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.

[blaise]

I've also recently been reading plays- I realize some people don't really enjoy that, but for some pieces the chances of you actually ever seeing it produced are slim.
Woyzeck, by Georg Buchner is outstanding, as is Six Characters in Search of an Author, by Luigi Pirandello.

Two of my favorite novels are baseball themed books: You Know Me Al, by Ring Lardner is hilarious, and The Southpaw, By Mark Harris is a great baseball book. If you're a baseball fan, and haven't read those you should definitely check them out.

[BigOlChiefsfan]

Working on a couple self help books about diabetes and heart disease as well as Gene Wolfe's latest "Pirate Freedom".

[irishjayhawk]

I just read I Am Legend. Great book, loved it and the reshoots their doing for the movie I hope don't impact the fitting ending, which apparently is by the book.

I am now into The Golden Compass. Liking it thus far.

[Jilly]

Originally Posted by NewPhin

I absolutely love her. It's one of the few places where my and my wife's literary tastes intersect. The Poisonwood Bible definitely appeals to my ambitious fiction tastes in that's it's a BIG work with lots of ideas and lots of nerve driving it. That being said, I think the Prodigal Summer is probably my favorite work of hers. It just spoke to me like crazy.

My wife finished her memoir about eating locally a while back, but I haven't picked it up yet.

Oddly enough she also writes for an environmental magazine about organic growing.... I need to pick up prodigal summer, I haven't read that one yet.

[mlyonsd]

I just got done with Bob Dole's biography, One Soldier's Story.

He's quite a guy. For some reason I thought he had a prosthetic arm but that isn't the case. The nerves were damaged from a shell burst in Italy, to the point the arm is practically useless, although he can move it some.

The book was pretty dry though, his sense of humor is just about as lame in writing, much like it is here on CP.

[Easy 6]

Originally Posted by mlyonsd

I just got done with Bob Dole's biography, One Soldier's Story.

He's quite a guy. For some reason I thought he had a prosthetic arm but that isn't the case. The nerves were damaged from a shell burst in Italy, to the point the arm is practically useless, although he can move it some.

The book was pretty dry though, his sense of humor is just about as lame in writing, much like it is here on CP.

Bob Dole is 'Ol Skool, he doesnt cotton to a bunch of soft or funny talk.

[KC Jones]

I recently finished Giants in the Earth and I heartily recommend it. I can't stop thinking about the ending.

It's an old novel (1920's I think) originally written in Norwegian about some Norwegian pioneer families settling the Dakota territory in the late 19th Century.

I just started yet another Pratchett book, "Monstrous Regiment".

[Adept Havelock]

Originally Posted by KC Jones

I just started yet another Pratchett book, "Monstrous Regiment".

I love Pratchett. Probably the best satirist writing today. That one is a bit different, but fun.

[chief52]

Just starting " Devil in the White City " by Erik Larson. Anyone read it? Turn of the century in Chicago.

[EyePod]

I know that fantasy isn't typically considered "high brow reading," but George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series is AMAZING. I'd recommend it to anyone.

[Fairplay]

Originally Posted by chief52

Just starting " Devil in the White City " by Erik Larson. Anyone read it? Turn of the century in Chicago.

I think frazod read it. I think its mentioned in this thread a ways back.

[Frazod]

Originally Posted by chief52

Just starting " Devil in the White City " by Erik Larson. Anyone read it? Turn of the century in Chicago.

I read it earlier in the year. Good read - interesting hybrid mix of crime story with history of the fair.

[KC Jones]

Originally Posted by EyePod

I know that fantasy isn't typically considered "high brow reading," but George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series is AMAZING. I'd recommend it to anyone.

I started that series and yes, it is amazingly well written. Especially the first book. Halfway through the second I set it down and I've never gone back. Not that it says much about the book, I do that with books and series I really like sometimes. At some point I plan to go back and start over.

[NewChief]

Salon does their annual book awards. The two I'm really dying to read are the Denis Johnson book and the new Michael Chabon:

http://www.salon.com/books/awards/20...oks/print.html
Fiction

"The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Díaz

The title character of Díaz' first novel is an obese Dominican-American geek living in New Jersey, with a baleful, dying mother, a devoted punkette sister and a heart full of thwarted romance. With grace and brio, Díaz conjures a world that encompasses everything from streetwise Spanglish to Dungeons and Dragons, campus politics to immigrant family saga. And guess what? It all fits perfectly, because, as it turns out, there is no better analogy for Rafael Trujillo, the fearsome real-life Dominican dictator, than Tolkien's Sauron -- no matter how far Díaz extends the metaphor, it keeps on working; "What's more sci-fi than Santo Domingo?" Oscar asks. And what fantasy could be more heartbreaking than the yearning of an oddball "ghetto nerd" (or anyone else for that matter) for perfect love?

"Sacred Games" by Vikram Chandra"

At the beginning of Chandra's vast, electrifying second novel, Mumbai's most notorious gangster dies in a strange, cube-shaped bunker after a shootout with the police; the rest of the book tells us why. The man in charge of unearthing the truth is a courtly, middle-aged Sikh police detective named Sartaj Singh, who follows the trail through a dirty, maddening, glorious city that rivals Dickens' London in ruthlessness and vitality. Mumbai may be violent and trashy, drunk on Bollywood dreams and choking on its own smog, but it's the real hero of this story; Chandra clearly loves it to distraction even when it horrifies him. The villain is not a criminal, really, but fanaticism in all its forms, and the battle is literally between life and death, between those who understand that this world is necessarily chaotic, flawed and painful and those whose craving for order, calm and purity make them so very, very dangerous.

"Then We Came to the End" by Joshua Ferris

"We, too, thought it would never end," say a group of ad agency employees in late-20th-century Chicago, speaking of the Internet- fueled economic boom. Joshua Ferris, a former adman himself, has written his first novel entirely in the first-person plural, capturing the way a bunch of mismatched strangers, when thrown together in an office, can learn to function as a single, organic entity. Or not. "Then We Came to the End" is a deeper, sharper, sadder version of that popular Thursday-night sitcom, filled with recognizable types -- the office intellectual staying late to work on his novel, the conspiracy theorist, the woman who knows all the gossip, the guy everybody distrusts, the talented boss they all regard with slightly awestruck incomprehension. There are intrigues over Aeron chairs and paranoia once the layoffs begin, as well as intimations of tragedy throughout. Against the odds, and half the time against the will of the people involved, a single, organic entity does emerge, but what to do with it? Ferris has taken one of the unsung experiences of modern life and delicately exposed its complicated, conflicted heart.

"Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson

The Vietnam novel to end all Vietnam novels, Denis Johnson's celebrated (and misunderstood) epic takes all the genre's clichés, from the dangerously naive CIA officer to the feral tunnel rats to the cigar-chomping colonel who thinks he can win this thing, and runs them through a blender. The result recasts the war not as a tale of American hubris and Cold War skullduggery gone wrong, not even as a tragedy belonging to a specific place or time, but as a titanic clash between two fundamentally different ways of understanding the universe and how it works. That collision plays out through shattering battle scenes and sweaty afternoons in tin-shack bars, through the after-dinner philosophizing of deluded spies and the calculations of villagers just trying to make it to the next planting season. Johnson's magnificent vision is less tragic than cosmic, the story of history repeating itself not because we don't understand, but repeating itself whether we understand it or not.

"The Yiddish Policeman's Union" by Michael Chabon

During World War II, the Roosevelt administration briefly considered resettling Europe's Jewish refugees in Alaska. Michael Chabon's soulful alternate-history novel dreams up what the world might have looked like if that scheme had played out. In a bustling, if well-bundled, Yiddish-speaking community in Sitka, a burnt-out homicide cop named Meyer Landsman investigates the death of a junkie chess-player who might have been the promised Messiah, and gets on the bad side of the district's Hassidim-run organized crime syndicate. The novel offers lots of genre fun -- snappy dialogue, action and suspense -- yet it's all seamlessly married to a searching consideration of Jewish identity. What would it mean to be a Jew in a world where the Holocaust never happened and the state of Israel didn't exist? Are human beings the products of history, or does our essence transcend it? These are weighty questions for a book that's so entertaining, but Chabon's themes never overload his frame. Like the very best dancers and magicians, he makes it look easy.

Non-Fiction

"The Father of All Things" by Tom Bissell

The two books about Vietnam on our list this year prompt a question: When is a war truly over? Can a soldier ever really "get out"? Tom Bissell's engrossing memoir about his relationship to his father, a Vietnam veteran, offers a sobering illustration of how a war's legacy can extend across generations. Tom Bissell wasn't born until after his father returned from Southeast Asia, yet in his mind the collapse of South Vietnam and the crumbling of his parents' marriage are "endlessly connected." At the heart of "The Father of All Things" is a journey the two men took together to Vietnam, 40 years after Bissell's father last set foot in that country. By turns hilarious, grief-stricken, perplexed and enlightening, Bissell's account of that trip offers a new understanding of the war, one designed for all those Americans who, though too young to remember it, still live in its shadow.

"Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations" by Georgina Howell

Born into Victorian wealth and propriety in 1860s Britain, Gertrude Bell abandoned convention in her 30s to become a mountain climber and explorer, crisscrossing the Arabian desert on her own in the years before World War I, excavating archaeological sites, befriending chieftains and sheiks and writing best-selling books about her adventures. Her political expertise and influence in the region were so prized by Winston Churchill that after the war she became, with T.E. Lawrence, the chief architect of modern Iraq. Unfortunately, her personal life was less successful; ill-fated love affairs and family tragedies took their toll. A woman of great physical courage, panache and intelligence (she spoke six languages, wrote and translated poetry, drew maps for the British Army and photographed ancient ruins), Bell is a dream subject for any biographer, and Howell turns her story into a ripping yarn, complete with detailed accounts of Bell's early, life-and-death exploits while mountaineering in the Alps.

"Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA" by Tim Weiner

Before Sept. 11, most Americans (not to mention foreign nationals) would probably have described the Central Intelligence Agency as a puppet-master operation with eyes everywhere, skillfully manipulating world events from behind the scenes. Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, and the revelations of faulty intelligence contributing to the buildup to the Iraq war, we've caught a glimpse of a different but equally troubling CIA. Tim Weiner's fascinating and masterfully reported "Legacy of Ashes" locks this new image in place. It reveals an agency chronically and often disastrously short on solid intelligence, and all too prone to embarking on half-baked covert operations with little concern for the long-term consequences (or even the short-term ones). Weiner, working from impeccable sources, documents that the CIA's recent bumblings represent more than just a temporary difficulty adjusting to the post-Cold War world; incompetence has been a major problem since the agency's inception. The implications of this story are scary (America is in desperate need of a decent overseas intelligence service), but the telling is never less than compulsively readable.

"The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved" by Judith Freeman

Raymond Chandler -- the supreme master of hard-boiled prose and founder of the bruised-romantic school of noir heroes -- is also the poet laureate of the seedy side of Los Angeles. Judith Freeman, a novelist fascinated by the intersection between Chandler's detective fiction and his real life, became curious about the writer's unusual marriage to a woman almost 20 years his senior. Material on Cissy Chandler's life is scarce (her husband burned all her papers after her death), so Freeman decided to exercise her fiction-writer's skills on the clues that remain: a long inventory Cissy kept of Ray's collection of glass animals, a remark he made about his wife's habit of doing housework in the nude, a handful of photographs and poems, etc. Most evocative are the excursions Freeman makes to houses and apartments the Chandlers rented throughout the city (the couple moved a lot), extended wanderings through a city that seems both lost and timeless. Her version of L.A. is as moodily unforgettable as Chandler's, a fitting tribute to the "new kind of American loneliness" born there and the man who made it his muse.

"The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman

"Imaginative" is not a word customarily applied to environmental reporting, but Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us" deserves that praise. Rather than trying to dent our apathy with dire images of melting glaciers and megahurricanes, he takes the opposite approach, describing how quickly and utterly the planet would be changed if the human race simply vanished. Within days, New York's subway tunnels would flood, leading to the corrosion of steel supports and the eventual collapse of the streets: Lexington Avenue "becomes a river." Suburban subdivisions fare no better, shattered by frozen pipes and devoured by mold and termites. Our cats would do just fine, but the dogs ... not so much (too dependent on humanity and vulnerable to larger predators). The earth's air and water would soon sweeten without us around to poison it, but our plastic crap, all those bottles and bags, will be sticking around until some microbe figures out how to turn them into lunch. For some reason, this doomsday scenario is more thrilling than depressing, perhaps because it beguiles us into doing what often seems beyond our power -- picturing a much healthier planet -- and considering a less drastic way to get there.

[the Talking Can]

Originally Posted by NewPhin

Salon does their annual book awards. The two I'm really dying to read are the Denis Johnson book and the new Michael Chabon:

http://www.salon.com/books/awards/20...oks/print.html
Fiction



Non-Fiction

Jesus' Son is one of my favorite books, and I also like Johnson's poetry...his other fiction hasn't moved me the same way...no point probably in reading harsh reviews, but here is one if you're curious:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/vietnam