What are you reading?

[Starmancer]

Aside from Manga, I loaned The Alchemist by...some guy I forgot...from a family member. Slowly going through it...and I mean slowly. About a paragraph at a time. I'm not much for books.

EDIT: oh hey, that's the book by the Brazilian author! I thought it was another ancient classic, but it's actually not that old. I've been wanting to read this for a long time, but I forgot what it was called.

[The Shoemaker]

I'm not reading anything [outside of gaming], just viewing the latest issue (issue 10) of NF Magazine digitally right now.

Spoiler

The issue is focused on game-crossovers...

How is that mag? I know it's a collaboration of a couple known internet writers (like RawMeat from GoNintendo) and the spiritual successor of Nintendo Power, but I've never read it.

[kitroplious]

How is that mag? I know it's a collaboration of a couple known internet writers (like RawMeat from GoNintendo) and the spiritual successor of Nintendo Power, but I've never read it.

It's a good throwback with some new stuff put in (Expanded retro section; "It's New to Me!" feature, and some other themed features.

[Kong Wen]

I made great progress on Journey to the End of the Night while on vacation last week—ploughed through about 200 pages on the flights up and back. Share, you were right, Céline really spares no one! I did find the book only really starts to pick up after Africa, about 150 pages in, but then once it picks up, it picks up good and fast.

You know how many books seem to have that one scene or that one passage that ties everything together and seals the deal, makes it a good book, and solidifies the book's message and meaning? Sometimes it seems like you read a passage and think the author must have written the whole book just to support this one scene. I found a passage like that in Journey, but I'll have to finish the book before commenting further. I have about 100 pages left.

I also picked up a copy of Tai-Pan in Toronto. I'll read that one next, since Share's raving about Whirlwind has started putting me back in the mood for more Clavell.

[Kong Wen]

Here's the passage in question in Journey to the End of the Night:

"When you stop to examine the way in which words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation. That corolla of bloated flesh, the mouth, which screws itself up to whistle, which sucks in breath, contorts itself, discharges all manner of viscous sounds across a fetid barrier of decaying teeth—how revolting! Yet that is what we are adjured to sublimate into an ideal. It's not easy. Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment. [...] Feces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or to grow. On this score we are far more unfortunate than shit; our frenzy to persist in our present state—that's the unconscionable torture.

"[...] All our misery comes from wanting at all costs to go on being Tom, Dick or Harry, year in year out. This body of ours, this disguise put on by common jumping molecules, is in constant revolt against the abominable farce of having to endure. Our molecules, the dears, want to get lost in the universe as fast as they can! It makes them miserable to be nothing but 'us,' the jerks of infinity." (291, emphases mine)

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. Journey to the End of the Night. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: New Directions, 2006. Print.

[Kong Wen]

This isn't something I'm reading (for reasons that will become obvious), but I figured this would be a good place to discuss it. The Future Library is a project that invites one author per year to contribute a manuscript for the next 100 years. In 2114, it will publish all the books using paper from trees it has just planted this year.

Margaret Atwood is the first author to contribute a manuscript. It'll be printed on archival paper and kept in a specially designed room in Oslo until 2114. It won't see the light of day until long after her death (and ours).

This sounds fun, even though we'll never see what becomes of it.

[VictorViper]

This has to be the coolest time capsule ever conceived. I have serious doubts about where the paper will come from (taking afterlife bets that it'll never see print), but none whatsoever that this will be unearthed and released to whatever exists by then, should we have the capacity.

[Kong Wen]

This has to be the coolest time capsule ever conceived. I have serious doubts about where the paper will come from (taking afterlife bets that it'll never see print), but none whatsoever that this will be unearthed and released to whatever exists by then, should we have the capacity.

The city has donated some land to the project, and 1000 trees have been planted specifically for this. 100 books doesn't use a lot of tree. It should be enough, as long as everything goes OK. If not, I'm sure they can borrow some trees from elsewhere, since it'll be a neat historical occasion. As for whatever exists by then, it's only 100 years.

[Sharecrow]

Okay, so I recently finished James Clavell's Whirlwind. I can honestly say that this is my second favorite Clavell novel after the mighty Tai Pan. I have not yet read Escape, which is kind of a side-story novel of Whirlwind with some more detail and scenes that aren't directly covered in Whirlwind. I'll get to it soon. I loved just about every page of this thing. As I carried on about in the chat, it made me want to visit Iran someday even more than I already had wanted to. I think what I knew about Persia from other non-fiction readings and from what glimpses I had of that culture when I was in the Middle East helped to build that desire too. This is definitely on my bucket list.

I also just finished Terry Brooks' Genesis of Shannara: The Elves of Cintra. This is book two of the Genesis trilogy that is set in a post-apocalyptic near-future. I love how specific Brooks was about where the Elves are hiding (even called out an actual National Park LOL - I googled images and I can see how he would make that claim). This book didn't click for me until I was very nearly done with it. I've read a lot of his works, though, so it could just be that I'm becoming satiated with that mold. I'm not sure. But there were a few scenes that more than paid off the time I invested in this and I'm looking forward to starting the third one soon, which I already own.

I realized this morning with a deafening clarity what I most want to read next for a physical book: Jose Saramago's Cain. I'm still reading a Ben Bova novel on my Kindle which I'll remark more on once I finish it.

After Cain, I'll either re-read The Scarlet Letter or read Jack London's The Sea Wolf for my first time. If anyone wants to weigh in on those options, feel free to vote

[Kong Wen]

After Cain, I'll either re-read The Scarlet Letter or read Jack London's The Sea Wolf for my first time. If anyone wants to weigh in on those options, feel free to vote

Not one of the options you offered, but if you're going to read London, I have no choice but to recommend The Star-Rover. It's one of the best books I've ever experienced, and it's been highly influential to my thinking despite the fact that I only read it for the first time relatively recently (in 2006).