What is the point of this thread when we have the one in Lady Sidhe's forum?? My god you people are stu.. uh... wai.. wait a second.. er, nevermind.

::sheepishly walks away::

I started the Wheel of Time series a couple months ago, and have made it to the 10th book. I.....can't......finish.....it. I'm stubborn enough to try and read it every day, but I can't slog through it. I just don't care what happens to any of them anymore. Such a promising start, too. In fact, I was into it all the way through book 7 or 8.

Now I'm reading the Bible a lot. The minor prophets are overlooked too often, imo. While I share the religious beliefs of the authors, if I didn't, the Bible would still be an amazing work.

Wake of the Perdido Star by Gene Hackman (!) and Daniel Lenihan. While celebrity-written books are usually almost completely the work of their co-author, Hackman has a real flair for storytelling. And I like the adventure-on-the-high-seas genre anyway.

The Prophet - Kahil Gibran. It's absolutely amazing. You can read it for yourself here:

http://www.columbia.edu/~gm84/gibtable.html

Read Gibran a lot in the 60's. Somehow it's not the same when I'm straight.:(

The 10th book? Holy shit, that's like an Ironman Challenge. :)

Reading the Star Wars Force Heretic series. I've only just discovered the extremely nerdy world of Star Wars books and these were the first I picked up. I've enjoyed them immensely so far, I can't wait to go back and read some more.

man, we just love trashing that Wheel of time series, don;t we? I'm a third of the way into book 2, because i had already bought it when i started to hear all of this...I liked the first one, although he does take his time getting from a to b, and i'll finish the second cuz i started it, but i guess i'll pay heed to your collective advice, and let it drop there.

anyone read the ring world sequels by niven?

Ringworld is great. I have almost all of Niven's books. He seems to be losing his touch recently, though - his recent books don't grip me as much.

I'm not starting Wheel of Time until it's done. I hate waitnig for the sequel, and I already am doing so with Song of Ice and Fire and the Sword of Truth (man is that sucking now).

I just read the comic book section of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol II, and am in the middle of reading the prose section. It has led me to the conclusion that my knowledge of Victorian literature is sadly lacking.

Nah read it while you still enjoy it, but as soon as you get sick of it, quit. And yeah, I *love* bashing that series.

I tried reading the first book in the series, definitly couldn't get into it, kind of odd becuase I usually like epic fantasy.

It irritated me how the women treated the men in the Wheel of Time series. All the characters joke about it, too. That irritates me even more.

I loved the series as well, but stopped around the 7th book or so.

You betcha!

I found the best way to enjoy the series is to buy a copy of "Tales of Known Space." It's a short story collection, but provides a timeline for the stories that make up the whole series. Read them in the order specified on the timeline, not in the order published. This means that you'll be switching back and forth between the various shorts and novels, and there is even one instance where you read the first half of one book (I forget whether it's A Gift from Earth or World of Ptaavs) a short story or two, and then finish that one out.

I think the series was great up to Ringworld ... Ringworld Engineers was a little forced and Ringworld Throne was pretty lackluster, in comparison to the rest of the books.

books you are currently reading
 

You guys are NOT going to peer pressure me into reading the "Wheel of Time" series.

I have just started Angels and Demons. I am prepared to hate it. It is appealing as the entire book takes place over a 24 hour period. Maybe it would be a good pic for those with ADHD.

I have devoured all of King's Dark Tower series and can hardly wait for August when the new one comes out (doing pee-pee dance)

I just finished JD Salinger's "Raise the Roofbeam Carpenter's and Seymour, An Introduction. YYAAAWWN.

Thanks to Wolf, I ordered "Fight Club" and "Choke" and am looking forward to their arrival.
I must have some seamy underbelly to peer into as my life is pretty squeaky clean.

-undone

happy happy joy joy!

I was just looking through all my paperbacks to see if I still have the first Dark Tower books (can't wait for sequel), and guess what I found?

The Brave Cowboy, by Edward Abbey. The book that shaped my views on nature vs. encroaching civilization (no, I'm not starting that up again, don't worry) more than any other.

It's a gem. You should read it.

books you are currently reading
 

mrnoodle, Edward Abbey rocks. Heyduke lives!

Re: books you are currently reading
 

That's right. I'm going to encourage you NOT to read it. But if you insist, you'll get to suffer like the rest of us.

And I agree with Juju. Part of why I quit reading them was because of the pages upon pages devoted to women bitching about how stupid men are.

The 'pages upon pages' thing above? I'm not exaggerating. Well, maybe a little bit.

I just read "Probability Moon". Seemed pretty good, but I remember how Kress totally messed up the Sleeper trilogy after a good start and I can't say I'm so sure I should go on to "Sun" and "Stars".

Also finished "The Silmarillion", which (along with the included notes) made me realize that Tolkein was totally obsessed. The "Vivian Girls" guy had nothing on him in that category.

Perth,
I read to escape reality. I am around bitchy women all day. Give me some peace!
I thought of another author I liked on my 45 minute drive home....Tim Dorsey, I think the first in the series is Florida RoadKill.

I'm continuing my Nordic explorations and chewing my way through Futhark by Edred Thorsson. The clear jabs at Ralph Blum (who made a bucketload of money off a less authentic but more accesible runelore system) are pretty amusing ...

Anything by David & Leigh Eddings, I'm especially fond of Belgarath the Sorcerer , and Polgara the Sorceres

Oh and if you can find a copy of it I recommend Leonard Wibberly's The Mouse That Roared.

Ok that's going to bother me, I swear I didn't read OnyxCougar's' post until after I hit submit

The Redemtion of Althalus is just as excellent as their other books Onyx, in fact it's almost too similiar considering it's set in a different world. But still excellent.

Heh. I love that series. To each their own, I guess. But I suspect you probably want to avoid Donaldson's "Gap" series if you don't like "Covenant".

I read all of the epic fantasy tome series that I could find when I was thirteen or so. I do not intend to read any again -- except Melanie Rawn's books.

I feel morally obligated to prevent people from reading the Wheel of Time.

Ugh, I bailed after book two or three of Thomas Covenant. Eddings other series, the Sapphire Rose, is pretty good. It's sort of a fantasy version of the Three Musketeers. For those who have seen the Xmen movies, picture Rogue as a young princess who inherits an unstable throne, and Wolverine as her knight protector.

For anyone who likes hard science fiction, great action, and strong female characters, the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. You can view a free copy of one of the earlier books at the David Weber section of Baen Books Free Library Weber puts C.S. Lewis' Horatio Hornblower into a slightly awkward female ensign instead of the cocky Captain Kirk we all know.

I liked the Miles Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. There isn't a free copy, but you can look at some sample chapters at
Baen Books

John Ringo started two good series, one about a shipwrecked prince and his escort, and another about an alien invasion of earth. The first books of both series are in the Baen Free Library

I downloaded the books to my PDA.

However, I still reread the Belgariad from time to time. I love the dialog between the characters. I think that Eddings writes witty banter better than any other author, although Tolkien had his moments, when he wasn't be overly ponderous or pedantic.


BTW, isn't it striking that the RIAA is raiding the homes of 12-year-old girls over copyright and a book publisher is giving away free samples over the Internet (and CD-ROMS with the same free library in the back of hardback editions).

Which is why you would hate The Wheel of Time. :)

I've mentioned them before, but the Shanarra books, by Terry Brooks, are a fantasy series I've really enjoyed, even if they get a bit wordy too.

books you are currently reading
 

My favorite authors of all time have to be Tom Robbins and John Irving. John hasn't written a new one in a long while. His last was "Widow for One Year"; I think anyway, Anyone remember? Is that the one about the guy who gets his hand bitten off by a lion? Tom Robbins' latest is "Villa Incognito" I just love his writing. His use of the language and viewpoint of the world. I re-read "Still life with woodpecker" a couple of months ago. It is still as great as the first time. Anyone else out there a Robbins fan?

Re: books you are currently reading
 

I went on a CS Lewis kick and am going through his Chronicles of Narnia. I'm on the third of them. They are a very light read, but good kids book stuff. And recently I hear they are making a movie of them!


I hooked a speech therapist co-worker of mine onto the Narnia books. I later found out she was Jewish. I wounder if I should mention to her that those books can be read as a Christian allegory... I mean, if someone gave me some books that later turned out to be, say, a Hindu allegory, I really wouldn't mind, I actually might find it more interesting. But I wonder if some people would consider it an attack on their faith, or a sly attempt at proselytizing or something.

I'm slogging through Mission of Gravity - a hard sci-fi book by Hal Clement. Imagine a super-large and dense planet with a gravity hundreds of times that of earth, yet spinning so fast that at the equator the gravity is only about 4 or 5 G's. Hal Clement's stuff is like reading a great physics book with a plot!

Oh, and I just finished reading 'Anti-Abortionist at Large: How to Argue Intelligently about Abortion and Live to Tell About It' :D It's about a pro-life philosophy professor (and I think priest) that was into public debate on the abortion issue.

Re: Re: books you are currently reading
 

Huh. As if the anti-abortionists are the ones whose lives are at risk.:rolleyes:

nope, just "unviable fetal tissue" :rolleyes:

These days they are calling them "stem cell tissue resources" and hey, they were going to be thrown out as medical waste anyway, so why not use'em?



heck, why not cook them on a grill, its just protein

Just read this on my computer screen:

ERROR 4838: Debate on abortion will cause system instability. Process canceled.

Hmm. Oh well.

I doubt all this joke cracking will spontaneously turn into a debate. That's like a riot spontaneously erupting nto a hockey game.

To get things back on track, I've also been reading the NY Times 2004 Almanac. I try to make it a point to by a different almanac each year. Last year I got the Britannica 2003. But its getting to the point where almanacs, dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc are almost not worth the paper they are written on. Google is just 10X faster in answering most questions. I'll say this for books, they are more fun to page flip and browse.

[throws]Can you look up how many abortions we had in this country last year?[/gasoline]

2004 almanac lists only up to 1998, in which 884,273 abortions were performed in the US, down from a million plus in 1997 and each year back until 1980. I wonder if the number has gone down because of the abortion pill not being listed as an actual abortion procedure. - Edit- I just noticed that 1998 data did not include AK, CA, NH, and OK. I bet California alone would make the final number break the one million mark.

Hmm, yes, under Internet, the number one visited website is Yahoo, with a listed audience of 87,895,000. I wonder where Cellar would fall on that list.

Oh, nice weather we are having, no?

Whoeee! Someone other than me who read the book instead of just seeing the movie!

Pretty please ...

Take the abortion debate to it's own thread, don't fuck up a perfectly good book discussion ...

There is a movie?????

Yup.

We're just screwin' with yah.

There's a book??!!!!!

books you are currently reading
 

Hi MrNoodle,
Since we were kind of discussing cowboys, I ran across this joke. Have a great day.
A successful rancher died and left everything to his devoted wife.
She was a very good looking woman, and determined to keep the ranch,
but knew very little about ranching, so she decided to place an ad in the
newspaper for a ranch hand.
Two men applied for the job. One was gay and the other a drunk.
She thought long and hard about it, and when no one else applied, she
decided to hire the gay guy, figuring it would be safer to have him
around the house than the drunk.
He proved to be a hard worker who put in long hours every day
and knew a lot about ranching. For weeks, the two of them worked, and the ranch was doing very well.
Then one day, the rancher's widow said to the hired hand,
"You have done a really good job and the ranch looks great. You
should go into town and kick up your heels."
The hired hand readily agreed and went into town one Saturday night.
However one o'clock came and he didn't return. Two o'clock and no hired hand. He returned around two-thirty and upon entering the room,
he found the rancher's widow sitting by the fireplace with a glass of wine
waiting for him.

She quietly called him over to her.

"Unbutton my blouse and take it off," she said. Trembling, he
did as she directed.

"Now take off my boots." He did as she asked, ever so slowly.

"Now take off my socks." He removed each gently and placed them neatly
by her boots.

"Now take off my skirt." He slowly unbuttoned it, constantly watching her
eyes in the fire light.


"Now take off my bra." Again with trembling hands he did as he was
told and dropped it to the floor.

Now," she said, "take off my panties." By the light of the fire, he
slowly pulled them down and off.

Then she looked at him and said, "If you ever wear my clothes
into town again,
I'll fire you on the spot."

I've read both the original, Hugo Winning novella and the expanded novel.

I remember liking the novella a lot better ... the story was tighter and most of the added stuff for the book was clearly padding to make it salable as a corollary product for the movie.

Michael Sheremer: TheScience of Good and Evil

From Booklist
The source of morality is the topic under discussion in Shermer's latest book to champion rationalism. Religion received a critique in How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science (1999) and does so again as Shermer offers propositions on the origin of our ordinary, innate sense of right and wrong. Disposing of religion's rival, moral relativism, Shermer dedicates his effort to convincing readers that his thesis, labeled "provisional morality," makes more sense. What that means is that ethical rules are accepted conditionally and are as falsifiable as any scientific theory. Shermer takes this precept into the realm of evolutionary psychology, drawing applied ethics from such drastically different sources as anthropological field studies in Amazonia and the TV show The Honeymooners. Contending that the source of ethics is solely evolutionary, Sherman conducts his argument in an assertive but not gratuitously aggressive fashion. This stance as well as his populistic bent should earn him the hearing that he clearly hopes believers in God will give him. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...books&n=507846

A) Have you read The Genealogy of Morals? I am currently reading this book and find it to contain many 'awesome moments of philosophy'.

'Must not our actually German word gut (good) mean "the godlike, the man of godlike race"? and be identical to the national name (originally the noble's name) of the Goths?'

B) From your blurb, I couldn't actually figure out where he claimed that morals come from. Amazon gave me a better idea of it, and given the names (Micheal Shermer, Steven Pinker) I assume that it is more credible than I first thought.

This thread is too good to let disappear!

Has anyone hear read A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge? While I'm not currently reading it, I think it is the next book I am going to read, when I finish slogging threw Narnia.

I've read it once before, and it is in my top twenty books of all time, maybe even top ten.



One thing I was thinking, was that we could try something along the lines of the cd exchange with books. I don't mean we set up a chain and send books, I mean maybe we can all agree on a book to read every month, and we can have a forum to discuss it. Hmm... :typing:

That book rocks!!!!!!!!!

Oh Yes! I love the well thought out aliens that basically have brains that are a distributed networks. (Vinge is a computer science guy)
But my favorite idea out of the book is the way Vinge structures the galaxy. I've read a lot of science fiction, and I've never run into an idea quite like his.


And I just looked at my earlier post and saw two errors that would make my english teacher cringe.

Sorry for the delay in responding, lost in the wash and all that...

I'll have to look it up.

You have to like a guy whose organization has Penn Jilette (sp) on his board.

Edit: went back and answered the first point

I'm getting desperate.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude". Supposed to be this literary masterpiece. Nobel prize winning author.

I'm over 300 pages in, and I don't get it.

The names are mostly the same, which gets very confusing after the first 3 generations, and the writing style is jumbled and goes from present to future to past with very little segue.

This is supposed to be the best book he's written. And I still don't get it.

Has someone else read this? Can you tell me what I'm missing?

edit: corrected the spelling of segue.

I never thought of Narnia as a slog ... you reading them in the "traditional" order, or the "order of events" order?

Your mentioning A Fire Upon the Deep caused a disused synapse to fire, and one rummage and book avalanche later, it turns out that I have a copy I never got around to reading. A friend of mine thrust it into my hands in a book store some years back and said "buy this." I did, but never got around to reading it. I'll have to do so now.

(I also found out during this that I appear to have both the paperback and the hardback of "slippage" by Harlan Ellison.)

It just seems to be going a bit slow. I'm reading them in the order the books are numbered. Lion, Witch..., Caspian, Dawn Treader.

That's very funny, because I did exactly the same thing to a friend of mine. I though it would be his type of book, so I was pretty ticked off when he gave up reading it saying he wasn't getting into it. He said he didn't like Vinge's style of throwing you into what is going on, and then only bit by bit explaining what the hell is going on. Funny, that was one of the things I liked about Fire Upon the Deep.

So wolf, just be aware that there will be times in the book (up to about half way) when things don't completely make sense, expect to understand it all later.

Great book and very good movie. Cliff Robertson nailed it. Some books can make you cry. The scene where he drops in on his teacher after regressing is a tear jerker.

Originally posted by OnyxCougar I don't think you are missing anything. A college English prof recommended that book to me so I bought it, read about 50 or so pages, and tossed it away. It sucked. I remember having the same problem you are having: who are these people, what's going on, where am I, what is he talking about, etc.

Sometimes, these masterpeices are masterpieces for reasons other than "its a really gripping page-turner" or "what a really insightful point of view he has" or some other sound byte reason. I never figured it out, shrugged my shoulders and forgot about it until now. That was 27 years ago.

I read enough of that stuff during college - from Hegel to a whole cadre of deconstructionists who can write the most tortured prose imaginable. I'll take a page turner or a good sci-fi or whatever over that stuff anytime.

I just got to the point where I figured my time was more important than figuring out why a book I couldn't stand to read was really important.

I just listened to the audio version of Crichton's Prey, the nano-technology thriller.

Before you torch me for "reading" Crichton, my neighborhood branch library has a limited selection of books on cassette that I can listen to in my car during my long commute.

Bottom line: Chaos theory meets Pandora's box done to the tune of undercooked chicken. Literally, Jurassic park but with molecule-sized villians and a lot more of them. It wasn't thrilling and no one, not even an "out-of-ideas-Hollywood," will ever make a movie of it.

You must have an older publication. The recent publications rearranged the order.

I just reread my three Moomintroll books (Finn Family Moomintroll, Moominland Midwinter, Moominvalley in November). Those are fun.

Fydor Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment.

Both painful, utterly excruciating. Fantatstic piece of writing, brilliantly crafted. Makes me want to learn russian to read the original. Neil Stepherson's Suicksilver is on the todo but too daunting list.

Just finished Quicksilver last week. It's not quite as good as Cryptonomicon, but I think that's because Crypro really stands on its own. Quicksilver is part 1 of 3. I think it's building the foundation for the rest of the series. I've been dropping hints liek crazy that I want the next book for my birthday next month. It's coming out at the end of April.

Anyone else notice that Stephenson really seems to change his writing style from chapter to chapter. Some are real fast paced page turners, and others are real dry technical ones. Both are good, but the switching back and forth from one style to another is sometime abrupt. I realize the style usually changes as he follws one character over another, but sometime the style changes when writing about the same character.

I really enjoyed Stephenson's earlier works. Diamond Age and Snow Crash were outstanding.

That's (along with the ton of unread books staring at me) why I'm waiting until they're all out to read them. I hate waiting for the rest of the story.

When will the next "Song of Ice and Fire" be out? :mad: