THE DREAMSELLER by brandon novak!

reading crime and punishment

i had like 24 hours of travelling to kill, and it was the only not crap book i hadnt read available at the airport bookshop. sadly its the constance garnett translation, but whatever, i guess that makes reading it a little easier.

so amazing how familiar i feel i am with all of raskolnikov's thought processes and feelings, guess it shows how good a psychologist dostoevsky was.

also fml im glad im not a 19th century russian.

Gonna pick up Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Anybody has a recommendation for which translation to choose?

Currently rereading Jurassic Park. A little slow so far, but IIRC it really picks up.

Can you elaborate on why that translation is inferior and which might be the better or best one, and why?

I read it like 20 years ago so I don't even remember who translated the version I read. I did find it a fantastic book.

i couldnt tell you which translation is best, but constance garnett was notorious for translating stuff very liberally; she pays very little respect to the authors writing style and language. hemingway commented that there is no difference between different authors' prose styles in any of her translations.

that being said, this makes her easy to read, as the books read as if originally written in english.

Mario Acevedo's 4 Vampire Detective books are awesome

Nymphomaniacs at Rocky Flats
X-Ratred Bloodsuckers
The Undead Kama Sutra
Jailbait Zombie

Good stuff

this is a sick (as in disturbing, but great) read. between it and interpretor of maladies, i'm alternating between two fantastic books rec'd in this thread. thanks.

in regard to the family, what strikes me most is the way it mentions a certain defense contractor I used to work for (more than a few times), and the aura around that place was just like the tone of this book's subject. Basically, if you weren't (probably) white and (definitely) christian, you weren't "in" the clique or the track to the top, and there were some really weird non-intelligent guys up there who seemed to be part of this, for lack of a better word, cabal.

Maybe I'm just not a dog person.

Call of the Wild by Jack London was a letdown. I just wasn't ever into it. Buck (the canine protagonist) goes through a lot of tense events and myriad "emotions," but it just never felt interesting. The constant "...and then Buck got a new owner" got kind of boring as well. I realize that it is realistic and probably is supposed to help the reader sympathize for Buck and is unknown future, but meh.

The book feels incredibly jumpy, which seems odd to me since it's a huge hit with young readers. There's just no real rhythm to it and the only exciting scenes were the ones involving fighting and death. While there are plenty of those scenes, it just never captivated me.

Perhaps I'm too old now to appreciate it.

Or perhaps I'm a cat person.

2*/5.

Just didn't appreciate it much.

Very creepy, but I could listen to stories like this all day.

I really hate who weird and distorted workplaces can be. I've worked at only a few that weren't really screwed up by the personalities of at least one person in power who either had no ethics or psychological problems they couldn't keep under control.

This is why, as an atheist and a liberal, I let the conservative Christians at work confess their beliefs and talk about them all day, and just keep my mouth shut. Ideologues have unfailing memory and resentment, and tend to feel not just justified but even righteous in manifesting them.

need help finding the title of a science fiction story

it's about an omniscient entity that looks like a sack of potatoes. It's the last of its race. People end up paying high prices for time with the being to ask it questions. One of the more mysterious clients is paying for time to ask it how to best steal it.

thx

Never heard of it. A little research showed one story that might fight your description, "The Singing Thing," by Lynn Coulter.

a world history book lol

Which?

My local library had a book sale today and one of the books I bought is a really nice edition of The Outline of History by the perennial H.G. Wells, published in 1919.
I already own many books on World History, but I figured this would be a nice addition, despite the inevitable factual errors and outdated theories.



BTW, tomorrow the library will have a "Bag Sale" so all the books you can fit in the bag would cost $3 total

Reading "Last Call" by him right now, partly because it has a gambling theme.
Much more out there than "Declare" and much harder to follow. Whether it is worth it will depend entirely on the conclusion.

I finally finished A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry, this morning. Spectacular, all 713 pages of it. Made me feel like I was a 90-lb beggar on the streets of India 50 years ago, and gave me an excellent realization (and eye opening) into what a third-world lifestyle would be like. I highly recommend this book.

Just about to head off for a walk to the library... on my list to pick up are The Pearl by John Steinbeck, Columbine by John Cullen and Where I'm Calling From, a collection of short stories by Carver.

the dolorous passion of our lord jesus christ

plan on starting love, poverty, and war by chris hitchens and also george orwell's collection of essays soon.

i bought like 15 books a couple of months ago and i need to really catch up... school is done now so i should have a lot more time. has anybody read bill simmons' book on basketball?

Just finished Ubik, pretty disappointing. Neat concept but didn't feel fully fleshed out, and the writing itself was really bad. Like it's seriously like it was ghostwritten by a 10th grader or something.

Currently starting Blindsight, have high hopes.

Just finished it a few days ago. If you're a fan of Simmons's columns and you have enough interest in the NBA, I definitely recommend it. I'm not a huge NBA fan, but I follow it a bit. Very educational in terms of a lot of the older players/teams I didn't know much about. And it's really, really long, but you can skip through to whatever sections you want to read.

In the past few weeks I've finished:
The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker. Lengthy, and it drags a bit at the beginning talking about different types of verbs, but a lot of good stuff. Worth a read if you have any interest in linguistics or psychology.

Tales from Q-School by John Feinstein. I've read tons of Feinstein's books on college basketball and a few of the others, but hadn't read any of the golf ones. This one is pretty good if you're not acquainted with some of the crazy things that have happened at Q-School, but if you have it's just okay.

American Original by Joan Biskupic. A biography of Antonin Scalia. Not particularly great. A decent enough read, but pretty much a straightforward, chronological history, mostly focusing on Scalia's Supreme Court tenure and the most important cases he was involved in. Obviously there is some background about his childhood and personal life, and it does a reasonably decent job of analyzing the various positions he's taken, but I didn't feel like I learned anything more about what really makes Scalia tick than I already knew.

Currently reading a couple of things I picked up from the local library's new books section:
The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
The Case for God by Karen Armstrong
A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

columbine is very interesting but the author's writing style is annoying

I'd recommend the Gregory Hays translation. It is available in most book stores.

Another very good book - perhaps even be the best in the field - is The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge.

Finished Cryptonomicon Thursday night. Have been making good progress in A Game of Thrones since then, I can't imaging it is going to take very long to get through this one.

I'm halfway through Market Forces by Richard Morgan. This was the first book he wrote and I believe it wasn't published until after he had success with his other novels. So far it's not as good as any of the other books I've read of his, which are my favorite SciFi novels, Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Black Man

I really want to read this, now. Sebastion Junger's WAR

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/r...rev11_ST_N.htm

I'm a little over halfway through The Grapes of Wrath. It is shaping up to possibly be the greatest novel I've ever read. I can't believe how good it is, or that I wasted so much of the last 33 years not reading classics like this.

Any recommendations on what to follow this with? I have The Brothers Karamazov and Moby Dick on the nightstand...