been watching "sons of anarchy" a lot on hulu so i bought a couple outlaw motorcycle gang books...

Running With The Devil - about an ATF agent entering the Hells Angels in Arizona written by the prosecuting DA, terrible book, not entertaining and poorly written...

Under and Alone - about an ATF agent entering the Mongols in SoCal, written by the actual agent, very entertaining and i can't wait to keep reading...by William Queen...

The Song of Ice and Fire books, are those heavy on religious stuff at all? My dad isn't much of a reader, but he does like knights and medieval stuff, so he might be into this...but he isn't big on fantasy that contrasts or condemns religion and stuff.

I might check it out myself. It sounds like it's getting good recs, and isn't too fantasy heavy (which I dislike).

Yeah I read it in high school. I liked it or else I wouldn't have picked up his new one. It's crazy how much I've learned and how much my thoughts on these matters have changed in the time between books.

this book has been out for ~2 years now (?). great book though.

kind of grunching this thread, and i'm sure both have been mentioned, but "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns" are must reads.

Actually a lot of what goes on in the books is sort of driven by differences in faith between the various characters and their kingdoms, tribes, etc. So I wouldn't say it condemns religion at all, though there are contrasting views.

For example the Starks, one of the main families in the books, subscribe to the old gods aka the Seven. Each has his own role (warrior protects one in battle, mother watches over you, stranger is death) and they are referenced a good bit. One of the insurgents is led by a follower of the Lord of Light, a single god who sees all, yada yada yada.

Kind of rambling there but hopefully that's enough for you to decide if you're dad would be into it or not.

It is. I don't think that would be problematic. At least, I don't think so. My dad wasn't a fan of my playing FF3 growing up because he thought it was anti-religion or something. I think he's changed his tune about things like that a little bit though.

Just finished Cheyanne Raiders by Robert Jordan.

Its a indian/western story that I believe probably inspired the Dances with Wolves story, as this was written befopre DWW and it is very similar.....I personally liked this book much more.

It was an extremely sad ending, but the imagery and descriptiveness is classic Jordan at his best.


Highly recommended

I've read the Gawande book and the Pinker books (about halfway through The Stuff of Thought). Also recommend Richard Selzer highly for med students. BTW, how do you find time for med school and all that reading?

Ah, just that you were a little mixed up about what book to memorize. (That, and I love tossing in a Yiddish word here and there.) Last year read a fine book about a guy whose mission was to save as many Yiddish texts as possible, Outwitting History. He was able to rescue well over one million Yiddish texts that would probably have been lost forever.

Anesthesia rotation baby.

Priorities haha. No I basically take a week off after every test and then cram and work like crazy before the next one.

I'll check out Selzer.

Starting "The Fatal" Shore by Robert Hughes. It's quite a tome.

Dustjacket synopsis:
"Australia's first white settlers came ashore from a British prison fleet in Botany Bay in 1788. Before them lay an almost unknown: unexplored, unexploited, and yet to be the scene of the most extraordinary social experiment then imagined - the creation of a prison camp in the South Pacific for an entire criminal class. It was, as this brilliantly written account of the convict transportation system argues, the sketch for the twentieth-century Gulag.

"The Fatal Shore follows convict transportation from the squalor of Georgian Britain and its obsessive fear of mob violence to the grim prison hulks - Noah's Arks of small-time criminality - that disgorged their human cargoes into the most elaborate penal system the world had ever seen. Many of those who survived the first fleets were condemned to starvation, disease and horrifying brutality, and yet within eighty years Australia became a promised land to which people have flocked ever since.

"In describing Australia's painful transition from prison camp to open society, Robert Hughes draws on a wealth of documents, private and official, never before consulted. They give vivid testimony to the most complete account yet written of how 160,000 men, women and children, some innocent, some not, but all united by their helplessness and criminality, were shipped off the face of the known world to suffer, to die, to succeed and go on to found a new nation. This is history on an epic scale, told with immense energy and panache."

Is it weird that I feel like I'm having trouble tracking "The Fall?" He's a hard speaker to follow because he jumps around a fair amount, and he's talking about a lot of things at once. I can tell there's a decent amount to chew on with this, but it's hard to sift through.

I'm kind of enjoying it, but definitely thinking I'll enjoy the reread way more.

Okay, I finished The Fall. This computer sucks and is acting weird tonight, though, so my write-up will come in a day or two. I feel really weird doing these write-ups for such well-known classics, as opposed to the lesser read literature I've been reviewing.

Sneak peek: The Fall grew on me as I went, and the ending was pretty powerful for me, especially given the opening epigraph.

Currently reading Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson. Just started so no real insights yet.

So, as mentioned before, I finished The Fall by Albert Camus. I feel pretty underequipped to do a writeup for this, but I've sort of made a resolution of sorts to do one for all the books I read. Off we go.

This is such a fascinating book to me. I was having a lot of trouble tracking the narrator throughout the first half of the book, and I ultimately realized why that is. But to understand that, I suppose some background is necessary for anyone who hasn't yet had the pleasure of reading this novel.

The Fall is one of those rare novels that takes place entirely in the second person. The narrator, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, spends the entire novel speaking about his illustrious, though tormented, life to an unknown listener. The format is especially effective because of two things, both of which are easily found in the opening epigraph,

"Some were dreadfully insulted, and quite seriously, to have held up as a model such an immoral character as A Hero of Our Time; others shrewdly noticed that the author had portrayed himself and his acquaintances…A Hero of Our Time, gentlemen, is in fact a portrait, but not of an individual; it is the aggregate of the vices of our whole generation in their fullest expression."

The epigraph seemed to make no sense to me until the second half of the novel, and especially near the end. Camus has carefully constructed a novel with multiple layers. On the surface, it's about Clamence and his generosities, admirable traits, and cringe-worthy vices. However, as the epigraph implies, the novel really takes a form of representing all men, with fascinating the results. It's terribly easy for the reader to take on the part of the mystery listener. So, essentially, the reader is taking the brunt of all the existentialism and is left to ponder about his own roles in society's morally ambiguous state.

The ending is where all of this tied together for me, though I don't think I'm taking anything away by revealing that to anyone who hasn't yet read the book. I would have much preferred to understand where I was headed from the start and I think that an awful lot of impact was left on the floor for me. I didn't realize it was there to begin with.

Either way, this novel was truly fascinating for me. While I didn't feel all of the emotions that Clamence was hoping the listener would feel, it had a strong impact on me and ultimately, I find it to be one of the most well-crafted novels I've read in a couple years.

5*/5

Next up: The Lightning Thief by Percy Jackson (a Lincoln Award Nominee)

Glad you liked it too. Gorgeous central metaphor.

In some ways it was almost too much to swallow at once. i don't mean because of the topic matter, but rather, it was just a lot of material in a short time. The guy never seems to stop and come up for air. I think I liked The Fall a lot more than The Stranger, but some bits from The Stranger were just so awesome; I don't know.

Also, correction: Next up: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. Percy Jackson is apparently a character in it. Oops.

I liked it better than The Stranger too.

better was better, although i think it's just largely a function of him having more experience as a writer.

both that and complications are excellent reads and highly educational for those of us exclusively on the patient side of health care interactions.

Is this thread just for fiction? Instead of taking my pre-mid life crisis in the normal direction and searching for meaning in various religious faiths, I have decided to try theoretical physics. I read an interesting book earlier this year called Physics of the Impossible which took a bunch of science fiction concepts and broke them into groups of "possible within a few hundred years", "theoretically possible but we're nowhere near advanced enough to implement", and "defies the laws of physics as currently constructed". Written at a very high level, but it was pretty interesting.

And now I'm reading another by the same author, Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos. I like this one better because he is more technical and getting much more in depth into string theory, m-theory, etc. I have never had much interest in physics past all the classes I needed to take for my engineering degree, so I'm not fooling anybody that I need to know the specific formulas or that I could add anything to the world by studying it much deeper. But it is nice to read about the history and general concepts of competing theories on how the world around us was created, continues to work now, and how it might all end.

I'd recommend Dr. Kaku's books to anybody who is technical enough that they know they might enjoy it but doesn't feel the need yet to delve into textbook type detail. My wife even nods politely when I get off the train talking about big bangs, paradoxes solved by Edgar Allen Poe, and bosons. And whether he's a bearded man in the sky or an exploding particle smaller than an electron, I feel like I get a better picture of our creator by learning about the tools he used to create all that surrounds us.

Has anyone read The Secret History by Donna Tartt?

I'm reading it at the moment (as a break from Chaucer) and I was wondering what other people who'd read it thought of it. I'm torn - I don't believe that the main character is male, for one thing; the setting in time seems to jump around too much; and some of the writing is fairly awful - "A december stillness hung, like a deadly oxymoron, over the April Landscape", for instance. Having said that, I still quite like it and I'm finding it hard to put down. It is quite hard to believe what's happening, and it seems to me that for some of the characters the author has been too concerned with painting them as romantic literary figures rather than with portraying real people.

Anyone any thoughts?

I much prefer my characters to be romantic literary figures. Real people are just so, you know, real. No real person has ever inhabited a novel--and that's a very good thing.

So you're not looking forward to smell-o-vision?

now i don't know about that sir.

the stranger has seemed to have a bit more staying power for me.

SoloAJ which do you prefer?