NVR - What are you reading right now? (Fiction or non-fiction)
Posted by Beans and Greens on May 12, 2007 · Member since Apr 2007 · 169 posts
I'm reading 'Raising Vegan Children in a Non-vegan World' by Erin Pavlina.
I'm curious what everyone else has their nose in at the moment! :)
I like it because it's not easy to read; it doesn't just hand you an easy plot. I feel like you have to work to get to know it.
Also, the descriptions of the people are lush and vibrant. I find the characters believable. I love the highly colored realism of the dialog.
Also, I like that it's not a happy story. Nobody does tragedy like Fitzgerald.
"Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect--you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them."
I like it because it's not easy to read; it doesn't just hand you an easy plot. I feel like you have to work to get to know it.
Also, the descriptions of the people are lush and vibrant. I find the characters believable. I love the highly colored realism of the dialog.
Also, I like that it's not a happy story. Nobody does tragedy like Fitzgerald.
Yeah, I can get that..except maybe the "realism of the dialog." Sometimes I have a problem with that in stories. I just think, "people do NOT really talk like that..." ..which I'm fine with, and of course some people probably do...so..yeah.
I did really enjoy it in the beginning, and then I think it became kind of muddled, and lost my interest a bit.
Slave by Mende Nazer. Story of a Sudanese girl kidnapped into slavery in 2000. It was in my box of freebies and since one of my students has to do a paper on women and slavery it will help. If I can just get Her to read it!
As to realism in dialogue...of course a lot depends on when and where you live. Realistic dialogue from NYC in the 1930s sounds odd in the Midwest in the second millenium...but then it would. Not to mention register: who is speaking, to whom, why, what about...I remember reading "The Outsiders" in the early 70s in Iowa and thinking, "OK, teenagers do NOT talk like this" and then meeting a girl from Texas and discovering, hey, yeah--where she comes from, they do.
I'm reading "The Face On Your Plate".....by Jeffrey Mason..........I just started but so far I've read some good information on how factory farms suck up resources and pollute.
I'm reading "The Face On Your Plate".....by Jeffrey Mason..........I just started but so far I've read some good information on how factory farms suck up resources and pollute.
that sounds interesting Tweety!
Jailbait Zombie by Mario Acevedo....same guy that wrote The Undead Kama Sutra.
Rereading "The best democracy money can buy" ... by Greg Palast. Investigative reporting seems to be a dying art, I'm glad Palast is still doing his thing.
dudes...i gotta catch up on my stack of reading .... :P
I can't get "Electric Bird" by Sia out of my head.
Shadow Baby by Margaret Foster.
I really need some chicklit,but that's gonna have to wait.
I'm reading Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris at the moment.
Super Baby Food by Ruth Yaron
Scars of Sweet Paradise - the Janis Joplin biography
Picking up Thomas Pynchon's "Against The Day" for the third time. Good news is I am already further than I was the last two attempts!
Also "The Score- How the Quest for Sex has Shaped the Modern Man" - Very interesting.
And "Bonk" by Mary Roach. Another one of those connections between science and sex books.
Bonk was really good! I have all three of her books (Stiff, Bonk, and Spook), but haven't read all of Spook yet.
I just finished A Thousand Splendid Suns by the guy that wrote The Kite Runner (don't know how to spell his name). It was good, I thought it was better than Kite Runner, but the ending was too happy for my taste.
The Score sounds good..I'm really interested in the science of sexy stuff.
Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky
I just started the new Flannery O'Connor biography ... I have a feeling I'll be using it in my thesis. ::)
The DaVinci Code...yeah I know, where have I been? But like the film "Titanic" there was such a brouhaha when it came out that I refused to read it. I do that sometimes. It was in my box of freebies, along with Deception Point, so what the hey, I'll give it a read. I haven't finished chapter 1 but so far it reads like a French cop film, which will mean I will like it since that is about 80% of my TV diet...LOL
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alaxandre Dumas
I never read Dumas when it seems so many others did. After reading 'The Three Muskateers' for the first time, earlier this year, I felt very deprived. So now I'm making up for lost adventure!
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alaxandre Dumas
I never read Dumas when it seems so many others did. After reading 'The Three Muskateers' for the first time, earlier this year, I felt very deprived. So now I'm making up for lost adventure!
The friend who gave me the box of books just discovered the original "Three Musketeers." After all these years of movies and cartoons the poor man actually believed that it was a kid's book! No, honey. "Literature" was popular fiction when it first came out!
Enjoy Dumas. Some of his short stories really rock, too. He has a fine grasp of irony.
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