Let's have a nerd geek pissing contest: Current read, and the book you read before that.

I'm reading God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert. Never read the Dune stuff before this year. It's neat. I think I like it because it is so oblique. But the fascist under (and over) tones kind of raise my hackles.
"I know what we need: An immortal benevolent ruler! Yay!"

This weekend I read the autobiography of Jack Black called You Can't Win. No, not THAT Jack Black. The real Jack Black. He was a bum, a thief, a stick up man and a yegg in 1880s and through the turn of the century. He finally went straight after nearly dying of an opium addiction. It's an awesome portrait of a world little known and a fascinating character study.

Vincent, if you're reading this, I highly recommend it.

-L

You mean non-RP books I assume?

I'm continuing to burn through Ross MacDonald novels (the reprints by Black Lizard.) I'm currently on The Underground Man, I just finished The Chill. I think I'm running out of them! I just have to cry after that.

Trevis

I'm reading Yi, a book of Chinese poetry based on the Yijing. I'm also reading (slowly) the Gormenghast novels. When I get back to California, I have the end of "All Men Are Brothers" waiting for me.

Last book finished: Book of the New Sun.

yrs--
--Ben

Mostly what I read these days is for school. My theme for this semester is "copyright and IP," and I've been reading Larry Lessig's Free Culture and The Future of Ideas, Kembrew McLeod's Freedom of Expression, and Siva Vaidhyanathan's Copyrights and Copywrongs and The Anarchist in the Library.

My non-school reading would be a lot of comics, as well as Robert E. Howard's "Conan" stories. I'm currently reading Midnight for Charlie Bone and enjoying it very much.

title and author, my literate nerds, title and author!

-L

I am chewing through China Mieville's fantasy stuff, Perdido Street Station, The Scar and now I'm working my way through Iron Council. They are fantastic books and the interviews I have read with the author are spot on with how I feel about geekdom and fantasy.

I am most of the way through David Simon and Edward Burns' The Corner, a narrative journalistic reporting on the drug corners of West Balitmore. Great stuff about the legal system and how it works from the junkee-eye-view.

I am an unapologetic Tolkienian. Aside from him, I love David Gemmell as a second best. My system is a mixture of the “high” fantasy of Tolkien with the “grittiness” of Gemmell.

Domhnall wrote: I am an unapologetic Tolkienian. Aside from him, I love David Gemmell as a second best. My system is a mixture of the “high” fantasy of Tolkien with the “grittiness” of Gemmell.

oh yeah...

Last read was actually S King's The Shining (first time I'd tried him).

Recent read: God, Guilt, and Death by Merold Westphal

I just finished Jeff Chang's Can't Stop, Won't Stop, a history of hip hop, as well as Orson Scott Card's Shadow of the Giant. I'm still digging through Ka Kanaka: Stand Tall, a look at traditional Hawaiian cutural values, and The Sufi Path of Knowledge, an overview of the Muslim philosopher Bin Arabi.

I'm reading Goa, by Kara Dalkey, the first book of fantastical/historical trilogy set in the Portuguese colony of the same name in 1597. The main character is an apprentice apothecary dragged into intrigue between the Inquistion and a Hindu goddess. So far I'm pulled in. The background is rich, and hey, pirates!

Previously, I slogged my way through War of Honor by David Weber (whimper). My shame at having read this book (which should have been titled My Dinner with Honor, as all that happens are people sit around and talk about the galacto-political situation for endless pages, often while having dinner) is only exceeded by the shame of knowing I'll eventually read whatever the next pile of dead trees that Weber cranks out for fan service in this series. But only as a used paperback... I still have a shred of pride.

Let's get outlandishly nerdish, then:

I'm currently reading and re-reading the following (due to an article in progress, but purely of my own free will and not any mandatory studies): C.S. Peirce's collected works, Adelsten's dissertation Interikonicitet, books on hermeneutics by Phillips, Palmer, Jeanrond, Husserl, Gadamer and Ricoeur (in their original languages, or course) and a half-dozen others on art/culture theory (Kaprow, Bey), child psychology (Winnicott, Korkee, Rizzuto), etc. In the mean time, I'm also amusing myself with Hebbershålsapokryferna by the Swedish surrealist Nikanor Teratologen. It's a thoroughly disturbing and frankly sick book, but also brilliant satire and exceptionally well written.

And no, I indeed do not have a very active social life at the moment.

Happy birthday, Forge.

-Jiituomas

Just finished Freedom evolves, by Daniel Dennet, am starting on Global brain, by Howard Bloom.

In fiction, hmmmm War of the Flowers by Tad Williams was a way back, but fair(l)y memorable.

Currently reading:

Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland (again)
W.O. Frazer and A. Tyrrell, Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain
Jack Vance, The Blue World

Read since the 27th of March:

Ethan Coen, Gates of Eden. I didn't even know he wrote fiction.
A.J.P. Taylor, British Prime Ministers and other essays. Would be Britain's foremost living popular historian if he weren't dead.
Benjamin Woollett, The Queen's Conjurer. Resumes had to be a lot longer in Elizabethan England, to paraphrase Ken Hite.
Eric Flint, 1632. Trash.
Jonathan Letham, Motherless Brooklyn. Excellent.
Colin Evans, Great Feuds in History. I'm not sure the English Civil War was a "feud" properly so-called, but it's an enjoyable book and it was only a pound.

Currently reading: The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin.

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, the birthday forum. Neat.

Ok, currently reading (finishing up) Textual Interaction: An Introduction to Written Discourse Analysis, by Michael Hoey. It's a relatively recent summary/introduction of Hoey's approach to discourse analysis. Nothing new, but a nice overview. I tend to like Hoey's work, which always offers clear claims that are easy to assess, agree with, disagree with, work with, etc.

Last read Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language by Sydney M. Lamb. Actually a re-read that I pulled out because I was reading some claims in some of Hoey's more recent articles that seemed really compatible with Lamb's claims but coming from an entirely different starting point. So I pulled it out to see if my memory was accurate. I think it largely was.

I haven't read any fiction in a very long time. I keep meaning to remedy that, but I also keep not succeeding.

Rich

Currently:

The Complete Conan vol I, RE Howard
The Iliad, Homer (Trans. Fagles)
The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare

Previous:
Going Postal, Terry Pratchett
Free Range Education, various

Currently reading: Convinction and Thread, ideology of Sakari Topelius by Matti Klinge, this famous Finnish historian. It's a book about a Finnish author from the 19th century and his politics. Pretty heavy cultural history.

Before that, Poetry of Finland, one of those big-ass (1000+ pages) poetry compilations, starting from around 0CE and going until the end of the eighties.

On top of my RPG reading list (which is always long), I'm currently reading:

The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky. It's the bomb! This is just one in a whole string of poker books I've been reading lately, and there's more to come.

The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (Conan of Cimmeria, Book 1) by Robert E. Howard. Great stuff, the stories are so cool in their original form.

The Game Inventor's Guidebook by Brian Tinsman. This one hasn't impressed - or surprised - me much.

Vägen till Jerusalem by Jan Guillou. Swedish book about a little boy that ends up a knight templar taking part in the crusades (man there's gotta be a better way to sum this up). It's the first part in a trilogy. (I think this is the same book in English.)

I used to always wonder how people could read so much in so little time, but have come to the conclusion that I read just as much, I just read several books at once. :p

TTFN,

Yoki

I too am one of these people who reads more than one thing at once. I'm currently in the middle of:

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Jagged Orbit by John Brunner
The Hour of the Dragon by Robert E. Howard

The last book I finished (re)reading was Red Planet by Heinlein

Currently:

DeQuincey, "Confessions of an English Opium Eater." First 70 pages = dull.
Howard, "The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian." Overrated!
Vance, "Tales of the Dying Earth." Funny!
Clark, "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell."
Chernow, "Alexander Hamilton."
Hesse, "Siddartha." Hippie lameness.

Just finished:

Camus, "The Plague." Excellent!
Calvino, "Invisible Cities." Atrocious!

well, i work at a porn store to pay the bills. outside of that i'm a freelance illustrator. this means i draw a lot, but i should really be drawing a lot more. my skills are finally getting honed to the point i need them to be at, but i'm not quite there yet. along that path i also pain and do graphic design, though neither incredibly well.

i enjoy reading, though i'm incredibly picky about what i'm reading. I just dinished reading the book Film Noir, a survey of films of that genre, in research for the RPG i've been designing for about two years now. i also just picked up V. but Pynchon, so we'll see how that is.

When in my environment (a large, metopolitan city) i tend to be an outdoorsy kinda person, as much as a city guy is. i like going to parks, walking around town, that sort of stuff.

I'm also a big music snob. currently on the top of the list are the Twilight Singers and Chris Whitley. I live on an island in the pacific right now though, so i don't really ever get to see a concert, which is very bad for the soul.

finally, i'm a comic geek. love the stuff. always have, ever since i was itty-bitty, and i still do to this day. nothing makes me happier than having a new comic in my mits, all full of possibilities.

that's pretty much it for me. i'm boring, what can i say. ;-)

Currently reading:

Quicksilver, by Neal Stevenson (more at http://www.nealstephenson.com/ )

The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse, Robert Rankin


-Matt

JamesNostack wrote: Calvino, "Invisible Cities." Atrocious!

Currently reading The Dark Between the Stars, by Damian Broderick (read more Australian scifi peoples!), and last read was On Blondes, by Joanna Pitman.

GB Steve wrote:

JamesNostack wrote: Calvino, "Invisible Cities." Atrocious!

One of my favourite books!

Currently reading Planet of Adventure, by Jack Vance.

Previous to that, I'm sorry to say, was The Honor of the Queen.

Previous to that was more Vance: The Demon Princes, Vol 1.

joshua neff wrote:
I hold in my head close to Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars, another of my favorite books.

Currently Reading: The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan (again)
Last Read: Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn (again)

It didn't used to be this way, but these days I read books the way some people watch TV. I read several at a time, rarely finish what I start, and if it's nonfiction, I skip around the chapters until I think I have a good idea of the author's message and then I put it on the shelf.

Currently I'm reading Aleister Crowley's Liber Aleph Vel Cxi: The Book of Wisdom or Folly, James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games, and Robert Sardello's Facing the World with Soul, all like this. (In case you're curious, I don't recommend becoming this. It's grotesquely unsatisfying. And yeah, I read games like this too. In fact, it may be reading games that did this to me.)

The last book I actually read, cover to cover? Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Paul

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.

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.

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

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!)

Jack Aidley wrote: 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).

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.

Currently reading: Nightmare Town, by Dashiell Hammett.

Recently finished: Glimpses of Abidharma, by Chogyam Trungpa.

--Em

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

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.

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.

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

J B Bell wrote: It's amazingly obvious that Grant Morrisson's Gideon Stargrave is heavily based on Cornelius.

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.

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

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.

What I'm reading
High Crimes and Misdemeanors
Slander
Treason
How to Talk to a Liberal (If you must)

Well? I wish I could say I'm in the middle of something but unfortunately I read really fast. A 250 page book I could easily nail down in a few hours. However, the longest it took me to read any book was the 48 Laws of Power. Great read, very useful, but all the anecdotes kept my mind a-swirling. Took me on and off about 2-3 weeks.

Just finished reading Life in Medieval Times by Rowling as research for the CoS fiction I'm writing. Keith is very knowledgeable in that area of history and I have a lot of catching up to do.

Other than that, everything else has been RPGs for writing reviews, or brain candy fiction not worth mentioning.

JamesNostack wrote: Hesse, "Siddartha." Hippie lameness.

Reading:


Iron Council by China Miéville
The Mead Hall, by Stephen Pollington


Just Read:

Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin



Miéville can write (which can't be said of all genre authors) and is very enjoyable. I'm resenting only having an hour or so a day for it, rather than being able to read it all in one sitting like his last two. I enjoyed Earthsea less than I expected, can't put my finger on why.

Currently reading alaistair reynolds's "Redemption Ark" interspersed with Alexander Kechris's "Classical Descriptive Set Theory".

Also flicking through Mind Hacks when I have the time, rereading Perdido Street Station (having read The Scar a few weeks ago and decided that I should refresh my memory of PSS) and have recently finished my umpteen and a halfth rereading of the earthsea quartet. (Well, the first three. As usual I've lost steam somewhere through the fourth book).

Luke Sineath wrote:
Sorry, no nerdy reads for me.

Reading now:
The Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kasmir by Sudha Koul - Oh this is a good one. Very rich and enveloping writing.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond - Whoa. Must read for everyone interested in culture or history, in my mind.

The Burning Times by Jeanne Kalogridis - Novel set in 1357 France, dealing with Knights Templar, submerging Goddess faith, questions of right/wrong.

Hidden in Plain View by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard - Quilts on the Underground Railroad. Facsinating, and occasionally seems a bit of a reach, but then, it has Cuesta Benberry as a supporter, so that's a big name to me.

Folk Legacies Revisited by David S Cohen - Dry and oddly bland presentation of really interesting anthropology.

Just read:
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks - Novel set in 1666 England, based on the actual village of Eyam, which quarentined itself with the Plague. I really liked this one, right up to the last ten pages, when it feels a bit contrived and rushed.

Wicked by Gregory Maguire - Novel by turns engaging and irritating, with the point, about the nature of evil, burried near the end and a bit heavy-handed.

Remember When by Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb - I also like good suspense in which there isn't (neccessarily) a murdered body. She's a fair writer, and I've read a lot of her stuff as mind candy. The earlier you go, the trashier it gets.

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown - Yeah, I read it. I liked it too, but I'm a sucker for religious conspiracy. I have the other one but havn't read it yet.

The Mole People by Jennifer Toth - Anthropology of homeless people in NYC's tunnels. A great and compelling book, esp. the last chapter where she realizes she's at risk for losing her objectivity, and gets out.

Next up:
Jewel by Bret Lott
America (the book) by (mostly) Jon Stewart
A whole big stack I saw today and even wrote down, but don't have with me.

Also a whole slew of kid books, too many to write out.

It's safe to say I read a lot.

Currently (upper titles have diverted attention from lower titles):
Introducing Stephen Hawking, J.P. McEvoy and Oscar Zarate
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, REH
Solaris, Stanislaw Lem
The Golem at Large:What you Should Know about Technology, Harry Collinds and Trevor Pinch
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Our Posthuman Future, Francis Fukuyama
Downbelow Station, CJ Cherryh
Entering Space, Robert Zubrin

The situation is likely only to worsen as I have indulged myself at a recent bookstore liquidation sale. Pity, I had been doing much better at finishing my reads last year.

Recently completed:
Introducing Sartre, Philip Thody and Howard Read
Chomsky and Globalisation, Jeremy Fox
Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, Mike Mignola