What book are you reading?

[Kanilina]

I'm now re-reading Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey.

Yes! A very good book to re-read!

[Blargoblarg]

I'm now re-reading The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey.

[Pax Nerdvana]

Mars by Ben Bova

[The Grene Knyght]

Love and Other Thought Experiments, Sophie Ward

[Hubub]

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

[The New California Republic]

Opposition in the GDR under Honecker 1971-1985 by Roger Woods.

[The Grene Knyght]

Blindsight, Peter Watts

[The Macabees]

Thomas S. Burns, Rome and the Barbarians, 100 B.C. - A.D. 400

[Disgraces]

Los miserables

[Elwher]

J N Chaney - Sentenced To War

[The Grene Knyght]

This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

[Pax Nerdvana]

Return to Marsby Ben Bova

[The Grene Knyght]

Troubled Times: the National Question in Ireland, Peter Hadden

[Spooky Candle]

the three body problem by liu cixin. it is both fascinating and deeply boring

[Astolfotopia]

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith

At Chapter 15 currently
It's rather boring but i do enjoy it

[The Macabees]

the three body problem by liu cixin. it is both fascinating and deeply boring

3-4 years after reading it for the first time, I realize it's a metaphor for the cold war between China and the US.

[Roegerland]

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

[Blargoblarg]

I'm now re-reading Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey.

[Free Las Pinas]

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

[The Grene Knyght]

Echopraxia, Peter Watts

[Sincluda]

Epic of Gilgamesh
It's a translation of an ancient super-poem. The introduction is very dry and long, but a good read for history and mythology buffs.

[Elwher]

Epic of Gilgamesh
It's a translation of an ancient super-poem. The introduction is very dry and long, but a good read for history and mythology buffs.

Whose translation? Some of them are much better than others.

[The Champions League]

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

[Sincluda]

Epic of Gilgamesh
It's a translation of an ancient super-poem. The introduction is very dry and long, but a good read for history and mythology buffs.

Whose translation? Some of them are much better than others.

This one was translated by Andrew George

[Postauthoritarian America]

Not a book, the last two contributions of Joseph Mitchell to The New Yorker, "Joe Gould's Secret" parts 1 and 2, Mitchell's hail and farewell to published writing. Now somehow I had thought Mitchell had spent like the last half of his "career" going in to work every day and coming home every afternoon, producing nothing and getting paid. I had spun this out to his staying through the Tina Brown era when in fact he was 85 when he wrote his last original published words and died at 87 of lung cancer that had metastasized. His last editor was William Shawn, who was famous for giving unproductive writers office space, salaries and masthead credit. So instead of being a workplace hero who died with the secret to getting paid for doing nothing, Mitchell was just in the right place at the right time when he decided to call it quits.

I ran these down after reading about an Italian hospital worker in his 60s who never showed up to work for 15 years but continued to collect a salary. I've got less than 4 years to go until retirement and was looking for some tips. It turns out the secret is to work in a country where goldbricking is fantastacally simple -- the story included a passage about a security guard who lived in the building he was supposedly working in and often turned up in his briefs to clock in before returning to bed -- threaten your supervisor with violence when she is going to report you, wait a short time for her to retire and get a series of supervisors who are too feckless to pursue the matter any further. Not having any of those advantages it seems I'm just going to have to tough it out until 2025.

Anyway it was a little break in my regular reading noted above, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which is hilarious and profound by turns and often both at once, and Benoit M. Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature, which mostly takes place at some distance above my algebraist's head but has passages in it about condensations and crystallizations that echo some of the best of Miller.

Apropos of nothing I just finished watching George W. Bush plugging his latest book of insipid, jejune "portraits" on the Jimmy Kimmel show. Most of them resemble paint-by-numbers if they were executed by someone who was both colorblind and illiterate. "W" had the brass to joke about Obama hunting down and dealing with Osama bin Laden, having somehow convenientely forgotten his own role in using the Saudi terrorist to launch two unnecessary and prolonged wars that nearly brought the US to its knees and may yet still do so as well as his own statements that dealing with him was suddenly the least important thing on his to-do list. How such a blithering idiot, such a profoundly uncurious and unintelligent moron, ever came to be President of the most powerful, prosperous nation on the face of the globe for eight years would be unimaginable if not for the four years of the just-finished Republican administration. That whelp of Ronald Reagan's offal needs to go down on his knees every night and thank whatever gods may be he will go down in history as only the second most awful chief executive in the nation's history.