What BOOK are you reading right now?

Just began 'The Hours"

I just finished "LIFE OF PI". Boy, what a great great read!!! Kept me up till 3am two nights in a row!

Dagmar, what did you make of the floating island?

I had an English teacher in high school who was an avid fan of Vonnegut so she tried (in futility) to spark my interest in him. Over fifteen years later, I picked up Slaughterhouse Five and read most of it in one sitting. I now read at least one Vonnegut a year.

Same goes for JCO and my professor for Freshman English.

I hate having to admit when I'm wrong.

Not wrong - just not mature, yet!!!!

Terry, last year I read JCO short story Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?Have you read that one. If so what do you think of the power that Arnold Friend exercised over Connie? Is it realistic to think that Connie would have caved in the way she did?

Here's something I found interesting. Arnold Friend had the numbers 33 19 17 painted on the side of his old junker. The book of Judges is the 33rd book from the end of the Bible. Chapter 19, verse 17 reads as follows, "Ane he lifted up his eyes, and saw the wayfarer in the open square of the city; And the old man said, 'Where are you going? and whence do you come?'"

I'm not sure where I read this little tid bit, but I've always thought it was interesting.

Ho hum, boring me. Just finished rereading Grisham's 'A Time to Kill' and am now rereading King's 'Bag of Bones'.

Hey, at least I'm reading again!

BillW, my all time favorite O. Henry story is The Ransom of Red Chief.

I must admit that I've never read Bradbury.

I think I read all the Holmes stories back in the 50s or 60s. Probably should read them again. So little time and so much to read.

Well, I just stumbled across this forum; I think I'll stay a while. I'm currently reading:

A Tale of Two Cities - Dickens
Nicholas Nickleby - Dickens
Erewhon - Samuel Butler
The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes
The Guns of August - Barbara Tuchman
The American Political Tradition - Richard Hoffstadter

I just finished Homage to Catalonia (Orwell) and To the Finland Station (Wilson). I recommend both wholeheartedly.

Welcome to A2K, EpsilonMinus!!

Almost done with The Hours, then hope to watch the movie. So far, quite incredible!

Oh, good list, epsilon, and welcome to a2k and here in books in particular. I have never read Wilson, but have read off and on lots about him. I'm interested in your reaction..

Tale of Two Cities. Haven't read it for many years but I remember being very moved by it.

Haven't read Guns of August but did read Distant Mirror, which I liked a great deal.

Thanks. To the Finland Station was wonderfully written. A history of socialism, combined with a study of history itself, it reaches top form in its incisive description of Karl Marx, warts and all. A rare combination of intellectual insight with an acute biographer's touch. Other historical characters like Babeuf, Bakunin, Lasalle, Engels and Lenin are vividly recreated.

To top it all off, I just noticed that the newest edition has a foreward by the much disputed Louis Menard.

Ah, well, I read about the dispute re Menand but as luck may have it, I forget what that is about. I am a medium fan of Mary McCarthy - who had an association with Wilson, no?

I should explain that I haven't an academic background in all of this, my reading has been for myself.

And, strange as it may seem, To the Finland Station has always attracted me as a name, ne'er mind the connotations with the title.

Well, I'm no expert on Wilson, and I have read nothing of McCarthy, but it is true that they were married.



Neither do I - I am but a mere student in an entirely unrelated discipline (Physics / Electrical Engineering).

Ah, well, that's comfortable! I love it when cross discipline (as they call it) happens... and as it happens, we have no discipline here. I m'self have a bacti major, and years later am a landscape architect, with some years of nights in between devoted to art studio. Which is by way of telling you to relax, we are just people who love books and while challenge on view can happen, mostly we try to work out why we think as we do.

Oss, nice to run into someone who likes Mary McCarthy. I read her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and her Intellectual Memoirs. In addition I have read several of her essays. Never read any of her fiction.

In the memoirs, which I enjoyed reading, I felt that she was at some pain to disengage herself from the ranks of the Stalinist sympathizers after it became apparent that he was a nasty man. She was thick with the intellectuals of the thirties. That was a very exciting time for them all.

I suspect that she was the sort of thinker that whats-her-name Coulter would label as treasonous.

Some time when you are in one of those bookstores with a coffee shop, pick up the correspondence of Mary McCarthy and Hanah Arndt. You can read most of while enjoying a Cappuccino. It's wonderful reading.

Welcome Epsilon

I read not the correspondence per se but about the correspondence...

at this point it is hard to remember what I read. I did read The Group, and Stones of Florence and (something) of Venice and once owned Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood, thinking now I must have read half of it. Have read seemingly innumerable refs to her since.

I know she had a tremendously high view of her own mind, which bemuses me, but gather she wasn't far off.