What Are You Reading? (Part Three)

[stewball]

I am reading 'Honour' by Elif Shafak.
It's about turkish/kurdish families in turkey and England. The Honour is of course an 'Honour' killing.
Quite good.

 

[laralove]

What a cheerful subject to be studying. What will you be reading besides this book? Any films? Anything ab Yad veShem in Jerusalem? The holocaust museum. I'm unable to go there anymore. Keep me posted.
My BiL was in a Russian concentration camp when he was a little boy. It wasn't like Poland though although there was starvation and beatings. No gas chamber which didn't stop people being murdered though I should imagine.

This course also requires Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Mark Klempner's The Heart Has Reasons: Dutch Rescuers of Jewish Children during the Holocaust, Thomas Toivi Blatt's From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival, and Christopher R. Browning (my professor)'s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

 

[natalie_ca]

 
I'm reading the 3rd book in the Jason Bourne series.  I must say that the movies are easier to follow, though vastly different from the books and their plots; make that completely different!  Part of the problem is that the author loves imposter characters, and when these imposters meet up and interact with the original character, you have a hard time following who is who.

Ugh! I'm still reading the 3rd book!  Still have about 250 pages to go!  The movies are far better even though they are only based on the characters of the book, not the actual story itself.

 

[nanner]

I'm in the middle of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Excellent book, and I find it really hard to put down. I can't just pick it up and read it in bits, as once I get started, I don't want to leave this world she's painting.

 

[miki]

I'm reading To Kill a Mockingbird  for the seventh time- definitely one of my favorites. DH is reading The Fault in our Stars  in anticipation for the upcoming movie.

 

[catspaw66]

I bought and downloaded the new Xanth book this morning with my Nook Color from B&N.  Order, pay, download and start reading without even getting out of the warm bed. Isn't technology wonderful?

 

[natalie_ca]

 
Ugh! I'm still reading the 3rd book!  Still have about 250 pages to go!  The movies are far better even though they are only based on the characters of the book, not the actual story itself.

Finally finished the 3rd book in the Jason Bourne series!  Now I'm into the 4th one! I think there are 8 in total!  Not sure I'll be able to read the whole series without a several other book break in between though!  LOL

 

[natalie_ca]

 
Finally finished the 3rd book in the Jason Bourne series!  Now I'm into the 4th one! I think there are 8 in total!  Not sure I'll be able to read the whole series without a several other book break in between though!  LOL

I gave up! I need a break from this series.  I'm starting Patricia Cornwell's book  "Dust".

 

[catspaw66]

I bought a couple of e-books from B&N yesterday for $2.99 each. The first is 14 novels by E.E. 'Doc' Smith. It is 2,576 pages. The second is Science Fiction Bundle, 500 short stories by the best in SF. It is 13,710 pages. I think I have enough reading for a long time for the price of one paperback. E-books are wonderful.

 

[zootandemo]

Hello!

I'm reading 'The War that Ended Peace' - about WW1, all that lead up to it and its aftermath which, of course, laid the foundations for WW2.

It's funny how the fashion for 'who's to blame' for the first war is cyclical: from 'It was the German's fault,' to 'it was everyone's fault,' depending on fashion.

Fiction wise, I'm leafing through 'Doing Time' - a collection of poems by prison inmates, (male and female). I got it because my college friend has an award-winning poem in it.

It's not all gloom and doom, as it may at first appear; tragedy still has its comedy, (or lunacy).

People can confound me sometimes... my cat always makes sense.

 

[jcat]

I bought and downloaded the new Xanth book this morning with my Nook Color from B&N.  Order, pay, download and start reading without even getting out of the warm bed. Isn't technology wonderful?

I bought a couple of e-books from B&N yesterday for $2.99 each. The first is 14 novels by E.E. 'Doc' Smith. It is 2,576 pages. The second is Science Fiction Bundle, 500 short stories by the best in SF. It is 13,710 pages. I think I have enough reading for a long time for the price of one paperback. E-books are wonderful.

:lol3::lol3::lol3: E-readers get you addicted. Not only is it so simple to buy e-books, but you don't have to worry about having to store and dust them.

I'm still rereading the Harry Potter books - I'm just about finished the fourth one.

 

[catspaw66]

E-readers get you addicted. Not only is it so simple to buy e-books, but you don't have to worry about having to store and dust them.

I'm still rereading the Harry Potter books - I'm just about finished the fourth one.

Yeah, they are addicting. You can carry more books than a small county library in a package weighing about a pound. If you have a SDHC micro card slot, a 32GB card will give you about 100,000 standard size novels. My Nook First Edition only has 1.28GB internal storage. I have 500 books on it -including the two new large ones, and am only using 75% of the internal storage.

I went to look something up in the first Harry Potter book, and ended up reading the whole series, again.

But there is still nothing like the feel and smell of a paper book, especially an older one, like my 1947 copy of Home Country by Ernie Pyle.

 

[Winchester]

Where are you all finding your books? I go to the B & N "Free" books to peruse books, but honestly one can only read so many paranormal romances and such. Some of those books are not what I'm looking for. I hit our library, but the waiting list is forever. As more and more people buy e-readers, the waiting list is taking longer and longer.

And I cannot afford to buy a bunch of books, even at the reduced prices for ebooks. 

 

[catspaw66]

Project Gutenberg is a site for free books that are out of copyright - what I would call the classics. The two I bought were in the B&N "Books under $5" link. If you like Science Fiction, Baen Books has quite a bunch of free ones.

Google the author you are looking for and add the word 'free' to it.   Like   Rita Mae Brown free e-books  Be warned that some of these sites require registering. I use a throwaway g-mail address for things like that. It is an account that I use for the Android part of my Nook.

 

[zootandemo]

Technology is great - yet I wonder if I'm alone in loving the look, feel and smell of a book.

I have plenty of paperbacks that bear the scars of being dropped in the bath; I underline or bracket passages I particularly love and make notes in margins...can't do any of that with an e-book.

I also count among my most cherished possessions, a few first editions by my favourite authors.

Also, if anyone is wondering what to expect from Vladimir Putin, I suggest reading 'It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway' by David Satter.

Read on friends!

 

[catspaw66]

 
Technology is great - yet I wonder if I'm alone in loving the look, feel and smell of a book.
!

.
But there is still nothing like the feel and smell of a paper book, especially an older one, like my 1947 copy of Home Country by Ernie Pyle.

 

My post was made 6 days ago, before you asked the question.

 

[jcat]

I've gotten a lot of e-books from Project Gutenberg. ManyBooks.net is another good source of free e-books in various formats. Amazon regularly has free e-books or ones on sale, so I check out their special offers for Kindle books on a pretty routine basis.

You can make notes, highlight, and bookmark pages on an e-reader. You can also skim pages, so there aren't really many advantages physical books have over e-books.

 

[otto]

Call The Midwife by Jennifer Worth. Loving it. Love the PBS series, too. Talk about type-casting!

 

[zootandemo]

catspaw66, I concur completely: I have a first edition of Cowper's Poems and a children's history school text by Charles Dickens, (among a few others), and they are a pleasure to hold, like my cat.

Isn't it amazing how tactile is happiness? Or how much our olfactory sense conjures memory or ideas?

I know my cat loves my almond moisturizer - have to be sure he doesn't eat it out of the jar! Or how the scent of cinnamon baking in a bread-and-butter-pudding makes me think, 'home'.

Or stressful situations and my recourse to remembering how differently the light plays on leaves in the various countries I've visited...

Or the sense of outrageous privilege I've known, just sitting in the stacks of a bookshop in Charing Cross Road.

 

[happybird]

I downloaded 50 Shades of Grey and noticed something odd- it mirrors much of the Twilight series. So many similarities! I googled it and lo and behold, there are sites claiming that 50 Shades was originally a Twilight fan fiction. Apparently, it was pulled from the fanfic sites by the author when it was picked up for publishing. The characters' names were barely changed. (Christian/Edward's adoptive father is Carrick/Carlisle, his adopted brother is Elliot/Emmett, and so on...). One blog listed all the similarities between the two series and there are a lot, more than I initially noticed. The general stories and characters are so similar, I wonder why there has not been a lawsuit. It is pretty hard to miss.
As for the books, they are fluffy, easy reading. No brain needed. I like that sometimes, though. It is very relaxing to just read and not have to really concentrate or critically think about the page I just finished. These books would be good for a day on the beach.
From the way people talked about them I figured they would be super dirty, so I mentally girded myself. Really, the graphic parts were nowhere as bad as I was anticipating. I guess the Anita Blake and Merry Gentry books by Laurell K. Hamilton desensitized me to that sort of thing, lol! I am almost done with the second book and overall, I am not terribly impressed. I wasn't expecting great literature by any stretch, but I honestly can't figure out what all the fuss was about.