I figured Id start a new thread for this, rather than us all tacking posts onto the LOTR thread......

Currently reading Cows by Matthew Stokoe.....Pretty vile stuff, but great fun....

A currently reading post, that's quite impossible. I believe it's something like this:

Guinea Pigs - Vaculik (very very very cool)
War & Peace - Tolstoj (lousily translated in Dutch)
The Tartarian Helmet (a very very boring comic book, in the Spike and Susy series -rem. Bpns avatar)
The rise and fall of great empires - Paul Kennedy (a master piece that is taking me too long, about a year now)
The Choice for Europe - Moravscik (a sensible book about Europe and thus very rare in its kind)
something by Hrabal that book is quite lost at the moment it was something with trains...
and this list could continue for a rather long time if my sister wasn't jumping on her chair -she wants to say some things too):regan:

Still Gogol... but I'm through with the Qu'ran.
Though I'm very close to finishing Dead Souls. The second part of it was completed by the author several times, but every time it was destroyed by him. There's one manuscript remaining which misses words occasionally and here and there it has unreadable hand writing. It's a great book though.

Yeah reading books.
At this moment I'm reading Gates of Fire by Elwin M Chamberlain in a Dutch translation in a Playboy Roman row of books. It is a disappointing story with a worse plot. The book before that was "A Rude awakening" By Brian Aldiss also in a Dutch translation in The row of Playboy Humor. And guess what. I didn't laugh once.
Further more I'm collecting the total biography of P.G Woodhouse in dutch and english. Had read over 45 books from the guy now and starting to read Mulliner Nights in English. Chapter 5 is called "The voice from the past" and actually that is what it is. Living in a time with no television, hardly telephone, no internet, no mobile phone etc. I love to read that kind a stuff.
In English now because of the humor that could not be translated and the use of "old fashioned words and understandings of the past.
I'm also trying to read and understand Big Blues, The unmaking of the IBM. A pretty old managementbook helping to understand the meaning of business in different economical settings.
Sometimes I open my (american)book of Multivariate Data Analysis. It was hard to learn it in a short time and for me it is some sort of knowledge that will fade out if you don't use it, and I won't allow that to happen. Apart from that I'm reading the English translation of the Philips taperecorder book to get my hands on the specific knowledge in English,
It helps me to speak about my favorite pasttime and also I need this to fully understand the servicemanuals that mostly are written in English.
And I open more regularely the PHP5 book from Baby Pee (bbp) To help her to get more content. in the site. Preparing a quiz now but the change of forms did't work quite well due to the redirection behind a action statement , with te help of the book I solved that and again some PHP scriptwriting is learned.

Ahhh. All of these posts make me wish i could read. One day, scallopino. One day...*looks to the sunset with quiet determination*

I don't have time to read anything else other than what i'm required to for skoowel. It's so much!

So i can't participate in this topic!

What do you read for school? I studied history for a year, and noticed you're reading some stuff I had to read as well...

Currently I'm reading for school:
some 6 books on Alban Berg, particularly the fragments on his Sonata op 1.

For history? It's currently the Vietnam War this semester. Pages and pages and pages of documents each week, plus a related main text (a couple of chapters each week), plus additional readings from other works on special topics (like JFK, or Lyndon Johnson, or MacNamara, or Ho Chi Minh, etc.)

And for politics: either the whole or main parts of the masterpiece/s by the thinker in question (Rousseau, Marx, Foucalt etc.), plus commentary and analysis ON those guys by other people.

It's all very interesting though.

My twentieth-century history teacher had the annoying habit of talking about unrelated topics. We had 6 classes in which we were to discuss the 1914-1991 period, but when we got to the last class we still had to talk about WW2.
We had 2 text books on the period, one by Joll (The Ascendency of Europe) and The Age of Extremes of which I can't come up with the author's name right now.

Some of the things I read:

Quote:

Originally posted by BBP My twentieth-century history teacher had the annoying habit of talking about unrelated topics. We had 6 classes in which we were to discuss the 1914-1991 period, but when we got to the last class we still had to talk about WW2. We had 2 text books on the period, one by Joll (The Ascendency of Europe) and Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes.

I think I stop with the playboy book, it is sh..

@ sis "Huntington" dear BBP, you gave me two of them. He wrote really well about everything before 1950 but after then it became an annoying mixture with his own ideas
(I'm especially annoyed by his sceptiscism towards postmodernism, either be neutral or shut up, or stop being a historian. :mad

@ scallopino, hah that's almost philosophy that polical course, if you have to read primary texts.
Foucault now that's someone I know something about. What did you read? Discipline & Punish? That is much refuted by historians for its style, i believe.

Actually Zaz we haven't got to Foucalt yet in the course. I was reading Discipline and Punish before semester started for my own enjoyment and was up to Panopticism when I had to postpone finishing it.

We've just done Marx, who is great to read. Next is a section on what Romanticism was, especially in contrast with the Enlightenment (which we've already done alongside Rousseau), then Weber, Nietszche, Foucalt and Habermas.

And yeah, it is very philosophical in a sense. I enjoy that kind of Politics because it's sort of a middle ground to (i) what people usually think politics subjects are (you know History of the Australian Labour Party, Feminism and Dissent in the 20th Century etc.), and (ii) straight out Philosophy; the first type i'm not really interested in and the second i would struggle to take seriously.

Finished Cows and the Lincoln Lawyer, by Michael Connelly since I was last here....Both very good reads....
Am now re-reading The Dice Man, by Luke Rhinehart.....An excellent book, anybody else read this? Very recommended indeed....

Quote:

Originally posted by zazkia: ... either be neutral or shut up, or stop being a historian ...

That's a pretty strident view about historians. I can't imagine not having an opinion about history.

Quote:

Originally posted by scallopino: I don't have time to read anything else other than what i'm required to for skoowel ...

As a local, I know what that "skoowel" is about, I wonder if anyone else does?

Quote:

Originally posted by scallopino: ... So i can't participate in this topic!

It is what you're currently reading.

Anyway, hi guys, the official forum getting back on it's feet has been pretty engaging, but I haven't forgotten about this place.

That's good... Thanks for remembering!

Right now, I'm re-reading Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground" because I didn't understand a word from it the first time I read it.