What are you reading today/book club

[hharrissonn]

I'm reading Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty right now and am really enjoying it. Very cool insights into the mortuary industry/cultural landscape of death in the West taken from working in the industry. References a lot of ethnography/anthropological study that I read while in school so that's kind of an added bonus. This is sort of perfect moment for me to be reading this while I'm preparing myself for the first death of one of my grandparents. It has been a bit cathartic. The writing is very easy to digest and not at all pretentious or jargon-y; it's pop-sociology kind of stuff.

She has a pretty good YouTube series called "Ask a Mortician" that's definitely worth watching if you're bored.

I also finally read Breakfast at Tiffany's a couple of weeks ago, and I'm surprised it took me so long. Capote's In Cold Blood is one of my favorites. Definitely a neat read, especially if you like Burroughs/Vonnegut.

[dakaf_fal]

I also took a little too long to read The Life and Death of the Great American City and just finished it a few days ago. I was surprised how modern the book felt considering that it’s over five and a half decades old. I enjoyed reading about housing density in cities and diversity of street life. The idea of implementing a sliding scale rent-to-own system for public housing was also very interesting, particularly since the author’s primary example for implementation was Baltimore rowhomes and I live in a Baltimore rowhouse. I’m also curious to know how much of this book’s dogma has been adopted into popular planning theory. Some bits seem easy enough to implement with proper incentives for new development and zoning laws, but other ideas presented by the author seem inherently difficult to implement unless city districts are given much more power to conduct their own affairs independent from city government.

[mittens]

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[can-]

has anyone explored neal stephensons works outside diamond age and snowcrash ? what are the hits? I probably wont read cryptonomicon.

[rjbman]

read most post-snowcrash but baroque cycle which was too stuffy for me to get into. havent gotten to the dodo one yet

- cryptonomicon is multiple parts, some ww2 stuff and some "modern" (90s) financial manuevering. was a decent read but it's been a while
- anathem is pretty cool, the premise is that there are monks but they study science and math instead of religion. then aliens are spotted.
- mongoliad is a long saga (4 books?) set in the mongolian era (wow shocker) cowritten with a bunch of other authors. very swordy. i liked them.
- reamde is a modern day thriller, very techno friendly (social networks, gold farming, etc). i didn't love it.
- seveneves - moon shatters and destroys earth, with some folks being saved by launching a spaceship. 3rd act is a millenia later.

usually the 3rd act is batshit crazy and not as connected to the rest. my biggest suggestions would be anathem and seveneves, in that order

[kickingthefly]

need a sci fi nerd @rjbman, some leguin etc dealt with the idea of a garden right? (coming at this via donna haraway who refers in passing).
any other notable gardens ? whats that 70s sci fi film with hydroponics spaceship where things go wrong..

[julius]

I've been having a mafia movie stint recently and so decided to pick up The Godfather by Puzo. It feels like I'm running through it, and I'm unsure if it's because of how much I like the book for itself, or if it's because I'm having the movie do a lot of the imaginative heavy-lifting. What do y'all think about the experience of reading a book after watching a movie or vice versa. I'm not so interested in the "better than" debate, but instead, how the experience of one affects the experience of the other.

[kickingthefly]

@rjbman yeah thats the one thank you. still need to read some leguin.

julius, i read the godfather i think after seeing the film and found it pretty much a potboiler? dont recall any of hte physical poetry of hte film. i think bad books make good films is a decent rule of thumb (solaris, stalker etc)

[Ques]

PSA to anyone who likes scifi: the three body problem series by liu cixin is virulently sexist, but it doesn't really crop up until the second book, at which point you've already invested 600+ pages of your time, which makes the realization all the more angst-inducing; AVOID

[soko]

anyone know what I should read if I liked both of Ben Lerner’s novels but moreso the first one??

[surfdude69]

Currently got all these on the go. I will probably start Journey to the End of the Night again as I started it ages ago and forgot a lot of what's happened so far. Hunger is fantastic though

[GeorgeT]

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

[Copeland]

I'm writing a short story, can someone read it and be brutally honest with me?