What books are you reading right now?

The Mindful Geek - Meditation for Skeptics - Michael Taft
The Poems of Theodore Roethke
Jolie Blon's Bounce - James Lee Burke

 

My God Have Mercy by John C. Tucker.

This is the true story of how Roger Coleman was convicted of murder in 1982, and eventually executed, even though the evidence was extremely circumstantial and scientifically unsound. The story is interesting; Tucker's writing not so much so.

 

I'm about three quarters through Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. This is my second read through. Mostly been reading things I've already read once. I just can't seem to find anything new that draws my interest and the local library is pretty barren unless you're into Danielle Steele or Mein Kampf.

 

The Goodwill run this afternoon was a good one. Next up will be chosen from:

Haven, a novel by John Peyton Cooke. It's supposed to be very, very scary.

When A Crocodile Eats The Sun, a memoir of his life in South Africa by Peter Godwin. I recall hearing good things about this book.

Anatomy of Injustice, by Raymond Bonner. A true account of a black man man wrongly accused of and convicted of murder in S. Carolina. I've read his book Weakness and Deceipt: U.S. Policy and El Salvador. **Another injustice book, Chris?**

First Person Plural, non-fiction by Cameron West, Ph.D. After many years of thinking he was losing his mind, West was diagnosed as having 24 distinct personalities, Dissociative Identity Disorder. This should be interesting.
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I forgot about a book that I bought more for casual reading.

Weird Texas, by Wesley Treat, Heather Shade, & Rob Riggs (the first two names sound like porn stars). The sub-title pretty much explains it, Your Travel Guide to Texas's (their mistake, not mine) Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets.

 

Lamb, The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore. Barely started and it's already the most realistic gospel I've encountered...and pretty humorous, as well.

/former seminary student

 

Haven, a novel by John Peyton Cooke.

This is a real page turner. Cooke keeps the plot moving at quick pace, and there were only a few parts that caused me to question the actions or in-actions. The book involves firearms (that's not much of a spoiler, and FTR firearms have a very small role in the novel) and for the most part--there are a couple of exceptions--Cooke wisely doesn't go into too much detail. IME too many authors write about guns without taking the time to make sure their info is correct, and the editor shares in this blame.

This novel, unfortunately like many others, gives away the fact that the ending is most likely going to be unsatisfactory. As I started getting near the end I knew that there was no way the author could end the book without "cheating." One of three things was going happen:
1. Too many entirely way too convenient things were going to happen to wrap up the loose ends.
2. The ending would be very general, i.e. the situation would be resolved generally speaking while the loose ends would be ignored.
3. The ending would extremely incomplete, either leaving the reader hanging period, or leaving an opening for a sequel.

Since Cooke is an experienced writer, four earlier novels and a number of short stories, he doesn't get a pass for how he ended this otherwise very good read.

 

The Boys of Everest

Its about an generation of English mountaineers that came out in the 60's through 80's and took more risks, did more incredible things, sometimes didnt make it... pretty interesting and very well written.

 

Currently reading Katharine Hepburn's biography. Not really into fiction. Fascinating to me to find out the back story behind famous people's rise to fame. Seems that they had to deal with a lot of the crap that we do, despite the fame and glamour.

 

I like to throw the occasional biography in to my eclectic reading mix. Not so much autobiographies.

 

I finished First Person Plural, non-fiction by Cameron West, Ph.D. While it was an interesting read, several things about this book bothered me.

FPP reads like a novel, and it doesn't work for a book about Dissociative Identity Disorder, f/k/a Multiple Personality Disorder.

West uses humor. One of his favorites is expressions along the line of "like ugly on an ape." Many times I asked myself, "Who does he think he is, Raymond Chandler?". I don't know if that's his way of coping with writing about his DID, or if he thinks he's being clever, but it seems out of place in a memoir about a serious psychological disorder.

He uses quotation marks for conversations where he wasn't present, and it is highly unlikely that they were recorded.

There are time gaps in his story. What makes this bad is they occur while he is struggling with his DID.

 

I'm reading two books.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, a novel by Umberto Eco. A man wakes up from semi-comatose state brought on by a stroke, and the only memory he has is what he's read. He begins the process of trying to make sense of his life while attempting to recover his lost memory. All is good until about page 100. At that point Eco--true to form--starts off on a tangent about propaganda used by the Italian government in comic books and children's books during WWII. I stopped reading at page 342 because I needed a break from Eco.

Why Eco turns some of his "novels" into lengthy essays on history, philosophy, religion, etc. I'll never understand. Many authors include such discussions in their novels, but none (that I've read) do so to the extinct of Eco.

The four Eco "novels" that I've managed to finish in descending order of "readability":

The Name of the Rose--By far his most readable.
The Prague Cemetery--Readable, but many digressions into Italian history and that of the Catholic Church.
Foucault's Pendulum--Pretty much only if you like mathematical puzzles. It's as though the plot is there only to support the puzzles.
The Island of the Day Before--Do NOT bother reading this POS excuse for a "novel." This is one of the the most disjointed WTF?? books I've ever read.......even by Eco's I'll-digress-any-time-I-want-to standards.

 

Picked up Amy Poehler's Yes, Please, but so far I've only read a few pages a night before falling asleep. I need to carve out some reading time this week.

 

The movie TNOTR was good, but it didn't come close to matching the book as far as describing the importance of the Catholic Church in controlling knowledge and making the laws that ruled Italy at that time in history.

FP is a very difficult read. As you previously posted it will appeal to those people who enjoyed the puzzle solving aspect of The Da Vinci Code.

I'll repeat what I've previously posted: Eco should write non-fiction history, religion, science, & philosophy books. In order to be accepted as serious academic non-fiction, Eco would need to include extensive footnotes & references; perhaps he finds finds it much easier to present his interpretations in the form of "novels." With that said, I suppose that he writes his "novels" for a very specific group of readers.

 

Last night I finished When A Crocodile Eats The Sun by Peter Godwin.

I very much enjoyed this book about Zimbabwe under the rule of Robert Mugabe, and how it it affected Godwin, his family, white farmers, and the black Africans who were supposed to be "liberated." Much of this book is based on personal experiences, with Godwin's parents having major roles.

The book ends with the death of Godwin's father (this not a spoiler, his declining health is prominent in the story). Because so much of it is personal, I would've liked an afterward to update the readers. But that might not have been possible since his father died in early (Jan? Feb?) 2004, and the book was first published in 2006.

Godwin uses an interesting and accurate term to describe the Mugabe government: Kleptocratic.
I looked up the origin (no, Godwin didn't coin it). Per one source, the term kleptocracy dates back to 1819.

I'm going to read Godwin's latest book, The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe.

 

I chose some classical literature which I somehow missed in school, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

The book contains four Bronte novels, Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, & The Professer, so if I like JE I can delve further into her works.

 

Anatomy of Injustice by Raymond Bonner. Non-fiction. Edward Elmore, a semi-literate, retarded black man is accused of of murdering an elderly white woman in South Carolina in early 1983. He is convicted on the flimsiest of evidence, the most damning of which was most likely planted and never should've allowed to even be mentioned in any of his three trials, and sentenced to execution. His two public defenders were indifferent at best, completely incompetent at worse.

I have mixed feelings about this book. Some authors of justice-not-served anti-death penaltybooks go into so much detail they make what should be an interesting read boring; Bonner is superficial in parts where more details would've been useful. It reads as though Bonner rushed this book. The same can't be said for Bonner's Weakness and Deceipt: U.S. Policy and El Salvador, which I've read.

AOI does clearly illustrate that relying on the judicial system to right their own Very Obvious Wrongs is a huge gamble with odds heavily favoring the judiciary covering its ass.

 

Edward Lee Elmore (see post 2117) was freed from prison on 03-03-12 after spending 31 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. I haven't yet watched all of the story in the link, I'm sure that it will definitely be anti-death penalty.

 

I just finished How De Body? by Teun Voeten. TV writes about his experiences in war-torn Sierra Leone during the late 1990s.

 

A Dark History: The Popes
Vice, Murder, and Corruption in the Vatican

by Brenda Ralph Lewis.

So far a very interesting read, to say the least.