So What Do You Read?

[Shreyas Sampat]

Currently Reading:

Abhinaya Darpana, the Mirror of Gesture trans. Ananda Coomaraswamy
Also misc. other Bharata Natya books.

Morphology By Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes Mark Aronoff
Also misc. other morphology books.

Grass For His Pillow Lian Hearn

Last Completed:

Either Perdido Street Station, read after The Scar in keeping with my bad habit of reading sequels first, or Across the Nightingale Floor, the prior book in Hearn's series. Not sure which.

[David Laurence]

Currently reading:

Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. A gift from my mom, it's pretty "not-my-thing" so far.

Just finished:

Ring, by Koji Suzuji. The Vertical translation. I needed to read it to get up the courage to watch the movie, which I'd bought in the bargain video bin 2 weeks previous and not had the courage to watch.

[Keith Senkowski]

Right now I'm reading The Mammoth Book of Native Americans, edited by Jon E. Lewis and The White People and Other Stories, by Arthur Machen.

Keith

[Matt Snyder]

Reading:

The Gunslinger, by Stephen King
How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker

Just read:

Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem

(gawd, I'm a slow reader lately!)

[Thor Olavsrud]

Read before that: The Ra Expeditions by Thor Heyerdahl (If you haven't read Thor Heyerdahl's auto-biographical books, do so. They're fascinating stuff).

Hey Jack, if you ever make it to Oslo, make sure to check out the Thor Heyerdahl Museum (right across the street from the Viking Ship Museum, where they have the Gokstadt ship). They actually have the Ra II on display, as well as a replica of the Kontiki.

Anyway, as to what I'm reading.

Currently:
Moral Calculations: Game Theory, Logic, and Human Frailty, by Laszlo Mero.
A Scanner Darkly, PDK

Just Finished:
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, PKD
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Charles Seife

[Brennan Taylor]

Thanks to a conversation last week with Ron Edwards, I am currently rereading The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers. This is definitely a Conspiracy of Shadows book!

The book I read before that was some tall ship book set during the Napoleonic wars, one of a series, and I can't even remember the author's name, much less the title.

[Emily Care]

Currently reading: Nightmare Town, by Dashiell Hammett.

Recently finished: Glimpses of Abidharma, by Chogyam Trungpa.

--Em

[C. Edwards]

I'm another one of those that reads more than a single book at a time. Usually I split between a fiction and a non-fiction book.

Currently: Fiction-wise I'm reading a compilation of Dashiell Hammett novels. I'm through Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, and The Maltese Falcon. I'm in the middle of The Glass Key and still have The Thin Man to go. In the realm of non-fiction, I'm at the end of The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time by William Sullivan.

Last: For fiction it was Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy. Non-fiction was Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability by David Holmgren.

-Chris

[Lee Short]

Last completed:  Carla Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain:  Imperial Defense in the Early 17th Century.  Read this as research for my pirate game; reads very easy for the solid research it is.  

Current:  Mack P. Holt The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629.  More background research for the pirate game.

[J B Bell]

Currently:  The Cornelius Chronicles, Michael Moorcock.  Literally just started it.  It starts with a conversation between Jerry Cornelius, an aristocratic-looking Brit with long, dark hair, etc., and a slightly dumpy Indian guy.  Apparently, they then have sex.  I didn't know they even allowed that kind of thing to be published in 1965.  It makes me giggle.  It's amazingly obvious that Grant Morrisson's Gideon Stargrave is heavily based on Cornelius.

Recently:  The Last Light of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay.  Inoffensive, but overall, meh.  I was unable to really care about any character, there were so many.  It reads like a series of short shorts more than like a proper book, though of course it's a lot of them.  It's not stereotypical fantasy at least, but I don't think I'll be checking out any more Kay.

I'm in the middle, as always, of tons of dharma works and other nonfiction.  One I recently actually finished is Swallowing the River Ganges from the pen of Matthew Flickstein.  It was OK, but I like the classic Mindfulness in Plain English by the Ven. Henepola Gunaratana better.  I think I like the Sri Lankan view of Theravada Buddhism better generally.

And Emily, damn, Abidharma stuff?  My Buddhist friends think my fetish for heavily bookmarked, academic works is weird, but that stuff is just plain skull-crackingly impossible for me.  It's like trying to read an electronics catalog--I have yet to see anything that could justify being called an "introduction".  If there is such a beast, please let me know--I'm fascinated but repelled at the same time.

[Jason Morningstar]

This weekend I read the autobiography of Jack Black called You Can't Win.

Also now in the public domain; I'm in the process of preparing it for Project Gutenberg.  It's fantastic grist for the RPG mill.  I played around with a game design based on greasy yeggs like Black - the main attribute was nerve which, of course, you could easily lose.

--Jason

[joshua neff]

It's amazingly obvious that Grant Morrisson's Gideon Stargrave is heavily based on Cornelius.

Well, Morrison's admitted as much. Jerry Cornelius is a huge influence on Morrison.

My favorite how-I-got-into-gaming story: My good friend Sean "Le Mon Mouri" Demory got into gaming when some friends of his who played D&D told him, "You get to play Moorcock stories." He went out & found some Moorcock--the Jerry Cornelius novels. Having read those, he joined his friends to play and was horribly disappointed that he couldn't play a dimension-shifting, bisexual, gender-switching, drug-using dandy rockstar assassin.

[Jeph]

I'm currently reading Faust and Oedepus for school... in my spare time, I'm working through Neal Stephensen's Baroque Cycle and Frank Herbert's DUNE books (doubt I'll ever go near his son's stuff).

Recently... I just reread all of the other Stephenson stuff I have (The Big U, Cryptonomicon, The Diamon Age, Snow Crash) and a third of the Black Company series. The latter third... I've read the first and the last, but have yet to do the middle.

[ScottM]

Currently rereading: Robert Holstock's Mythago Wood.  (I got the sequel for Christmas and am now getting to it.)  It's one of my favorites, the one I selected to share with my grandma as a teen.  I thought the just post WWII setting would hook her... but it didn't work.

Last read: Nancy Kress's Beginnings, Middles, & Ends.  It's a fiction writing book, way up at the holistic overlook level (with some zeroing in, mind).

Yup.
Scott

[Luke Sineath]

Right now, I'm reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, unabridged, by Edward Gibbon.  Before that, I read On Liberty, by J.S. Mill.

Sorry, no nerdy reads for me.