What have you read lately?
 

I just finished "Live From Baghdad" by Robert Wiener. :) Phenomenal book about a CNN crew that was the only news crew who had the balls to stay in Baghdad during the Gulf War. I highly recommend it! :nod:

What you have you read?

I just finished Leon Uris' book "Trinity." Absolutely amazing...definitely a page turner. It's the story about the life of a Catholic Irish man living in Northern Ireland and his fight to free the Irish from English rule. It was very touching and also very funny at times. It's very long, but so great. I just bought the continuation of "Trinity" called "Redemption."

I'm reading a great book called "Not Like Us" by Richard Pells. It basically describes the influence American culture has has on Europe since WWII and their efforts to resist it.

I finished Wicked last week, I thought it was excellent!!

I also finished "A Little Princess" for my Children's Literature class...

Now for fun I'm reading a book by some British author whose name escapes me...but the book is called "One Hit Wonder" So far it's pretty interesting.

Live From Baghdad (the movie was great. I just finished Joe Eszterhas's Hollywood Animal. It was actually pretty good-surprise ending.

I rented the movie earlier, I'll watch it tonight. :)

Hollywood Animal is on my list! I've heard it's fantastic. ;)

Joe Eszterhas' other book "American Rhapsody" is fantastic as well. Interesting take on the whole Clinton/Monica thing while being stuck in the Hollywood loop.

I just finished Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for AP English 4. And I didn't understand it at all. I see something in the coin toss as a theme and I still don't understand existentialism but the fact that Timon says it on the commercial for The Lion King 1 1/2 makes me crack up. "Don't go getting all existential on me..." even though I have no real idea what it means.

Other than that, I've been meaning to delve into a book on the Montessori method and I just checked out a book called Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli from the library. And I have two books on autism I need to dig into sometime soon.

And I still say I don't get to read enough. :/

Film criticism, yeah I know I'm a geek, but then again, grad school does that to a person----I just got finished reading "Men, Women and Chainsaws" by Carol Clover. It deals with ways of reading gender in the modern horror film, excellent book, I highly recommend it for fans of horror/slasher films.

My latest read was 'The Devil In The White City" which is about the Chicago World's Fair and a serial killer who "worked" the city at the time. Not as grisly as it sounds. Fascinating stuff about the architecture and the creative and political process of basically constructing an entire city in 8 months. Plus, it is an interesting commentary on the evolution of US culture from country to city living.

Also read "Blood Canticle". An excellent return to form for Anne Rice. I even read her bad books, but this was a nice wrap up to her witch and vampire stories.

Another was "Life Of Pi". Remarkable. A boy and a tiger stranded at sea in a lifeboat. Sounds ridiculous, but it was a profound tale about life and our perceptions. Great book.

I am reading "Black Friday" by James Patterson.

I also just finished "The Small Rain" by Madeline L'Engle (the same woman that wrote "A Wrinkle In Time")

I read "Devil in the White City" a few months ago. I got it because I originally read a book about the killer-HH Holmes-that was rather sensationlized and seemed to take some liberties vis-a-vis the known facts of the case. "Devil..." is more scholarly. The description of the architecture of 1893 Columbian Exposition was interesting as well. The other book was called "Depraved" (I think, and if not, it is by the author who wrote the serial killer book called "Depraved"). It did not really reveal too much about the Expo.

I was less intrigued by the serial killer's spree than by the building he designed & built--it was a large block of store fronts on the ground floor with bizarre murder rooms of different sorts on the other floors. Ghoulish, I know, but fascinating to read about. At the time, I was studying "psychoanalytic approaches to art" and was interested in Holmes's structure because it containing awkward angles, claustrophobic spaces, strangely configured corridors, secret rooms and passages, etc. Since most serial killers don't have the money, ambition, desire, or ability to build such a structure, I thought the details (few though they were) about Holmes's so-called "castle" were extremely interesting from a psychological standpoint. Architecture is a realm of creativity in which one rarely sees a serious criminal take part, and clearly it is psychologically revealing.

Otherwise, I have been catching up on James Patterson novels I have not read, as well as some fun Freud texts.

Just finished Carrie Fisher's "The Best Awful There Is"--it's okay, I don't know if I'd exactly recommend it though. Now reading Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them--very funny and much better researched than I had any idea it would be.

"Blow Fly"
 

I just finished "Blow Fly" by Patricia Cornwell. It's a Kay Scarpetta novel, and I couldn't put it down. It started off kind of slow, but once it got going it had me hooked.

Before that one I read "The Waiting Child: How the Faith and Love of one Orphan Saved the Life of Another." It's about a little girl who was adopted from China at age 3 or 4 and would not let her new parents forget "her" baby boy in China, a boy she was "responsible" for at the orphanage. My daughter is also Chinese and this book should come with a box of tissues. Very heartwarming. :)

Carol

My friend played Rosencrantz in a college performance of the show. It was good, both the play and the performance. Mostly, it's about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern being trapped in their fate. They find the note that says they are going to be executed, yet they do nothing about it because they feel there's nothing they can do about it. R and G seem to be two of the most fascinating Shakespeare characters (personally I don't get why) because of the fact that they don't do anything. They just seem to have no control over their "existence," hence "existentialism." That's what I took away from the play anyway, your teacher may disagree with me. I of course wanted to learn more about existentialism, so I took Intro to Existentialism as my philosophy gen ed class, but I don't think I learned a thing in that class. It was a night class and we had a grad student as a teacher...he was terrible. He gave us readings that were like, upper level philosophy-major readings (Nietzsche and stuff like that). The class never even nailed together a definition for existentialism, yet he just kept going on about all this philosophy nonsense that no one understood (except the obvious few philosophy majors or those weirdos who just "get it"). Sorry, I keep getting into these side tangents in my posts.

I don't read on my own I think because I just have to do it too much for classes. I finished Julius Caesar and Richard III for Intro to Shakespeare and am now on Othello with four more plays to go for the semester. We're reading snippets from "Reality Squared," a book about television. "Blood, Sacrifice, and the Nation" we're reading for Rhetoric and Culture, plus various articles, plus some book on Theories of Pop Culture for my Intro to Pop Culture class (believe it or not, it counts toward my English minor). Yeah, way too much reading...it's getting pretty annoying.