What BOOK are you reading right now?

The members of the book group I had belonged to were certain there were times for some books. I think teenaged students are more likely to enjoy books from the 19th Century. It takes some adjustment to reread those books as adults.

Reading a lot of history now: A Biography of Martin Luther (he wasn't a nice man) and a The Sixteenth Century, part of the Short Oxford History of Europe series.

Rabelais In English Literature by Huntington Brown.

You definately get different things out of a good book, when reading during different times of your life.

It is good though - my daughter asks I don't get it? Why would Miss Havisham want this boy to come over? She also didn't get that she was wearing a wedding dress. But then she noticed a few things I missed.

Great way for both of us to discuss what we think and then compare to what the teacher brings up in class.

My mother was very well read; considering she didn't get her Masters in Social Work until she was 52.
I miss our book discussions terribly.

that is sweet - great memories. I hope my daughter thinks the same --- instead of it being a chore.

I have to admit - I cheat a little - I read up on the internet to help.

Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell

If you turn it off and clap your hands, does it come out in a new edition?

One of my favourite Dickens, GE. Does she not have an annotated version? Funny, the Victorian era is fifty years further back in time than it was when I first read that book!

Reading books at different times of one's life is a very interesting process. Reading Austen in late adolescence, when i first attended university, i just didn't get it. Later in life, pushing 40, i found her delightful and thought-provoking. I read Heinlein as a boy and loved it, and re-read him with growing contempt when i was in my 30s.

One of the most interesting such experience i had, though, was re-reading Vanity Fair about 40 years after i had read it in university. I had enjoyed it when i first read it. I know now that there was much that escaped me. Re-reading it late in life, though, i appreciated it in a way i never could have done when i was a callow and silly boy. The sentimentality was a product of his age, and easily understood and overlooked--some of it. One thing which mattered very much to me this time, though, was in recognizing when the sentimentality had something to teach about human nature. For example, one can dismiss Rawdon Crawley as an empty-headed, conceited younger son of a minor aristocratic family who deserves all of his misfortune. But Crawley truely loves his son, and by reading carefully, one comes to see that he's not a bad man so much as an unfortunate man who is a product of his times, and who has, underneath the macho-military veneer, genuinely decent instincts. I greatly enjoyed and profited from re-reading that novel.

I hope to read a book again some day. Maybe after the kids have finished uni

Can't resist informing us that the kids are at uni. eh Wilso.

i.e. you have superior genetic material than most of us.

If you're not reading a book right now you shouldn't be posting here.

From my long experience in pubs I discovered that a lady who had a kid/s at uni. would find someway of telling the company within 2 minutes of meeting her independently of the content of the discussion in hand. I would say that it's a reflex action. Nearly a blurt.

I will admit that it is understandable that people should tell others of the superiority of their genetic material. Even when they have to troll a thread in case any poor unenlightened soul remains ignorant of such startling, and personally creditworthy, information.

Perhaps you should read whatever the kids are reading so that you can give them a mature take on the material. You saw the difference getting older makes to reading in Setanta's banal blather about Jane Austen.

Not that he bothered explaining what the difference was. Simply that there was a difference. Which everybody knows anyway. It would be quite amazing if there was no difference I should have thought.

The only thing Setanta knows about Jane Austen is that there is literary cachet in mentioning that one has read her books. Or even one of them.

I'm reading Virgil's Aeneid. I like first hand accounts of life in the pre-Christian era. It makes me feel as if I have hit the jackpot.

My children are 4 and 6 you pathetic ******* dipshit. Jesus, don't you EVER get tired of being an ignorant **********?

I just finished reading this- '7000 Days in Siberia' a true account of an Austrian guy in Russia who was arrested by the Russian secret police on trumped-up charges in 1934 and sent to the gulags for the next 20 years.
It's a sickening window on what life was like in a godless atheist country-

I was only having a bit of fun my dear. I thought you had me on Ignore.

My advice about reading the things your children are reading might be even more applicable considering what you say about them. It isn't very easy to start with grown up books when there has been no long-standing and slow entrance into them. The plant has no roots you see.

At six, a real reader is content to sit in a sunny window-sill all the hours outside mealtimes, and other sundry offices, with his or her nose in a real book and not be easily distracted. They are dreamers and are learning to dream from others who were also dreamers; some of whom lived the dream.

I remember reading Rider Haggard under the bedclothes with a torch because my mother wouldn't let me have the light on after 10 o'clock. When I was forced out into the wilderness I had a vague idea what was going on as opposed to what everybody said was going on.

Your literary expression could do with some work being done on it.

Wilso --

I put Spendius and few others on ignore. It makes a difference when I come to this site not to see their posts.

I went to a talk by Robertson Davies who said he loved to reread books just for the comparison. He found that there were books like the ones Setanta mentioned that he loved in youth and felt less drawn to later.

He also liked to read a book when he was the age the author was at the time of writing it. I think that is a tad extreme but he liked it, particularly as he grew older.

I've read a lot of meaningless fiction. Not so much decent books that expand one's knowledge and horizons. I've reached a time and attitude in my life when doing so becomes more attractive. But as my previous post conveyed to those with the intelligence to interpret it, modern life, work and family don't afford me the time for such pursuits. Perhaps some time in the future.

Interesting re author age, I get that.

Me, I'm in a distaste impasse, as the last three books I've zipped through have increasingly annoyed me. It's all a matter of what is at the Goodwill on a given day, usually pulsing stuff as opposed to literature. The first two, good writers I like for the procedural genre, were testing my lowering tolerance for violence, actually boring, and the third, also a procedural, this time by a clinical psychologist, was a teeth grinder (not that I do that). It started out with lugubrious writing in contrast to the other two, and then got better with the writing but with most of the characters varying from unbelievable in the case of several, to the clinician dunderhead protagonist.

I'm taking a New Yorker readathon break now, and then back to Beatrice Cenci, which I should have kept reading in the first place. That will turn violent too, but in this case there is a history basis, that I slightly remember, for the play. And - I'm interested in Moravia's playwriting mode.

You shouldn't worry too much about the value of what you read. I've just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It was very entertaining, and it was also disturbing in some passages. It's not great literature. Before that, i had read Blue Mars, the third volume in a wonderful trilogy. I think it's some of the best science fiction ever written--but more for the adherence to genuine science than anything else--it's not undying prose. Light fiction might be the best bet for you right now. You could read a few pages, and no big deal if you set it down and don't pick it up again until the next day, or the next week. When your children get older, you might have more time for reading. The fact of reading is more important than any arbitrary assignment of worth to what you are reading.