Finished Michael Connelly's The Burning Room . It's very good quality Connelly. I think his editors missed a few things. It's hard to know if they were rushed or if it's difficult to make changes to Connelly's work.

How you have judged prior Connelly novels is how you'll judge this one. There's no new ground when it comes to plot, character, description or action. It is a page turner, more so than some of his have been.

BBC radio 4 is doing a dramatization of War And Peace, available for download.

I'm trying to read through the book Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror and I don't know what the **** is going on.

I just stumbled across "Truth, Justice And The American Way" by Julian Novitz, a thoughtful piece on this novel (and on De La Pava's second novel) that should be of interest to its readers: http://www.sydneyreviewofbooks.com/t...-american-way/.

I was reading (and enjoying) Ben Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, this morning, which plays extensively with the borderline between art (or representation) and reality. In an early scene, the I-narrator watches Christian Marclay’s conceptual-art film The Clock and keeps glancing at the time on his phone -- forgetting that the film's central conceit is that the many clock- and watch-faces on screen are synchronous with real time. And as I read the novel I found myself noticing its running title at the top of my iPad screen and thinking: “10:04? That can't be right.”

I mentioned in another thread that I made a New Year's resolution to read more. I used to really enjoy reading but for a long time now it's been replaced by audiobooks, tv, podcasts, games, and general pissing about on the internet.

Inspired by a friend who did managed to make his goal of 52 books (!) last year, I've bought a kindle and a number of books chosen from here: http://graphics.wsj.com/best-books-2014/#best-of

I've not set a definite goal yet (52 would be way too high) but was thinking something easily attainable with a bit of dedication, e.g. 12, maybe 24. I'll decide later this month depending on my progress.

1. Audiobooks count!
2. Here are a few of what I would consider to be modern classics. Stuff I'd suggest to people check-off over annual best-of lists. Sticking to non-fiction because I have (relatively) more experience there:

A Short History of Nearly Everything
Thinking Fast and Slow
At least one, really any one, of Stephen Jay Gould's essay collections.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined
Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress - and a Plan to Stop It.
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman
If you like baseball: Ball Four

A Short History of Nearly Everything is great. I listened to it on audio book. I prefer non fiction on audio book more than fiction.

Can anyone recommend me a book like A Short History of Nearly Everything but instead of science the book is about the human body/health?

^+1 Great book.

Thanks! I'll definitely check those out as I love all of Bill Bryson and Richard Feynman's stuff.

I think I'm going to start off with trying fiction first though. One of the reasons I want to do this is I feel it will help my concentration, well, better than bouncing between multiple reddit/2+2 tabs does. For me, reading fiction is much more of a challenge in that regard as you really need to concentrate or you lose the plot. I love non fiction but I find I can zone in and out of that easily.

Look at books by Mary Roach. Gulp and Stiff in particular.

Read the first two. Added the rest to my To Read list.

Thanks for the suggestions. I will look into them.

If you want science nonfic recommendations, Ancestor's Tale by Dawkins is the only book of his you need to read, its amazing. Selfish Gene is his most famous but all of it is restated in Ancestors Tale and the book is more comprehensive.

Finished My Struggle: Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard. The book has an interesting structure. It begins with a detached meditation on death and moves to a scene from young Knausgaard's childhood. The book culminates in a trip to his grandparents' house in the late nineties, where his father drank himself to death, and where Karl Ove, with the help of his brother, cleans the disgusting (and I mean disgusting) house and dwells upon family, memory, life, and, above all, death.

I enjoyed some part immensely; other parts seemed tedious and seemingly pointless. Will I read the whole thing? Probably not, but I could see myself dipping into Book 2 to see how things progress.

The book was brutally honest and entertaining.

Finished reading The Places That Scare You by Pema Chodron. The book explains how difficult circumstances can harden and embitter a person, or soften a person so that he/she can live better and connect with others.

Started reading The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics by James Kakalios.

For what it's worth, limiting my casual internet use to 30 minutes per day a few months ago literally changed my life and may have been the most positive change I have ever made.

(Unfortunately, after a couple of months when I reached the goal I was going for I regressed, but the point stands.)

I had a set block of time (12-12:30 AM) and was allowed to check email once per day earlier in the day. Could do actual necessary things on the internet outside of the block (look up directions, get restaurant's phone number, etc.).

FYP

/edit although I also made a conscious decision at some point to read more books and less news/articles/online stuff and have been very happy with that decision.

Terminator 2: Infiltrator

The first in a trilogy of books by S.M. Stirling that form a sequel to the first two Terminator films. These were released well before the filmed sequel, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

Every sequel seems to use the same trick. How can the story reference and innovate on the previous films so as to make the stakes feel higher? T3: RotM brought in a TX, a terminator like the T1k, but one that can, hey, do the stuff the T1k explicitly couldn't do (form weapons that required moving parts). This seemed to me standard and boring.

Stirling's innovations seemed to me ingenious by going the exact opposite direction. He makes everything low tech.

The terminator sent back to kill the Connor's is actually a human, an I-950. This generation of terminators are made from humans raised by Skynet, with a neural implant that ensures their loyalty.

The Arnold character is the current day former military man on which Skynet will later base the appearance of their Model 101s. He runs into the Connors, is shocked when he sees photos from Sarah Connor's previous skirmishes and recognizes the face of her first attacker/later ally, learns the truth about the coming Judgment Day when they run into low tech Terminators the I-950 has built.

The time paradox latches on to what both Terminator films suggest, that the only reason Skynet could possibly be built is that Skynet sent Terminators back from the future first to kill John Connor, later to assure its own existence. This technology is essential to Cyberdine developing the technology that will become Skynet. I guess we have to go the route of believing that in the first iteration, Skynet was developed independently, and now all Terminator stories are an unknown iteration of a long past original timeline.

The first book builds a long slow burn, then has an exciting climax. No real conclusion, but that was expected given its the first in a trilogy.

Okay, so the story is good, but the writing is sometimes downright terrible. The worst offense is the head hopping POVs. The narrative jumps from POV to POV literally from paragraph to paragraph. Other than that, it's not that the writing is always BAD, only that it's barely competent. So it's an unusual book in that while I very much enjoyed the story in this book, I had no desire to finish the trilogy. I wikid that ****.

The Burgess Boys- I picked this book up after watching the Olive Kitteridge miniseries on HBO (it's by the same author, Elizabeth Strout). I enjoyed it quite a bit. I prefer history and don't read novels very often but I appreciated the author's story of the family dynamics of a WASP family in Maine, with each sibling going through their own ups and downs. I won't pretend to have any sort of skill in literary critique but suffice to say I thought the book was warm and well written.

With regards to reading sites like 2p2, I found that once my 30 minute block started I could very quickly read whatever threads I like to read, check all my normal sites for updates etc., and I'd be shocked to find that making the rounds on all of my sites and catching up for the day often took like literally 8 minutes. Then I could use the rest of the time for reading longer articles or whatever. You could even write down things you want to check on during your time block and then speed through the list. So much more efficient than just blowing hours on the internet black hole throughout the day.

Finished Sodom and Gomorrah (Vol. IV of In Search of Lost Time) by Marcel Proust, C.K. Scott Moncrieff (Translator), Terence Kilmartin (Translator), D.J. Enright (Revisions) and have started Vo. V, The Captive and The Fugitive.While I'm working on it, I'm going to read several other books that I've pushed aside for a while, but now need to be read for various reasons.

Proust, at Vol. IV, is starting to move like a novel. It is interesting that Proust is able to do so much while having so little happen to his characters, which of course is consistent with his final conclusion with regard to art and what good art is. He uses the most ordinary of events to develop his characters and become examples of his views. His comments on memory, art, life, love, sex, etc. remain unusually prescient.

I'm really enjoying The White Boy Shuffle. Junot Diaz fans should check it out.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan is vibrant, poetic. So far, one of the things that have really stood out is the depiction of the beginning of love. Really beautiful stuff.

Finished Out of the Dark by Patrick Modiano. It's short and very good. A 60's slacker fails to connect with a shallow woman who is moral flexible and, much like Daisy in The Great Gatsby, moved on (matured, became responsible, did whatever she needed to achieve what she wanted) when the "slacker" and Jay Gatsby did not.

The only constants are mutability and loss and they are ephemeral and uncertain.