Reading anything?

[ER]

Just started Bleak House. I have a mixed record of finishing Dickens' books but I'll see how it goes.

[Javakoala]

I'm not reading anything of such grand value.

Recent titles:

"The Cats"  Which would make a great movie that would p**s off PETA

"The Jeweled Dagger"  Modern romantic suspense (well, modern as of 1974) but it looked like a gothic romance

"Night Of The Crabs"  Another that would be a hoot if they filmed it in all of its blood-soaked gory...uh, um, glory

"The Worms"  People turning into giant grub worms.  No, I'm serious.  Really.

[indianasmith]

I am in the middle of Seymour Hersch's THE DARK SIDE OF CAMELOT.  Great read.  Man, the Kennedys are  a slimy clan.

[Rev. Powell]

Finishing up SELECTED WORKS OF EDGAR ALLEN POE.

[Newt]

Finishing up a very thick bio of Picasso and at the same time "The Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys". 

[frank]

"The Tender Bar" by J.R. Moehringer.

Recommended to all barflies...



Looking at you, Rev. ...

[Trevor]

My brother gave me a copy of William Shatner's Up Till Now for my birthday. A very good book and strangely emotional in places.

One thing that did knock me for 6 was the disclosure that Leonard Nimoy was struggling with alcoholism for many years until his wife convinced him to give up drinking, which he did. I've always had a huge amount of respect for Mr Nimoy and now I have even more.  

[BTM]

I just got done reading Stone of Tears by Terry Goodkind, started on the Cirque De Freak series (heard it was pretty good, even for a YA series.)

Also have the book Sacrifices by Andrew Vauches that I'm going to start soon as well.

[BTM]

I'm not reading anything of such grand value.

Recent titles:

"The Cats"  Which would make a great movie that would p**s off PETA

"The Worms"  People turning into giant grub worms.  No, I'm serious.  Really.

Who are those two by?  I couldn't' find them in a search on Amazon.

[ghouck]

I have a few books I'm trying to pick up, but it only shows me how bad my eyesight is getting. I REALLY want to finish "Into the Wild" and a book of Hemmingway shorts, , but every time I do I realize my eyes aren't that good anymore. I've also started "Foley is good" and "The Prince and the Pauper". . I wonder if my medical covers lasik or whatever it's called?

[Sister Grace]

As a hermit, I read quite a bit. When we moved down here, twenty-three cardboard boxes of books were put into storage. Currently I don't have anything on hand to read; which is rare...going to the flea-market today to try and find some decent books. I was so hard up for something to read last night, that I began to read my daughter's Clue series. Now talk about a trip down memory lane... However, this month I've had the pleasures of...

The Sinner-
by Tess Gerritsen. She is a great author and I love her books, however I read this one out of sequence so I didn't feel as if I got the whole picture.

Triptich-
by Karen Slaughter. Great book; I actually felt so bad for some of the characters that I cried during the 'sex in the closet at the juvie center' scene...

The Long Last Call-
by John Skipp. I waited so long to read this book. It was aweful!! The ending was so anti-climatic and p**s$% me off so bad, I actually threw the book after reading the last page.

Pandora Drive-
Tim Waggoner. Awesome book, but some of the scenes were too graphic, even for my tastes... I really liked the premises of this book, if our imaginations could become real. There was a lot creative violence in this book, which was refreshing for a genre that has been so over-done.

[ER]

Wrapped up an English translation of Ildefonso Falcones' Cathedral of the Sea, the story of Spanish Medieval life and the building of Barcelona's famous fourteenth-century church of Santa Maria de la Mar. While many are comparing this novel to The Pillars of the Earth, that's mostly for marketing purposes, as the stories don't share much common ground beyond their mutual church construction. I have mixed feelings about this book, which was sometimes fascinating and at others a slow moving, marginally far-fetched take on the rise of one person from poverty to society's greatest heights, all set during the era of the Black Death and Inquisition. It was descriptive as far as the laws and customs of the era, and some practices of the time are shocking, but it also required a reader to just accept some improbable happenings. I'm glad I read Falcones' work but its sheer size required an investment of about a week to get through. Apparently it was and is a record-setting best seller in Spain but I don't think it's making similar waves here so far.

[ER]

2001's Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival by the Sansum Medical Research Institute's T.S. Wiley, is a scary book about how modern people are suffering the catastrophic health effects of chronic sleep deprivation. Wiley provides copious data that correlates spiking levels of heart disease, cancer, obesity, insanity, even the increasing global phenomenon of male infertility, to the recent decline in the time people spend asleep.

Through most of history, going back tens of thousands of generations, humans have slept nine to twelve hours nightly in patterns ruled by the seasons, and the human body was created/evolved/adjusted to operate in conjunction with this downtime, but in the last three generations as we in the developed nations stay up late to watch TV and read via readily-available artificial lighting, that figure has fallen to about six hours a night, with potentially horrifying results for our blood sugar levels, hormones, brain chemistry and much more.

With our long, light-soaked hours, we have tricked our bodies into thinking we dwell in perpetual summertime, resulting in the body staying in a metabolic mode with enhanced cravings for carbohydrates, the rapid storing (for leaner wintertime) of consumed calories, and a minimizing of the production of vital chemicals. For example, the hormone melatonin, necessary to life itself, is only produced in darkness, and only during specific periods in the human sleep cycle. The average modern person neither sleeps in darkness nor gets enough sleep for the body to cycle through the peaks and valleys of the slumbering process necessary to produce nearly enough melatonin, leaving the majority of us literally starved for this age-retarding, weight-regulating, mood-enhancing hormone.

As Wiley convincingly points out, the results of all this, our sleep deprivation and the demonstrated effects in lab rats, in monkeys, in humans under test conditions, mirror many of our modern health ills.

A frightening book!

[Rev. Powell]

2001's Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival by the Sansum Medical Research Institute's T.S. Wiley, is a scary book about how modern people are suffering the catastrophic health effects of chronic sleep deprivation. Wiley provides copious data that correlates spiking levels of heart disease, cancer, obesity, insanity, even the increasing global phenomenon of male infertility, to the recent decline in the time people spend asleep.

Through most of history, going back tens of thousands of generations, humans have slept nine to twelve hours nightly in patterns ruled by the seasons, and the human body was created/evolved/adjusted to operate in conjunction with this downtime, but in the last three generations as we in the developed nations stay up late to watch TV and read via readily-available artificial lighting, that figure has fallen to about six hours a night, with potentially horrifying results for our blood sugar levels, hormones, brain chemistry and much more.

With our long, light-soaked hours, we have tricked our bodies into thinking we dwell in perpetual summertime, resulting in the body staying in a metabolic mode with enhanced cravings for carbohydrates, the rapid storing (for leaner wintertime) of consumed calories, and a minimizing of the production of vital chemicals. For example, the hormone melatonin, necessary to life itself, is only produced in darkness, and only during specific periods in the human sleep cycle. The average modern person neither sleeps in darkness nor gets enough sleep for the body to cycle through the peaks and valleys of the slumbering process necessary to produce nearly enough melatonin, leaving the majority of us literally starved for this age-retarding, weight-regulating, mood-enhancing hormone.

As Wiley convincingly points out, the results of all this, our sleep deprivation and the demonstrated effects in lab rats, in monkeys, in humans under test conditions, mirror many of our modern health ills.

A frightening book!

That's an interesting theory.  I suspect he's on to something. 

[lester1/2jr]

post-war by Tony Judt.  it is about europe 1945-1989  though it was started in 89 and finished in 99 so there is the beginings of the post commie era as well.