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+--- Thread: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading Whatever (/showthread.php?tid=74)
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading Catch-22 - btp - 05-24-2012
Catinuing!
man somebody should update that thread title.
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RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading A Magical Cats Mystery - btp - 05-27-2012
Thanks Schazer for your swift and modly thread-updating response!
So guy's I've decided this is way better when I have someone reading this with me, and not just me by myself.
If anyone is interested, I can set up a little something where I scan the pages to you and we do a live-co-reading via skype or commenting thing of your choice.
Or hey, if someone would be interested in doing one by yourself, I'd love to toss a couple of pages your way! Not right to hog all these cats.
So yeah, if you're interested post here or PM me or talk to me if I happen to be on IRC (it's like a shooting star or a plane crash- yeah sometimes it happens, but it doesn't last long). If there aren't any takers I'll just toss part 3 of 3 up here and keep on goin!
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading A Magical Cats Mystery - Schazer - 07-12-2012
Bumping this thread because oh man I just finished Sirens of Titan. I always forget that books make me cry, I'm bloody hopeless. For the guts of it, it was super-nihilistic (deterministic?) in that time-traveller-infested causal-loopery-fuckery thing Vonnegut does.
I suppose the other main message was "even if your whole destiny is controlled from on high, or hell even if it utterly isn't, staging a silent protest against the world and refusing to engage in any of it isn't worth it."
Which, while phrased exceptionally poorly by me, is still the kind of message that slaps someone like me in the face.
Lovely read sped along by snappy writing, would recommend.
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading A Magical Cats Mystery - Stovie - 07-25-2013
I just finished off Red Storm Rising on the suggestion of a friend. It was pretty excellent, far better than any of the other Clancy novels I've read barring maybe The Hunt for Red October. I'd suspect this is mostly due in part to the fact that he really only has three or four actually good novels, this being one of them. It certainly doesn't help that the newer ones are usually written by ghostwriters who can never just seem to pin down the style.
Other than this, I read the first of The Dark Tower series. I've been told not to read past the first book, though.
Oh god there are two book threads and this was the one I was told to post in.
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading A Magical Cats Mystery - SleepingOrange - 07-26-2013
I got the impression at the time this was supposed to be less a general book thread and more "Talk about the books that we're reading as a group" sort of virtual book club. Like it says in the title.
But who knows, who cares, it's not like the forum's big enough to have a problem with redundant threads.
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading A Magical Cats Mystery - Elpie - 07-27-2015
A couple people talking about how we should read more so I'm bumping this thread. Would anyone be interested in bookclubbing something in the nearish future?
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading A Magical Cats Mystery - Schazer - 07-27-2015
I could and would read Catch 22 again
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading A Magical Cats Mystery - Plaid - 07-27-2015
I'm in. Recommend me some things you guys are discussing in irc, i recognise nothing
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading A Magical Cats Mystery - Elpie - 07-27-2015
CATCH-22 is a big sprawling comedy set during World War II. I haven't read it since high school (it's one of many books I read after it got referenced in an episode of Lost) but I liked it a lot and I want to reread it soon.
I'm probably the biggest lit nerd in this community, but I'm terrified of recommending books. I've been using my Amazon wishlist to track the things I want to read, and my Goodreads to track what I've already read. (Both of those links should work? Lemme know if they don't.) Also, here's a list of books referenced in Lost.
I dunno what kinda stuff we'd want to read. If we wanted to do something genre-y, I'd suggest Watership Down, which is one of my favorite fantasy books, criminally under-read, and I haven't read it in a while. It's about bunnies, and Sawyer reads it in season one of Lost.
If we wanted to do something more capital-L-Literature-y, I'd probably suggest something by Toni Morrison, because I love her and want everyone to read her stuff. Maybe Jazz, cause it's one of the less heavy ones, and I've been meaning to reread it.
And I'd be down for pretty much anything else. I have two books going right now but I want to be done with both of them by the end of the month, so I'm wide open after that. In general, I want to read more women and writers of color, and also more trashy/popular literature (hence the Gillian Flynn at the top of the Amazon wishlist).
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading A Magical Cats Mystery - Schazer - 08-24-2015
I want to recommend a book I just read! I will also offer to send said book to anyone who wants to read it, on the condition that either a) you send it back or b) you send it on to someone else who wants it.
While I was at the "American Book Centre" in Amsterdam I grabbed a bunch of natural history+nonfiction type books (all but one of them written by ladies!), and on the plane ride home powered through Naming Nature, by Carol K Yoon.
It's a crash course (the author's personal trajectory, tbh) through taxonomy's history, from Linnaeus through to molecular systematics and the dreaded cladists. A lot of the folks in the biology department at my university were molecular taxonomists, so actually getting some context behind what they do finally made a bunch of stuff click.
The author bemoans the modern world's ills and the wider public's detachment from the natural world too much, eye em oh, but I can kind of get behind her points about how the democratic nature was taken out of natural history/biology.
If you like anecdotes about dusty old scientists like Linnaeus that make them seem more like real human beings, though, this book is great for that! The story of taxonomy is cooler than you'd expect, because the Truth hurts in a weirdly existential way, and we get to see nerds getting passionate and rude over things like that.
For me with a biology background it immediately demystified what the various schools of taxonomy are about, so I'd definitely recommend it for the biologists on the forum. Even if you're not (especially if you're not, even) I would be very happy if you wanted to try this book! I'd be happy to talk through concepts if a keen reader wanted to.
I also picked up: A Sting in the Tale, about some british nerd and his beloved bumblebees,
The Soul of an Octopus, which is probably about the author being captivated by cephalopods and their weird alien intelligence, and (once I get it back off Plaid)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is easily my strongest recommend off this list for anyone to read, sciencetypes or no. I should rave about it once I get it back and finish reading it through myself, BUT I'm happy to send this one around if anyone wants to tackle it.
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading A Magical Cats Mystery - Plaid - 08-24-2015
I can second the book about Henrietta Lacks, since I'm the reason Schaz hasn't finished it (i stole it before she left :v). Really, really interesting read and I I was left thinking about it for a while after I finished it.
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading Whatever - Schazer - 05-12-2017
Hey friendly reminder: Vonnegut is still really really good
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading Whatever - BRPXQZME - 05-12-2017
It’s just a coincidence, but my sig for the past month-ish is an oblique quote from Cat’s Cradle.
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading Whatever - a52 - 05-12-2017
I was wondering why it sounded familiar.
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading Whatever - BRPXQZME - 05-13-2017
To me it bore a striking resemblance to FFXIV’s Maelstrom motto (Till Sea Swallows All). Not just in phrasing, but in subject matter.
In the game, it references a mythological civilization-ending flood that happened once before and—legend has it—will finish the job when it finally happens again; like many such catastrophic floods found in the world’s mythoi, it happens because the sins of the people are too great for eh, let’s say, the earth or whatever “powers that be” to bear it (in this case, a war of magic that was getting out of hand and likely to end life itself).
Cat’s Cradle takes this kind of myth and kind of turns it on its head in some ways: it’s an obvious man-made disaster in the works, the action happens on some island that’s got everything and nothing to do with the Cold War, and
Not the only time a video game has made me think of the book, either. There’s a visual element at the end of Mother 3 that reminded me of the exact same chapter.
RE: The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading Whatever - Reyweld - 05-18-2017
I just finished reading "Ella Minnow Pea" by Mark Dunn, which is an excellent story (told through a series of letters) about a girl, Ella, and a ludicrous development in her country of Nollop (a fictional place founded by the creator of the phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog").
Further description (although still not letting loose any substantial spoilers):
This story is funny, touching, and speaks to the importance of language- down to the last letter. I definitely recommend it.