What are you reading???

[Maine-iac]

Finished "The Prime Minister" this weekend. I'll probably take a Trollope break for a month or so before polishing off the last book in the Palliser series "The Duke's Children". I think that one skips ahead in the time line a bit more than the other books in the series. I did enjoy The Prime Minister though. I think Trollope writes Victorian women very convincingly. They aren't the stereotypical "domestic angels" that many authors of the period like to pretend that they were, but neither do they have the problem of many contemporary novels set in the past where modern sensibilities are imposed on historic heroines in ways that just don't ring true. Some of the characters are progressive (Alice Vavasor, Lady Laura Standish, and to a lesser extent Emily Wharton) and others are decidedly not (Glencora Palliser, Madame Max Goessler) but still not insipid pattern cards of virtue. George Eliot writes Victorian women well too, but since she was one, you expect it more than you do from Trollope.

Right now, I'm re-reading "Cheaper By The Dozen" which always makes me smile.

[Descalzo]

I'm trying to read The Republic by Plato. It's pretty heavy. I needed a break, so I finished the Twilight series. I quite liked it.

[campbell]

I finished the new Order of the Stick book this weekend (War and XPs), and I'm back to reading Orthodoxy by Chesterton.

Need to update Shelfari.

[SirVLCIV]

Originally Posted by Maine-iac

Hmmm. Haven't read a lot of those. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" is pretty interesting, though I don't know if it quite qualifies as "literature". When it first came out I saw someone reading it in the airport, and figured it was a symbolic title, so I asked my sister if she knew what it was about. She told me "It's about a man who mistook his wife for a hat. Really. Non-fiction."

Yup - non-fiction. The title case was the first one in the book. The patient apparently lost the ability to visually distinguish 'total' objects (as in, he could look at your eyebrow, your lips, your nose, but not distinguish your face from someone else's). Very odd.

The scenario in question occurs when the man gets up to leave, and grabs his wife's hair, in an attempt to put his hat back on.

There's also a guy with a 30 year amnesia gap, who's 'present' is 30 years prior, and believes himself to be 30 years younger than he actually is.

[SirVLCIV]

Originally Posted by SirVLCIV

I apologize if I'm less than enthused (my first choice, 'Revolutionary inventions in music' was cancelled due to lack of interest, and the other interesting courses don't fit into my 2 day schedule). Final semester, and I'm done with courses in my major; I'm so ready to get the degree

We've got the following this semester:

1. William Carlos Williams, The Doctor Stories Eh. Autobiographical stories - not bad - I hated the lack of quotation marks. Very annoying.
2. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Pretty cool - more of a case study than a book for the masses. Doesn't insult the intelligence of the reader by dumbing it down too much.
3. Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith ~30% into it. Good read so far; not what I would read on my own.
4. Doris Z. Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation
5. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors
6. Arthur Miller’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People
7. Dale Wasserman’s play One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (based on Ken Kesey’s novel)
8. Margaret Edson, Wit: A Play

.

[MathGuy]

I only have about 60 pages left in the Dark Tower. I can barely function right now. The beast is in my bag right now, calling to me. Its song is somewhat more malicious than Ves'-Ka Gan. It says, "Come. Finish it. Take a lunch break. It doesn't matter that it's only nine in the morning. It's lunchtime (somewhen) somewhere."

[MCSS]

Dark Tower is one helluva good story. =]

[Maine-iac]

Finished "Cheaper by the Dozen" pretty quickly. Now reading Susan Wittig Alberts "Tale of Hawthorne House", from the Beatrix Potter series. Now this series has several features pre-disposing me not to like it:

- I tend to dislike historic figures as sleuths, as they are usually written so as to behave anachronistically, and to take on personality characteristics dear to the author, but not necessarily attributed to them in legitimate biographies and memoirs.
- I'm not a big fan of Albert's, finding the heroine of the "China Bayles" series to spend too much time indulging in bouts of self-pity, and her Victorian series written with her husband as "Robin Paige" to be wildly anachronistic.
- I tend to find stories with anthropomorphic animals to be saccarine.

And yet, somehow, this series is charming, and so far this entry is the best of the lot.

[yankeetripper]

The Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States of America

George Washington - George HW Bush

[Patience]

Originally Posted by yankeetripper

The Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States of America

George Washington - George HW Bush

That seems pretty boring. The inaugural adress of the President has been the White House since 1801