What book(s) are you reading at the moment?

[Moksha]

Harold Bloom: Take Arms Against A Sea of Troubles. Bloom wrote this a few weeks before his death. It's a wonderful celebration of literature and how it can heal pain and help you cope with life.

Also listening to Michael Hordern read MR James on audiobook. F...ing brilliant.

[biscuits]

This sweet idea sucked me in when I walked into the bookshop today:



The Owl and The Pussycat is my guess

[Dean Winchester]

Reading Gavin de Becker's Gift of Fear on a personal recommendation. Scathing review to follow, it's terrible so far.

[anxiouslondoner]

I finished Consider Phlebas by Iaian Banks weeks ago but IDK if I can be bothered with any of the others in the series. Even though it kept me reading I was kind of depressed by it.

[Appear]

^^ What was it??


I'm reading The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. His central argument is that most complex human activity is ultimately driven by strategies we unconsciously employ to repress awareness of our own mortality, or to try to gain a kind of immortality by producing/contributing to something that outlives us.

It's a little reductionist (though less so than you might expect) and is probably too psychoanalytic for today's (and my) tastes. But his arguments are compelling and he draws on a range of sources that make for an interesting read.

[biscuits]

^


I can read excerpts as a bedtime story. 50p a word.

[Professor Willow]

Mercury and me, by Jim Hutton.

[Appear]

^^ Googled - sounds interesting.

51p per word with voices? Shall I get in your bed or will you get in mine? I'm a heavy bed farter wherever I am.

[Tubbs]

I've just started this:



Although... I have a feeling it's going to wreck me, being about the Holocaust. Wonder if I should hold off reading it until I'm in a better frame of mind (whenever that may be)

[Moksha]

Just finished Great Expectations. Wonderful book. Harold Bloom, the literary critic, described Dickens as a writer of realistic fairy tales. He combines two things that don't normally go together – sentimental fairy tale and savage realism. No one had ever done that before, and no one has done it since. His books form their own little world, with their own rules, and you either buy into it or you don't.

[Gellerbing]

Currently Reading "the rumour", almost finished it then I'll be moving onto Mathew perry's biography

[Appear]

^^ Great Expectations is probably my favourite bit of Dickens. I hadn't heard what Bloom had said about his writing before - he's right on the money.


I'm currently reading 'For Profit: A History of Corporations' by William Magnuson. He discusses a handful of corporations from history from as early as the Roman empire to the present day to show the good and bad corporations can do (and have done) for society. It's interesting from a purely historical perspective but is really effective in showing how particular economic phenomena like monopolies can play out in the real world. There are also lots of interesting factual tidbits, like the Roman Empire basically having its own G4Ss and Sercos.


Before that I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - and I'll never be complaining about my job or general circumstances again.