What're you reading these days?

[Captain Hat]

I just finished reading through TRANSMETROPOLITAN again.

Awesome comic series.

Also reading Ringworld Throne again (on my way through the series) and The Algebraist by Iain M Banks.

[Shishio]

The Year's Best Horror anthology. (Forget what year.) Making Comics, and various other comics.

[P-Sleazy]

Just finished reading As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and The Coal Tattoo by Silas House. Tattoo was half decent and Dying was crap in a hat. Both for English 102.

Now We're reading The Virgin Suicides which so far is very good. Very good movie of it too.

[Death by Stabbing]

I just finished reading Plum Island by Nelson DeMille. It was one of the best books I had ever read I can't remember the last time I laughed out loud while reading a book so much...if ever...It was double-ly funny because the main chracter is very similar to me...

Now I'm probably going to finish Timothy Zahn's Star Wars Survivor's Quest (my copy is signed by the author) or I'll finish T.H. White's Once and Future King...actually I'll probably do King first because it's the school library's and they don't let you take them out for that long...like only 2 weeks and I've almost had it a week without reading that much...

so that's the deal there...

DBS

[Muffin Mage]

Originally Posted by Tiako

Don't feel bad. In addition to historical fiction, I am also reading Voltaire and Machiavelli.

So? I've been meaning to read Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes for a year or so now. And God help me when I get around to the Canterbury Tales.

All of this for the hell of it.

I win.

[Fifthfiend]

Tattoo was half decent and Dying was crap in a hat.

I actually sort of liked As I Lay Dying. Although I liked it at the same time as I thought it was, well, crap in a hat.

I liked the whole 'layers of consciousness' idea on a conceptual level, it's just at the level of actually having to work out what in the hell is going on, it doesn't actually facilitate things.

[Nietz]

You guys are so gonna laugh at me...

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

I've been meaning to read it for some time now, but only began now that I finally found one in the original English (I'm Portuguese speaking, but I've been pretty much only reading books in English lately).

Other than that, I picked up on my beloved science fiction again. I just finished Arthur Clarke's The Light of Other Days, and William Gibson's Virtual Light (and soon intend to read the rest of his Sprawl and Bridge trilogies as well as Pattern Recognition) and will go next to Dan Simmons' Hyperion.

I'm also reading some short histories from Osamu Dazai and The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi by Nagaru Tanigawa (wich spawned the all-so-popular anime), but since my Japanese ain't so good, those are taking some time.

[Magus]

Originally Posted by Nietz

You guys are so gonna laugh at me...

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

Don't feel bad, I'm a native English speaker and I just got around to reading it two weeks ago. I've been meaning to read it for three years or so but never got around to it.

So, what did I think of this book that pretty much everyone has read at one time or another, and beloved by so many people? I thought it was as pointless as The Great Gatsby but far more entertaining. I hate the Great Gatsby, but I enjoyed The Catcher In The Rye quite a bit.

Oh, and I can't quite get it clear whether or not the main character of Catcher In The Rye is dying of a terminal disease or not. I think he's dying of tuberculosis or asthma, what with his talk of always being shortwinded and writing the book while he's in the hospital. I just couldn't quite get this clear in my head. I know it's probably supposed to be ambiguous or something.

Oh, and I read Knife of Dreams by Robert Jordan, which piqued my interest in what I thought was a failing series, and I tried to read State of Fear by Michael Crichton, but I couldn't get past the first one hundred pages of so.

State of Fear is a dissertation on why global warming is false, disguised (poorly) as a thriller. It is so boring I quit reading it, and I think I have never done that with any other book in the past five years, especially by Michael Crichton. Seriously, pick it up for a lesson on how not to write a novel. It even had detailed apendices going on and on about all the proof against global warming, and FOOT NOTES, for goodness sakes. I hate hippies, too, MC, but if I wrote a novel about it it would be far better. I'm not a big fan of Tom Clancy, but the hippies plot to destroy the human race in Rainbow Six was way better than these hippies' plot to destroy the human race (and at the same time convince them that global warming is real, when of course it is FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE rammed into my head with a sledge hammer by Michael Crichton over and over and over with paragraphs of facts and graphs and data sheets and character dialogue). I hope MC goes back to his normal science-fictiony self with whatever his next novel is.

Seriously, it actually takes on the facets of propaganda. This lawyer is part of a case to sue the American government for rising water levels (this is probably the only clever thing MC came up with, cause with people suing McDonald's over their obesity I could see this happening), but apparently they think it's a really shaky shot at best. The propaganda starts here, because MC contends that it's not shaky because suing the American government over rising water levels sounds pretty ridiculous, but because, of course, there is scads of detailed proof against global warming and guess what you're going be told what it is for five chapters. The lawyer is all like "but everyone KNOWS global warming is real" and his fellows is like "no, the defenders are going to use THIS GRAPH to disprove it".

I hate MC. He did stuff like that in Jurassic Park to explain how genetics work (and a little bit of how chaos theory works, gah), but it was thrown into the middle of an exciting plot about people escaping from cloned dinosaurs. This novel gets bogged down in the neverending details of why global warming is false and it's thrown into the middle of a really boring plot about hippies using a TIDAL-WAVE MACHINE TO CAUSE FLOODING OF COASTAL CITIES TO MAKE PEOPLE THINK GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL. I simply don't care, MC. I just don't care about all the evidence against global warming. I care less now than I ever did thanks to you. I don't believe acting around the belief that it is real is quite as bad as acting around the belief that eugenics is real, either. I don't think belief in race superiority is on quite the same level as belief in global warming as affecting the future of mankind, MC.

[Satan's Onion]

Originally Posted by Magus

Oh, and I can't quite get it clear whether or not the main character of Catcher In The Rye is dying of a terminal disease or not. I think he's dying of tuberculosis or asthma, what with his talk of always being shortwinded and writing the book while he's in the hospital. I just couldn't quite get this clear in my head. I know it's probably supposed to be ambiguous or something.

I always thought Holden ended up in a nuthouse. I mean, he is pretty fuckin' whiny, so if he tried to off himself and got sent away to the enchanted kingdom, I wouldn't be too shocked. (Note: I'm not actually so callous towards people with legitimate mental problems. But, every single time I opened up this book for school, Holden Caulfield made me wanna punch him. And I just bet I could kick his ass, too. Whiny fucker.)

[Nietz]

So, what did I think of this book that pretty much everyone has read at one time or another, and beloved by so many people? I thought it was as pointless as The Great Gatsby but far more entertaining. I hate the Great Gatsby, but I enjoyed The Catcher In The Rye quite a bit.

I can say I'm enjoying it so far. You know you always hear that this book is the next best thing to Shakespeare and stuff, but most of my friends had told me it was just dumb and pretentious. It is a good book, I think, but not the big life lesson it's often portrayed as (and I, for one, don't feel yet like shooting rock stars).
I also thought of Gatsby as pretty pointless, but I it seemed to me like it was supposed to be pointless, like that was Fitzgerald point in it. I kind of liked it, but not too much. As for The Catcher, I'm still not sure if Salinger is actually trying to get a point across, and if he actually manages to do so. Let's see how it turns out.