Since my last post, two Pratchett novels, a classic book of SF, and an interesting work on sociology.
The Last Continent is Pratchett's spoof of Australia. It wasn't his best, but was worth reading. It reminded me I'd like to have the Luggage.
Wee Free Men was set on Discworld and had some of the familiar characters (briefly) but is meant for younger readers than your average Discworld book. I still enjoyed it though.
Walter Tevis'
The Man Who Fell to Earth was a quick read over the weekend. Humanoid comes to Earth and tries blending in. The movie is now in my netflix queue.
I picked up Robert Putnam's
Bowling Alone after hearing him on
OPB. The book is on the decline of social capitol at the end of the twentieth century. Part of the book details all of the ways in which it has declined (voting rates, club membership, church-going, etc). The next part speculates on why this is. The end talks a little bit about why we should care and starts to propose some ways to reverse the trend.
posted by kristin at 2:37 PM
I'm more behind on blogger than reading for a change. I read Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy last week. Very very good stuff. I definitely agree with all the people who recommended I read it, and wonder what it was that made me not really interested the first time I picked up book one (The Golden Compass).
Last night I went to see John Dunning at Powells. He didn't do a reading, just rambled a bit and then asked for questions. Overall, definitely better as a writer than a speaker, but I picked up two signed copies of
The Sign of the Book for me and my dad. While I was waiting for him to begin I started reading his
The Bookman's Promise and finished that last night before bed. Like the rest of the books in the series, it's a mystery about books and bookselling. This one got me interested in reading something written by Sir Richard Burton, so I may track something down one of these days.
posted by kristin at 1:46 PM
Yet another book meme
From
Scribbling Woman Here's a list (I'm told) of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've partially read. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.
#1 The Bible #2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain #3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Qur'an #5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain #7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift #8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne #10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman #11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli #12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank #14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert #15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker #18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck #22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon #23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell #28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell #29 Candide by Voltaire #30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee #31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck #34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence #40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley #41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque #45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding #47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway #49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy #50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury #51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey #57 Color Purple by Alice Walker #58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger #59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn #63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck #64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison #65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson #72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser #74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles #76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath #77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl #82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov #83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut #86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder #89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse #91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner #94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood #99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess #101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn #107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein #108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
posted by kristin at 11:20 AM
Bought at Powells (or arrived from Powells.com) over the weekend:
Paco Underhill - Why We Buy
Thomas Pakenham - The Scramble for Africa
Neil Gaiman & Stephen Jones - Now We Are Sick
Lisa Goldstein - The Alchemist's Door
Lisa Goldstein - Summer King, Winter Fool
Lisa Goldstein - Travellers in Magic
Lisa Goldstein - Walking the Labyrinth
posted by kristin at 11:17 AM
Bought at Powells yesterday:
Jack Finney - Time and Again
Jeanette Winterson - Oranges are not the Only Fruit
Steve Cash - the Meq
posted by kristin at 8:58 AM 
