What Are You Reading Now?

[Green Lantern]

Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn. It's a bit of a latter day hardboiled detective story but the protagonist suffers from Tourette's and constantly struggles to communicate with the rest of the world. Excellent read.

[OhioBlue]

Just finished The Count of Monte Cristo (finally) and then The Giver.

Currently reading Mother Night (Vonnegut) and listening to Dante's Inferno.

[pelagius]

Amazon.com: Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won eBook: L. Jon Wertheim, Tobias Moskowitz: Kindle Store

Like freakonomics, applied to sports. I'm only a couple of chapters into it, but so far, some really great stuff. Tells about a high school football coach in Arkansas who has won several state championships with a pretty limited athletic pool (small private academic school), because he never punts, taking to the extreme the notion that football coaches at all levels don't go for it on fourth down nearly enough, due to loss aversion. Talks about why refs swallow their whistles at the end of games. Why coaches shouldn't pull players who are a foul away from fouling out. How the strike zone changes depending on the count, and how being a star player affects that change. Thats just from the first few chapters.

Really fun read.

Toby is a friend, and he was on my dissertation committee (for the record, Toby is a great empirical economist ... he has done some really nice "real" research). I haven't read the book, but I've had a number of conversations about the book with him. I'm glad book the appears to be a good one.

[happyone]

I finished Khan : empire of Silver . Not bad. It is not about Genghis, but his 3rd son and successor Ogedai and the Mongol invasion of Europe. Other major characters include Tsubodai, the greatest of the Mongol generals, the various grandsons of Genghis and the wife of Genghis youngest son, who basically succeeded her husband as Kahn of the Mongol homelands and was the mother of Kublai. I think I've enjoyed this series more than his one on Julius Ceasar.

Currently reading the book Wuap mentioned about TR

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/River-Doubt-Theodore-Roosevelts-Darkest/dp/0767913736/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297437333&sr=8-1"]Amazon.com: The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey (9780767913737): Candice Millard: Books@@AMEPARAM@@http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51OHgjzcqIL.@@AMEPARAM@@51OHgjzcqIL[/ame]

[Gidget]

I am in the middle of two books right now and I have about 7 on my current waiting list, but I have been thinking of adding Jonathan Franzen's two big books to the list, The Corrections and Freedom, anyone have any feedback on either of these?

[FN Phat]

Our Iceberg is Melting.

It is mandatory reading at work to coincide with changes that upper management is making. Size 14 font, double-spaced with colored pictures. My kind of book. I actually enjoyed the fable.

[wuapinmon]

Currently reading the book Wuap mentioned about TR

Amazon.com: The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey (9780767913737): Candice Millard: Books

Let me know what you think. I enjoyed it, even though the writing wasn't stellar; the history made it worthwhile, though please remember that Lope de Aguirre was killed in Venezuela, not Perú.

[LA Ute]

Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, by Claire Harman. I have read only Pride and Prejudice and saw a BBC production of Emma, so I am no Austenophile. This review got me interested enough to spend $9.18 to buy the Kindle version.

Whoops, you have to be a subscriber to read the article. Oh, well, here's an excerpt:

When Jane Austen died in July 1817, aged 41, she had achieved moderate fame as a writer. In the previous six years, four of her novels had been published. She had been the subject of a long and highly favorable review in one of the country’s most respected journals, the Quarterly Review, and the Prince Regent was said to be “a great admirer” of her works, keeping sets of her novels at each of his residences.

Yet just a few years later, she was forgotten. Almost nothing was published by or about her during the 1820s, although a few admirers, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge, quietly enjoyed her books. In the 1830s, Jane’s brother and sister, satisfied that their sister’s fame was now irretrievably a thing of the past, were only too happy to sell five of the six copyrights in their possession to the publisher Richard Bentley. Bentley kept a small stock of Austen novels in circulation, and by the early 1840s, he had created a market for her books. It was a small one, though, and when the copyright of each expired (Sense and Sensibility in 1839, Pride and Prejudice in 1841, Mansfield Park in 1842, Emma and Northanger Abbey in 1857, and Persuasion in 1860), the publishing world didn’t seem to notice....

By the 1890s, editions of Jane Austen’s novels had become widely available. At the turn of the century, according to one anonymous reviewer, “every man of intellectual pretensions either likes to read her books or thinks it necessary to apologize if he does not”—a state of affairs that’s held true ever since. In 2010, it’s possible to think the Brontës preposterous and cloying, to think Thackeray cold and pretentious, and to dislike Dickens’s long-winded moralizing. It’s simply not possible for a literate person to think poorly of Jane Austen.

Harman’s book is an attempt to answer the question, How did it happen? How did Austen go from being the author of a few half-remembered Regency-era romances to one of the most hallowed names in English literature? Austen, after all, wasn’t one of those writers who, like Blake or Kafka, were misunderstood or ignored by their own age but later given posthumous esteem. Austen hasn’t just achieved her due; she has become a permanent international celebrity, a universally recognizable brand, an obsession among Anglophiles all over the globe. She is the subject of scores of biographies, her works analyzed in thousands of literary-critical articles and monographs, and her novels have inspired more box office successes than any other 19th-century writer. All this from an author whose oeuvre extends to six novels, each of which concerns the affairs of (to quote Austen herself) “three or four families in a country village.”

So I am curious and will see what I get from this book.

[oxcoug]

If you haven't read it, check out 'The Professor and the Madman.' It is about the creation of the Oxford Dictionary. It focuses on the person in charge of putting the dictionary together...as well as a person who wrote more entries than any other person. This person was also crazy and a murderer. It is a fascinating read into how the dictionary was created and how some brilliant people are truly messed up.

Yeah read that and a few years ago and will second - fascinating read.

[Gidget]

Hello out there. Nobody has read Jonathan Franzen?

[Jeff Lebowski]

Hello out there. Nobody has read Jonathan Franzen?

I read Corrections when it was first published. I thought it was quite good. Well worth the read.

[ERCougar]

Toby is a friend, and he was on my dissertation committee (for the record, Toby is a great empirical economist ... he has done some really nice "real" research). I haven't read the book, but I've had a number of conversations about the book with him. I'm glad book the appears to be a good one.

Interesting. The guy sounds like a sports nut. Just finished the book last night. Some of his other points:
-The home court advantage is real, goes across all sports, and is almost completely due to officiating (and has nothing to do with sleeping in a hotel, being outside of one's time zone, etc).
-The worst pick you can have in the NFL draft is the #1 pick. At the very best, you'll overpay for a decent player; most of the time, you'll overpay for a dud. You should always trade down.
-In basketball, it's better to have a superstar and four scrubs than five good players. (I like the implications for BYU here...)
-There's no such thing as the "hot hand" or "momentum". This is a really interesting chapter and he does a good job of laying out his case, but I still have a hard time coming around on this one.
-Defense doesn't "win championships", and is no more important than offense (and probably less so)
-Icing a player doesn't work, and probably hurts more than it helps.
-The Cubs aren't cursed. They're just really bad, due to the fact that they have little financial incentive to improve. The Yankees are consistently good for the same reason.

Anyway, hope that didn't spoil much, but really--the fun of the book is not necessarily the points he makes but how he makes them. I can't imagine any sports fan not thoroughly enjoying it.

[dabrockster]

Finished "Son of Hamas"... Interesting book...I think it could have been more detailed but I enjoyed it.. Although I had a feeling of hopelessness when he gave his idea of how to solve the Middle east problem. But it did enlighten me on things I did not know about the culture there...

[il Padrino Ute]

Am I Not A Man? (The Dred Scott Story) - by Mark L. Shurtleff

Yes, that's the same Shurtleff who is the Utah AG. I've very much enjoyed it thus far.

[happyone]

I just finished The River of Doubt. I liked it. Unlike Prof Wuap, I don't know enough about South American history to comment on the accuracy of the author's facts, but I'll take Wuap's word on the location of the death of Aguirre. To me it is amazing that there were still major unexplored/unmapped areas of the globe less than 100 yrs ago. Before reading this I didn't know that much about TR's expedition to the Amazon, mainly that he had gone on one. I liked her portrayal of the relationship of TR and his son Kermit who accompanied him both on this expedition and his safari to Africa after TR left the presidency. I also liked the contrast she drew between the two leaders of the expedition, TR and Brazilian Army Col Candidio Rondon, who according to Millard is one of the greats in exploring and mapping the Amazon Basin. Basically the expedition was a Charlie Foxtrot from the get go. It was planned a leisurely journey down one of the Amzons tributaries and ended just about killing TR. One critique of the book though, I would like more maps!!

I am now reading some brain candy - David Weber's new book
[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Out-Dark-David-Weber/dp/0765324121/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1"]Amazon.com: Out of the Dark (9780765324122): David Weber: Books@@AMEPARAM@@http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41V2pwuFsML.@@AMEPARAM@@41V2pwuFsML[/ame]

He is one of the few science fiction authors that I still read.