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I LOVE Sarah Vowell.

Seems like the perfect thing to get an audiobook of, as I love listening to her voice when she does stories on This American Life.

Of course, I'll say the opposite of David Sedaris, whose voice makes me want to kick in my radio and throw it out the car window.
 
Right now I'm trying to get through Tom Robbins' Villa Incognito, which I've put off for years due to bad reviews. And I liked his last book a lot.

It certainly hasn't started out very promising...
 
I'm nearly all the way through This is Your Brain on Music, which is a great book about how music relates and affects your brain, what processes are started when you listen to music, etc. It turns out that nearly every brain region is affected by the different components of music. I've also started a few others in the meantime. First is Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma's Fabulous Flaming Lips, which has been a good, quick read so far, about halfway through it. Second is Resounding International Relations. It's about the mixture of music, culture, and politics from a political science viewpoint, rather than the typical musicological view that many academic music books about music and politics have. Takes me a bit longer to read that though since it's all academia type language. Third, Rebel Musics. Again, a book about music and politics, but this one's written from that musicological standpoint. And, the last one, Music in the Post-9/11 World. That's a really interesting one about censorship and how music was used/evolved/changed after 9/11. (Another musicological one as well).
:nerd:

Those don't include all the various books I'm reading for classes either...like Can't Stop, Won't Stop, Code of the Street, and textbooks. :crack:
 
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I bought 5 books when I went to Barnes and Noble on Sunday, and one of them ( a mystery thriller) kept me up all night. I just couldn't put it down. It was around 3:30 when I finished it, I read the whole book in one night :lol: I also got Memoirs of a Geisha which I've heard really good things about and read great reviews on.
 
I'm smack dab in the middle of The Color Purple for one of my classes. I can say this much: I'd rather hear a dialect than read one.
Even Hagrid's dialect got annoying, and it wasn't even that bad!

I also half-assed my way through Catch-22 and didn't like it although the premise behind it was excellent. :up: I didn't like the movie either.
I read The Last Days of Louisiana Red and didn't care for anyone in it at all. :yawn:

Surprisingly, I've been read Wilde up and down for another class and I really love him! Everything I've read by him (poems, Salome, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest) has left me more and more impressed. (In case you were wondering, I prefer them all by that order, last being best.) :wink:
I want to read An Ideal Husband as soon as I finish this semester.
I'm also reading Yeats' poetry right now, but I'm not big on poetry, although it is quite nice.

Yeah, and a bunch of boring textbooks about feminism in film and film history are thrown in the bunch too. I'll be so glad to get out of school and read stuff that *I* want to read.
 
I'm almost done with "White Oleander" now, and it's one of the most beautifully written and narrated books that I've ever read. simile and metaphor alone is striking. I find myself re-reading entire passages just to fully mine the depth. I've found all the characters so full and rounded out with all of their flaws and imperfections. It's just so full of truth and reality, hope and fear, pleasure and pain, joy and sorroiw. It's now definitely on my shortlist of my all-time favorite books. I know it's one I'll read many more times.:heart: :heart:
 
PlaTheGreat said:
I can say this much: I'd rather hear a dialect than read one.
Click to expand...

I barely understood a word of Trainspotting when I read it. It was seriously annoying.
 
I loved Trainspotting (film) and I'm pretty sure that having the captions on only helped that out. :lol:

Hooray for no dialect in captions! :hi5:
 
I'm reading "Little Children" by Tom Perotta now, and it's excellent. I'm almost done with it. It really weaves the stories of all the characters into a thoughtful, and entertaining novel. It's part satire, part drama that takes a look at the not-so-beneficial aspects of the American Dream, upper middle class suburban life that society expects us to shoot for. Through the lives of the characters, the story points out that the life that is supposed to make us happy often makes us miserable by forcing us to tow a specific corporate and family line that prevents people from taking risks and also creates an environment that doesn't allow people to deal effectively with their issues, under the "pretend everything is fine and perfect" guise. It's similar in theme, not plot, to "American Beauty" or "Desperate Housewives". I can't wait to go out and rent the movie. I highly recommend this one too.
 
corianderstem said:
I really liked Little Children.
Click to expand...

It's excellent! I actually just got back from the library because I was checking out Perrotta on line yesterday, and found out about his latest book "The Abstinence Teacher". I'm going to read that next. It sounds just as wonderful as "Little Children"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abstinence_Teacher
 
I just got put on the waiting list at the library for "Wicked" by Gregory Maguire. I hope it doesn't take too long to get it becaue I really want to read it.

I just remembered I really want to read "Atonement," thanks to Thora. I'll probably have to be put on the waiting list at the library for that one, too.
 
Just finished "The Time Traveller's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger. It is basically a romantic novel with an intriguing sci-fi twist - its male protagonist suffers from a disorder which causes him to randomly disappear from his present life and find himself in the past or present. Personally I'm a sucker for such scenarios and mind-screwing paradoxes it poses; here its main aim is to explore the relationship between Henry the time traveller and his wife, who first meet when he's in his fourties and she is six. I really enjoyed the book and found it quite moving.
 
^I LOVED Time Traveler's Wife. Demi Moore has purchased the rights to that novel btw.

I just finished Valerie Bertinelli's book and it was really a disappointment. She certainly wasn't the innocent clean cut all American girl everyone thought she was.
 
I finished "The Abstinence Teacher", and I enjoyed it just as much as "Little Children". I would definitely suggest it! Cori, I know you mentioned really liking "Little Children", so if you ever want to check it out, you should go for it. I just started "The Age of Anxiety: From McCarthyism to Terrorism" by Haynes Johnson, and I can already tell it's really going to challenge me and interest me. He chronicles the history of the Cold Warn and how the Bush administration is using similar fear-mongering and McCarthy-like tactics in the "war on terror."
 
I actually had The Abstinence Teacher on loan from the library, but wasn't in the mood to read it, so I returned it. I'll definitely get around to reading it eventually.
 
#16 How To Be Popular by Meg Cabot

Another challenging read. Ha! What can I say - I adore Meg Cabot. This one wasn't her best as far as the teen-lit set goes, but it was far from the worst I've read of hers. It was cute and the perfect book to have at my bedside to easily pick up and put down when I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore.
 
I'm about to dumb down this thread guys

I read Tori Spelling's memoir this weekend. I have to say, it was entertaining. It'll be a good summer-time-by-the-pool read for those of you who like that sort of thing. :wink:

If anything she wrote about her mother is even remotely true, then Candy Spelling is monster. :crack:
 
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