What are you reading?

[rowjimmy]

about to start Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"..I've owned it forever and for some reason I just never got around to reading it..

I have that on deck, as well.

Read that Friday& Saturday.

Amazing book.

[Mr Minor]

about to start Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"..I've owned it forever and for some reason I just never got around to reading it..

I have that on deck, as well.

Read that Friday& Saturday.

Amazing book.

Awesome.  Glad you liked it.  When I finished it, I looked around like "dude, I need someone to talk to about this crazy ass book!"

On the side I am reading (just about finished) The Wave.  It's about a history teacher in the 1960s who does an experiment in his history class to show his students how easily the Germans were swayed into Hitlers ideas as well as turning a blind eye/playing dumb about the atrocities the Nazi were doing in the concentration camps. 
Great read.  Very easy read, as it's young adult, but interesting message and it's based on a true story.

[rowjimmy]

about to start Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"..I've owned it forever and for some reason I just never got around to reading it..

I have that on deck, as well.

Read that Friday& Saturday.

Amazing book.

Awesome.  Glad you liked it.  When I finished it, I looked around like "dude, I need someone to talk to about this crazy ass book!"

Yeah. And of course I finish it at 1am with no one else awake and not even any internetz to talk at...

[gainesvillegreen]

Thought you folks just finishing up The Road as of late might like this article on McCarthy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/books/01typewriter.html?_r=3&8dpc

[gainesvillegreen]

I don't kow if anyone bothered to read the link I posted above, but, in the end, the Olivetti went for $250,000.

:-o

[sprobeck]

I read The Road a while ago, not recently. Thought it was pretty good.  I'm reading a bizarre classic right now--Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. What a mind blower!! Beautifully written and surreal.

[sunrisevt]

^^^One of the most important American novels--maybe English language novels, even--of the 20th century, imo. I wrote half my master's thesis on Invisible Man.

[mehead]

Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol

[sprobeck]

^^^One of the most important American novels--maybe English language novels, even--of the 20th century, imo. I wrote half my master's thesis on Invisible Man.

Nice!! :rawk:

[gainesvillegreen]

Just finished this today, glad to have the opportunity to get back to READING during this break:

Review/Summary:

Three generations feel the pull of the land in tiny Sharon Center, Iowa, yet for all the fecundity of the soil and the river, the Montgomerys do not flourish. Wilson, the town's reticent but kind grocer, lives contentedly enough with schoolteacher Della. Their son, John, seeks truth in his work as a mechanic and marries a profoundly sensual woman. John's son, July, feels safe on the axis between order and wildness. As the Montgomery saga slowly and dramatically unfurls and darkens, Rhodes is mesmerizing, his narrative style at once utterly natural and extraordinarily complex as he shifts points of view, inlays stories within stories, and brings July into the harsh light of the foreground in the wake of shocking deaths that leave him alone and inconsolable. He rises from a resourceful street urchin to a young man of promise, but there is no escaping the "death business"; July's fate is noose-shaped, and no sense can be made of it. Rhodes writes with both symphonic grandeur and down-to-earth humility in this galvanizing novel of "the quick, naked bones of survival." This is a descent into grief as resonant as James Agee's, an embrace of the heartland spirit as profound as Cather's and Marilynne Robinson's, a story that echoes Dreiser, Steinbeck, Gardner, and Bellow--and an authentically great American novel in its own right.

Author Bio:

As a young man, David Rhodes worked in fields, hospitals, and factories across Iowa. After receiving an MFA in Writing from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1971, he published three novels in rapid succession: The Last Fair Deal Going Down (Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1972), The Easter House (Harper & Row, 1974), and Rock Island Line (Harper & Row, 1975). A motorcycle accident in 1976 left him paralyzed from the chest down, since which time he continued writing but stopped publishing. He lives with his wife, Edna, in Wonewoc, Wisconsin.

Link to "recent" interview with Poets and Writers:
http://www.pw.org/content/after_flood_profile_david_rhodes

[Hicks]

Brutal, but great. 

[gainesvillegreen]

Have you read Oryx and Crake?

[Hicks]

Have you read Oryx and Crake?

But of course.

[sprobeck]

I'm about half way through Aravind Adiga's Between Assassinations. Great read! Had to see what he had for us after White Tiger!!

[gainesvillegreen]

Have you read Oryx and Crake?

But of course.

Would you consider that required reading prior to getting into The Year Of The Flood? Would you recommend reading both simultaneously?