What are you reading right now?

[Doc]

Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californias, 1846-1890...

Which is pretty interesting as a mirror of the current immigration uproar given that the Californios dealt with an unmanageable influx of Caucasian immigrants who basically overturned their society...and now the fear of immigrants from south of the border doing the same to "American" society seems prevalent among hard line anti-immigrant types.

Doc

[The Blonde]

Sounds like something I would be interested in reading Doc.

Im in the middle of a biography on Ferdinand von Zeppelin.
Probably semi boring to most, just a History of light aircraft and how Count Zeppelin came to pioneer the first first rigid dirigible in 1900.

[Stiffler]

haha, you said rigid dirgible...

[The Blonde]

It means something pretty effen cool in German I sware.

And...I know what it means, and Im a girl. Thats hot. I wish I knew a girl who knew her way around a dirigible. You guys are lucky.

[stinkbug]

Just finished -
"Becoming Justice Blackmun" by Linda Greenhouse

Amazing biography of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, with rich insights into the inner workings of the Court. (Blackmun authored Roe v. Wade, then defended it for the better part of a generation.)

We rail about Republican-this and Democrat-that, when a huge chunk of our path is charted by the Supreme Court, under the radar. Way under.

Cool tidbit: Blackmun and Warren Burger were elementary school chums from small-town Minnesota. Ended up on The Court together. Ended up bitter enemies. What are the odds...

Another cool tidbit: Roe v. Wade was initially taken up to protect medical doctors from prosecution. Nothing at all about women's rights. Women's Rights wasn't even a consideration in the beginning.

[Ceedog]

Trying to make heads or tails of the Oregon sport fishing regulations. Should send me off to sleep for the rest of this week. Maybe by next year I can figure out how, when, where, and with what type of bait/lure I can possibly go catch an clipped adipose chinook.

[Dano]

Just finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Awesome book about post apocolyptic America and the love between a father and son that helps them navigate the gnarliness..

So that led me to crack open Blood Meridian....so far I am totally enthralled with his description of 1850's Texas and Mexico and the utter brutality of the region.

[Jacob]

A collection of Japanese death poems.

[Foul Pete]

Just finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Awesome book about post apocolyptic America and the love between a father and son that helps them navigate the gnarliness..

So that led me to crack open Blood Meridian....so far I am totally enthralled with his description of 1850's Texas and Mexico and the utter brutality of the region.

both are stunning novels but what a contrast in style. 'blood meridian' is way denser and involved. one of my all time favs...

[Dano]

both are stunning novels but what a contrast in style. 'blood meridian' is way denser and involved. one of my all time favs...

Yeah - I am just pouring through it. Awesome read so far. You are right though... The Road is so much more skeletal, but somehow the imagery of the brutality and devastation remains..

[gills]

both are stunning novels but what a contrast in style. 'blood meridian' is way denser and involved. one of my all time favs...

Yeah - I am just pouring through it. Awesome read so far. You are right though... The Road is so much more skeletal, but somehow the imagery of the brutality and devastation remains..

I'm half way through 'The Road' right now and Blood Meridian is one of my favorites of all time--- beauty and brutality incarnate.

Funny thing about 'The Road'. Oprah picked it as her book club book which is causing a lot of alarm for the mid life house wives that are reading it for book groups that often frequent my book shop-- best comment yet, "It was like the whole world had ended, like money wouldn't even help you-- that really scared me." Another note--- it one the pulitizer prize, and when a book wins a prize, the publisher sticks a sticker on it denoting that it won in order to market the book--- well, apparantly, Oprah's little sticker denoting that it's in her club is more powerful a selling point than winning the Pulitizer as we're yet to get a shipment of 'pulitizer sticker' marked copies. I do, however, diligently peal off all the oprah stickers as copies come in. I just can't bear that Oprah likes Cormac. I hate that as a matter of fact. Any woman who can find value in both "the Road" and "The Secret" needs to fall off a cliff.

[Wilbur Kookmeyer]

Formulating the Universe with MS Excel

[Stiffler]

Licensed to Kill, Hired Guns in the War on Terror by Robert Young Pelton

Even better than I anticipated.

Somebody wanna do a book swap with The Road?

[Betty]

Thats on my table for my next read Stiff, how you like it?

Right now Im on 'A long way gone: memoirs of a boy soldier' by Ishmael Beah.

This is how wars are fought now: by children, traumatized, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become the soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.

What does war look like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But it is rare to find a first-person account from someone who endured this hell and survived.

In A LONG WAY GONE: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a powerfully gripping story: At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. At sixteen, he was removed from fighting by UNICEF, and through the help of the staff at his rehabilitation center, he learned how to forgive himself, to regain his humanity, and, finally, to heal.

This is an extraordinary and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.

[gills]

Stiffy:

Send my your address, I'll send you a copy of The Road. You'll dig it. Doc, you should read it too, I think you'll like it quite a bit. Have to say, this is the first piece of fiction I've read in five years where I'm going to be heartbroken when its done. Methinks this is Cormac's best work yet, mainly because of the precision of the text---- I might in the end like Blood Meridian better, but the sheer prowess of the seamless technique in the book is unreal. Never before have I been riveted in a book when someone has lost a lighter.