Summer Reading 2013

originally posted by MLipton:

Damn youngsters!! I much prefer the experience of reading a book that I hold in my hands, turning the pages, etc. Maybe I just spend too much time on the computer at work. And get offa my lawn, too.

Mark Lipton
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Damn youngsters!!! Still able to read that damned small print and not needing to increase font size...
 
I still subscribe to the print version of the New York Times. It is just not the same on the intertoobz/handheld electronic devices.

Well, more accurately, Chelsea subscribes on my behalf so we can get the professor discount. There are benefits to having a PhD.
 
Brooke Allen's Other Side of the Mirror - a nice travelogue on Syria. For some reason there are plenty of great travel books on Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, much of North Africa, Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, but I've always been puzzled why there are so few good ones on Syria. Allen's is nice but not great, but that's still very welcome.

Michael Shermer and the Culture series of Iain M. Banks are also being read.
 
Just finished Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning and just starting They were counted by Miklos Banffy (about Transylvania)...what can I say I am part Transylvanian...

And translating an Italian thriller involving a Caravaggio obsessed serial killer. Details here as soon as it is out in English.
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Peter Creasey:

originally posted by Jay Miller: I find reading it on the Kindle much, much easier.
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Jay, I MUCH prefer reading ebooks on my Sony ereader rather than reading paper books.

I had to read a paper book recently and found it to be a hassle...plus, I kept tapping words expecting to see the dictionary pop up with a definition!

. . . . . Pete
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Damn youngsters!! I much prefer the experience of reading a book that I hold in my hands, turning the pages, etc. Maybe I just spend too much time on the computer at work. And get offa my lawn, too.

Mark Lipton
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+1
 
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
what can I say I am part Transylvanian...
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Well, I am not part, I am 100%, whatever that means, which is to say Romanian, Hungarian, German, and Slovak - I am missing the Serbian and Ukrainian parts, which are, naturally, more prevalent in Banat (south of Transylvania) and Bucovina (north).
 
originally posted by Jay Miller:
For all of you starting Song of Ice and Fire I'll warn you that Feast of Crows (Book 4) is a pretty rough slog. I considered giving up on the series several times while reading it as he did a good job of destroying all interest. He was back on form with Dance with Dragons though.
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I agree that FoC was a bit rough, but found Dance of Dragons appallingly bad. I'm convinced that he has completely lost control of the stories and that the story is now being written by the Family Guy joke manatees picking random plot concept balls from a net. By the end of the book, I found that I'm now rooting for the Others, but I'm afraid it will turn out that Ben Linus is their leader.
 
I'm happily ambidextrous about books and Kindles. As long as my mind disappears into the language, I don't care how the language is presented. The dictionaries that are attached to Kindles can make life easier, but if I'm being serious about construing a passage, I will consult the OED regardless. If I'm not being serious and approximations are sufficient, though, it is nice not to have to put the book down and pick it up. On the other hand, books are much easier to flip back and forth through if you need to remind yourself of something.

I'm enjoying reading Zola's Rougon-Macquart series and all of Hardy's novels, both on Kindle. No one needs me to recommend these books, though. And I'm not sure I'd recommend all of them. The Return of the Native is better than I remembered it. A lot of other Hardy hardly rises above romantic comedies and dramas. The best Zola novels, so far, are the most famous. I did like La Curée, though and La Conquête de Plassans.
 
I find it bothersome with paper books to have to hold on to the left and right sides. It is much easier to hold the ereader with just one page being displayed.

Plus, when eating or otherwise having my hands occupied, it is handy to be able to set the ereader up in a bracket for reading then just quickly swipe to change pages.

. . . . . Pete
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
. On the other hand, books are much easier to flip back and forth through if you need to remind yourself of .
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I agree and this is the biggest drawback to the ereaders , for me anyway. I pretty much use my iPad for books now but wish the was a easier or more efficient way to go back and forth.
 
You folks are inspiring. I don't do much leisure reading, for many reasons, despite the fact that I love it.

But, the two most recent books I read were Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf and Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin.

Both have such lovely clean writing styles, they really soothe the brain. Mrs. Dalloway is much more of a fanciful 'vacation read'. Baldwin is more serious but I keep coming back to re-read the book because I love his unique window on 1950s race and social relations on both sides of the Atlantic.
 
originally posted by Cliff:
For summer, in a vaguely related vein, try Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power, a fascinating history of sugar, which argues that sugar was the essential ingredient in the industrial revolution.
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Yes, I remember enjoying this book when I was searching for all manner of food history books.
 
I'm working my way through François Chartier's Taste Buds and Molecules. "Working" because it is difficult to get past the annoying "modern" page design (typefaces meant to look like handwriting, color bars over paragraph headings, pages printed to look as though they were made from hand-made paper) and 33 pages of self-congratulatory introductions, including a foreword by a guy with a PhD in cancer research. On the other hand, it's hard to dislike a chapter heading that reads "The molecular chain linking vin jaune, curry, maple syrup, sauternes, etc."

Also just finished Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon, sort of an upscale Alan Furst. It made good reading during our recent deluge (11 inches of rain in 10 days, or something like that).
 
originally posted by Cristian Dezso:
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
what can I say I am part Transylvanian...
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Well, I am not part, I am 100%, whatever that means, which is to say Romanian, Hungarian, German, and Slovak - I am missing the Serbian and Ukrainian parts, which are, naturally, more prevalent in Banat (south of Transylvania) and Bucovina (north).
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My mother's family is not from the area, though neither are most of the above, so I could be even more Transylvanian than I admit. And the Miklos Banffy book (so far about pre WWI life in Kolozsvar) is really good.
 
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