What are you reading the week of July 26, 2009?

[DUgosh]

The Shack by Wm Paul Young

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Non-fiction

So I guess it doesn't count, but FWIW-World Religions From Ancient History to the Present edited by Geoffrey Parrinder

[rurallib]

2. Just got "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins

[WCGreen]

12. Just ordered the book...

[ConcernedCanuk]

3. "THE FIST OF GOD" by Frederick Forsyth

.
.
.

It's about the Iraqi invasion into Kuwait, and the buildup to the Allied response.

Fiction, but based on facts . . very enlightening

[vixengrl]

4. "Phantom" by Terry Goodkind, to be followed by "Confessor"

and I'll probably finish PIerce's Idiot America. And I probably will get to a bookstore today....

I tend to read more than one book at a time--I have half-read books strewn about my house.

I got into Goodkind's Sword of Truth series from watching the tv show "Legend of the Seeker". The books are more....intense, and loaded with Mr. Goodkind's philosophy, but I can't hold that against a good story and good characters.

[Jim__]

5. Straw Dogs by John Gray.

The main thrust of the book seems to be that humanity is like any other animal and cannot control its own destiny. Scientific progress can give us longer life, but ultimately, because of our human nature, technology will destroy us. He maintains that humanism retains many secular Christian values, including the idea that man is special.

From the foreword:

Among contemporary philosophers it is a matter of pride to be ignorant of theology. As a result, the Christian origins of secular humanism are rarely understood. Yet they were perfectly clear to its founders. In the early 19th century the French Positivists Henri Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte invented the Religion of Humanity, a vision of a universal civilization based on science that is the prototype for the political religions of the 20th century. Through their impact on John Stuart Mill, they made liberalism the secular creed it is today. Through their deep influence on Karl Marx, they helped shape 'scientific socialism'. Ironically, for Saint-Simon and Comte were fierce critics of laissez-faire economics, they also inspired the late 20th century cult of the global free market. I have told this paradoxical and often farcical story in my book Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern.

Humanism is not science, but religion - the post-Christian faith that humans can make the world better than any in which they have so far lived. In pre-Christian Europe it was taken for granted that the future would be like the past. Knowledge and invention might advance, but ethics would remain much the same. History was a series of cycles with no overall meaning.

Against this pagan view, Christians understood history as a story of sin and redemption. Humanism is the transformation of this Christian doctrine of salvation into a project of universal human emancipation. The idea of progress is a secular version of the Christian belief in providence. That is why among ancient pagans it was unknown.

Belief in progress has another source. In science, the growth of knowledge is cumulative. But human life as a whole is not a cumulative activity; what is gained in one generation may be lost in the next. In science, knowledge is an unmixed good; in ethics and politics it is bad as well as good. Science increases human power - and magnifies the flaws in human nature. It enables us to live longer and have higher living standards than in the past. At the same time it allows us to wreak destruction - on each other and the earth - on a larger scale than ever before.

I'm not sure where he goes with all this, and from what I've seen so far, he makes claims but doesn't always back them up. The book does seem like interesting food for thought.

[Arctic Dave]

6. Just finished Hocus Pocus by Vonnegut and am now on to Cannery Row.

Light summer reading, nothing too heavy.

[hippywife]

7. The Virgin Suicides by J. Eugenides. n/t

[azmouse]

8. Helter Skelter

It'll be 40 years next month that the Tate/LaBianca murders occurred.
I've never read this book and I wanted to know the real story of what happened.

[fishwax]

9. Ironweed, by William Kennedy

for starters :)

[fadedrose]

10. Almost finished with MURDER ONE by Wm. Bernhardt

About 30 pages left - don't know what I'll start tomorrow..

MURDER ONE is better than the last one I read -

SILENT JUSTICE (last week) - which would be my least favorite of all the Bernhardt books I read so far. It was too long, and kids dying of leukemia caused by industry's waste disposal is not a keen subject of mine.

[WCGreen]

11. The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti...

I picked this book out of the NYT recommended reads and turns out, two months later, I am at a writing workshop and Hannah read the story I submitted...

She liked it but said it need specific areas of work.

So far the book is living up to the billing given in the NYT.

[saltpoint]

13. WHITEWATER. Paul Horgan.

[fadedrose]

14. MURDER AMONG THE OWLS, Bill Crider

Tedious. I speed-read it and couldn't wait to finish it.

Bill Crider's characters lie, cheat, steal, gossip, fight, kill, and do all sorts of unimaginable stupid nasty things, but they don't SWEAR. Somebody has to explain why the author thinks swearing is so bad that he can't use any profanity in his books....gees, even the bible . . .

How many times I had wished somebody would have said "dammit."

[Araxen]

15. Road of the Patriarch

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&tag=mozilla-20&index=blended&link_code=qs&field-keywords=road%20of%20the%20patriarch&sourceid=Mozilla-search

[closeupready]

16. Mary Renault's "The Charioteer"

n/t

[InternalDialogue]

17. For some reason, the title intrigues me.

What's the quick overview?

[closeupready]

18. It's basically a gay romance set in WWII England

and how the closet impacts lives. Heterosexual Mary Renault was very pro-gay. Many (most?) of her works were pro-gay and written in a much less free era. Cheers. :)

[InternalDialogue]

19. Thank you!

I will look for this on the library shelves and check it out.

[krispos42]

20. "The Loch", by Steve Alten

Read it over the weekend while I was travelling. I found it fairly hard to put down. It's about Loch Ness, and the underlying science in the story is based on some pretty neat real-life theories.

Picked it at random from the shelves in my local big-box store. Very glad I did!

[Wickerman]

21. Lorrie Moore's Gate at the Stairs

well worth the 10 year wait. A remarkable writer.

[Sanity Claws]

22. Just finished A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

I really loved it. It truly captured a time and place.

[fadedrose]

23. Finished METZGER'S DOG by Thomas Perry

Confusing at times but very good. The kind of book you remember for a long time...

[timeforpeace]

24. Book 2 of The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb, "Royal Assassin"

Fantasy. OK, but the plot depends on the heroes being and remaining really stupid in order for the bad guys to keep things moving along. That's insults the reader IMO.

[TheCentepedeShoes]

25. The First Man In Rome

by Colleen McCullough
I hadn't waded into a Big Fat Fiction Book since The Terror and I thought something about ancient Rome might be interesting
Like it so far

[vixengrl]

26. This is a great series--and it starts well.

If you like epic story-telling and depth and history and motives and so on--this is a great historical fiction serioes--I love it myself to bits. McCullough's Sulla is the most charming sociopath you will ever know. Her Marius is a not-always charming soldier--but they propel the greatest historical romance ever--I cannot recommend her Rome stuff highly enough!