What are you reading?

[Wrang1er]

I am on the library waiting list for Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave by Zora Neale Hurston.

Brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.

I heard about it on NPR and I am excited to get it. I haven't read for pleasure (which I sorely miss) since starting school in January. I am hoping I can make time for it.

[Breathless]

Upcoming flight, so I have loaded up my reading material, mostly educational, however.. The Lord of the Rings.. is purely for pleasure. re-reading..

[homoe]

Originally Posted by Wrang1er

I am on the library waiting list for Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave by Zora Neale Hurston.

Brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.

I heard about it on NPR and I am excited to get it. I haven't read for pleasure (which I sorely miss) since starting school in January. I am hoping I can make time for it.

There was an excerpt of this book in the April 30-May 13 issue of New York Magazine. It looks will worth the wait

[Wrang1er]

Originally Posted by homoe

There was an excerpt of this book in the April 30-May 13 issue of New York Magazine. It looks will worth the wait

It came in yesterday. Unfortunately, I can't't start it today because I have school work and yardwork.

[homoe]

The Wife by Meg Wolitzer because the movie is coming out soon and it looks so very good!

I've just started this, but so far so good.

In the past I have not been fond of books where the wife has given up her dreams so the husband can realize and pursue his.

[2qt]

Caleb's Crossing - Geraldine Brooks

Interesting read so far.. Was skeptical but happy I bought it...

[charley]

The BBC has published a list of 100 books that have shaped the world as follows:

Top 100

The list was determined via ranked ballots and first placed into descending order by number of critic votes, then into descending order by total critic points, then alphabetically (for 73 to 100, the titles listed are tied).

1. The Odyssey (Homer, 8th Century BC)
2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852)
3. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949)
5. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958)
6. One Thousand and One Nights (various authors, 8th-18th Centuries)
7. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605-1615)
8. Hamlet (William Shakespeare, 1603)
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez, 1967)
10. The Iliad (Homer, 8th Century BC)
11. Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987)
12. The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri, 1308-1320)
13. Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare, 1597)
14. The Epic of Gilgamesh (author unknown, circa 22nd-10th Centuries BC)
15. Harry Potter Series (JK Rowling, 1997-2007)
16. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood, 1985)
17. Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922)
18. Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945)
19. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
20. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert, 1856)
21. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Luo Guanzhong, 1321-1323)
22. Journey to the West (Wu Cheng'en, circa 1592)
23. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevksy, 1866)
24. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, 1813)
25. Water Margin (attributed to Shi Nai'an, 1589)
26. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, 1865-1867)
27. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960)
28. Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966)
29. Aesop's Fables (Aesop, circa 620 to 560 BC)
30. Candide (Voltaire, 1759)
31. Medea (Euripides, 431 BC)
32. The Mahabharata (attributed to Vyasa, 4th Century BC)
33. King Lear (William Shakespeare, 1608)
34. The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu, before 1021)
35. The Sorrows of Young Werther (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774)
36. The Trial (Franz Kafka, 1925)
37. Remembrance of Things Past (Marcel Proust, 1913-1927)
38. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
39. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)
40. Moby-Dick (Herman Melville, 1851)
41. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937)
42. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf, 1927)
43. The True Story of Ah Q (Lu Xun, 1921-1922)
44. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865)
45. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1873-1877)
46. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, 1899)
47. Monkey Grip (Helen Garner, 1977)
48. Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925)
49. Oedipus the King (Sophocles, 429 BC)
50. The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka, 1915)
51. The Oresteia (Aeschylus, 5th Century BC)
52. Cinderella (unknown author and date)
53. Howl (Allen Ginsberg, 1956)
54. Les Misérables (Victor Hugo, 1862)
55. Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1871-1872)
56. Pedro Páramo (Juan Rulfo, 1955)
57. The Butterfly Lovers (folk story, various versions)
58. The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, 1387)
59. The Panchatantra (attributed to Vishnu Sharma, circa 300 BC)
60. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, 1881)
61. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1961)
62. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (Robert Tressell, 1914)
63. Song of Lawino (Okot p'Bitek, 1966)
64. The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing, 1962)
65. Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie, 1981)
66. Nervous Conditions (Tsitsi Dangarembga, 1988)
67. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943)
68. The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967)
69. The Ramayana (attributed to Valmiki, 11th Century BC)
70. Antigone (Sophocles, c 441 BC)
71. Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)
72. The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K Le Guin, 1969)
73. A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens, 1843)
74. América (Raúl Otero Reiche, 1980)
75. Before the Law (Franz Kafka, 1915)
76. Children of Gebelawi (Naguib Mahfouz, 1967)
77. Il Canzoniere (Petrarch, 1374)
78. Kebra Nagast (various authors, 1322)
79. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868-1869)
80. Metamorphoses (Ovid, 8 AD)
81. Omeros (Derek Walcott, 1990)
82. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1962)
83. Orlando (Virginia Woolf, 1928)
84. Rainbow Serpent (Aboriginal Australian story cycle, date unknown)
85. Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates, 1961)
86. Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, 1719)
87. Song of Myself (Walt Whitman, 1855)
88. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884)
89. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain, 1876)
90. The Aleph (Jorge Luis Borges, 1945)
91. The Eloquent Peasant (ancient Egyptian folk story, circa 2000 BC)
92. The Emperor's New Clothes (Hans Christian Andersen, 1837)
93. The Jungle (Upton Sinclair, 1906)
94. The Khamriyyat (Abu Nuwas, late 8th-early 9th Century)
95. The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth, 1932)
96. The Raven (Edgar Allan Poe, 1845)
97. The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie, 1988)
98. The Secret History (Donna Tartt, 1992)
99. The Snowy Day (Ezra Jack Keats, 1962)
100. Toba Tek Singh (Saadat Hasan Manto, 1955)

The BBC link is as follows:

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/201...aped-the-world

[Orema]

Just purchased the kindle edition of So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo.

[homoe]

Originally Posted by homoe

The Wife by Meg Wolitzer because the movie is coming out soon and it looks so very good!

I've just started this, but so far so good.

In the past I have not been fond of books where the wife has given up her dreams so the husband can realize and pursue his.

This may be one of the few times a movie is a bit better than the book...I didn't hate it but the movie looks SO much better....

[dark_crystal]

I owe a commercial review for this book so i will proceed to gather my thoughts here



Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlen, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, by Alec Nevala-Lee

As the editor of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction for nearly four decades-from 1937 until his death in 1971-John W. Campbell, Jr. discovered such legendary writers as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein and collaborated with L. Ron Hubbard on the development of dianetics, the philosophical foundation of the controversial Church of Scientology. In this extraordinary cultural biography, Alec Nevala-Lee tells the story of these four men, their relationships, and their collective vision of the future, revealing in unprecedented scope, drama, and detail how the literary genre of science fiction emerged to shape the imaginations of millions.

I was not excited when i opened the package, although i have done a ton of similar books so i did not question the assignment.

I described it to my officemates as a sausage-fest, i recall.

HOWEVER, i had to check the author's gender because i guess this is one of the first "cultural biographies" to come out in the eight months since the #metoo hashtag went viral and it really shows.

We all know Hubbard was a sociopath, but i did not know Asimov was a groper, and Heinlein reminds me of Charles Lindbergh a little bit, if Charles Lindbergh had been a literary genius. I had never heard of John Campbell (big racist apparently) or given any thought to early pulp sci-fi magazines, despite the fact that sci-fi is at least half of my pleasure reading, because early sci-fi looked to me like a sausage-fest.

It WAS. But the author is extremely frank about these "gentlemen's" terrible behavior and meticulous about crediting the contributions of the women in their lives and letting them be fully fleshed characters, empathizing with them where they are victimized and recognizing female pioneers in the magazine-- and that made the book readable for me.

Where i had resisted looking too much at the genre's development, i now understand the process that led us from John Carter to Star Wars, which is where my own history starts.

I feel like that understanding is worth having.



I guess that's what i will say in my review. I just have to completely depersonalize it somehow!

[homoe]

.


The Alice Network by Kate Quinn.

[Kätzchen]

Originally Posted by dark_crystal

I owe a commercial review for this book so i will proceed to gather my thoughts here



Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlen, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, by Alec Nevala-Lee

As the editor of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction for nearly four decades-from 1937 until his death in 1971-John W. Campbell, Jr. discovered such legendary writers as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein and collaborated with L. Ron Hubbard on the development of dianetics, the philosophical foundation of the controversial Church of Scientology. In this extraordinary cultural biography, Alec Nevala-Lee tells the story of these four men, their relationships, and their collective vision of the future, revealing in unprecedented scope, drama, and detail how the literary genre of science fiction emerged to shape the imaginations of millions.

I was not excited when i opened the package, although i have done a ton of similar books so i did not question the assignment.

I described it to my officemates as a sausage-fest, i recall.

HOWEVER, i had to check the author's gender because i guess this is one of the first "cultural biographies" to come out in the eight months since the #metoo hashtag went viral and it really shows.

We all know Hubbard was a sociopath, but i did not know Asimov was a groper, and Heinlein reminds me of Charles Lindbergh a little bit, if Charles Lindbergh had been a literary genius. I had never heard of John Campbell (big racist apparently) or given any thought to early pulp sci-fi magazines, despite the fact that sci-fi is at least half of my pleasure reading, because early sci-fi looked to me like a sausage-fest.

It WAS. But the author is extremely frank about these "gentlemen's" terrible behavior and meticulous about crediting the contributions of the women in their lives and letting them be fully fleshed characters, empathizing with them where they are victimized and recognizing female pioneers in the magazine-- and that made the book readable for me.

Where i had resisted looking too much at the genre's development, i now understand the process that led us from John Carter to Star Wars, which is where my own history starts.

I feel like that understanding is worth having.



I guess that's what i will say in my review. I just have to completely depersonalize it somehow!

Thanks so much dark_crystal for sharing about this book and how hard it can be at times, to evaluate books, as an librarian. I appreciate your thoughts on this particular subject (book). --K.