What are you reading?

[dubkitty]

if you're interested in reading music stuff, the Peter Guralnick 2-volume biography of Elvis is the best biography of a contemporary musical artist i've ever read. the word i'd use for it is "magisterial." and "fair"...he doesn't shy away from the ugly stuff, but he doesn't delight in it either.

[devnulljp]

Any recommendations for must read nonfiction? Serious stuff please.

Off the top of my head...
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
The Origin of Species
Guns Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
The First Three Minutes - Steven Weinberg
QED - The Strange Theory of Light and Matter - Richard Feynman
Chaos - James Gleick
Wonderful Life - Stephen Jay Gould
The Double Helix - James D. Watson
The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan
Consciousness Explained - Daniel Dennett
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley
Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution - Richard Fortey
At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity - Stuart Kauffman
Evolution and the Theory of Games - John Maynard Smith

[jfrey]

Have almost all of those already. Anything else?

[D.o.S.]

Any recommendations for must read nonfiction? Serious stuff please.

Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie
Michael Herr's Dispatches

[devnulljp]

Have almost all of those already. Anything else?

The Art of the Soluble - Peter Medawar
The Song of the Dodo - David Quammen
The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins
Your Inner Fish - Neil Shubin
Consilience - EO Wilson
Sociobiology - EO Wilson
Lucy the Beginnings of Humankind - Donald Johanson
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory - Stephen J Gould
The Feynman Lectures on Physics and QED
The Two Cultures - CP Snow
Genetic Takeover and the Mineral Origins of Life - AG Cairns-Smith
The Logic of Scientific Discovery - Karl Popper
I'm assuming you've read Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach ... how about The Mind's I, which he wrote with Dan Dennett?
The Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan
The Nature of the Chemical Bond - Linus Pauling
Microbe Hunters - Paul de Kruif
On Growth and Form - D'Arcy Thompson

[RR Bigman]

one day, I will live this experiment.

Haven't read this since High School. I find Thoreau's language a little "roundabout" for my modern brain, but that's sort of the charm for me. Forces me to reread and focus more on what I'm reading. Same thing with Poe and Lovecraft (though Lovecraft's use of such elaborate and fanciful language is a little bit of an anachronism, it definitely shows his Poe influence)

[bigchiefbc]

Started "A Storm of Swords" (3rd book of A Song of Ice and Fire) last night. Already made it through 125 pages. Fucking sweet so far.

[Achtane]

[dubkitty]

I just finished Flags Of Our Fathers. it's an unusual WWII history written by the son of one of the guys in the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph. Like many veterans, his father wouldn't talk about the war, and in fact never told them that he'd been awarded the second-highest decoration for valor in the Navy (he was a medic attached to the Marines), one step below the Medal of Honor, and he also assiduously avoided interviews or publicity about the photo after doing a War Bonds fundraising tour. After he passed, his son wanted to know what happened there and why his father wouldn't talk about it; this led him to the lives of the other men in the photograph, the men in their company, and other veterans of the battle, and the story of how the photo became an American icon. the book intertwines the lives of the six fighting men and their families, the epic conflict, the commodification of the surviving men and their fates, and the mystery of the corpsman's experience into a compelling narrative that humanizes the battle to a painfully intimate degree without resorting to the cheap "isn't it tragic" post-Ken Burns use of the personal anecdote, and depicts the courage, loyalty, and genuine love between the men who fought in WWII better than anything i've read in years. here's that non-fiction for you.

[jfrey]

^ Will add it to my list.

[D.o.S.]

one day, I will live this experiment.

Haven't read this since High School. I find Thoreau's language a little "roundabout" for my modern brain, but that's sort of the charm for me. Forces me to reread and focus more on what I'm reading. Same thing with Poe and Lovecraft (though Lovecraft's use of such elaborate and fanciful language is a little bit of an anachronism, it definitely shows his Poe influence)

If you ever go to Walden Pond, it makes Thoreau's wild wilderness experience a little more laughable. Given its proximity to civilization and all that.

Still a great book, though.

[phantasmagorovich]

This is awesome. I loved it despite or maybe even because of the fact it is so unrealistic and constructed.

[mutmoo]

[Achtane]

This is awesome. I loved it despite or maybe even because of the fact it is so unrealistic and constructed.

I really enjoyed High Rise, so I got most of the collection. I'm liking it so far, but it's not grabbing me as instantly as High Rise did.

[Chankgeez]

i'm back into Children Of Men. it's...... even more bleak than the movie. because it's first person. and the main character is NOT a happy or even good person. it's ok. kinda making myself keep going at this point. it's kinda interesting, hope it gets better.

LOVE the movie.

I just finished The Children of Men and now see how they never could've filmed a movie from that novel without greatly adapting it.

I LOVE the movie too.