• Welcome to League Of Reason Forums! Please read the rules before posting.
    If you are willing and able please consider making a donation to help with site overheads.
    Donations can be made via here

Whatcha reading at the moment?

arg-fallbackName="Laurens"/>
australopithecus said:
Read Animal Farm twice because work was dead this week. Probably my favorite book evers.
Click to expand...

If you enjoy Orwell, have you tried 'A Homage to Catalonia'? That's definitely my favourite book of his.
 
arg-fallbackName="Lallapalalable"/>
I've listened to Animals by Pink Floyd over and over, does that count? Never actually read the book, it'll probably be my next printed-on-dead-trees reading venture.

My current brain candy is

http://www.scp-wiki.net/

I just found out about it, and holy shit, some of those stories/reports are quite well written and enjoyable all on their own. I saw that SCP-087, my favorite read so far, is being made into a game, currently in beta. The best aspect of all of these are that they are brief, giving the added depth of your own imagination to fill the gaps.
 
arg-fallbackName="Frenger"/>
I haven't updated in here for a while. Read LOTS!

At the moment I am reading J.B.S The life and work of J.B.S Haldane.
 
arg-fallbackName="Lallapalalable"/>
The Napoleon of Notting Hill. A few chapters deep. Not too hard to read for it's age, with bits of dry, Victorian humour here and there. (hee hee! I put a 'u' there! I'm so hip)

Actually, the cool part is this is off a DS cartridge called "100 Classic Books" which is basically what you would think. The screens serve as each page, you rub the touch screen to go back of forward, all very nice. The pages are laughably small, so when I saw an 1100 page count for the book here I was worried, untill ten minutes or so had me breaking triple digits. I wonder what War and Peace's count is?

Edit: Holy fuck, 13,208. I'll keep that one on the back burner.
 
arg-fallbackName="Daealis"/>
As our local film-establishments started to promote Total Recall, they had the small info-snippet in their homepage, that started with these words: Total Recall is a remake of an action thriller based on the short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" by Phillip K. Dick..." And I was like: "It's a novel?!".

And that's what I'm reading at the moment. I wanted to see how these fairly different interpretations allign with the original story. I'm guessing this "remake" is much more loyal to the original writings, but since I'm barely a few pages in, I can't say for sure.
 
arg-fallbackName="Lallapalalable"/>
"Tales from the Arabian Nights"

Holy shit, first three stories and nothing but sex and racism. Read on, I say!
 
arg-fallbackName="theyounghistorian77"/>
Been a little while since i updated myself on this thread, for anyone's interest i am rurrently reading

Arno J. Mayer, "Why Did the Heavens not Darken?: The 'Final solution' in history."

Peter Longerich, "Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews"

R.I Moore, "The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950--1250" (Recommended to me by the good Anachronous Rex himself :p )


I could also give a brief mention to A N Wilson's "Hitler: A Short biography". It is often said that one should not judge a book by it's cover however in this case i think you can. To give you all some context as to how short it actually is; The main material consists of 190 pages supplemented with only 6 pages of end-notes and only 4 pages of select bibliography. And it's also ridden with factual error. All this together makes it easily amongst the worst biographies of him that I've ever had the misfortune to come across, but then i also have the feeling this book was not aimed at a person like me.
 
arg-fallbackName="Frenger"/>
theyounghistorian77 said:
Been a little while since i updated myself on this thread, for anyone's interest i am rurrently reading

Arno J. Mayer, "Why Did the Heavens not Darken?: The 'Final solution' in history."

Peter Longerich, "Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews"
.
Click to expand...

No wonder you're always so cheery with those feel good books you're reading :)
 
arg-fallbackName="theyounghistorian77"/>
Frenger said:
theyounghistorian77 said:
Been a little while since i updated myself on this thread, for anyone's interest i am rurrently reading

Arno J. Mayer, "Why Did the Heavens not Darken?: The 'Final solution' in history."

Peter Longerich, "Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews"
.
Click to expand...

No wonder you're always so cheery with those feel good books you're reading :)
Click to expand...

I'm glad i make people happy and slightly more knowledgeable at the same time :)
 
arg-fallbackName="Frenger"/>
theyounghistorian77 said:
I'm glad i make people happy and slightly more knowledgeable at the same time :)
Click to expand...

Hey, you do that in bucket loads :)

Now reading Look, homeward angel - Thomas Wolfe.

About 200 pages in. I can see why Kerouac liked him so much, he's awesome.
 
arg-fallbackName="he_who_is_nobody"/>
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body - Neil Shubin
 
arg-fallbackName="Frenger"/>
he_who_is_nobody said:
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body - Neil Shubin
Click to expand...

I loved that book, you can just tell that Neil is a genuinely wonderful human being. Let us know what you thought of it.
 
arg-fallbackName="he_who_is_nobody"/>
Frenger said:
I loved that book, you can just tell that Neil is a genuinely wonderful human being. Let us know what you thought of it.
Click to expand...

I enjoyed the book as well; I gave it 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon. The reason I could not give it 5 out of 5 is two mistakes I saw in it. The first one was not terrible, but still annoyed me. Shubin kept saying your inner shark/amphibian/retile, which I kind of expected because of the name of the book, but that still made my inner cladist want to scream at the end of every chapter. Again, given the title of the book and how it is written for the general public, this can be forgiven, but I wish he would have talked about how we were never sharks or amphibians or retiles in our evolutionary history and he was just using those terms to make it easy for the public to understand.

The second, more egregious mistake was made when he was talking about conodonts. Shubin seems to claim that paleontologists were claiming that conodonts were everything but teeth, which is simply not true, the actual leading hypothesis was that they were teeth, which is why they were called conodonts (literally translates to cone tooth). Moreover, conodonts are not teeth, at least not anatomically similar to our teeth. It appears that the creature, which possessed these hard parts, may have used some of them as teeth, but they were mainly used as structural support of the head. Conodonts are the forerunners of our skeleton, not simply teeth.

Still a great book and I would recommend it to just about anyone.

Now I am starting Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives by David Sloan Wilson.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top