Book Thread Continued

[Esper_Crusader]

Wishsong of Shannara

[Azrael]

I just finished Conversation in the Cathedral by Vargas Llosa. I don't really know what to say about the book. Absolute masterpiece. Books like this make me wish I could sit inside some people's heads and just watch it go to work.

Recently bought a copy of Kobo Abe's The Box Man and D. M. Thomas' Memories and Hallucinations. Started reading The Box Man earlier today. I can tell I'm very much going to enjoy this book.

[CastNuri]

Currently reading (selectively) poems from "Twenty Love Poems & a Song of Despair" by Pablo Neruda. It has the original Spanish text alongside English translations. :)

[Azrael]

Do you speak any Spanish?

[CastNuri]

Yeah. I know enough for the grammar/basic vocab to make sense, but some of the more complicated words and tenses are a bit confusing.

[Tooker]

Speaking of Spanish, I've been trying to get started again on Don Quixote.  I have a copy in the original, very old school Spanish that I was reading while I was in college, but I had enough other things to read that I gave up on it.  It's got amazing footnotes that helped me get the old references... but now I speak Spanish so infrequently that I think it'd be too much even with the footnotes.  Think I've got to find an updated language version.

While I'm on the subject, it's a matter of strange pride to me that I have read many of the books that Don Quixote read before he went crazy.  I won't say I'm not crazy, but I can say that I've never jousted with a windmill. :)

[Desert Walker]

I've just started reading Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta by Robert Palmer.  It looks promising and should be easy to tear through.  The 600 page text-book sized monolith Texas Blues by Alan Governar which is probably coming up next, on the other hand...that will be a challenge.

[CastNuri]

Listening to the audiobook for Tina Fey's "Bossypants." This book seems to be aimed at a certain demographic. Well, it's definitely aimed at females.

Entertaining stuff while I'm painting my nails or drying my hair off. I'm already nearly halfway through the thing and I can tell that it does what Fey presumably set out to do-- make you laugh/smile/snort. :P

[Superflat]

I'm reading this book... what's it called... "A Game of... Bones...?" No, that's not quite right... "A Frame for Homes?" That doesn't seem to be it.

Oh! It's "A Game of Thrones." It's some obscure fantasy novel, you've probably never heard of it.

...what? HBO made it into a TV show? There goes all my hipster nerd cred.

(Jk, it's really good, I'm like a bajillion [read: 600] pages in.)

[Vanguard]

I finally managed to get a copy of Roberto Bolano's "The Savage Detectives" and have burned through about 100 pages in the last day. Gotta love the morning commute.

I finished Raymond Roussel's "New Impressions of Africa", which is a very fun, eccentric poem. Basically, it's divided into 4 cantos and each canto is a single sentence that keeps getting interrupted by parenthetical digressions, footnotes, and illustrations. It has next to nothing to do with Africa.

Basically, the French Whitman.

[CastNuri]

Finished the audiobooks for "Bossypants" as well as "And Then There Were None" (which was read by the guy who plays Hastings in the ITV series!). Liked them both.

Currently reading 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda.

[GrimReality]

I finished Crown of Shadows last night. The last in the Coldfire trilogy. The book, and the series as a whole, never really lived up to the potential  I saw early on. The highlight was the characters, with Gerald Tarrant being a poster boy for anti-heros everywhere. Unfortunately the story was kinda all over the place, and truly bored me on several occasions. I guess I was hoping for something a bit more magical and fun, and got the complete opposite.

Now I'm going to read the second Hitchhiker book. I expect to be amused.

[Esper_Crusader]

I re-read Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers again today just to kill some time.  Awesome, as always:)

[CastNuri]

Read the latest Fables tp and some of my Walking Dead compendium. Trying to catch up on my backlog of graphic novels!

Also re-reading "Hunger Games" because I have the other two novels from the trilogy and I want to finish it in time to talk to my friends about the movie casting.

[John]

Speaking of Spanish, I've been trying to get started again on Don Quixote.  I have a copy in the original, very old school Spanish that I was reading while I was in college, but I had enough other things to read that I gave up on it.  It's got amazing footnotes that helped me get the old references... but now I speak Spanish so infrequently that I think it'd be too much even with the footnotes.  Think I've got to find an updated language version.

While I'm on the subject, it's a matter of strange pride to me that I have read many of the books that Don Quixote read before he went crazy.  I won't say I'm not crazy, but I can say that I've never jousted with a windmill. :)

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2134