Reading List

[dgreco]

Found this somewhere else and I Just thought it would be good if we could form a topic with a reading list. A few books that I just finished that I thought would be good to start off with.

Kidder - Mountains Beyound Mountains

Chuck Klosterman - Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs & IV: a Decade of Curious people and Dangerous Ideas.

Hope others will add some books. Thanks.

[Captain Worley]

Anything by Greg Iles, John Connolly, Micheal Connelly, and Lee Child are good reads for novels. Carl Hiassen is pretty funny, but Dave Barry adapted his style, and took it up a notch.

I'm all over the place with non fiction. I just finished "Electrifying America" and "Consuming Power" by Nye. Both were truly interesting books. "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is an interesting take on why some societies prosper over others. BVrian hagan has a couple of good books out on how climate affected society.

I also highly recommend Uncle John's Bathroom Readers. I have them all, and they are all entertaining, funny, and full of arcane knowledge.

[dgreco]

thanks for the list...

has anyone heard anything good or bad about Cultural Amnesia by Clive James?

[cinco]

"Guns, Germs, and Steel" is an interesting take on why some societies prosper over others.

[Captain Worley]

if i'm not mistaken, PBS aired a series based on this book. it was truly fascinating... of course i'll have to check out the book as it would be more in depth.

[JDC]

I just finished Divorce Your Car! by Katie Alvord. Before that I read James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency. I've just started Kunstler's Home from Nowhere, his "sequel" to Geography of Nowhere.

[Pillsbury]

My favorite book over the past few years has been Great Ape by Will Self. Absolutely nothing do to with urban planning, but a wonderful story nonetheless!!

[davidals]

Regarding urban issues and concerns, I've recently finished Juan Williams' Enough and Mike Davis' City Of Quartz, and both were extremely interesting. Williams uses Bill Cosby's infamous series of rants a couple years ago as a point of departure for further social critique, and Davis analyzes Los Angeles' history - focusing on urban planning, class and race relations and its mythic and cultural status - in an attempt at divining L.A.'s future, and the futures of many of America's more expansive metropolises by extension. Both very good and very smart reads, if also very tough and harsh in their repective critiques.

As for other stuff - Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges is a hands-down personal favorite collection of short stories, something I re-read often. And Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory is another fave I've re-read recently - an autobiography retracing the first half of his life in fine, vivid detail, and with a great deal of sly humor...

And for any culture geeks out there, Donald Richie's A Hundred Years Of Japanese Film is a piece of artitistic history that reads like a novel, and will turn a novice into a fan, with tantalizing descriptions of hundreds of films, movements and directors. The writing and research is a perfect balance of readable accessibility and scholarliness...

[FromCityToRural]

My own personal favorites:

"Tuesdays with Morrie" - Mitch Albom

"Song of Solomon" - Toni Morrison

"Their Eyes Were Watching God" - Zora Neale Hurston

For fun, I like The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsythe, and the V.I Warshawski books by Sara Paretski, although they can get old by the third or fourth one. Louis L'Amour's a good way to pass the time as well.

[dgreco]

I think most of Mitch Alboms books have been pretty good. Thought I would throw out some theorist and other classical readings...

Michel Foucault

Emile Durkheim

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

William James

Anna Julia Cooper

John Maynard Keynes

Georg Lukacs

Betty Friedan

Saskia Sassen

Frantz Fanon

Claude Levi-Strauss.

WEB Dubois

The best reading is Foucault idea on power... one of the greatest reads ever.

[dtown]

"Tuesdays with Morrie" - Mitch Albom

[Snowguy716]

Some good books that I've read recently:

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho... a pretty short read and really quite philosophical at the end, but good and with a nice twist.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova... a book about vampires, but extremely well written. It's definitely an "I can't put it down" book.

What is the What? by Dave Eggers... a biography Achak Deng growing up in Sudan during the civil war and his journey to Kakuma refugee camp and his eventual move to the U.S... it was really moving. The way he describes things and the horrors he has lived through are profound.

The Coyote trilogy by Alan Steele- If you like science fiction, this story is very good about a group of people who hijack a space mission to colonize another planet from the tyrannical government that runs America and its trials and tribulations in a new world.. surprisingly good. The political overtones are hard to ignore and I think Libertarians would especially like this one.

[Captain Worley]

Peter Egan has a few books out containing some of the editorials he's written for Cycle World and Road & Track. He can really write and his tales of road trips on anything from a Honda 50 to a Ducatti are just amazing. I've only read Leanings, the first volume from his Cycle World writings. He has two volumes of Leanings, and three, I believe volumes of Side Glances, his editorials for Road & Track.

[Neo]

Slightly past its prime but still an excellent read is Blink as well as The Tipping Point.

I also enjoyed The World Is Flat but this was before they put out the revised edition (always happens to me!), the same thing happened with Freakonomics.

[dgreco]

Slightly past its prime but still an excellent read is Blink as well as The Tipping Point.

I also enjoyed The World Is Flat but this was before they put out the revised edition (always happens to me!), the same thing happened with Freakonomics.

[ezcheese]

I recently read Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks and Out by Natsuo Kirino. I am currently reading Grotesque also by Nastuo Kirino. Her books are a great commentary on women's issues in Japan.

[runawayjim]

i just read running with scissors. thought a bit odd at first (and throughout), it was a fun read. took a little bit before i was really engaged in it, but after the first couple sections, i was sucked in.

i also recently read jimmy buffet's a salty piece of land. it was a very fun read.

past favorites include orwell's animal farm, camus' the stranger, and i don't remember who wrote it, but the perks of being a wallflower was an excellent book.

[dgreco]

i just read running with scissors. thought a bit odd at first (and throughout), it was a fun read. took a little bit before i was really engaged in it, but after the first couple sections, i was sucked in.

i also recently read jimmy buffet's a salty piece of land. it was a very fun read.

past favorites include orwell's animal farm, camus' the stranger, and i don't remember who wrote it, but the perks of being a wallflower was an excellent book.

[nowensone]

If you are brave, read all 6 books of the Dune series by Frank Herbert, of which the movie (1984) is only the first book. They are languorous and difficult reading at times, though once complete they leave a mark on you. Herbert traipses across religious themes, humanity and psychology, in addition to very imaginative conjecture on the evolution of people and cultures.

[runawayjim]

I have heard mixed reviews of perks of being a wallflower, I think more so because of the stigma of being emo that is attached to it, but you say it was worth the read? Also, animal farm is a great book. It is also a fun book to read it really gets your imagination to open up.

[Captain Worley]

Battlefield Earth by L Ron Hubbard was pretty good. Thefirst time I read it, I enjoyed it as a post-apocolyptic sci-fi novel. The second time I read it, I realized what a wicked sense of humor Elron had ( a planet of lawyers, the Selachee, were evolved from sharks).

Currently reading Hitler's Scientists, which is an interesting story of what happens when science is applied with government mandated outcomes (for example, advanced physics were derided as 'Jew-science' and not pursued, which slowed Germany's atom bomb program).

[dgreco]

Battlefield Earth by L Ron Hubbard was pretty good. Thefirst time I read it, I enjoyed it as a post-apocolyptic sci-fi novel. The second time I read it, I realized what a wicked sense of humor Elron had ( a planet of lawyers, the Selachee, were evolved from sharks).

Currently reading Hitler's Scientists, which is an interesting story of what happens when science is applied with government mandated outcomes (for example, advanced physics were derided as 'Jew-science' and not pursued, which slowed Germany's atom bomb program).

[ironchapman]

Isn't hubbard the creator of Scientology?

[JDC]

I have heard mixed reviews of perks of being a wallflower, I think more so because of the stigma of being emo that is attached to it, but you say it was worth the read? Also, animal farm is a great book. It is also a fun book to read it really gets your imagination to open up.

[dgreco]

Yep. (Forgive the Wikipedia link).

History geek that I am, I am currently readign Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars...in English, of course. Fascinating work.