What book are you reading right now?
 

I'm not a big reader (except DSF forums :) ), but a doctor friend of mine suggested a good book for anyone who has a daughter. The book is STRONG FATHERS, STRONG DAUGHTERS by Dr. Meg Meeker. It is scary to me to realize how much of an influence a father has on his daughter and how much she looks up to me and how important my interaction with her as she grows up makes such a difference in how she develops in life (especially in the kind of world that we live in today). One part I read last night really hit home. It said...

"From the moment you set eyes on her wet-from-the-womb body until she leaves your home, the clock starts ticking. It's the clock that times your hours with her, your opportunities to influence her, to shape her character, and to help her find herself- and to enjoy living."

So far it is a good read.

I fucking DEVOUR books, I always have, ever since I was a kid.

Just finished reading Hannibal the last book in the Thomas Harris series (Silence of the Lambs etc) It was amazing.

Just started Hunting Badger, which is part of a series by this dude Tony Hillerman about two Navajo Tribal police officers on the reservation in New Mexico. Kind of murder mysteries meet Native Indian Fokelore. This one is about a big robbery that takes place and they can't find the culprits. This guy writes amazing "whodunnits:, if you're into that.

Currently reading Opening to Channel, which is supposed to help you learn to connect with your "spirit guide" or "higher self" and supposedly will help you accelerate to enlightenment.

I thought the DSF forum was all the enlightenment I needed, but this book seems to be saying otherwise...Hmmmm..

Oh I'm also reading a book of short murder stories by Canadian writer Max Haines called Bothersome Bodies.

Okay, you can make fun of me for being a geek now....

Books
 

Unfortunately, I am reading a lot of adolescent literature (yes let the flaming begin) because i am a 7th grade English teacher. Most of the new books are a little disturbing with the sexual content.

Just finished the first two books in the Twilight series and they are surprisingly good.

Time Traveller's Wife was great as was The Dante Club. Both are for gwon ups...Mall by Eric Bogosian was one of the best books I have read in a great long while.

You're like my wife, M-EM...she can read multiple books at once. She loves to read. I have to do them one at a time and I'm a slow reader. She can finish a book in a week or less.

Reading John Sandford latest Prey book.

Nice! Great series. I'm only about 5 books into it but it's on my to do list.

I think the last book I read was Night Stalkers.

I have a bad habit of buying books and then losing interest in them. I have about 7 or 8 books on my shelf that I just am not interested in reading.

I'm taking a break from "real" books and re-reading The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller.

haha

Homo

(I'm kidding)

If you have any control over what they read, hit them with some classics:

To Kill a Mocking Bird
Lord of the Flies
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (may be too advanced for 7th grade)
Animal Farm

Those are all books that blew me away at that age.

I've been wanting to read that Twilight series, but haven't got around to it. I've heard so many good things about it though.

finished Dan Browns Angels and Deamons about to start Grishams testament

Not to sound like a complete nerd, but I just finished up:

Stephen Hawking's "Universe in a Nutshell", and "A Brief History of Time."

Also "Relativity Simply Explained" by Martin Gardner. Awesome books. Blew me away.

Now I'm midway through the Lord of the Rings books (Two Towers).

Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey

i have been going through a bunch of wrestler autobiographies. i just finished the chris jericho book which was really good and is just as good if not better than mick foley's original "have a nice day!"

Mick also started writing novels. I finished his first "tietam brown" while i was in ny and am working on his second novel "scooter." he is a really talented writer, who will probably shock people due to his immense literary talent.

I mainly read historical fiction, and usually the bodice rippers. I read before bed so don't usually go for a lot of heavier stuff. I might be starting something by Peter Straub soon? BC recommended it. To be honest, we discussed it in bed after I was drugged so it's all kinda hazy in my mind what I'll be reading. Oddly, I like inspirational historical fiction even. Janette Oke, Lori Wick. I started a 5 book series about Acadia and the ousting of the French to Louisana. The series spans from then until the Rev. War and is set in Acadia, Louisana, Boston, and England. I just finished the Love Comes Softly series and the Prarie Years series which are set mid to late 1800s and early 1900s. And then there is always the Malory novels by Johanna Lindsey. I also like the Alex Delaware novels by Jonathan Kellerman. And the Women's Murder Club series by Patterson is good.

I almost always have at least one fiction book and one non-fiction going at the same time. My non-fiction selections right now are a book on Tips on Better Living with RA, a book for nurses on chronic pain, and two RA magazines. Drool inducing if you're not interested in those subjects but highly fascinating to me. I am also half assed reading some ebooks on various rheumatology subjects.

Mrs. BC, you are a nurse?

I am just a few pages from finishing this....



I got half way through it, and found out it was actually a sequal, so I will be reading that next.

Side note, I am a major Stephan King fan.

Nope, just have this long standing (21 years now-since I was 10 and found a "cool" nursing book on rheumatic diseases) insatiable drive to know as much as possible about rheumatoid arthritis, fibro, and chronic pain. It's kinda spread from just reading for my own curiosity to being the "newslady" and being the person people in the support group I'm in turn to when they need info they either have looked for and can't find OR just know it'll be easier to ask me to find it simply because I inherited a ton of resources and then continually build on them.

I'd have LOVED to go into the medical field somehow but RA prevented that. I'm too unreliable. I never know when I'll feel good. So, I do my part how I can. It's not much, but it gives me a feeling of being useful to more than BC and Mini-BC. Especially since I'm really not all that useful to them.

I did the same thing a few years back. Straub did a good job, though, because you can read them separately. I liked the first book better (Lost Boy Lost Girl).

Holy Shit, I think I'm in love.

You guys are all gunna totally hate on me but i liked this book.
It def is not high-brow literature. Iceberg Slim is the true pulp fiction. Shit that Dolemite and all the blaxploitation films emulated. Plus it's his true story.

Truthfully, as long as people ARE reading, which is seeming to be a lost thing now, who cares what their choices are? Just the fact they do read is something.

Fable by William Faulkner. It's about WWI and mutiny in the French ranks (sort of like the Kirk Douglas movie Paths of Glory). It uses the setting to get at the reality of war and what it means.

It's a very tough read but I enjoy the book. It won the pulitzer prize in 1955 and Faulkner won a Nobel prize for literature.

You are TOTALLY right.

Got 2 going.

Star Wars - Invincible
Death and Honor by W.E.B. Griffin.

What's the Star Wars one about?

It's the last book in the Legacy of the Force Series. Han and Leia's oldest son is a Sith Lord bent on ruling the galaxy and his twin sister has decided that she has to kill him. Decent series.

Both excellent books.

I am starting a new position at work as a supervisor and have been given a bunch of leadership books to read from the company.

21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and Winning with People both by John C. Maxwell topped the list...good books for dealing with people. I'm about to start What Every Manager Should Know About Training.

Sounds pretty good. I got so far behind on the SW books, I just gave up.

I'm reading The Confusion by Neal Stephenson. It's Book 2 in his three volume Baroque Cycle. Just finished the first one - Quicksilver. Interesting historical fiction with tons fact that after the first book seems to center around the theme of money, why is there money, why we value and set values to things...along with alchemy, the history of banking, and Sir Isaac Newton all thrown in. It even has lots of pirates and whores in it! Whewww!

Tough read but fascinating and very rewarding. It is as they say a rousing yarn!

To quote stephen King in the book Cell: "Neal Stephenson is a God!"

Just wanted to thank people posting in this thread.. I haven't read in a while and it's about time I should read again. I'll probably pick one of these books up within the next few days to read.

Just Checking: Scenes from the life of an obsessive-compulsive by Emily Colas

From Booklist
Colas worries a lot. She fears that the baby-sitter is using the family's toothbrushes. She suspects someone has tampered with her Cap'n Crunch. An obsessive-compulsive mother of two, Colas makes worry an art. This anecdotal, first-person account of Colas' illness is highly readable and funny. It also benefits from one of the symptoms of the illness (which affects 2.5 percent of Americans over the life course): a vague awareness that something is awry. At its best, Just Checking is a lighthearted glimpse of a treatable illness. But it's not the whole story. After she runs over a chipmunk, Colas repeatedly returns to the scene to verify that she has not killed a child. Behind the comic behaviors that Colas emphasizes is a gnawing disorder that is often painful and frightening. One hopes that Colas will take up her pen again, explore this part of her experience, and risk the darkness.

Slapboxing with Jesus by Victor LaValle
Amazon.com
Victor D. LaValle grew up in Queens, New York, an African American male in a city and a country where guys who look like him are made to feel like interlopers. His debut collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, is hard-edged, violent, poetic. As in Junot Diaz's Drown, the prose is a series of choppy, precise sentences, like jabs ("The NYU banners flapped with the wind, loud enough to sound like teeth cracking in your head"), and the stories take place in small stuffy apartments where walls are inadequate shields against the loud and inescapable neighborhood.

Like Diaz, LaValle is pretty merciless when it comes to the subject of women. As the title suggests, this is a macho book. The opening sentence of the first story begins, "The next morning I was still scratching my nuts." Readers without nuts might be a little put off. The love that occurs in these pages is between brothers, between guys who have known each other since they were kids and who have tried to bail each other out, set each other up, find a whore they can both share. In the powerful three-page story "Chuckie," even boyhood bonds break apart in the face of a violent Italian gang. When the title character is beat up, the narrator realizes that he can only protect himself: "The blood started coming. I didn't know a face had so much. Helping was still an option for the others, but not me..."

The highlight of the book is "Ghost Story." Like Denis Johnson's famous "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," it renders paranoid delusions from the first person--and bit by bit the prose collapses as the narrator's medication wears off. Here he recalls a stint in a mental hospital:

"Just the hours that were eons sitting on a couch, a row of ten of you, ten or twenty, no books, magazines too simple for the mildly retarded and your active mind leaps further and further over an empty cosmos, as lonely as the satellites sent to find life in the universe. But in there, at least, was when I'd realized how they waged their war, my enemies: through sockets and plugs, through a current."

Such passages establish LaValle as a writer to be reckoned with, one capable of transporting the reader to a strange and terrible interior.

Just finished Dennis Lehane's latest, THE GIVEN DAY. If you only know him through his books made into movies, GONE, BABY, GONE & MYSTIC RIVER, then you'll find this quite different. It's his first attempt at a historical novel, following several different characters from different walks of life during the tumult of the Boston Police Strike in 1919. A really good read.

Previous to that I read Jason Goodwin's THE BELLINI CARD, the third in his series of mysteries set in Istanbul & the Sultan's court in the 1830s. There were two previous books: THE JANISSARY TREE & THE SNAKE STONE and they all feature Yashim the Eunuch, who tends to the Sultan's harem & has a knack for getting to the bottom of some very murky goings on. This is a great combination of history & mystery writing.

In the same vein, try Steven Saylor's "Roma Sub Rosa" series of mysteries, set in ancient Rome, They now number twelve; the first was ROMAN BLOOD. Gordianus the Finder is the sleuth in all of them. If you like the HBO series, ROME, then you'll like Saylor's mysteries, plus his novel ROMA, which chronicles the first 5 centuries of the city's history through the experiences of one family.

Remembrance of Things Past by Proust

cool thread
 

I'm actually gonna pic up some of these.

Anyway today I'm reading a comedy:


The Stupidest Angel



By:Christopher Moore


Read half of it last night. It's really fuckin' funny so far.

I really love this thread,since I am an avid reader,so I hope it gets updated every so often.

Anyways,I just finished reading Narcissism: Denial of the true self
by Alexander Lowen M.D.

Great book,if you have an interest in psychology,particularly what makes
the narcissist tick.

I highly recommend it.

just finished "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch




Everyone should give it a read. Very inspiring and I couldn't put it down.

I just finished (re)reading Catch 22 by Joseph Heller last week.

I'm not kidding or fucking you with hyperbole - it's the best fucking book I've ever read - right up DSF alley.





I'm (re) reading The Hobbit right now because my daughter is trying to read it. I love those books, I'm such a nerd.


I'd like to read some Chuck Klosterman or Kurt Vonnegut next.....I still haven't read Breakfast of Champions.

Fuck yes....Black House and Straub kick serious ass.

We shan't even bring up Roland or the Dark Tower.....I'll start to precum.

No offense....but if I could, I would cockwhip John Maxwell. Harshly too, I don't mean 'cockwhip' in a gentle, loving way.

Here at work - I had to sit thru several hours of him presenting that very same book. That man is ONE pompous, annoying muthafucka in person.

so I guess that means you would completely blow your load if Jo typed it in italics