What book are you reading?

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Exit-Utopia-Post-Soviet-Broadsides/dp/1594032645

Jean-François Revel, 1924-2006
France's defender of freedom.
MAY 15, 2006
http://www.weeklystandard.com/jean-franois-revel-1924-2006/article/13333

I highly recommend this book to all my libertarian and conservative friends. It is one of the greatest works of RW polemics I have ever had the pleasure of reading.

 

I'm reading Critical Lives which is about the live of Guy Debord. I used to believe that it was only me that believed progress and consumerism destroys anything of real value in community relations and structure until I read the Society of The Spectacle several years ago.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-War-Europes-Tragedy/dp/0674036344

 

I am TRYING to read War and Peace. My intuition has been telling me for 50 years not to start it, and I should have listened. You talk about a slow, dull slog! I can read maybe 5 pages a day, after which I feel like Saint Sebastian on his last day.

Tell me this "masterpiece" gets better or I am going to pick up a good modern thriller.

 

LOL - I had the same problem with Melville's Moby Dick - I plowed a short way into that tedious novel and had to bail.

My wife has a copy of War and Peace in our library but I never took the plunge. After reading your comments I don't think I ever will...

 

Dracula by Bram Stoker

(hardback)...
I started reading it in March or April, then I put it down and started where I left off recently.

Let's see, in my head I picture

as Mina Harker


as Lucy Westenra


As Dr. Seward


As Professor Van Helsing

and at first

but also

on my latest read, for some reason
.. As Jonathan Harker.


...
's
Renfield (to me).

and...


&
(Not even a Vampire)!

Are Count Dracula, to me.

So when I'm reading it, it's these guys.


I'm also reading it going, Piccadilly, yup! Know it, Liverpool Street, yup, know it, Amsterdam, yup, know it Haarlam - Heard of it (thank you Van Helsing)!
but when they took the Underground from Liverpool Street (to somewhere, forget where, probably knew it) I was like...
Hang on, this story is old. . .
- but then of course, so is the London Underground and tbh, we still do that today!

Dracula was written by an Irishman living and working in London called Bram Stoker.
In London, he was inspired by his friends from Transylvania (The Romanian's who keep Nigel Farage up at night today *citation needed) and their folklore.

 

In between reading Wilson's The Thirty Years War, I've begun re-reading the 150th Anniversary Illustrated Edition of Henry David Thoreau's classic Walden:



Walden: 150th Anniversary Illustrated Edition of the American Classic

As if one could improve this enormously important and influential book, this edition includes some very nice photography of the area where Thoreau conducted his famous experiment in the woods. While the photos are recent, they still give you a glimpse of what Thoreau saw with his own eyes many years ago.

 

Bravo! Transcendentalist Thoreau wrote many fine books that have exerted a great influence to this day:

https://www.google.com/search?q=tho.....69i57j0l5.7464j0j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

 

For many years (so many I cannot quite remember the actual number) I have promised myself that I would read it (via audio book as my eyes could never take that kind of strain). But my reading list is sooooooooooooo long that I just have not had the time to take that plunge.

Ah, mebe some day ...

 

I can relate. I should have bought stock in Amazon years ago so I could get some of my money back.

I've gotta build some more book shelves, too. Our library is literally overflowing (I married a journalist who has quite a collection of books, herself).

My biggest problem right now is that I've been slogging through books that are about as long as War and Peace. The book on the Thirty Years War that I'm currently reading is 1000 pages and I've got a 700 page history of India waiting in the wings. Since I only have time to read late in the evening it can take me months to finish a long book, especially if the material is dense. I think it took me something like 3 months to read Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (650 pages).

Nevertheless, I would like to read some Tolstoy one day. I saw a film version of Anna Karenina starring Keira Knightly and Jude Law that I really liked, so I can imagine the novel is even better. I'd also like to read some more Dostoevsky, too. I own a copy of Demons (aka The Possessed) and that's a fantastic novel.

 

@Talon -


Re Dostoyevskii - I read many of his works such as

Poor Folk
The Idiot
The Possessed
Crime & Punishment
Notes From Underground
Brothers Karamazov
The Double
The Adolescent

and a few of his short stories.

I've read some of Tolstoy as well:

Death of Ivan Ilyich
Kreutzer Sonata
The Kingdom of God Is Within You (a MUST read for all professing Christians such as the right wing Pharisees in this forum) What Is To Be Done?
Prisoner of the Causasus





Of all the 19th century Russian classics, I consider Turgenev's Fathers & Sons to be the greatest writing of all. There are still quite a few of those classics that I have not read. Guess I won't ever get to read them.


By the way, many of these classics exerted a great influence upon Soviet era writings. I strongly recommend the following website for good examples of these works: http://www.sovlit.net/

 

Have you read "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy? I just read it in February. Amazing. Really stuck with me.

 

Speaking of spirituality and Christianity, I was surprised at how spiritual Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago is - you don't see any of that in David Lean's film. For example, there's the scene where Yuri's uncle Nikolai, a former priest who isn't even in the film, is discussing philosophy with his friend Ivan:

"What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels. Now what is history? Its beginning is that of the systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death may eventually be overcome. This why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves. Now, you can't advance in this direction without a certain upsurge of spirit. You can't make such discoveries without spiritual equipment, and for this, everything necessary has been given us in the Gospels. What is it? Firstly, the love of one's neighbor - the supreme form of living energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And secondly, the two concepts which are the main part of the make-up of modern man - without them he is inconceivable - the ideas of free personality and of life regarded as sacrifice. Mind you, this is all new. There was no history in this sense in the classical world. There you had the blood and beastliness and cruelty and pock-marked Caligulas untouched by the suspicion that any man who enslaves others is inevitably second-rate. There you had the boastful and dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns. It was not until after the coming of Christ that time and man could breathe freely. It was not until after Him that men began to live in their posterity and ceased to die in ditches like dogs - instead they died at home, in history, at the height of the work they devoted to the conquest of death, being themselves dedicated to this aim..."

Like I said, you don't see anything like that in the film, and there's a lot more of it in the novel. I mentioned over in the Classic Movie Buffs thread that you could make another film of Doctor Zhivago that is truer to the book and it would be an entirely different movie than the one David Lean made (although it would be impossible to improve upon Freddie Young's Academy Award winning cinematography). There are characters and scenes in the book that aren't in the film and there are scenes in the film that aren't in the novel. Furthermore, Yuri's love affairs aren't central to the novel as they are in the film. The differences between the novel and film are really striking.

 

^ great post, Talon

 

I just finished Half a King by Joe Abercrombie. Really great read. In-depth characters and nice twists and turns. Not the usual story arc and not over-the-top fantasy with hundreds of names to remember and 15 chapters of backstory. Will check out the sequels soon.

 

Just finishing up City on Fire by Garth Risk Halberg. Also reading The Leftovers by Tom Perotta.

I want to get to The Alienist before TNT's adaptation next year. Also will read Ready Player One before Spielberg's version set to drop, I think, at the end of March.

 

So cross word puzzles count? Thats all I read right now. Last good book I read was The Perfect Storm.

 

I am currently on CD 45 of a 47 CD set of William L. Shirer's 'Rise and Fall of the Third Reich'. Truly one of best books I've ever read (or, well at least listened too).

 

I've finished Dracula by Bram Stoker this week...
I can now say that I've read Dracula..

My current read was one I unearthed at my Grandmother's House...
It's a 1965 edition of 1984 by George Orwell.


I remember seeing a poster in Croydon's Waterstones (chain book store) quite recently that sparked my interest about the edition I unearthed.
This very cover.
http://www.englandathome.com/product/book-jacket-poster-nineteen-eighty-four/

Just a coincidence.

I like that the one I'm reading was published when 1984 was still set in the future, but, good find, interesting read nonetheless.

 

Having finished Lance deHaven-Smith's "Conspiracy Theory in America" 2 months ago, I'm now halfway through Sharyl Attkisson's "Smear".

 

https://www.amazon.com/Spanish-Civi...-1&keywords=The+Spanish+Civil+War+hugh+thomas

 

Why do men go to war?

 

https://www.amazon.com/Early-Church-Penguin-History-v/dp/0140231994

The Early Church

No one writes English like the English! Elegant, clear, precise, informative.

 

To kill each other.