Reading anything?

[BTM]

fAUSTO - I have several 100 year old books for sale on EBay right now . .  . sellername indianasmith1, and they're cheap . . .  Kipling, Byron, Churchill among others.  Picked em up in an estate sale last weekend.

Dude, where are you getting all these arrows heads?  Did you loot a burial ground or something?

[Cthulhu]

I've just read Animal farm.
Good.

Good.

[InformationGeek]

I'm not currently reading, but I will be in the future.  I'm back in school and my English teacher gave us the list of things we will be reading.  Here's what I'll be reading in the future:

The Tell Tale Heart, The Birds, The Lottery, Frankstein, 1984, Lord of the Flies, and Brave New World.

[Rev. Powell]

I'm not currently reading, but I will be in the future.  I'm back in school and my English teacher gave us the list of things we will be reading.  Here's what I'll be reading in the future:

The Tell Tale Heart, The Birds, The Lottery, Frankstein, 1984, Lord of the Flies, and Brave New World.

Man, you lucked out.  You could have got a lot worse assignments than those.  No Jane Austen is always a good thing. 

[InformationGeek]

I just finished reading the Lottery in class and I really have to ask, "What happened?"  I am just confused at how everything was told and explained.  From what I could gather, it seemed like it was an early verison of the Wicker Man.

[Doggett]

I'm not currently reading, but I will be in the future.  I'm back in school and my English teacher gave us the list of things we will be reading.  Here's what I'll be reading in the future:

The Tell Tale Heart, The Birds, The Lottery, Frankstein, 1984, Lord of the Flies, and Brave New World.

Man, you lucked out.  You could have got a lot worse assignments than those.  No Jane Austen is always a good thing. 

When I was in high school, I had to read 1984, Of Mice and Men, Mayor of Casterbridge, Macbeth, Midsomer Nights Dream and A Christmas Carol.


All pointless because I was asleep when the exams took place*. So I did all that reading for nothing. In fact, as I never took the English Lit exam...every English Lit lesson I ever had was pointless !
Don't worry, I did turn up for me English Lan exams !



*There was an error printed on the exam timetable I was given. I wasn't deliberately trying to avoid exams. I'm still a little bitter about it...

[AndyC]

Over four years of high school and five English courses, I can barely remember all the books I was required to read. The ones that stood out were Lord of the Flies, In the Heat of the Night, The Ox-Bow Incident, A Tale of Two Cities, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, as well as an assortment of Greek myths and several Shakespeare plays, the most enjoyable of which was Twelfth Night, although Julius Caesar and "the Scottish play" were both good as well. That's just what was enjoyable enough to remember. I have to say, there is something nice about so many people all having a few books in common, thanks to high school English. My friends and I used to quote lines out of Lord of the Flies for years afterward. I could probably call any of them up today and say "sucks to your assmar" in my best approximation of an upper-class British accent, and they'd know exactly what it meant. Probably get all nostalgic too.

[InformationGeek]

Since you are talking about those stories, my class is currently on the short story unit.  We have just read Jumping Frogs (By Mark Twain, can't remember the full story) and The Lady or The Tiger.

[Saucerman]

I just started David J. Skal's The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror and my mind has already been blown. 

[BoyScoutKevin]

Two mysteries.

The first is "The Crack of the Lens" by Steve Hockensmith.

The 4th in the "Holmes on the Range" series.

The others being . . .
"Holmes on the Range"
"On the Wrong Track"
"Black Dove"

Two brothers, ex-cowboys, who pattern themselives on Holmes and Watson, roam the Old West, just  before the turn of the century, solving crimes.

In this one, they have to solve the mystery of who's killing the town's prostitutes. Is it another prostitute, the county sheriff, the preacher, the newspaper editor, the photographer, the town marshal, the pimp, or a stranger?

The second is "The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu" by Michael Stanley (i.e. Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip.)

The second in the "A Detective Kubu Mystery" series.

The other being . . .
"A Carrion Death"

What sets this one apart from most mysteries is its location. The mystery series takes places in Botswana.

In this one, police detective Kubu, or "Hippo," as he is also known for his great size, has to solve a string of murders at a bush camp in northern Botswana.

And, actually, both mysteries are better than I make them out to be.

[Leah]

Cirque Du Freak
Batman: No Man's Land 1-5 and Hush

[BTM]

Just got done reading Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson.  It's a VERY interesting account of the 1900 hurricane that really did a number on Galveston, Texas. We're talking about four thousand or so dead.  The book really gets into details on the lives of the people in the town and what happened.  A very good read!

Larson also co-wrote the novel Devil in the White City, another very good historical read.

[schmendrik]

Since you are talking about those stories, my class is currently on the short story unit.  We have just read Jumping Frogs (By Mark Twain, can't remember the full story) and The Lady or The Tiger.

Why do we make kids read stuff in high school and college which is too advanced for them? I know, I know, it's good for us. Probably sets up good habits.

Every once in awhile I feel guilty about my junk reading and get something "good for me", some classic which I either didn't read when I was supposed to or somehow never had assigned in school. So I recently got a book of Hawthorne out of the library and read Scarlet Letter and House of the Seven Gables. Also an early novel that Hawthorne disowned and nobody knew it was his till after his death.

I admit it was slow going at first, but I started getting into it, and then started realizing that Hawthorne actually had a sense of humor and inserted a number of cynical little comments in there. I was actually chuckling out loud sometimes. Plus I got this whole fascinating perspective on the culture of circa-1850 that I'd never paid attention to first time around.

However, I've tried Dickens in the same spirit and never managed to finish one.

Twain is great. Very modern. I've read a bunch of his stuff. It always surprises me how modern he sounds, when contemporaries writing at the same time sound like they're about 1000 years older.

Anyway, right now I'm back to the junk food. Got a bunch of sci-fi out of the library and I'm currently reading The Alien Years, an invasion story by Robert Silverberg.

[Psycho Circus]

[AndyC]

Still reading IT. Holy smokes, this is a long book, but it hasn't failed to hold my interest. And the end is finally in sight.

Of course, to be fair, I've been really busy lately and haven't had much time for reading.