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Activities of Ku Klux Klan Organizations in the United States. 7/10

It's a book of hearing transcripts before the Committee on Unamerican Activities. It's a fascinating read. It gets very repetitive at times (they are hearings, after all) but in all, it's an interesting description of how the Klans were organized and what people were up to.

You can download some from the web. I happened to run across an old book version (from the Library of Congress) at the used book store this weekend. http://www.archive.org/details/activitiesofkukl04unit

Two more books by Giorgio Agamben. This morning I finished Means Without End: Notes on Politics, and I'm about 15 pages to the end of Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive.

My brain seriously hurts. I read for about 12 hours today, with breaks for food, a quick run, and mental health breaks. If you're going to do that, don't read about Auschwitz. Just a word of advice.

Cormac McCarthy - All the Pretty Horses
10/10

This is my favorite McCarthy by far/so far. So beautiful; a sad and supremely paced story with all the depth and brutality you'd expect from McCarthy. There were times when I actually just put the book down and stared at it.

I have about 5 pages left in Don Quixote, which is overwhelmingly good. It's like a 17th century Confederacy of Dunces. 11/10

Carlin - When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops? - 7

Live>books

A Lion Among Men - Gregory Maguire

I just started it, about 50 pages in, and it's so much better than Son of a Witch. Loving it.

altars of radness wrote:I have about 5 pages left in Don Quixote, which is overwhelmingly good. It's like a 17th century Confederacy of Dunces. 11/10

Just started this a few days ago and already love it. I totally agree with the 11/10. I hope I go crazy like him when I get that old.

Salem's Lot - Stephen King: 6/10
Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut: 7/10
The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler: 8/10

Time Enough For Love - Heinlein
8/10

I really liked it, but the only thing that annoyed/bored me was that it was so focused on sex.

I have a question about this book: Why was Ira so obsessed with keeping Lazarus alive?

Timothy Burke - Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe 7/10 Cool idea that's well researched, but came off a little dry given the richness of the material.

Emily Martin - Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture 7/10 A lot of interesting ideas about the ideal self in contemporary America and how that interacts with mania.

Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man
Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination

the godfather of cyberpunk

The Great And Secret Show by Clive Barker - 8.5/10

I want to give this a higher score, but I know I haven't read enough books yet.

After Dark, My Sweet - Jim Thompson: 6/10
Too short, and kind of felt like a toss-off. I hope there is more of his stuff to the level of Killer Inside Me.

Stephen Hawking - The Universe in a Nutshell - 8.5

Pretty awesome. It would be higher if the one I"m on now, The Fabric of the Cosmos, wasn't waaay more in depth.

More Information Than You Require - J. Hodgeman - 7.5
Very funny, probably enjoyed it more than Areas of My Expertise, although I gave up about 200 names into the list of all living mole men. However, I would like to see Hodgeman try his hand at something with an actual story instead of just these almanacs of retarded facts. Two is alright, but a third would be pushing it.

Re-reading Dune for the umpteenth time. 10/10 of course.

Cat's Cradle - 10/10. Hadn't read it since high school. Still probably my favorite Vonnegut.

God Emperor of Dune - 9/10. Second favorite of the Dune books, though I haven't read Chapterhouse yet and I'm about 2/3 of the way through Heretics.

Auschwitz by Laurence Rees - 9.5/10. Excellent, if not a little difficult to get through at times.

Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor: 7/10
Totally fucking weird.

The Glass Key - Dashiell Hammett: 9/10

World without end by Ken Follett.
Tome 2 of "The pillars of the Earth".
I love novels with a Medieval setting.
Literature for fags. Just what I need.

http://www.ken-follett.com/bibliography ... t_end.html

Bil Bryson - Notes from a small island

Judith Butler - Precarious Life 7/10

This is a series of essays that Butler wrote in the period after 9/11. Parts are quite good, but other parts seem kind of obvious. I think she didn't have a clear idea of who her audience was, and the book suffers for that reason. I believe she was trying to write to a larger audience and be a public intellectual, but I think once you start talking about "sovereignty in the field of governmentality" and stuff like that you can be sure you've lost everyone but your academic audience. The best essay was the one on mourning and loss.

Now reading: Christopher Steiner - African Art in Transition

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? PKD

I wish I could go back and re-rate The Road. I think it's only a 7. And this is an 8. I enjoyed A Scanner Darkly a lot more than this (it's a perfect 10, IMO), but PKD's writing really pulled me along and I think that it has a lot of interesting ideas in it that I wish would've made it to the movie (or would've made it to the movie more clearly). The emphasis on empathy, the super-blurred line between man and machine, questions about the soul, the concentration on kipple, the idea of Mercerism and it's lie/truth dichotomy. As usual, PKD packs a ton of ideas into a small amount of space and manages to hold it all together with a super awesome narrative. He's awesome at taking complex ideas and filtering them down to their most basic elements... but he doesn't hold your hand. There's so much going on in this book, but perhaps not as much as is going on in A Scanner Darkly. Next up is the Three Stigmata...

8/10

Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market Eric Schlosser (of "Fast Food Nation" fame) 7/10

Had extremely high expectations for this book but it wasn't a "stay up all night" read as FFN was. My main let down was that each section (drug dealing, pornography, and prostitution) felt a little too short but a worthy read nonetheless.

Before that, I read (and re-read a few more times for good measure) Ekeroth's Swedish Death Metal.... words cannot describe how crucial this is top anyone interested in the Scandinavian DM scene. Even if you only read one book a year, or even a decade... this is THE one. 10/10

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality - Brian Greene (the dude that wrote The Elegant Universe) - 10

Fantastic. It starts with Newton and ends with braneworlds and loop quantum gravity.

Thanasphere - Vonnegut - 9
Short stories count as books. Short books.

father of lies wrote:The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality - Brian Greene (the dude that wrote The Elegant Universe) - 10
.

I read The Elegant Universe, man that shit aint easy, if your head doesn't spin when thinking about the quantum than you're not doing it right