February 23, 200916 yr I'm reading the fourth book in the Twilight Series, Breaking Dawn. Some young 20-somethings at school were reading it and chatting about it everyday............i thought they were total nut jobs! Turns out they are very good books.
February 23, 200916 yr I've started reading "Endless Summers", about the Indians after the '48 championship team. They put together some pretty amazing teams in the following decade, despite not winning another championship.
February 23, 200916 yr My favorite Tribe book is the Curse of Rocky Colavito by Terry Pluto. One of his other books, Our Tribe, actually made me cry..........yeah, i'm a sucker.........
June 20, 201014 yr I thought this was an interesting thread, and it had far too short a life (only 12 days). I'll try to resurrect it with my reading list from the past few months. These books went beyond affirming my Liberal observations and suspicions; they expanded my comprehension of some of the things that have happened out of public view. - Sands of Empire; Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition, by Robert W. Merry - Empire of Illusion; The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, by Chris Hedges - The Limits of Power; The End of American Exceptionalism, by Andrew J. Bacevich - Tear Down This Myth; The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy, by Will Bunch - Idiot America; How Stupidity Became A Virtue in the Land of the Free, by Charles P. Pierce Possible future candidates for the table beside my big, comfy reading chair: - Hubris, by David Corn and Michael Isikoff - Fiasco, by Thomas Ricks - Losing Iraq, by David Philips - Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran - The Creationists; From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, by Ronald Numbers - Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons, by Peter J. Bowler
June 20, 201014 yr I just finished reading "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future" by Michael J. Fox. Pretty good read, especially for someone who has recently graduated college/high school. Very inspirational :)
June 20, 201014 yr I just finished reading How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship, and Musical Theater, by Marc Acito. It is a very entertaining book that had me laughing out loud. Sadly, the Mansfield Library doesn't have the sequel. :( Over the last few months I have read: -The Sookie Stackhouse novels (all 10) by Charlaine Harris -Hero, by Perry Moore -The Screwed-Up Life of Charlie the Second, by Drew Ferguson (A wonderful book, I highly recommend it) -The Vast Fields of Ordinary, by Nick Burd -Code of Conduct, by Rich Merrit -All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy -The Pick-Up, by Nadine Gordimer -Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams (not a book, but...) -The Brother's Bishop, by Bart Yates -The Sixth Form, by Tom Dolby -The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog: A Novel, by Dorris Lessing -Closet Case and When You Were Me, by Robert Rodi I also re-read The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley
June 21, 201014 yr Recently I have read: A Devil in the White City (Larson) Cannery Row (Steinbeck) Collapse (Diamond) Next up is: Germs, Guns & Steel (Diamond) Travels with Charlie (Steinbeck)
June 21, 201014 yr Recently I have read: A Devil in the White City (Larson) Cannery Row (Steinbeck) Collapse (Diamond) Next up is: Germs, Guns & Steel (Diamond) Travels with Charlie (Steinbeck) If you liked Devil in the White City, you might like Isaac's Storm and Thunderstruck, both by Larson. I got about two thirds of the way through Collapse and gave up. My doctor said that after she read Germs, Guns and Steel, she wasn't sure she wanted to tackle Collapse. I was going through some other depressing stuff at the time, and that book was more density and grimness than I could handle right then. Maybe if I tried now, I'd make it through. ... and I'm up 'way too late. I'm having a hard time catching all the typos that my keyboard causes.
June 21, 201014 yr I'm thinking of reading more Edward Abbey. I read The Fool's Progress awhile back and i think i need to read The Monkeywrench Gang and Desert Solitaire. I've also been recommended books out of the Discworld series. I'll have to get specific book references though. I'm not sure i want to start at the beginning. Other than that, i think i need to get more trade paperbacks of some comic book series.
June 27, 201014 yr Just visited Borders this evening and picked up a new addition to my Leftist Library: Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, by David Corn and Michael Isikoff
June 27, 201014 yr Last book finished was The ORSANCO story, which describes how the Ohio River Sanitation Commission, which is an interstate compact formed in 1948, managed to reduce water pollution in the Ohio River through 1965. I am currently reading Farm Drainage, a technical manual written in 1859. It is interesting for its colorful language, its serious mention of witches and their ability to locate underground sources of water, and description of the economies of farming in America in the 1850's compared to the economies in England.
November 23, 201014 yr Has anyone else read "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen? Relevant to UO because the protagonists are urban pioneers in the 1980s in the Midwest and much of the story takes place during the GW Bush years, post 2001 and sprawl is almost a character in the book. Very enveloping story, especially for someone like myself who is similar in age to the protagonists. I would love to discuss it here if anyone else has read it.
November 23, 201014 yr Last book finished was The ORSANCO story, which describes how the Ohio River Sanitation Commission, which is an interstate compact formed in 1948, managed to reduce water pollution in the Ohio River through 1965. I am currently reading Farm Drainage, a technical manual written in 1859. It is interesting for its colorful language, its serious mention of witches and their ability to locate underground sources of water, and description of the economies of farming in America in the 1850's compared to the economies in England. The Farm Drainage manual sounds interesting; the technology was a lot different from what we have now. Did they even have clay tile then? I've read a little bit about draining the Black Swamp that is now a vast expanse of incredibly flat land in northwest Ohio. That involved a huge amount of hand labor and crude but effective improvised technology. Books that have languished on my shelves include some bought for a modern American lit course about 1960. I never followed through with the course, and the books went unread. I recently finished John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, and The Big Money). I should go back an annotate some of the references that give the stories setting and context before I pass the book on, because a lot of younger readers probably wouldn't recognize Sacco and Vanzetti, Samuel Insull, the Paterson Silk Strike, Ludlow, Colorado, and several others unless they had an interest in the histories of labor, technology, and transportation. Currently I'm reading short stories by Eudora Welty.
November 23, 201014 yr Cincinnati's Incomplete Subway: The Complete History "Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago." - Warren Buffett
November 23, 201014 yr Knufflebunny Free LOL...Is that as good as Knufflebunny Too, a great story of mistaken identity..
November 23, 201014 yr Knufflebunny Free LOL...Is that as good as Knufflebunny Too, a great story of mistaken identity.. Sweet and poignant. A true coming of age story. I dare say, there likely shant be a Knufflebunny For. On to the Pidgeon Series.
November 23, 201014 yr Also, I just finished up the Dresden Files. Very fun series. I've been meaning to start with that series. Maybe I'll pick up over the break. I'm through the second book of his Codex Alera series right now, which is also pretty entertaining, if a little predictable.
November 24, 201014 yr I've got that series on my iPhone (thank god for drinkmalk.com). The problem is there are just too many awesome series out there!
November 30, 201014 yr Last book finished was The ORSANCO story, which describes how the Ohio River Sanitation Commission, which is an interstate compact formed in 1948, managed to reduce water pollution in the Ohio River through 1965. I am currently reading Farm Drainage, a technical manual written in 1859. It is interesting for its colorful language, its serious mention of witches and their ability to locate underground sources of water, and description of the economies of farming in America in the 1850's compared to the economies in England. The Farm Drainage manual sounds interesting; the technology was a lot different from what we have now. Did they even have clay tile then? I've read a little bit about draining the Black Swamp that is now a vast expanse of incredibly flat land in northwest Ohio. That involved a huge amount of hand labor and crude but effective improvised technology. Pretty cool! I have a Rural Sociology book from 1922 that I haven't gotten around to reading yet. From what I've skimmed much of the topics and language seems surprisingly contemporary- "building community", "declining villages", etc. I need to get around to reading it. I got the book at the "Two Dollar Rare and Used Bookstore" that used to be on Euclid and recently made way for some spec tech space. I wonder what happened to that business.
November 30, 201014 yr Also, I just finished up the Dresden Files. Very fun series. I've been meaning to start with that series. Maybe I'll pick up over the break. I'm through the second book of his Codex Alera series right now, which is also pretty entertaining, if a little predictable. Just now saw this ... nice to know there are other Dresden Files readers (or likely-soon-readers) out there! (I actually just recently learned that my boss reads it, too, which was one of the more stunning and hilarious revelations I've had recently.) Haven't picked up Codex Alera yet. Can't remember if I already commented in this thread or not yet, but I don't think so, so: - Currently rereading some of my favorites in the Dresden Files and Wheel of Time series, and also just recently finished rereading the latest two books in the Kushiel's Legacy series by Jacqueline Carey (note to readers: Hobbit was G. LotR is PG. Wheel of Time is PG13. Dresden Files is R--maybe PG13. Kushiel's Legacy is NC-17, but for all that, is one of the most engaging and artistic works of alt-history fantasy out there). Also, I reread HP7 after seeing the movie. Meh. - Have some cookbooks checked out from the public library, including some with amazing photography. It's food porn. I'm not the biggest fan of the South (seriously, they wear dress khakis and ties to football games--something is deeply wrong with the Southern psyche), but I have made an official exception for <a href="http://www.amazon.com/South-Beautiful-Cookbook-Mara-Rogers/dp/0002251965">Southern cooking</a>. (I just returned that to the Akron public library, along with a couple of others in the same series.)
November 30, 201014 yr Southern cooking is indeed the best thing about the South (#2 is "60 and sunny" in Feb.) Just had a southern style breakfast this morning- cornbread pancakes, which I'd never had but am now a devotee of, and country ham, which I've had a long standing relationship with. One of my buddies is always talking about the Dresden series, but I haven't read any of it yet. I'm not a big fiction reader.
November 30, 201014 yr Traditional fantasy readers, especially of "real world" fantasy series (i.e., ones set on Earth, not in completely fictional worlds), will like the Dresden Files. The hallmark of someone who will love the Dresden Files is someone who enjoys both fantasy and film noir. The amount of traditional film noir tropes in most of the books, especially the first half dozen or so, is thick. The hallmark of someone who will love Southern cooking is a person with taste buds.
November 30, 201014 yr I decided to "challenge" myself and try out the Christ Clone and Left Behind series. I couldn't finish the first CC book, and I turned off LB somewhere in the middle of the 3rd. Those series are just excruciatingly bad - the quality of writing (especially for LB) is appalling. Forget the religious stuff, the books are just AWFUL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
December 17, 201014 yr I'm FINALLY getting around to reading I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb. I love his storytelling, especially She's Come Undone.
February 15, 201114 yr I've now moved on to the autobiography of Ron Jeremy. It started as an inside joke that's gotten a little out of control, but it's rather entertaining!
February 15, 201114 yr Tried getting into the Fay scarpetta series. Book 1 was dull and book 2 isn't quite doing it for me either
February 15, 201114 yr I'm reading Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman as a part of my Sword and Laser podcast/book club reading. I'm a few weeks behind at the moment but hope to be finished by the weekend to start the new book.
February 15, 201114 yr Whenever I hear Ron Jeremy, he actually tends to come off as kind of interesting. He's done a few reality TV shows and his latest movie appears to be a spoof of reality TV involving competing food trucks, Flying Pink Pig. He talks about it here: http://blogs.laweekly.com/squidink/2011/01/ron_jeremy_speaks_out_on_flying_pink_pig_controversy_thanks_for_suing.php After reading Secret Agent 666, I have started on Al Crowley's "Confessions". Gave up on Byzantium, Latin Romania and the Mediterranean. Romania wasn't Romania.
February 16, 201114 yr Stephen King: "Under the Dome", Sci-fi/horror about a small main town cut-off from the world by a mysterious force field/dome "A House Divided" by Fredrick Barton, A fictionalized account of an account of how a dirt-poor white boy from central Louisiana survived his own turbulent family, the cultural, educational and material deprivations of the Great Depression and the horrors of World War II to stand for justice in the civil rights movement. Sherlock Holmes and Mark Twain's " A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" using the Google reader app on the ipod. Great to have something to read when I am car pooling or waiting on my kids.
February 16, 201114 yr I started Under the Dome a little while ago, need to get back to it. It really is similar to the Stand.
February 16, 201114 yr I'm currently making my way through The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson, a 1963 classic of working class studies and Marxist historical interpretation. It's a heavy 800+ pages and I'm reading it for a historiography course, but it's quite good. It's no Ron Jeremy, but I recommend it to anyone interested in working class issues.
February 22, 201114 yr For light reading I finished Bike Snob: Systematically and Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling and Velo: Bicycle Culture and Design. Also starting on the Chainbreaker Bike Book: A Rough Guide To Bike Maintenance Velo I saw at the CAC bookshop and figured it would be cheaper if I got it via Ohiolink. Lo & Behold UD had it already. This was more a picture book, portraying various aspects of bike culture (including graphic design). Interestingly this was published by the Germans, who I didn't think where into bike subculture, but they do use bikes a lot (at least the older generation did, for utility reasons). Bike Snob was entertaining, but after awhile one could predict the humor. Yet there is some common sense things in here, things I myself was wondering about, like "why don't bikes have fenders anymore?" (they should if you are doing commuting or errand riding). It explained about this "fixie" trend in cycling, actually about a lot of cycling subculture things. Sort of common sense stuff in there. Chainbreaker is a mix of how-to and reprints of a zine from one of those bike co-op shops, so its not a professional book, but there are some interesting things in it. I appreciate the DiY concept here. The zine stuff is a bit tedious but the how-to part is interesting (esp. since apparently New Orleans cycle people have different terminology for some bike parts or tools or stuff...the book was written by people from a New Orleans bike co-op. @@@@@ For serious reading the best 'Ive read over the past two months was this book: City: Urbanism and It's End, by Doug Rae. The book was specific to a city but had general application. This book looks at things as detailed as the distribution of corner stores and neighborhood retail, churches, civic institutions (the book is as much sociology and political science as it is "policy" and "geography"), and so forth. And it also looks at the urban renewal era. Not a particularly optimistic book, and Rae's definition of "urbanism" has been questioned, but he is right (based on what I see here in Dayton) that theres' no brining back these smaller industrial cities. Or, more accuratley, the forces that shaped them are no longer in play. There time is over. Also read in the past two months: Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, by Sharon Zukin. After reading this I need to get her "Loft Living". Zukin explains the getrification phenomenon, what was happening with "Williamsburg", how gentrification is pushing out older aspect of black culture in Harlem, etc. I appreciate her riff on "authenticity". Zukins book is pretty goog context to some of the discussion we have here at Urban Ohio.
February 22, 201114 yr I just finished the Jason Kidd series by John Sandord. Easily his weakest series, not even close to the Prey or Virgil Flowers stuff.
March 10, 201114 yr Im in the middle of Counterculture Green (link is to a NYT book review) which is about Whole Earth Catalogue and its sister publications, the people behind them, and the "alternative technology' movements relationship to it. This is an interesting book as it talks about Stewart Brand, sure, but also other folks involved with that whole scene, like J Baldwin and Peter Warshall and others who I hadn't heard of. It gives some good backstory, and some details behind the Point Foundation, which is where the catalogue money went., and how Point funded things that seemed related in spirit but not officially. Turns out there was a relationship, a financial one, with Point money going to stuff like the New Alchemy Institute. To some degree this book is, for me, an exercise in nostalgia as I recall this stuff from my younger days (I was 10 years old 1969, when the first Whole Earth Catalogue came out). This book explains how this "practical environmentalism" came out of the 1960s counterculture and then into mainstream society in the 1970s. So, a bit of "1970s nostalgia" in reading it, even though its not a light reading "remember when" kind of book. Things I had forgotten about like "Bolinas" and the "New Games" where discussed. ...and, actually here is a bit of personal connection and nostalgia since not only did I subscribe to CoEvolution Quartelry (and even got some of the back issues) I used to have a plot in a communtiy garden in Sacramento that was part of a demonstration project during the Jerry Brown administration when Brown had the Whole Earthers as advisors and political appointees. The book does touch on that relationship, too (and mentions the California Water Atlas as a product of this connection, which I have in my personal library) Other writers have pointed out the libertarian undertone in this movement, especially the book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, which was a more negative look at this unholy mix. Counterculture Green is a bit more optimistic, and doesnt focus on the IT/internet side. As befits the title, more on the environmental/"sustainablity" side (interesting also that the term "sustainability" wasn't used by this movement, coming into use in the 1980s, first. Anyway, a little trip down countercultural memory lane.
January 15, 201213 yr I've started on the Autobiography of Mark Twain that came out in 2010. Wow, it's amazing. http://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Mark-Twain-Vol-1/dp/0520267192/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326601866&sr=8-1 Last year I read Mao: The Unknown Story, which was also incredible: http://www.amazon.com/Mao-Story-Jung-Chang/dp/0679746323/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326601946&sr=1-1 I also read a biography of Leon Trotsky, a book on the 2008 auto bailout, and at least one more whose name I can't remember right now. The Mark Twain book will be impossible to get through for the average reader who bought it. It's very scattered, and I wish they had used different fonts for the various notes and oddities that they included. Repeatedly he's being self-depracating and winking at the reader, and I know many people will put the book down because they don't get what he's doing.
January 15, 201213 yr From Amazon's page: Breakdown of a BIG Book: 5 Things You'll Learn from Mao: The Unknown Story 1. Mao became a Communist at the age of 27 for purely pragmatic reasons: a job and income from the Russians. 2. Far from organizing the Long March in 1934, Mao was nearly left behind by his colleagues who could not stand him and had tried to oust him several times. The aim of the March was to link up with Russia to get arms. The Reds survived the March because Chiang Kai-shek let them, in a secret horse-trade for his son and heir, whom Stalin was holding hostage in Russia. 3. Mao grew opium on a large scale. 4. After he conquered China, Mao's over-riding goal was to become a superpower and dominate the world: "Control the Earth," as he put it. 5. Mao caused the greatest famine in history by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear and arms industries: 38 million people were starved and slave-driven to death in 1958-61. Mao knew exactly what was happening, saying: "half of China may well have to die."
January 15, 201213 yr Recently I read Elantris, The Alloy of Law (Mistborn), Enders Game and Enders Shadow series, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and I just started The Gunslinger (Dark Tower 1).
January 15, 201213 yr Reckle$$ Endangerment by Gretchen Morgenson & Joshua Rosner. it's about the recent finance & real estate meltdown. Seriously frustrating to read as the banks just tossed out all the old rules of thumb (rule of thumbs?) on home loans, etc.
January 16, 201213 yr First books of fantasy and sci-fi series often end up being hard to read for one reason or another. Which reminds me I need to get back to reading Malazan (series) sometime. There is a brutal first book if there ever was one.
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