Ok for the high brow crowd what books you are reading

[big nasty kcnut]

I'm reading The New American Revolution by tammy bruce. She is a great thinker and funny.

[OnTheWarpath15]

Just picked up the following:

102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

Approximately 1500 pages should keep me busy over winter break.

['Hamas' Jenkins]

Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified.

I already know all the cocktail party stuff about relativity, but this delves deeper into philosophical issues of space and time.

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by OnTheWarpath58

Just picked up the following:

102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

Approximately 1500 pages should keep me busy over winter break.

Excellent book.

[keg in kc]

Originally Posted by irishjayhawk

Let me know if it's worth reading. Especially if it's on par with Duma Key.


I'm reading World War Z. Gotta find time to read a good chunk of it.

Probably going to finish it in the next couple of hours. I've really enjoyed it. His character-building skills never fail to amaze me.

I'm about to start Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy.

[OnTheWarpath15]

Originally Posted by patteeu

Excellent book.

Yeah, I didn't realize until after the fact that I picked up 2 Pulizer winners, TLT being one of them.

[NewChief]

Reading The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Really, really enjoying it so far. The premise sounds a little juvenile or simplistic, but it's really good.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...103670_pf.html

Below is a good review of the book, but it does offer some details on the book's premise. Not anything out of the ordinary for a book, but if you like to be totally surprised, don't read it. I'll just say that the book involves a brilliant high school senior mildly obsessed with a book series called the Fillory novels (somewhat analagous to the Narnia books). He's about to head off to an Ivy league school when he finds out that magic is real and he's been accepted into a college of magic. It then turns into a sort of grown up Harry Potter series.

Spoiler!

Post-Harry Potter, The Spell Is Cast
By Keith Donohue
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, August 1, 2009

THE MAGICIANS

By Lev Grossman

Viking. 402 pp. $26.95

Once upon a time, about 12 years ago, Harry Potter was born. At the height of the series's popularity, every other person on the subway, it seemed, had a big fat volume in the lap. Despite this summer's film version and two movie sequels to come, the last of the original novels has been written and the hero's fate is sealed within an epilogue. And in the darkest hours, one hears the sad refrain: Where have you gone, Harry Potter? For those who miss him still, an alternative is available in Lev Grossman's new novel.

"The Magicians" is about a boy who grows up. Quentin Coldwater is his rather Anglo name, and he lives in Brooklyn, where he is a senior in high school. He is a bright young thing, kind of a nerd, and his secret from childhood is a passionate attachment to a series of fantasy novels set in the mythical land of Fillory. As the story opens, he is on his way to an interview for a spot at Princeton. For most of us that's fantasy enough, but Quentin ends up at the far more exclusive Brakebills College of Magic, situated behind an invisible boundary somewhere on the shores of the Hudson River.

At Brakebills he is introduced to welters, a kind of chess that is the distant, yawning cousin of Hogwarts's Quidditch. He learns all about the arcane magical arts and how to cast spells. A fairly spectacular semester abroad in Antarctica is one of the book's great set pieces. And Quentin learns all about college girls. And booze. And ennui, love, sex and death. His sidekicks and rivals are versions of Harry's friends. They are brash and profane, and they smoke and do all sorts of very adult things that would get one kicked out of Hogwarts.

The first half of the novel concludes with a clever take on the problem faced by many graduates: what to do with the rest of one's life. "No one would come right out and say it, but the worldwide magical ecology was suffering from a serious imbalance: too many magicians, not enough monsters."

The monsters arrive in earnest in the second half. First among them are privileged alumni leading a dissolute life in Manhattan. Dragged into the party life by a couple of louche friends, Quentin experiences an adult moral quandary, and at precisely this moment of his deepest regret he discovers that his childhood fantasy has come true. Fillory is real.

And there in Fillory, Grossman is at his most exuberant and inventive. Situated just beyond the puzzle of the Neitherlands, the magical kingdom in the dark woods is populated with walking trees with clock faces and a talking bear who loves peach schnapps, a beautiful naiad with dire warnings, and giant hares and ferrets wielding swords and quarterstaffs. The battles -- failures and triumphs -- are dark and dangerous.

On a quest to save Fillory from an oppressive spell, Quentin and his fellow magicians move through an expressionistic landscape. One of the most remarkable passages in the novel follows the hero as he makes a solitary journey of self-discovery and learns the bitter truth about the real people who first discovered the way into an imaginary land. At the heart of "The Magicians" is the betrayal of true friendships, where the reader is left as lonely as the hero, and the novel swells to its heartbreaking ending.

Grossman, Time magazine's book critic and a frequent writer on technology, clearly has read his Potter and much more. While this story invariably echoes a whole body of romantic coming-of-age tales, Grossman's American variation is fresh and compelling. Like a jazz musician, he riffs on Potter and Narnia, but makes it his own.

Vladimir Nabokov once observed, "The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales." "The Magicians" is a great fairy tale, written for grown-ups but appealing to our most basic desires for stories to bring about some re-enchantment with the world, where monsters lurk but where a young man with a little magic may prevail.

[Slainte]

IN-N-OUT BURGER: A behind-the-counter look at the fast-food chain that breaks all the rules By Stacy Perman.

[cdcox]

Over the Christmas break, I'm hoping to find time to read the final installment of the Underworld USA trillogy, "Blood's a Rover" by James Ellroy.

Kind of surprised no one else has mentioned it in this thread.

[Jenson71]

B. Dalton is going out of business, so everything was 40% off. For $35, I picked up

Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt - H.W. Brands

The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Lawrence Wright

The Odyssey - Homer, translated by Robert bundle of sticksles

Poetics - Aristotle, translated by Malcolm Heath

The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. DuBois

[DaKCMan AP]

Finished The China Study and now quickly reading Grisham's Ford County before picking out a more substantial read.

[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by 'Hamas' Jenkins

Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified.

I already know all the cocktail party stuff about relativity, but this delves deeper into philosophical issues of space and time.

Is it readable for a dumbass like me?

I know a passing bit about science, and a good bit of psychology from an organizational behavior perspective.
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[patteeu]

Has anyone read Tad William's Otherland series? I'm halfway through the first one (City of Golden Shadow) and it's pretty good cyber sci fi so far.

[Amnorix]

Currently "Chancellorsville" by Stephen Sears. Just finished Landscape Turned Red, about Antietam, by the same author.

[Frosty]

Originally Posted by patteeu

Has anyone read Tad William's Otherland series? I'm halfway through the first one (City of Golden Shadow) and it's pretty good cyber sci fi so far.

I have. However, it has been a while and I don't remember a lot of it. I do remember it was pretty good but very long.

[JohninGpt]