Books - we read what we are?

[misscam]

Been writing on a new BSG fic, whereupon I scribbled down the following line: He trusts her with books - "it's a gift, never lend books" - and thus part of him. (What you read is part of who you are, after all. She's a teacher, she knows that.)

I started to think about that - my mind is horrible at wandering off on tangents, truly - and comments from the last post I did concerning my bookshelf. So, are we what we read?

Here are the last ten books I read (or reread). With opinions. Draw your own conclusions.

1.Thud!
This is one of my favourite Terry Pratchett books and I reread it about once a month. It's not the funniest of them. But it is an example of how much a book can tell you about our own world when not set in it.

2. How Soccer/Football Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization
Flawed book, but interesting topic. Don't agree with half of it, but arguing with it in my head was half the fun.

3. A Deadly Brew
I think it was falena84 that recommended these to me while I visted her in Italy. I've been reading the series slowly but surely. It's got crime, which I adore, and it's an interesting visualization of a historical time I've had troubles picturing before. Good book - I even lent it to my mum.

4. What Came Before He Shot Her
I've tried three times to finish this book. I always fail. It's a book set in the world of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, but it's a book about the killer, not the police. It's so relentlessly grim and depressing I can't take it. I'm not the most cheerful of people in my own writing at times, but holy shit I cannot take that book. I need some hope.

5. A Short History of Nearly Everything
I reread this book a lot, because there's so much fact in it and every time, I managed to put more of it in my brain. I love this book. This is a book that shows why science, life and the universe is awesome. It's a gateway into more awesome. It's also the book I would hit hardcore creationists with. Weapon of choice, yes.

6. Nordfronten. Hitlers skjebeområde (by Asbjørn Jaklin)
This is a Norwegian book, the title roughly translating to The Northern Front. Hitler's fateful territory. It's basically about the war in the North during WWII - invasion of Norway, Finland's involvement, the northern battles against the Soviet Union. I knew a lot of the Norwegian stuff already, of course, but this book gave me a lot of sympathy for Finland, caught between Hitler and Stalin. We often write WWII as the war between good and bad, but nothing's that simple. In a battle of Biggest Asswipe, Stalin and Hitler would take it into extratime, seriously.
I want to hug Finland :(

7. War of the Ancients
Why thank you, I am a horrid WoW geek! Now this includes reading backstory. And also Tyrande/Malfurion OTP, yo. Blizzard must love my money. (Bookwise, I rate it average - I've read worse, I've read better, it kept me entertained on the train so did its job.)

8. Simply Love
A Romance Novel. Yes, I read them. I have a vaguely love-hate relationship with the genre, because on one hand I must enjoy it to have kept reading the genre for many years, but on the other hand I've been known to get so annoyed at some books I stop reading midways. This one I liked okay. Sex didn't fix everything, the characters didn't annoy me to death and the romance was built slowly.

9. Stalingrad
Oooow this book. Not because it's bad - it's very well-written, and that's exactly why. This makes all the suffering real and painful and for both sides. It makes a painful truth of war clear - war kills moral highground. Reading Berlin just made this clearer to me.

10. Berlusconis Italia. Historier om makt, mafia og motstand (by Simen Ekern)
This is another book in my "understanding Italy" project, which I started after visiting falena84. Italy has always been football and food to Norwegians, and when I realised I knew more of ancient Rome than modern Italy, I started reading. This is a Norwegian take on it - Berlusconi's Italy. Stories about power, mafia and resistance roughly translated. I'm not sure how my project is doing, but where I before regarded as Berlusconi as a joke and expressed my bewilderment anyone would vote for him, I think I get some of it now. It depresses me, as I can no longer pin it all on Berlusconi, asshat of impressive height. I also have to realise the very sad truth - to my social democratic heart - that in Italy, the left is not particulary better. Between plague and cholera, what do you pick? At least the cholera brings a show. Oi, Italy. I feel for you.

Give me your last ten - or five, if you can't remember ten. I'll tell you what impression of you I get from it. Also, taking book recs eagerly, oh yes.

(Yay football now, and my team won yesterday wheeeee.)

Comments

[evilstorm.livejournal.com]

but this book gave me a lot of sympathy for Finland, caught between Hitler and Stalin.

I know what you mean, but my pity for them is seriously tempered by awe and respect for their sheer fucking batshit awesomeness.

[denorios.livejournal.com]

I was flicking through that football one in a bookstore the other day - would you say it's worth reading or not?

And all the books I've read so far this year are here. And if you're looking for book recs, have you read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell? It's my all-time favourite book - I'm currently reading it again for the umpteenth time.

[rivrea.livejournal.com]

Yay! Book memes!

The non-fiction books about Stalingrad and WWII in Norway sound very interesting, albeit rather depressing in their own right.

The last ten books I read:

-- J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun

-- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison

-- Wolf Haas, Das ewige Leben (Eternal Life) & Der Knochenmann (The Grim Reaper): two macabre, quirky and black-humoured Austrian mystery novels about a taciturn private dectective

-- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

-- Daniel Kehlmann, Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World)

-- Oliver MacDonagh, Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds

-- Andrea Maria Schenkel, Tannöd (The Murder Farm

-- Alice Walker, The Color Purple

-- Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

WIPs:

-- a business-training book about project management

-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

[misscam.livejournal.com]

Bwhaha, yes. Though at least half of that is Stalin being a totally paranoid idiot, with his purges and what not. I mean, the close to ploughing over the Germans did at the beginning of their war with the USSR wasn't just Germans doing well. It was the Red Army just not being a fight force.

But yeah, much respect for what Finland did in the face of such an overwhelming enemy. Norwegians in general were and are sympathetic for this reason - sadly, Quisling and the Nazis in Norway used this sympathy recruit Norwegians into the German army. They were told they'd help Finland, and got the eastern front instead. Most died.

Both Stalin and Hitler are so made of fail. Bah.

[misscam.livejournal.com]

It is, but the author will get on your nerves a bit. Still, a lot of the stuff he brings up got me pondering, so was worth reading for me.

No, I haven't. What genre is it?

[denorios.livejournal.com]

It's sort of historical fantasy - set in the Napoleonic era in an England in which magic used to exist and has since faded away, and it's about two magicians who set out to revive it. It's written in a sort of Jane Austen period-appropriate style, and features fairies and Raven Kings and Lord Byron and the Duke of Wellington - and it's utterly fantastic. It's the kind of book you absolutely love in and when you finish you've almost forgotten that magic isn't actually real!

[evilstorm.livejournal.com]

Well, having Siberia rather made up for that. :D

’cause, I mean, Napoleon had been steaming in there 100 years before: "I'm going to kill them, I'm going to kill them, going to… Oh, it's a bit cold, it's a bit cold. Right! Ok, ok, bad idea." And then Hitler, "I've got a better idea, got a better idea… Oh, it's the same idea! It's the same idea, it's the same idea..." --Eddie Izzard

Yeah, my history buff friend is rather terrified of all you Nordic dudes for this reason. :D Seriously, skiing anti-tank personnel? Holy fucking shit, okay.

Wait, they pulled a bait-and-switch? What. How did that happen. What.

[despertarse.livejournal.com]

currently reading: 'Kafka on the Shore' by Haruki Murakami

up next: 'Pictor's Metamorphoses' by Hermann Hesse, 'Middlesex' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Dharma Bums' by Jack Kerouac, and 'Hocus Pocus' by Kurt Vonnegut

last books read, only included 3 school required reading books out of many:
'Their Eyes Were Watching God' by Zora Neale Hurston
'The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & other stories' by Charles Bukowski
'The Human Fly and Other Stories' by T.C. Boyle
'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead' by Tom Stoppard
'Heart of Darkness' by Joseph Conrad
'Tender as Hellfire' by Joe Meno
'The Lovely Bones' by Alice Sebold
'Geek Love' by Katherine Dunn
'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac
'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' by J.K. Rowling

rec: 'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini, if you haven't already read it

[misscam.livejournal.com]

Classics. Crime. And interestingly, a book about what made another author's book what they are. I'd say that shows you are not just interested in reading as a past-time, but actually in books as an artform.

I have a partciular interest in WWII non-ficiton books. Got loads of books on various aspects of it. Not sure why it exactly got my attention, aside from Norway's obvious involvement. Maybe it's because it's a war of so many horrors, and trying to understand human "evil" as it were has already been interetsing to be. (Some of that is visible in the sort of crime books I pick too.) But anyway, I do recommend both Stalingrad and Berlin. I think it's actually fairly balanced, abd doesn't reduce the Germans to caricatures.

[partly-bouncy.livejournal.com]

My last ten in no particular order...

The Open Brand, When push comes to pull in a web-made world by Kelly Mooney and Nita Rollins It was a book on marketing in a web 2.0 world, information on companies that did that successfully, what certain people did and why it was unique.

1. Zlata's Diary, A child's life in wartime Sarajevo by Zlata Filipovic Pretty much what it says. I loved Sarajevo but didn't feel I really had a clue after visiting because so hard to conceptualize that. Gave an idea of what happened from the perspective of 10 to 13 year old child.

2. Three Cups of Tea, One man's mission to promote peace... One school at a time by Greg Mortenseon and David Oliver Relin Biography about a guy who went to climb K2 in Pakistan and ended up building schools in Pakistan.

3. Chasing Ghosts, Failures and facades in Iraq: A soldier's perspective by Paul Rieckhoff Biography of an American soldier's experience in Iraq.

4. Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez Biography about an American hair dresser who went to Kabul to help women learna trade to improve their lot in life.

5. CSI: Grave Matters by Max Allan Collins CSI tie in.

6. Getting Stoned with Savages, A trip through the islands of Fiji and Vanuatu by J. Maarteen Troost About a guy's experience living in Vanuatu and Fiji with his wife. (It made me want to move back to the region before I realized I left that after only three months for a reason.)

7. Love & Blood, At the World Cup with the footballers, fans, and freaks by Jamie Trecker A book about a journalist's experience with the World Cup in Japan/Korea and in Germany.

8. Can I Keep My Jersey? 11 teams, 5 countries, and 4 years in my life as a basketball vagabond by Paul Shirley A book about an American basketball player's experience playing professionally. (And after reading it, I pretty much didn't want to watch another NBA game ever.)

9. The Catcher was a Spy, The mysterious life of Moe Berg by Nicholas Dawidoff A book about an American Jew who was a baseball player and had some real insecurities and identity issues in his life even as he did a few good things for the country.

10. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Violate them at your own risk! by Al Ries and Jack Trout Another marketing book. I liked this better than the first one.

[misscam.livejournal.com]

Yeah - moving all the factories behind the Urals probably saved the Soviet. They not only surpassed the Germans in production - they doubled and trippled the Germans numbers in tanks and planes. It was still a close call. Reading some of the history books I get a bit worried by how close it was at times, eep.

LOL at the quote, though. Hehe.

I have a Finnish great-grandfather. Fear the hardcore in my genes! :P

Oh yes. See, Quisling seized upon the Soviet invasion of Finland because a large number of Norwegians were sympathetic to the Finns. So he proclaimed Norway would send people under Norwegian uniform to help the Finns fight, something even people who loathed Quisling could get behind and volunteer for. But the Germans just took all the Norwegians who signed up and stuck them in a SS division and they were sent to the Eastern front in German uniforms.

Quisling got the flak for it, though it was really the SS not giving a shit how Quisling got the men, just that they had more canon-fodder.

In ironies of ironies, some of these Norwegians were the last defenders of Berlin.

[misscam.livejournal.com]

Iiinteresting. I did like the dragons-in-Naoplean-war books quite a lot (admittedly, for idea more than writing style of the author, which sometimes didn't agree with me) so that might be something I'd very much like, yes.

*makes note*

[denorios.livejournal.com]

Oh, the Temeraire books? Yeah, I liked them, but I found the actual writing a bit...simple? I'm not quite sure how to describe it, just a bit straightforward and basic. But Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has a wonderful, whimsical tone and I ♥ it SO MUCH. It's the most wonderful world and there's loads of footnotes and asides that give it so much depth.

Last Books I read

[bloodanna.livejournal.com]

1 and 2. Books One: The Summer Tree and Two: The Wandering Fire of The Fionavar Tapestry (a trilogy).

3. The Dead Zone. I don't know why I keep reading his books, I utterly hate his writing, plus he references himself which drives me nuts...

4. Silence of the Lambs. Good, I know how it would go having seen the movie, but still addicting and delightfully creepy.

5. Chocolat. I loved this book though I do think the movie had a (better?) more straight-forward plot.

6. August. Long and a bit boring in places, but the ending wrapped it up and fit so perfectly that I find myself thinking about every-so-often and smiling.

7. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. OMG, I loved this! Definitely one of my favorite books that I'm going to re-read over and over again.

8. Raisin in the Sun. Eh, good. Read it for school.

9. A Farewell To Arms. A "Classic", blagh. Read it for school, hated it. I know it's based on his life and the ending did make me tear up, but his dialog! I mean who the hell talks like that? It even sounds weird in the movie and there it's been tweaked (plus most of it's said by Rock Hudson which helps *laughs*).

10. Grapes of Wrath. Another school book. The later parts about what was happening, yet not about the family personally, I liked, but rest was tedious and the writing was repetitious, if you made a drinking game out of every time he uses some form of the words dust/dusty you'd be sloshed within two pages. Plus the ending didn't seem to... End it, ya know?

Sorry, when I tend to get carried away when talking about my books. :)

[misscam.livejournal.com]

I had to google half of these! Interesting mix of contemporary and recent history - very grounded.

I have the book, just haven't read it yet. I'm always weary of things that get hyped too much, so I wait for the hype to leave my brain before I read, lol.

[misscam.livejournal.com]

Those be the ones. And yeah, I think the writing was a bit... It was just the words she wrote. It didn't have something deeper or anything that made me feel she meant more than the actual words on the page. If that makes any sense at all.

I have to see if I can find it here in Norway, obviously. It's lovely to find new books to heart.

[misscam.livejournal.com]

'Textbooks', biographies, non-fiction? Speaks to your historical interest, heh. Definitely not surprised from what I know of your interests in fandom.

I want that football book, I do.

Re: Last Books I read

[misscam.livejournal.com]

Good Omens is my most read book, by far. It is awesome and I had to buy a new print because I wore out the old.

Don't like books that are forced on you (from school) but enjoy those who have had a good adaptation? Interesting if movies make you want to read the books. I often go the other way - it's not always a good.

[partly-bouncy.livejournal.com]

Biographies and history are awesome. :)

Football books can be really interesting. I read the one you read about a year or two ago. It was interesting. If you're interested in American soccer, A Home on the Field by Paul Cuadros is an interesting book that ties the game into class issues in the USA and the immigration issue. And there is a book on Iraqi football that is also excellent.

[rivrea.livejournal.com]

Well, you know what they say: you can take the girl out of the literary studies department, but you can't take the literary studies department out of the girl. :)

And I'll definitely put Stalingrad and Berlin on my veeery looong to-read-some-day list now. If you have got any other WWII recs, please let me know.

[manicr.livejournal.com]

We are a hardcore kickass people. Suomalaista sisua!

Just don't stand between a Finn and his drink.

[misscam.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Well, Angela Lambert's Eva Braun is worth a read, if not technically a WWII book. Laurence Rees' The Nazis: A Warning from History is also very interetsing, if supremely uncomfortable to read. He also has a book on Auschwitz that falls under the same heading. (They all make me so *shameface* for the whole of Europe, minus the awesomeness of Denmark.)

Might think of some more later.

[slickmeister.livejournal.com]

I was going to post my list, then I realised that I read so much it turned into kind of a mess.

"Ok, I got geeky and just re-read the Thrawn Trilogy because sometimes I miss star wars... but before that I....blwuieuifhawehfahh."


Could've read good omens In there... Pretty sure I read fragile things... before that I have no clue.

[misscam.livejournal.com]

*makes note*

I so hate the soccer word. To me, it's always and forever and first football. American football is rugby, dammit! /rant But yeah, sounds like an interesting book. I've always seen football and the US as a divorce, except they never got married in the first place.

[manicr.livejournal.com]

Book meme! Yay!

Hmm let's see if i remember the ones I've recently read.

The Gold Falcon by Katerine Kerr, I'cve read the series so far and will be starting with The Spirit Stone next. I'm somewhat nostalgic about this series and it's not bad.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis this book is actually in a way more suited for cinema, even if the book is better than the movie, given the constant rambling fashion input.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov this book, despite it's controversial content, actually left me untouched. I merely observed that I have known girls (and still do), who like young Dolores "Lolita" "Lo", have found satisfaction for their need for attention from men, men quite older than themselves.

I wonder if this says something about the jaded society we live in or if it's just the girls here in Sweden who see such credential in snaring an older man around their little finger.

Velocity by D. Koontz not his best nor his worst, a pleasant read in a way but for a thriller lacking in thrills.

Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay the worst in the series. A disappointment for someone who enjoyed the original realistic spin instead of this pseudo-scfi he concocted.

A hoard of class literature in programming, syntax and semantics has otherwise kept me busy from reading much new stuff though I have re-read a few of my own books.

These include A few Discworld novels (I adore the Watch series, Thud! included though Night Watch is by far my favourite), I have every single one except Making Money and the Amazing Maurice, Good Omens (again), Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman and a few others.