking. Panz?