Bouks do gud 4 mee.

[Unreadphilosophy]

I had to think of a little humor to start this thread with.

Anyone have their face stuck up the asses of any good pieces of literature? I'm currently dividing my time between three works:

-Bag of Bones by Stephen King
-The Case Against the Fed by Rothbard
-The Telescreen by Jeffery Grupp

[Weltall]

As I mentioned elsewhere to you, The Human Stain by Philip Roth: A bad book and a good story.

I happened to come into possession of a box full of random paperback fantasy novels last year. For some reason I don't quite get, I always feel like reading some epic fantasy when springtime hits and the weather gets warm. My box has perhaps forty books, and I looked through it for the first one which wouldn't place me into the middle of a series. I came up with A Breach in the Watershed by Douglas Niles.

[Darunia]

I'm in the middle of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I haven't read in a while and I picked it up one night and I realized that I enjoy the heavy, intense atmosphere, and the plot entices me.

[A Black Falcon]

I mostly read fantasy, science fiction, and history books. Occasionally politics. Those genres I could say plenty about. Other genres, not so much. :)

[lazyfatbum]

mah. I spend my reading with keeping up with the film and game industry and who's producing what and getting in to a lot of college study especially Yale's offices and two books on string theory that read like hippie shit, at any given moment i'm expecting Yoda's monologue. Good data though. Oh, experimental writing too but I do that in chats on irc, nothing you haven't seen before just new paradigms and arcs with subtle changes in film design, think branching off of Akira Kurosawa and Kubrick with the burst-story trips (like you see in 90second commercials and cartoons) but with more reward at the end and less confusion for the front row. Dodesukaden is taking my free time too because I have to pick it apart.

Lots of reading/writing but nothing yunno... just for fun really. I'd love to read Under the Dome (King) and and some of Dan Abnett's new shit. Nothing else really jumps out at me.

[Darunia]

Lazy is lying. He is 100% illiterate. He can't even type (he hires Mexicans to do all his verbatim posting for him, which he dictates from a wheelchair across the room.)

(He's also crippled.)

[lazyfatbum]

I am the Mexican Stephen Hawking. Bring me grapes.

(Yo soy el mexicano Stephen Hawking. Tráeme uvas.)

[Weltall]

Esteban Hawking!!

[Unreadphilosophy]

What types of political books do you read, Falcon?

[Sacred Jellybean]

I'm in the middle of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I haven't read in a while and I picked it up one night and I realized that I enjoy the heavy, intense atmosphere, and the plot entices me.

Same here. I've been wanting to get into Dostoevsky for a while and Crime and Punishment seemed to be a good place to start. I've heard a lot of good things about The Brothers Karamazov too, so that's probably where I'll head next.

Bag of Bones by Stephen King

I read this a few months back. There are some very good parts, most notably a nightmare scene you might have already read about (and if not, I think that's a mild enough spoiler). Overall, though, I felt it was unsatisfying. The antagonists were corny, and the protagonist felt too self-referential for my taste. That said, even a bad Stephen King novel is usually still worth reading through at least once.

[A Black Falcon]

Not too many, really. I read the news a lot, and read quite a few history books, and sometimes political science ones, but mostly I get politics from magazines, websites, etc., not books. I did read quite a bit of stuff about the Japanese political system for my thesis on how Japan's poor handling of World War II legacy issues hurts them, for example, but books about politics... I don't know. I know there are lots of current-events politics books out there, but I generally feel like I get a pretty good picture of that by following the news... I have read a few here and there, though.

Political history is definitely something I find very interesting, though, like most kinds of history, so recent political history (the last century or so, say) is certainly something I've read quite a bit about over the years.


On another note, one other kind of 'book' that I like that I didn't mention there are cartoon collections. I've never been into comic books (superhero comics, etc.), but I do like cartoon collections, both of good newspaper comics or of political cartoons. The Funny Times, a monthly liberal "newspaper" full of comics and humor articles, is something I've read for many years now for instance (my mom has subscribed for a long time now), and love... or other things like the interesting "Dr. Seuss Goes to War" collection of some of Dr. Seuss's World War II cartoons, or one I got just a few months ago, "Herblock", compiling the works of a liberal editorial cartoonist who wrote editorial cartoons for somewhere around seventy years in the 20th century. (In addition to the book, it comes with a DVD with 13,000 cartoons on it... :)).

Non-political cartoon books I love include Calvin & Hobbes, of course (the best cartoon ever! I have all 10 of the yearly books and most of the other collections as well.), The Far Side (we have all 15 yearly collections and some other books), For Better & For Worse (we have maybe eight or ten of these), etc. Doonesbury is the best comic in newspapers today, no question, but for some reason we never bought those books...

Probably my overall favorite cartoon books, though, are Larry Gonick's The Cartoon History of the Universe series, which was just recently completed and is five volumes. Volumes 4 and 5 changed the name to "The Cartoon History of the Modern World", but it's the same series. I should write about these in a separate review or something though, because I've loved this series for a long time, and thing his work is just brilliant... I've learned so, so much about history from these books, and read them over and over.

[Unreadphilosophy]

Have you read the The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard? That book will change your view of the political system forever.

Also, End the Fed by Ron Paul is another must.

And, and, read For a New Liberty by Murrary Rothbard.