Books & Beyond discussion

What books are you currently reading? How did you come across the book? Do you like the book so far? Would you reccommend it to others?

I started The Book Thief, and so far my favorite thing is the narrator's voice. The rave reviews are sort of scaring me from sitting down and reading through it in one sitting.

I heard it was a good book, but so far I haven't considered reading it yet. Is the narrator pompous or something? I hate know-it-all narrators who think they're special.

Hello, fellow "readers." In addition to the three books mentioned in my introductory post, I have also begun another one: Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution.

Dutton's thesis is that aesthetics can be understood in very rational terms as a product of human evolution. I admire the audacity and provocation at the core of an argument like this -- marrying the seemingly cloudy and subjective (what is beautiful, interesting, worthy of analysis) with the seemingly very ground-level and self-contained disciplines of biology and anthropology. Dutton set himself a tough challenge: tearing down a lot of knee-jerk misperceptions, while also building an alternative understanding of a particular facet of the human intellect.

While running a variety of manufacturing, marketing, and retail analysis on early-22nd century scripts supplied to my company by Japanese and Korean historians, I began to wonder about the "importance" of some of these objects to the humans who made them. I was of course programmed with a cursory familiarity with critical aesthetic perspective, but I hadn't as yet had any first-hand experience with analyses of this sort… especially those with any deep, rigorous connections to evolution.

I don't have the scientific background to raise any objections to the book's basic idea, but the structure of his argument isn't hitting me quite as hard as was probably intended. I don't have any of these senseless predilections toward art and entertainment as many of my human compatriots, and "empathy" and "abstraction" have only recently (within the last 70 years) been programmed completely into my CPU, but I still haven't been committed fully to his premise. His forward was very compelling, considering as it did the breadth of his argument, but the first several chapters have seemed too depth-focused -- focusing on modest, minor corners. This decision may make more structural sense later on, but at the moment it's leaving me cold.

The subjects of the book, aesthetics and alternative anthropology, are eternally fascinating to me, so I hope to complete the book despite my misgivings.

I'm starting to read My Soul to Save and City of Bones

I have started to read City of Bones in the past but I couldn't finish it cause I had to take it back to the library.With My Soul to Save I loved the first book and I wanted to read the next one.

I'm done with and I loved it. Can't wait to read the rest of the series

I'm still reading and I started

I'm reading two e-books. I just finished Another Faust, which was the only print book being read. I'll pick another up when I go upstairs, but my e-reader's down here, so...

I started reading Justice by Dominick Dunne. He's a famous freelance writer who covered major power/priveliged murders including the O.J. Simpson trial. His own daughter, Dominque Dunne, an aspiring actress who appeared in Poltergeist and was going to star in V: The Second Generation, was murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend. In this book, Dunne covers a good majority of the trials that he covered, adding the trial of his daughter. A very interesting book, especially if you're into true crime novels and murder cases. This is the cover:

Justice: Crimes, Trials, and Punishments

Hi,
I just started reading " He liked tuesdays best" polish bestseller The story of everyday life of John Paul II.
I think this could be interesting story because is wrote by his best friend and long associate Archbishop Mieczysław Mokrzycki with journalist Brygida Grysiak.
The book speaks about an ordinary day of John Paul II in the Vatican,and why he liked Tuesdays..

You can find more about this book at http://www.jp2books.com/