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What are you currently reading? v2

inflorescence said:
I read 'The Fault in our stars' last week by John Green, it was a present. I don't think a book has ever quite effected me so emotionally before. I must have cried through more than half of it..which doesn't really sell it but it is really rather beautiful and sad and bittersweet, may sound a bit dramatic but I genuinely think it may have fundamentally changed how I view this precious and often ill considered life and the time we have here..l-Link.

I rarely re-read books but last read 'Middlesex' by Jeffrey Eugenidesmany many years ago and decided it was worth revisiting.Had no idea it won a pulitzer prize winning novel till just now-link.
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I may have a look at this book , Inflo. Books like this interest me.

Evey
 
Recently finished Hannu Rajaniemi's quantum thief trilogy. If you like really hard sci-fi you'll love it - he doesn't make it easy to follow his concepts. (using an online glossary helped (there isn't one in the books)). Some of the most mindblowing sf i've read though - mostly about post-human 'singularity' type society - the technologies and concepts are brilliant and the world finely crafted; on top of that there's a sort of crime thriller plot full of literary references to Maurice Leblanc's Arsene Lupin detective novels (not that i'd heard of these before). Really worth it if you like scifi (but it's quite hard (not hard to read, just hard to keep up with his concepts - the glossary helps)

Some non-fiction i read recently: Politics and Paranoia - anthology of writings by Robin Ramsay of Lobster magazine (and a column in Fortean Times). Excellent articles on various conspiracies - but a damn sight less flaky than usual conspiracy theory fare. A few articles on usual conspiracy topics (eg JFK, ufology), but focuses more on certain british topics: labour party history (and the influence brought to bear to push it away from the left); the rise of new labour; the 'Wilson Plots' called the 'british watergate' - this is his specialist subject as it was his tiny magazine from hull that scooped that story (although ignored by the main media until Spycatcher was released, backing him up). The articles sometimes repeat themselves, but it's well worth a read - can be dipped into nicely as a 'toilet book'. (just looked and it's not available anymore in amazon (except for £800) - wooo, the man really doesn't want you to read it!!! (lots of the articles are online anyway - just google robin ramsay).

Also read Complexity: a Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell. This was a fascinating 'popular science' book covering the latest thinking in the new(ish) field of complexity (chaos theory, emergence etc) [Shambles: i reckon you'd like this]. Not heavy on maths, but doen't simplify too much - i just find this subject fascinating; like how ants colonies can organise themselves into complex societies with no central coordination (just by individual ants following a small set of chemical rules, complex behaviours 'emerge' - like finding optimum food distribution, defence, even farming). She spends quite a lot of time on computer programming (cellular automatons), but gives a good overview of various aspects of this wide field. The most interesting to me was the stuff from Stuart Kaufman about genetics and how complex DNA is - rather than a passive strip of computer code as it's often thought of, it's actually a complex interacting network, with the 95% of it that used to be thought of as 'junk DNA' being a major part. It's almost like previous thought on genetics has had another dimension added to it; as she suggests in the book, there's a reluctance for 'gene science' as a whole to emphasise how big a shift this is - in no small part because how much biotech companies have built their share prices on the promise of 'a gene for this or a gene for that' type thinking.
 
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Well, I love Studio Ghibli & just stumbled across this book:

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Studio Ghibli: The Films of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata

I know virtually nothing about this book but it seems to have good reviews from the few there are & I'm sure I'm in for a treat... has sections on pre-ghibli, ghibli & other projects. It's only 160 pages long but the pages look packed with text... think I'll start reading this in a second. :)
 
read this over the holiday some time ago:
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an autobiography of sorts, non-ficticious, light but very entertaining read, about a physics graduate who goes on to become a magician
 
As ever - academic papers and Bluelight.
This life as a drugged up scientist is rather a nice one, I must admit. :D
 
Agreed, am mostly going thru a backlog of papers, also a brilliant textbook by G. Strang on wavelets, a collection of Greg Egan short stories, nibbling at Thomas Kuhn's the structure of scientific revolutions. Want to start with a re-read of Curtis Roads' microsound soon.
 
Lincoln Townley - The Hunger (http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Hunger-Lincoln-Townley/dp/1471135411)

Blurb:
The Hunger has one language and it is the language of excess. Lincoln gave The Hunger everything he had and still it wanted more. It wanted his life. Hidden from the London tourists lies a demi-monde of decadence where a man can party to excess for as long as his wallet allows. Lincoln was in charge of sales and marketing for a famous men's club in Soho, connecting wealthy punters with hopeful girls. He worked his way through an endless supply of beautiful young women, breaking beds and smashing toilets along the way. After he left the club he held private sex parties for city bankers. But even that was not enough to satisfy The Hunger. Lincoln wanted more coke and more women. And he devoured them. Driven to drink more, snort more, fight more and f*ck more, Lincoln pushed his body to the point of collapse and then he pushed it further. When you're possessed by The Hunger, is there ever a way out? This raw, brutal and honest account of one man's addiction to excess is a tale of terrifying madness.

Brilliant read if you like the kind of Wolf Of Wall Street/celeb autobiography tales of rich people taking shit loads of drugs and having a wild time. Lots of this book in particular I found pretty relatable as well. Haven't quite finished it but it's been extremely entertaining so far, can't believe the guy is still alive with some of the stuff he got up to tbh.
 
Under The Skin - Michel Faber

This is a warped and superbly descriptive, adrenalin engaging read. Easy to read at bedtime but nerveless enthralling entertainment. I'll give it 2 nights and I'll have devoured it!

NSFW:
Isserley always drove straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her.

So begins Michel Faber's first novel: a lone female scouts the Scottish Highlands in search of well-proportioned men and the reader is given to expect the unfolding of some latter-day psychosexual drama. But commonplace expectation is no guide for this strange and deeply unsettling book; small details at first, then more major clues, suggest that something deeply bizarre is afoot. What are the reason's for Isserley's extensive surgical scarring, her thick glasses (which are just glass), her excruciating backache? Who are the solitary few who work on the farm where her cottage is located? And why are they all nervous about the arrival of someone called Amlis Vess?

The ensuing narrative is one of such cumulative, compelling strangeness that it almost defies description--the one thing that can be said with certainty is that Under The Skin is unlike anything else you have ever read. The result is a narrative of enormous imaginative and emotional coherence from a writer whose control of his medium is nearly flawless and who applies the rules of psychological realism to a fictional world that is terrifying and unearthly to the point that the reader's identification with Isserley becomes one of absolute sympathy.
 
a friend left this at my house and i picked it up:

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looked like mediocre airport fantasy but it's pretty good. it's first of a trilogy so now i have to get the other two :)

alasdair
 
Just finished A History of the World Since 9/11 by Dominic Streatfeild- an excellent read powered through it in about two days. Before that was a bill bryson book One summer in america. Very easy reading, im a fan of his writing style in general you can learn some of the more abstract areas of history from him and he is pretty funny at times.
 
A book of Glasgow history told through miscellany. A fuck of a lot of people were deported for stealing live ducks back in the day.
 
^ Sure that's quite interesting. I got my Mum a P&J history of "the granite mile" (i.e. Union Street), which is full of photographs & is rather intriguing. Amazing to see the changes over the past 100 years or more.

alasdairm said:
a friend left this at my house and i picked it up:



looked like mediocre airport fantasy but it's pretty good. it's first of a trilogy so now i have to get the other two :)

alasdair
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Ah, intriguing... I am fan of the Wheel of Time Books by Robert Jordan, who unfortunately got cancer before he could finish writing them himself. I believe it is Brandon Sanderson who finished the series off. He met with Jordan prior to his death to talk over stuff, so I've no doubt it fit in quite well but I've yet to get that far.

I've been halfway through book 9 for a long time now. I was thinking of picking it up again soon though.
 
Kota said:
A book of Glasgow history told through miscellany. A fuck of a lot of people were deported for stealing live ducks back in the day.
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Sounds like my kinda thing. Can you tell us the title/author?

Also: if you're into the history of Glasgow, I can thoroughly recommend the Hidden Glasgow forums. I've just recently discovered the site and it's taken over my life, it's so damn interesting!

Chatative said:
^ Sure that's quite interesting. I got my Mum a P&J history of "the granite mile" (i.e. Union Street), which is full of photographs & is rather intriguing. Amazing to see the changes over the past 100 years or more.
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The P & J, heh. I know it well. Union Street is quite a bizarre piece of construction. It's hard to imagine Union Bridge looking like a normal bridge, without the shops.

I'm currently reading:

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All about the Cambridge Spies, i.e. Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Sir Roger Hollis (former head of MI5). It's dry as toast but I quite often like that.
 
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