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Thread: What book are you currently reading?

  1. #21
    Wow, lot's of reader's here! I'm impressed with the selection fo reading materials presented.

    I just finished In the Time of Butterflies, am currently reading The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, and have next in line The Bookseller of Kabul and The Places In Between (recommended on this forum a while back).

    Cachehiker: A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of my all time favorite books! John Irving is probably my favorite author, well, one of them anyway, he is a brilliant character writer, for sure.
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. ~ Frost

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  3. #22
    Quote Originally Posted by TreeHugger
    A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of my all time favorite books! John Irving is probably my favorite author, well, one of them anyway, he is a brilliant character writer, for sure.
    It will likely end up one of mine as well. I will finish it tonight. This is the first book of his that I've read and it was recommended to me by the guy I'm always talking books with at the bar on Friday nights. He is a voracious consumer of literature and I frustrate the hell out of him with my 15 pages per day pace and tendency to insert career oriented stuff into the queue. He mentioned Irving's Dickensian characters and I had to move it up. Dickens has always been one of my faves.

    My other faves, or at least books that have had a dramatic and/or beneficial effect on my life and/or outlook, include:

    "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens
    "Mother Night" and "God Bless You Mr. Rosewater" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
    "The Bonfire of the Vanities" by Tom Wolfe
    "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S. Thompson
    "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess
    "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert Heinlein
    "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig
    "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
    "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" by Victor Hugo
    "1984" by George Orwell
    "His Master's Voice" and "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem
    "The Return of the Native" by Thomas Hardy
    "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte
    "The Lord of the Rings" by J. R. R. Tolkein
    "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand
    "Death is a Lonely Business" by Ray Bradbury

    I could go on and on and on ...

    What about you?

    Oh, and I shouldn't leave out:

    "How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food" by Mark Bittman

    Impressing a woman with my culinary endeavors in the kitchen has always been a major turn on.
    seen all good people turn their heads each day so satisfied I'm on my way...

  4. #23
    I just read "No David" to my five year old. Its a favorite. Thankfully I am done with the "Goodnight Moon" era of my life.
    Life is Good

  5. #24
    I've read all Krakaeur's books, I like his writing style. I also read Anatoli Boukreev's account of the Everest disater.

    I normally read about a book a week, usually military history, sometimes other history and biographies. I seldom read fiction.

    For the last four month's I've read nothing but football books, currently sitting on my nightstand are:

    "Single Wing Offense With the Spinning Fullback" by John F. Aldrich
    "Winning Single Wing Football" by Ken Keuffel
    "Gap Air Mirror Defense" by John T. Reed
    "Coaching the Spread Option Offense" by Bobby Granger
    "Defending The Spread Offense" by John Rice

    I'm guessing most of you would find my reading selection boring....


  6. #25
    Carbon Footprint Donor JP's Avatar
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    Not a big conventional sports fan

  7. #26
    Quote Originally Posted by TreeHugger
    I actually thought Boukreev's book was quiet different than Into Thin Air as well. It had a different perspective. I thought Krakauer was rather accusatory, particularly toward Boukreev and enjoyed reading the other side. I also read Climbing High by Lene Gammelgard, she was on Scott Fisher's team, I love this book and keep it on my nightstand to revisit periodically. It's a woman's perspective, written in a journal type format from her actual writings and thoughts at the time. Very very good. And inspiring.
    I thought the Gammelgard book wasn't great. Maybe not even "good" IMHO.

    By someone's count, the '96 Everest events has spawned something like 27 or more books, as of a couple of years ago.

    Read both the Krakauer and DeWalt (Boukreev) books and both were interesting reads. Krakauer's being a great read. This differences have been debated to death, and, its interesting to follow in the subsequent re-issues of at least Krakauer's book, he's updated the conversations between he, DeWalt and Boukreev with some of that info. In then end, they agreed to disagree. Not on what happened, but, why and how, methinks. Accusatory? Yeah. Questioned Boukreev's role as a guide, surely.

    Am currently and slowly finishing Walter Bonatti's the Mountains of My Life. Makes me feel like a wuss, for sure.

    In the way of that has been a recent purchase of Alan Kearney's Patagonia which is chock full of interesting history on the peaks down there.

    -Brian in SLC

  8. #27
    Just starting Janet Browne's 2-volume biography of Darwin.

    Just finished The Grapes of Wrath. That's the best fiction I've read in a long time--set in the 30's, but amazingly relevant. And every year around Halloween I read some Victorian ghost stories. This year I decided on something slightly more modern and went with Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

  9. #28
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian in SLC
    I thought the Gammelgard book wasn't great. Maybe not even "good" IMHO.
    I also read both the Beck Weathers and Gammelgard books on the Everest deal.... Yawn.... not really worth it unless you are really into sniffing every fart on the expedition.


  10. #29
    Quote Originally Posted by jb
    Just finished The Grapes of Wrath. ... best fiction I've read in a long time
    I found The Grapes of Wrath to be terribly tedious, not to the degree of Moby Dick but hard to stick with. Page after page after page of poor souls drawing maps in the sand with sticks. That was a long time ago though, and my tastes have changed a lot since then. Steinbeck experimented a lot and I've enjoyed everything of his that I've read. Maybe I should give it a second chance someday.

    I've also read Krakauer's book Into Thin Air. It was a relatively quick and entertaining book and I really appreciated the break from some of the heavy stuff I had been reading. Unfortunately, I never really considered it the sort of epic tale that gets put on the "special" shelf in the living room.

    So many books ...
    So little time !!!
    seen all good people turn their heads each day so satisfied I'm on my way...

  11. #30
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian in SLC
    Quote Originally Posted by TreeHugger
    I actually thought Boukreev's book was quiet different than Into Thin Air as well. It had a different perspective. I thought Krakauer was rather accusatory, particularly toward Boukreev and enjoyed reading the other side. I also read Climbing High by Lene Gammelgard, she was on Scott Fisher's team, I love this book and keep it on my nightstand to revisit periodically. It's a woman's perspective, written in a journal type format from her actual writings and thoughts at the time. Very very good. And inspiring.
    I thought the Gammelgard book wasn't great. Maybe not even "good" IMHO.


    -Brian in SLC
    Maybe it's my female connection. :-) Here are a few quotes of hers from the book, I really like her messages:

    1. "I am grateful for the invaluable lessons I have learned from the mountains."
    2. "You must pursue your goal and have the courage to persevere even in the face of failure."
    3. "Learn from failure, grow through losses."
    4. "To grow up is to learn that one's mature life consists of a sum of personal choices and decisions."
    5. "It is up to me, and me alone, to decide how I will spend my life."
    6. "The well balanced person strives not only for the goal but lives fully in the flow of life."

    Pretty cool stuff, I think. :-)
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. ~ Frost

  12. #31
    Just finished "Night Fall" by Nelson DeMille today. He is one of my favorite authors because of the wise cracking dialogue that I appreciate. This one is a good choice for government conspiracy fans. Earlier this week, I read "Up In Honey's Room" by Elmore Leonard, another favorite for the same reason. Many of his books have been made into movies, such as "Get Shorty".
    Stan

    Check out my photo gallery at www.pbase.com/sparker1

  13. #32
    Quote Originally Posted by cachehiker
    Quote Originally Posted by TreeHugger
    A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of my all time favorite books! John Irving is probably my favorite author, well, one of them anyway, he is a brilliant character writer, for sure.
    It will likely end up one of mine as well. I will finish it tonight. This is the first book of his that I've read and it was recommended to me by the guy I'm always talking books with at the bar on Friday nights. He is a voracious consumer of literature and I frustrate the hell out of him with my 15 pages per day pace and tendency to insert career oriented stuff into the queue. He mentioned Irving's Dickensian characters and I had to move it up. Dickens has always been one of my faves.

    My other faves, or at least books that have had a dramatic and/or beneficial effect on my life and/or outlook, include:

    "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens
    "Mother Night" and "God Bless You Mr. Rosewater" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
    "The Bonfire of the Vanities" by Tom Wolfe
    "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S. Thompson
    "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess
    "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert Heinlein
    "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig
    "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
    "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" by Victor Hugo
    "1984" by George Orwell
    "His Master's Voice" and "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem
    "The Return of the Native" by Thomas Hardy
    "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte
    "The Lord of the Rings" by J. R. R. Tolkein
    "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand
    "Death is a Lonely Business" by Ray Bradbury

    I could go on and on and on ...

    What about you?

    Oh, and I shouldn't leave out:

    "How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food" by Mark Bittman

    Impressing a woman with my culinary endeavors in the kitchen has always been a major turn on.
    (You're right, women are impressed (and turned on) by culinary endeavors) :-)

    OK, since you asked, here are some of my all time faves:

    Lolita - Nabokov
    Last Exit to Brooklyn - Hubert Selby
    Book - Robert Gruden
    Life of Pi - Yann Martel
    3 Cups of Tea - Greg Mortenson
    Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
    The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
    Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen
    Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
    Anything by E Annie Proulx
    Anything by John Irving ( I particularly loved one of his newer ones called Until I Find You)

    Of course, there's more, but that's it off my head for now. I cant wait to try some of the recommendations I"ve read about here!
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. ~ Frost

  14. #33
    Terry Goodkind - Confessor

    Just finshed "The Orc King" by R.A. Salvatore - Wow it was amazing but the ending bummed me out. But the Dark Elf series (by R.A. Salvatore) is probably the best set of books I've ever read. I believe the series is about 15 books long and I would highly recommend it to anyone who like fantasy novels.

  15. #34

  16. #35
    Just finished the Dark Tower series by Stephen King.

    Am currently reading Kate Elliott's Crown of Starts - on Volume 2.

    I am going to read Ken Follet's "Pillars of the Earth", and that was before Oprah picked it - next. I can't seem to read enough.

    I prefer Fiction - Non Fiction bores me to death.
    Biking, Hiking, and Fishing are life. Everything else is just fluff.

  17. #36
    We Were Soldiers Once, and Young by Hal Moore and Joseph Galloway.

  18. #37
    Here is an amazing book I read recently. Wow, so powerful and thought provoking... how does one live through this and come out "normal", or even "ok"?

    A Long Way Gone, Memoir of a Boy Soldier. By Ishmael Beah.

    I got to hear him talk here in SLC. I just remember looking at him and listening to him thinking "what those eyes have seen...." It was hard to imagine. whew.
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. ~ Frost

  19. #38
    Well, I just finished this book: Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10
    by Marcus Luttrell. If you want non-fiction that's gripping read this. I couldn't put the darned thing down.

  20. #39
    On my night stand from top to bottom:

    On Writing by Stephen King
    Zion Canyoneering by Tom Jones
    All the Men are Sleeping by D. R. MacDonald
    November issue of Ophra

    I love Steinbeck, Longfellow, and Wordsworth.

    I read Janet Evanovitch as soon as it becomes avaliable. Great reading on the freeway and at work.

    I'm about to try to read Carrie - trying to get adventrous.

  21. #40
    Two wheels from Hell live2ride's Avatar
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    Just picked up two new books, don't laugh at one of them ( I saw it on opera and am a nut about health so I thought I would give it a chance)

    You on a diet, by Mehmet OZ.

    Into the wild, Krakaeur



    Two wheels are better than four, keep the rubber side down.

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