What'cha Reading?

[vashti]

I'm just now getting to where I can stand it again, DM.

Lovesjoy - did you see that I also read The Help (well, audiobook)? I liked it.

[MVPlaya]

My favorite passage from Fear & Loathing, I guess because I'm a Berkeley kid, and because me & my 9 closest friends all went to Vegas together three weeks ago. This excerpt captures ones of the central themes of Fear & Loathing, the failure of the hippy movement:


"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."


You can see the speech in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, with Johnnie Depp:
[url]http://s224.photobucket.com/albums/dd244/harum-scarum_1966/?action=view&current=2e91781d1373652d138a3821b6639 ee5.flv[/url]

[lovesjoyajm]

I'm just now getting to where I can stand it again, DM.

Lovesjoy - did you see that I also read The Help (well, audiobook)? I liked it.

Yep - I meant to quote you. I'll have to check it out when I thin out the pile a bit!

[lovesjoyajm]

Just finished reading Bill Bryson's "The Lost Continent". Very amusing.

[MetalPhoenix]

Recently started reading "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins

Love it. Completly tears religion apart and exposes the madness of it

[Illusional]

alright, with all my time being consumed with drinking, ps3, exercise, and work... one would think that i actually read.. but i do. i read this damn forum...

anyways, i just finished a pretty graphic series of novels. if you like that fantasy type with a lot of blood, murder, sex..blah blah blah.. then i suggest "the night angel trilogy" by brent weeks. it's the only thing that he's written and it kept me actually reading all of those three books.

raverboy

[vashti]

I just finished this, and I really liked it:

City of Thieves by David Benioff

During the Nazis' brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives by complying with an outrageous directive: secure a dozen eggs for a powerful Soviet colonel to use in his daughter's wedding cake. In a city cut off from all supplies and suffering unbelievable deprivation, Lev and Kolya embark on a hunt through the dire lawlessness of Leningrad and behind enemy lines to find the impossible.

By turns insightful and funny, thrilling and terrifying, City of Thieves is a gripping, cinematic World War II adventure and an intimate coming-of-age story with an utterly contemporary feel for how boys become men.

[Doc Durian]

Training manuals to evade thermal imaging detection in the field and camo pattern science. It's interesting that nature has evolved to the extent that the big jungle cats can have patterns which evade detection by other animals yet don't seamlessly blend into their environments.

[Gigabitch]

Special Topics in Calamity Physics. It's a novel, and the author is a bit too self-amused. The character of the father is one of the most tiresome people I have ever met in fiction. I keep hoping it will be a good story, but I'm halfway through and still waiting.

[ChatterBox]

Some of my favorite books:

The Left Behind series
"Empress Orchid" By Anchee Min
Stephen King books
Harry Potter series
Biographies by Carolly Erickson

[misombra]

i've been reading dr. spock's book on child care. it's so informative. i'd throw away every other book i have on pregnancy and babies for just this one book.

[schneeflocke]

i just finished trigger by wolf dorn, it´s very creepy

[QueenofCorona]

Just orderd Chelsea Handler's new book, "Chelsea, Chelsea Bang Bang" off Amazon. I hate waiting but its a good $10 cheaper when I order off Amazon.

[schneeflocke]

at the momment i´m reading a long way down by nickhornby for the third time ;-)

[the_robot]

Umm.. does my blog & news feed count? I haven't read a book in a week, since I finished "Agile Web Development with Rails"... the last non-geek book was the last book of "The Sword of Truth" about a year ago...