Current book(s) you're reading?

[Loren]

My First Summer in the Sierra, by John Muir

Exceptionally beautiful and enthralling. Has inspired me to read all of his writings.

 

[Aeolienne]

The Many Faces of Science: An introduction to scientists, values and society by Leslie Stevenson & Henry Byerly

 

[Trophonius]

I'm reading

The Essential Guide to overcome Avoidant Personality Disorder, by Martin Kantor.
The Art of Fiction, by David Lodge
The Sign of Four, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The last one is a re-read for a monthly book club, this month we discuss A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, the first two Sherlock Holmes Story.

The Art of Fiction is a compilation of a series of articles. D. Lodge published in a newspaper I believe, where he shows an excerpt from a book and uses to illustrate a kind of literary technique.

The one on AvPD is, so far, not a good book. It's an overview on AvPD and therapy techniques used to treat it, while the title makes it seem a self-help book, or one that could be useful to the non-professional in mental health, is nothing of the sort except by a tiny chapter on self-help at the end of the book. Additionally, the author has highly questionable practices, such as pushing a pathology on a person who gave a book of his a bad review, and using friends and even his own daughter as a case example.

 

[Sean Emgee]

The Descent Of Man by Grayson Perry

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

The code book, by Simon Singh

 

[Kalinychta]

“Celeste Ng’s enthralling dissection of suburbia meets Shirley Jackson’s creeping dread in this propulsive literary noir, when a sudden tragedy exposes the depths of deception and damage in a Long Island suburb—pitting neighbor against neighbor and putting one family in terrible danger.”

 

[Streetwise]

Felix the railway cat by Kate Moore about the rescue cat Felix who lives at Huddersfield Railway Station

 

[Trophonius]

Yesterday I finished The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole — the very first gothic story.

Now I'm reading The Blackwell Companion to American Gothic.

 

[Aeolienne]

Sacred Economics: Money, gift & society in the age of transition by Charles Eisenstein

 

[Trophonius]

I finished The Mysterious Mother, a gothic play by Horace Walpole. Now I'm reading Introduction to the Structural Analysis of the Narrative, by Roland Barthes.

 

[OkRad]

Back onto Virgil (Aeneid). Everytime I read this, I am again blown totally out of the water with his descriptions of nature. Stunning. If Homer is the Big Bang, Virgil is one of the most exquisite diamonds formed.

 

[watersprite]

Name of the Rose, Greek Buddha Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia, Running Wild A Quest For Healing Actoss 7 Continents, The Body Keeps The Score Brain Mind and Body in the Healing Of Trauma, (re-reading) Zorba The Greek, Mathieu Ricard’s The Skill of Happiness

 

[_eri_bellehumeur]

I'm reading a few currently:
Cleopatra (from the Royal Diaries Series- a childhood favourite), and Spectrum Women

 

[OkRad]

Robert Sapolsky's Behave.

 

[Mary Terry]

Memorials of a Southern Planter by Susan Dabney Smedes written 20 years after the American Civil War. She was the daughter of a wealthy, slave owner cotton planter whose 10000+ acre plantation is about 10 miles from my home. The book factually describes their way of life before, during and after the war.

She states in her Preface that she wrote the book for her family's descendants who "will hear much of the wickedness of slavery and of slave-owners. I wish them to learn of a good master: of one who cared for his servants affectionately and yet with a firm hand, when there was need, and with a full sense of his responsibility.... [T]hese memorials may throw a kindly light on Southern masters for others, as well as for my father's descendants. Should this be so, I shall not regret laying bare much that is private and sacred."

So, in other words, she was trying to justify slavery and defend her father's honor 20 years after the war ended.

I grew up with descendants of that family and their slaves, as well as descendants of prominent Mississippians mentioned in the book. I know many of the locations she describes such as local mineral wells where people went to "take the waters" so it is kind of personal to me. Living history.

Margaret Mitchell plagiarized the heck out of the book about 50 years later when she wrote Gone with the Wind. The parallels between the two books are strong.

 

[Aeolienne]

The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites by Elizabeth Prettejohn

 

[Trophonius]

I finished La Dame aux Camélias. It's such a beautiful and moving story. Manly tears were shed.
Now I will be reading Benito Cereno, and Bartleby the Scrivener, both by Hermann Melville.

 

[Jorg]

 

[watersprite]

Sacred Economics: Money, gift & society in the age of transition by Charles Eisenstein

I’m curious as to whether this
is satisfying or not.

 

[Aeolienne]

The Royal Horticultural Society Treasury of Garden Writing selected by Charles Elliott