What book are you reading?

aNiMaL wrote:

I am mid way through a Michael Crichton book called "Airframe." Its pretty good. It's about an quality assurance investigation over an airplane after a suspicious mid air flight incident which killed a few people, and injured a bunch more. Meanwhile, this airplane company is trying to seal a deal with China for some airplanes. It's getting pretty suspenseful.

Anyhow, I want to finish it so I can start reading my next book; "Scar Tissue" by Anthony Kiedis.

What book are you reading?

stephen kings 'cell'. about half way through it, should have it finished in the next day or two.

soulsinging wrote:

the self-loathing of an addict is about the only thing he got right in there, ill give you that. it was the only part worth reading in that whole mess of a novel and certainly the only remotely accurate sentiment.

Soulsinging,

I thought of you the other day when I was reading "A Million Little Pieces". In the part I was on, he sits on the couch and watches and episode of "ER" and he goes on this two page rant about how it did not depict drug addiction accurately. I thought it was really funny given what I had read from you about his book!

I'm not very good at just readin one book so I'm reading quite a few at the moment.

The Pearl
Grapes Of Wrath
East Of Eden by John Steinbeck

The Catcher in The Rye

The Bible

To Kill A Mocking Bird

Heavy Weather.

P.G. Wodehouse.

this book will break your heart. just a warning.


In the same vein as Fall On Your Knees or The Way the Crow Flies by Anne Marie Macdonald (both of which I highly recommend as well), this book, The Little Friend, is a beautiful and breathtaking story of a family living with tragedy. Sounds too sad, I know, but believe me, it's written in such a way that you cannot put it down. The characters are rich and detailed and you KNOW them. And the story is just heartbreaking.

It's basically about a young girl's quest to solve the murder of her brother when he was nine years old, and she was just a baby. He was killed on Mother's Day, as the whole, big family fussed around to prepare dinner and he played outside. Here's an excerpt: the boy was Robin; Charlotte is his mother:

"Whenever Robin was going anywhere- to school, to a friend's house- it had always been important to him to say goodbye, in tender and frequently quite prolonged and ceremonious ways. She had a thousand memories of little notes he'd written, kisses blown from a window, his small hand chattering up and down at her from the backseats of departing cars: goodbye! goodbye! When he was a baby he'd learned bye-bye before hello; it was his way of greeting people as well as leaving them. It seemed particularly cruel to Charlotte that there had been no goodbye this time. She had been so distracted that she had no very clear recollection of the last words she'd exchanged with Robin, or even the last time she'd seen him (that day), when what she needed was something concrete, some small fine memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her- sightless now, stumbling- through this sudden desert of existence which stretched before her from the present moment until the end of life."


(bold added by me)

Maybe because I'm a mother of a boy, this passage immediately makes my throat tighten and my eyes well up. What an acute pain to lose a child, and there is something about the way she describes the tenderness felt between a mother and son- especially a sensitive one like hers, or mine- that just makes my chest ache. I'm re-reading this book now- I read it three years ago- and I'm preparing to have my heart broken again and again.

Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The unbearable lightness of Being) - Milan Kundera

Just finishing up A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick

For anyone thinking about reading Scar Tissue, personally i enjoyed the read. Same with Dirt.
Perferred Angels and Demons to Davinci.
Loved Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Edge34 wrote:

Just finishing up A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick

loved it, heard theres a movie coming some time this year......it occured to me while reading that it'd make a great film. Bought Valis soon after I'd finished it but whilst i m yet to taste it, a few flick-thrus seem to suggest a hard to grasp plot...........

soulsinging wrote:

that is a pretty great book. i read it a while back and nobody captures the emotions and confusion of love and lust like kundera. the book of laughter and forgetting is great as well.

now im reading 'a prayer for owen meany' by john irving. it's pretty good, but im making slow going of it. i think i like it better than 'the world according to garp' though.

Just finished it last night. I'm going to read Žert (The Joke) next, I have to read them for my Czech class. I like Kundera's style. Too bad their are only two books of his on the reading list.

I'm going to read Karel Čapek's RUR as well, he's the inventor of the word 'robot' in case you were wondering where that word originated from.