What was the last book you read?

Necromancer24 · May 30, 2010

Post here with a short review and the author of the book. The review is a must. You may take a review from a well-known site, but remember to give a source.

The last book I read was Animal Farm by George Orwell.

Review:

Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely-and this is vividly and eloquently proved in Orwell's short novel. "Animal Farm" is a simple fable of great symbolic value, and as Orwell himself explained: "it is the history of a revolution that went wrong". The novel can be seen as the historical analysis of the causes of the failure of communism, or as a mere fairy-tale; in any case it tells a good story that aims to prove that human nature and diversity prevent people from being equal and happy ,or at least equally happy.

"Animal Farm" tells the simple and tragic story of what happens when the oppressed farm animals rebel, drive out Mr. Jones, the farmer, and attempt to rule the farm themselves, on an equal basis. What the animals seem to have aimed at was a utopian sort of communism, where each would work according to his capacity, respecting the needs of others. The venture failed, and "Animal Farm" ended up being a dictatorship of pigs, who were the brightest, and most idle of the animals.

Orwell's mastery lies in his presentation of the horrors of totalitarian regimes, and his analysis of communism put to practice, through satire and simple story-telling. The structure of the novel is skillfully organized, and the careful reader may, for example, detect the causes of the unworkability of communism even from the first chapter. This is deduced from Orwell's description of the various animals as they enter the barn and take their seats to listen to the revolutionary preaching of Old Major, father of communism in Animal Farm. Each animal has different features and attitude; the pigs, for example, "settled down in the straw immediately in front of the platform", which is a hint on their future role, whereas Clover, the affectionate horse" made a sort of wall" with her foreleg to protect some ducklings.

So, it appears that the revolution was doomed from the beginning, even though it began in idealistic optimism as expressed by the motto" no animal must ever tyrannize over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. "When the animals drive out Mr. Jones, they create their "Seven Commandments" which ensure equality and prosperity for all the animals. The pigs ,however, being the natural leaders, managed to reverse the commandments, and through terror and propaganda establish the rule of an elite of pigs, under the leadership of Napoleon, the most revered and sinister pig.

"Animal Farm" successfully presents how the mechanism of propaganda and brainwashing works in totalitarian regimes, by showing how the pigs could make the other animals believe practically anything. Responsible for the propaganda was Squealer, a pig that "could turn black into white". Squealer managed to change the rule from "all animals are equal" to" all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others". He managed to convince the other animals that it was for their sake that the pigs ate most of the apples and drank most of the milk, that leadership was "heavy responsibility" and therefore the animals should be thankful to Napoleon, that what they saw may have been something they "dreamed", and when everything else failed he would use the threat of " Jones returning" to silence the animals. In this simple but effective way, Orwell presents the tragedy and confusion of thought control to the extent that one seems better off simply believing that" Napoleon is always right".

Orwell's criticism of the role of the Church is also very effective. In Animal Farm, the Church is represented by Moses, a tame raven, who talks of "Sugarcandy Mountain", a happy country in the sky "where we poor animals shall rest forever from our labors". It is interesting to observe that when Old Major was first preaching revolutionary communism, Moses was sleeping in the barn, which satirizes the Church being caught asleep by communism. It is also important to note that the pig-dictators allowed and indirectly encouraged Moses; it seems that it suited the pigs to have the animals dreaming of a better life after death so that they wouldn't attempt to have a better life while still alive...

In "Animal Farm", Orwell describes how power turned the pigs from simple "comrades" to ruthless dictators who managed to walk on two legs, and carry whips. The story maybe seen as an analysis of the Soviet regime, or as a warning against political power games of an absolute nature and totalitarianism in general. For this reason, the story ends with a hair-raising warning to all humankind:" The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which".
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Source: http://bookreviews.nabou.com/reviews/animalfarm.html

1234567ASDF · May 30, 2010

It was one flew over the cukoo's nest.

A classic american novel! I loved it and it was one of the best i've ever read. I totally recommend it

Arguably, some of the issues addressed by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are not as relevant in 2006 as they were in the mid-1970s, but that realization in no way diminishes the film's dramatic impact. This was the second English language film for Czech-born filmmaker Milos Forman, who would go on to win two Oscars (one for this movie and one for Amadeus), and was the picture that catapulted him onto the A-list for directors. The negative aspects of mental health care impugned by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are largely no longer in place today (electroconvulsive therapy is rarely used, frontal lobotomies are not performed), but the film's other themes are germane. On the surface, the movie is about the struggle of wills between patient R.P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) and Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). Beneath the surface, it's about the attempts of an autocratic force to squash the individual.

Jail is a frequent residence for McMurphy, whose latest conviction is for statutory rape. Rather than spending time behind bars, he decides it might be easier to serve his time in a psychiatric hospital, so he "plays mad." The plan works, but McMurphy soon discovers that life isn't so great in an asylum. The rules are looser, but some of the privileges he associated with prison - like being able to watch the World Series on TV - do not apply. Undaunted, McMurphy begins to make himself the most popular man in the ward, appealing to types as diverse as the diminutive, talkative Martini (Danny DeVito) and the tall deaf-mute American Indian, who is known as "The Chief" (Will Sampson). There to thwart McMurphy at every turn is Nurse Ratched, whose methods of treatment are so proscribed by rules and regulations that she can't see she's sometimes doing more harm than good.

The most evident conflict throughout One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is that between Ratched and McMurphy. They are natural antagonists. She's a strait-laced, by the book individual and he's a freespirit and rule breaker who pushes the envelope at every opportunity. (The reason he's in prison is evidence of that - having sex with a 15-year old.) For much of the film, they probe one another, each winning minor skirmishes. As the narrative accelerates toward its conclusion, McMurphy risks all in a final gambit. When he loses, we know it's over for him. For all that she is the film's villain, Ratched is not inherently malevolent. She's cool and unemotional, but she believes what she is doing is for the betterment of the patients. She's one of those individuals who does bad things while thinking she's doing good. That makes her more complex and interesting than a character who represents evil incarnate.

On a less concrete level, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is about an issue that was prominent in the 1970s (and has re-asserted itself with some force in the 2000s): the struggle of the individual against the establishment. This is a standard theme for movies and literature; what's different here is that the establishment wins. After McMurphy, representing the fly in the ointment, wins an occasional engagement, he is ruthlessly crushed. Ratched is victorious, as she must be in a tale like this. Like Terry Gilliam's Brazil, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a cautionary allegory of what happens when too much power is ceded to the government. In the Watergate atmosphere of the Nixon administration, this theme resonated forcefully. 30 years later, with many traits of Nixon's presidency replicated in the George W. Bush administration, this aspect of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (unlike that of the state of mental health care) has relevance.

The film's single sequence that arguably doesn't work is one that some consider their favorite. In it, McMurphy escapes and takes a group of the mental patients on a fishing trip. Forman was initially against including this and had to be "talked into it" by producers Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz. I believe his first instincts were correct. It has a whimsical, fairy tale-like quality that carries the scent of emotional dishonesty. Here, the ward patients are viewed not as individuals but as "cute" caricatures. The feel-good nature of the "vacation" marginalizes them as human beings. There's so much truth to be found in the rest of the production that this portion of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest feels forced and artificial.

The film's ending is unsurprisingly its strongest aspect. McMurphy's fate, presented in such an uncompromising manner, is like a punch to the gut, and the last true act of friendship shown to him by Chief brings a tear to the eye. The final scene is meant to be cathartic, but it doesn't seem that way. Although it's accurate to say that freedom has been attained by both Chief and McMurphy (albeit in different ways), it's hard to see the conclusion as anything but a cloud with a silver lining. For a film that is inspiring and upbeat for most of its running length, this change in tone leaves the viewer disoriented.

As portrayed by Jack Nicholson, McMurphy is one of cinema's iconic characters, so it may come as a surprise to learn that Nicholson was not the filmmakers' first choice. He was number three on the list, and was only offered the part after it was turned down by Gene Hackman and Marlon Brando. In 1975, Nicholson's star was on the rise. He had already been nominated for four Oscars and critics were atwitter about his work in Roman Polanski's Chinatown. For the actor, McMurphy would be the role that provided the final boost into superstardom. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest led to Nicholson's initial Best Actor win, the first of three (to-date). It's a top-flight performance, with the performer bringing out the humor and pathos in McMurphy's situation and showing that a sane man, when trapped in a ward full of insane compatriots, might easily go a little crazy.

In bringing Nurse Ratched to life, Louise Fletcher elected not to take the over-the-top approach of developing the character into a harridan. Instead, she portrayed McMurphy's adversary as an inflexible woman who believed in what she was doing. Self-righteousness, not sadism, is her flaw. This interpretation earned Fletcher an Oscar as well, although her post-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest career didn't follow the same trajectory as Nicholson's. This would be her only nomination. Future movies included Firestarter and Flowers in the Attic.

Other notable participants include Danny DeVito, Vincent Schiavelli, and Christopher Lloyd, none of whom were name actors at the time they made the movie. This was the first part for Brad Dourif, who was nominated for an Oscar, but did not win. The pivotal role of Chief was played by Will Sampson, a Native American with no previous acting experience. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest began a 12-year career for the big man that ended with his death in 1987. He was picked out of obscurity by the filmmakers because he was the only American Indian they discovered who matched the description of Chief as a giant of a man.

Ken Kesey, who wrote the book upon which the 1963 Broadway play and the subsequent movie were based, was displeased with the screenplay credited to Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben (Milos Forman also had a hand in writing it). He felt it detoured too far from what he had written, and refused to participate in publicizing the finished product. Nevertheless, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest became one of the most celebrated movies of the 1970s, winning the "Big Five" Academy Awards (Actor, Actress, Director, Picture, and Screenplay) and being nominated for an additional four. Although the picture has not aged as well as some of its contemporaries, its themes remain germane, the story has lost none of its punch, and the performances retain their freshness. Viewed 30 years after its release, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest remains a very good motion picture, although one that perhaps just misses the pinnacle of greatness where its reputation suggests it resides.
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Angelmax · May 30, 2010

American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

I think he is an incredible writer, an absolute master of language and one of the best storytellers around.

Here is a review I've shamelessly pilfered.

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Where do they go, the monsters of our childhood? After we conjured these boogeymen and solid shadows and beasties under the bed, did we really think they would fade away with our childish fears? Did we expect them to go quietly when we didn't need them anymore? Come to think of it, whoever said we had grown up?

Shadow, betrayed and abandoned by his own personal god, is the perfect liaison in the showdown that is coming. As the gods of our present and future prepare to battle the ancient ones, an empty shell like Shadow may well be the safest thing to be. If, that is, there is any place on Earth that is safe. Some of the places in which our hollow hero is about to find himself don't even appear on any of our maps. On every step along the journey he will suffer for our perceived sins.

Dark though the subject matter may be, American Gods is easily Gaiman's most amusing and entertaining work since Good Omens, his brilliant collaboration with Terry Pratchett. Interestingly, there are some plot points in common between the two novels -- here is clearly a theme that Gaiman tackles with glee and aplomb. If his name is not a household word yet, this book could well be the one that lands him that status.

American Gods has "Hollywood" written all over it. In the best sense possible.

The scope of this novel is reminiscent of King's The Stand, without the gratuitous 100,000 words here and there. Gaiman's command of language allows him to flesh out a character, build a setting, establish a mood, with a few dazzling, concise brush strokes. His artistry is such that, throughout the book there are phrases and passages that arrest the reader; words that deserve to be pulled out as a quote, an example of how we all wish we wrote. Or, how we wish all fiction could be written.

In a genre where cutting-edge has come to mean more graphic, more shocking, more disturbing, Gaiman represents the finest of another force in dark fantasy. While he does not flinch from violence and gore, neither does he depend upon it to carry his work. Many have said that Gaiman is the new face of horror fiction -- who could ask for a better poster-child?

American Gods is a dark, mesmerising adventure into the innermost reaches of the human heart and mind. The characters we meet along the way are distinctive and unforgettable, aspects of our own fears, desires, and weaknesses. What are they, really? Gods? Figments of our imagination? The only one who can decide that is you. Read Gaiman at his best and come to your own conclusions.

When the time comes for awards for 2001, expect to see this novel on every short list, if not in the winner's slot itself. Hard as it may be to believe, Gaiman has managed to top himself with a story that merits the label of classic.
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http://www.sfsite.com/07a/ag107.htm

Sythe · May 30, 2010

The Law by Frederic Bastiat.

Frederic Bastiat, The Law. New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1998. 79 pages.
Not every good idea is a new one. Many good ideas are old ideas which have simply been forgotten -- or are intentionally overlooked.
One wonderful source of good and important ideas is a very old but prescient book by Frederic Bastiat. In his slim volume which is succinctly entitled The Law, we find an impassioned, sustained, and persuasive reminder of the purpose of law and the legitimate use of government. It may have been written back in the early 19th century, but its truths speak to us today in the 21st century.

We would all – elected officials included – benefit from this man's ideas. Bastiat believed that the greatest single threat to liberty is government. And he calls all to recognize that might does not make right. That is to say, simply legalizing a particular undertaking does not change that undertaking's morally problematic nature. An legalized taking from another may still be wrong, whatever ink on paper may say.

Here are a few examples. He decries the government's penchant for "plunder": "See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime." What Bastiat called legalized plunder we call progressive taxation, necessary fee increases, and much-needed regulation.

Bastiat reminds us that good intentions are not enough to justify the pervasive and intrusive acts of the government to take from the fruits of labor of one person to give to another person. He calls such governmental actions "false philanthropy." He argues that the unintended consequences of such social engineering cannot be justified and often can be far worse than the intended good.

Bastiat's position is that wealth redistribution is not the same thing as wealth creation and that government's frequent and relentless intrusions into the market can actually diminish the ability of market actors to efficiently create wealth from which we all benefit.

"The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else," Bastiat argues. His point is that risk takers, entrepreneurs, and business owners who undertake ventures to create services and products to meet the needs of others cannot be counted on to continue doing what they do if they are not permitted to benefit from their labors. There are incentives and there are disincentives. Regardless of intentions, decision makers must examine the consequences of their actions.

Such legalized "plunder," Bastiat further points out, will tend to invite people to take advantage of the laws to their own benefit and the detriment of the public welfare: "Under the pretense of organization, regulation, protection, or encouragement, the law takes property from one person and gives it to another; the law takes the wealth of all and gives it to a few – whether farmers, manufacturers, shipowners, artists, or comedians. Under these circumstances, then certainly every class will aspire to grasp the law, and logically so."

The purpose of the law, writes this man who was well aware of the anarchy of the French Revolution, should be to "protect the free exercise of these rights" – and elsewhere in the book he makes clear that he shares the ideal that humankind is endowed with unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and property.

"It is not true that the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents, or our pleasures. The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights, and to prevent any person from interfering with the free exercise of these same rights by any other person."
The upshot of is clear: when officials regulate, legislate, and add red tape to the lives of citizens, they must think carefully and act cautiously. Whether it is the United States Congress or the Hawaii State Legislature, we cannot justify the exercise of lawmaking authority simply because our intentions are good and noble. We must respect the lives, liberty, and property of our citizens, to whom we owe the privilege of service and to whom we are ultimately responsible.

One may question how relevant a book two hundred years old is to us here in Hawaii today. But truth is always relevant. I commend this book to all citizens, including and perhaps especially my legislative colleagues, for their close study. We can always learn something new – even if that something is from an old dead white guy.
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Review: http://www.grassrootinstitute.org/system/old/Book_DVD_Reviews/INFO_bookreviews_TheLaw.shtml

Full text of book: http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basLaw1.html

Rhodesy · May 30, 2010

Bill Brysons: A short history of nearly everything. One of the most interesting books, I have ever read.
http://www.markusehrenfried.de/books/bryson.html

Well, I guess I cannot comment on the statement above... I am a particle physicist but I have no experience with LSD so far.

I'm going to recommend this book to you anyway; in fact, it is one of the best books I've ever read. It's one of those books I think everyone should read once in his life. Seriously. I cannot see how anyone could find this book boring or could not become interested in science while reading it. (On the other hand: there are many people who cannot understand how somebody can find 'Lord of the Rings' boring and my former German teacher at school never could understand why I hated Thomas Mann's novel 'Der Zauberberg'.)

Bryson's book -- extremely aptedly entitled 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' -- tells the story of the creation of the universe, the earth, life and most of the rest. He also describes in his humourous and ironic way how our understanding of nature developed. What I like most is his gift to bring things into proportions. Reading this book really helps to get an understanding of the size of things from galaxies to microbes and a feeling of the incredible time it took to form our planet. It also makes one aware that we know almost nothing about the oceans and the life forms inside it, don't know most of the plants and bacteria and fungi on earth and don't seem to care.

Bill Bryson is no trained scientist. Actually, I think a trained scientist couldn't write a book like this. He is also not a journalist, at least not one of those who read ten popular science books ("that is: non science books", as one of my former professors in theoretical physics used to remark ;-) and produce an eleventh book. Bryson has done a great deal of reading as the bibliography in his book shows. I was amused and delighted to see that I've read about 50% of the books Bryson lists in his bibliography and his quotations from many of these books reminded me of them. As far as I can assess the literature he used, I would say that he read 'the right books'. From this point of view Bryson's book is a good starting point to go on and read more specialized books on the subjects he covers.

His book is not free of mistakes. When I read his chapters about cosmology, atomic and particle physics I spotted several inaccuracies. (Actually, I don't want to call it 'mistakes' as I know very well how difficult it is to speak about something that complex in a abbreviated way. In fact only some minor things are 'wrong', and considering that he covers everything from biochemistry to particle physics, from geology to oceanography, from meteorology to medicine he has done an absolutely outstanding job!) I guess scientists from other fields will spot similar inaccuracies in chapters which cover their special subjects but over all this is probably the best single book you can find which gives the reader an overview over so many subjects, stays correct most of the time and is highly entertaining in addition!

Bryson's book reminded me of many books I read over the last 15 to 20 years and which I should look at once again, sometime. Most of them I read when I was still at school or during my first semesters at university: books by Isaac Asimov, Paul Atkins, David Attenborough, Hans Christian von Baeyer, David Bodanis, Francis Crick, Paul Davis, Richard Dawkins, Will Durant, Freeman Dyson, Timothy Ferris, Richard Feynman, George Gamow, Steven Jay Gould, John Gribbin, Alan Guth, Steven Hawking, Richard Leakey, Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan, Martin Rees, Carl Sagan, C.P. Snow, Ian Stewart, Kip S. Thorne, James Trefil, James Watson, and Steven Weinberg. One book I definitely should read again is 'A Guided Tour of the Living Cell' by Nobel laureate Christian de Duve (-- this book made me decide that I would like to study biochemistry, even though I finally ended up in particle physics).

Bryson's bibliography is almost a reading list for someone who wants to get an excellent overview about science, therefore in my opinion "A Short History of Nearly Everything" is a very good starting point.

Among many other things Bill Bryson also describes the History of one of my favourite science museums, the Natural History Museum in London. You think the history of a museum couldn't be funny? Then read Bryson's book! The man who made the museum in the 1880s open for everyone (not only to scientists with letters of recommendation) was Richard Owen, the first director of the Natural History Museum. Bryson characterises him as follows: "Owen was not an attractive person, in appearance or in temperament. A photograph from his late middle years shows him as gaunt and sinister, like the villain in a Victorian melodrama, with long, lank hair and bulging eyes - a face to frighten babies. In manner he was cold and imperious, and he was without scruple in the furtherance of his ambitions. He was the only person Charles Darwin was ever known to hate. Even Owen's son (who soon after killed himself) referred to his father's 'lamentable coldness of heart.'

To Owen's great displeasure it was proposed to erect a statue in memory of Charles Darwin and Owen tried everything to prevent this. "In this he failed", writes Bryson, "though he did achieve a certain belated, inadvertent triumph. Today his own statute commands a masterful view from the staircase of the main hall in the Natural History Museum" -- you can see it in the upper photo on the left side at the very end of the hall -- "while Darwin and T. H. Huxley are consigned somewhat obscurely to the museums coffee shop, where they stare gravely over people snacking on cups of tea and jam doughnuts."
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volvic · May 30, 2010

Andy McNab- Seven troop

Book is amazing!!!

"n 1983 Andy McNab was assigned to B Squadron, one of the four Sabre Squadrons of the SAS, and within it to Air Troop, otherwise known as SEVEN TROOP This is Andy McNab’s gripping account of the time he served in the company of a remarkable group of men – from the day, freshly badged, he joined them in the Malayan jungle, to the day, ten years later, that he handed in his sand-coloured beret and started a new life. The links they forged then bound them inextricably together, but the things they saw and did during that time would take them all to breaking point - and some beyond - in the years that were to follow. He who dares doesn’t always win... From the pen of the man who invented the modern military memoir comes another storming battering ram of thrill-packed, unforgettable drama. Never-before-revealed operations and heartbreaking human stories combine to create a new classic of the genre and a book that takes us back to where it all began…"

he is real EX SAS so it's first hand with a little bit of bullshit.

cosrob97 · May 30, 2010

About a boy

By Nick Hornby

School book

About a Boy is Nick Hornby's trifling and somewhat forgettable little novel about two boys: the 12-year-old actual boy Marcus, and the 36-year-old boy-at-heart Will. Will is a superficial bachelor who lives the easy life due to royalties from his songwriter father's one hit, an insufferable Christmas tune that he despises. Marcus is a preternaturally mature young boy whose bluntness, worldliness, and general oddness alternately bemuse and frighten his depressive mother, Fiona. The three of them come together in fairly random fashion, go through ups and downs, and leave us at the end of the novel slightly more grown up, but with hardly anything resembling closure.
Nick Hornby writes in a style that I initially found glib, but later thought of as plain spoken, unpretentious, and straightforward. It's not beautiful writing, but, rather, just barely functional, with a constant undercurrent of understated wit and a few flashes of genuine humor. With such spare writing, it falls to Hornby's story and characters to really give any weight to this book. And the truth is that they don't quite. The story of About a Boy is meandering and slight, absent any real passions (with the exception of one harrowing, central scene involving Fiona). The characters, also, felt inert: strangely so, as I thought that the premise of this whole book was Will's growing up, Marcus's opening up, and Fiona's ascent from darkness. A little bit of each of those happens, but not a lot. And the characters keep enough distance between each other that their relationships feel a bit cool.

This is not to say that Hornby does anything actually wrong in About a Boy. The book doesn't purport to be anything more than a realistic slice of life, and at that it is superb. But the slice of life that Hornby subjects to his relentless realism is rather narrow and rather pallid. It doesn't really resonate, I think, unless the reader's background makes him or her identify with one of the characters. The problem, of course, is that I'm not a precocious child, a flighty middle-aged bachelor, or a depressed single mother; nor do I know many people like that. And About a Boy doesn't do much to draw me into their lives. Don't get me wrong: About a Boy is an amusing, well written, and well crafted book. But it is also, as I said at the outset, just a trifle.
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http://www.scwu.com/bookreviews/h/HornbyNickAboutaBoy.shtml

The Fat Controller · May 30, 2010

Undine by Friedrich de la Motte FouquÃ©. A German fantasy novel where a princess of the water spirits named Undine marries a human knight so she can have feelings/a soul.

It surpassed all my expectations. It's in the public domain, so you can get the book for free here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3714

HTML version if you want to read it instantly:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3714/3714-h/3714-h.htm

Or the audiobook, here:

http://www.archive.org/details/undine_pw_librivox

The story itself has roots in earlier legends about Melusine. Wikipedia pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undine_(novella)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melusine

Sythe · May 30, 2010

The Fat Controller said: ↑

Undine by Friedrich de la Motte FouquÃ©. A German fantasy novel where a princess of the water spirits named Undine marries a human knight so she can have feelings/a soul.
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Lol! Beware sentences bearing the phrases: "german fantasy" and "novel".

Actually if I still cared at all for the fantasy genre, I'd probably read it.

`Failure · May 30, 2010

It was a book called Night by this one guy..I can't remember his name, unfortunately. It was a true story about him and his holocaust experience. I enjoyed it.

Plundy · May 30, 2010

Lets see... Sadly enough, "The Secret Life of Bees" was the last book I've read. Not a very entertaining one.

The New York Times Book Review
Lily is a wonderfully petulant and self-absorbed adolescent, and Kidd deftly portrays her sense of injustice as it expands to accommodate broader social evils. At the same time the political aspects of Lily's growth never threaten to overwhelm the personal. The core of this story is Lily's search for a mother, and she finds one in a place she never expected.... She finds her Madonna in a woman named August Boatwright, the proprietor of a honey farm that's a harbor of quiet civility. August and her sisters, June and May, are no mere vehicles for Lily's salvation; they are individuals as fully imagined as the sweltering, kudzu-carpeted landscape that surrounds them.
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Feren Silver · May 30, 2010

The last book I read was:

Big Boy Rules by Steve Fainaru

The current book I'm reading:

Brotherhood of Warriors: Behind Enemy Lines with a Commando in One of the World's Most Elite Counterterrorism Units

Plundy · May 30, 2010

Feren Silver said: ↑

The last book I read was:

Big Boy Rules by Steve Fainaru

The current book I'm reading:

Brotherhood of Warriors: Behind Enemy Lines with a Commando in One of the World's Most Elite Counterterrorism Units

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Please edit and post the review as stated in the first post. Also, is Big Boy Rules, about the War on Terror, or Desert Storm?

Brendan · May 31, 2010

Harry - A History

This is Non-Fictional. It is basically an Autobiography from the Webmistress of the Harry Potter fan site; "The Leaky Cauldron."

Tim Cornwell said:

AMERICANS embrace religion more fervently than modern Europeans and have invented several sects, cults, and prophets of their own. Go to the Leaky Cauldron website and you can't help feel JK Rowling's powerful imagination has begun to spawn a belief system on its own.

In between articles on the latest Harry Potter films and its stars, a wizard rock festival, and how to brew your own Butterbeer, the site invites you to register for LeakyCon 2009. It's a Harry Potter gathering promising to bring friends together from round the world for fun, fellowship and "to practise the greatest lessons of Harry Potter: bravery, nobility, acceptance, and above all, love".

Melissa Anelli, an energetic young freelance journalist from New York, is the award-winning webmistress of the Leaky Cauldron. Billed as "the most trusted name in Potter", it is Rowling's own favourite fan site, but repeatedly stresses its independence from her, her publishers, and the Warner Bros film studio.

Now Ms Anelli has written a book of her own. Harry, a History, is billed as the "inside story" of the boy wizard and his fans. In an introduction to the book, Rowling describes how she at first tried to keep as "ignorant as possible" about Potter hysteria. In 2002, for the first time, she Googled Harry Potter, and was "utterly unprepared for what I found". There were websites with tens of thousands of visitors, message boards, editorials, rolling news, fan art, fan fiction, quotes of the day, predictions and wild theories. Rowling praises Ms Anelli for trying to be "fair and honest and impartial".

The book has insights into how the Rowling phenomenon may have been a product of its time, interwoven with the explosion in the use of internet and Amazon.com. In "perhaps the biggest and best publication tool" Rowling's UK publisher, Bloomsbury, came up with the idea of a simultaneous nationwide launch for the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 1999: at 3:45pm on 8 July, just after British schools finished. TV footage of queues round the block created more queues and turned Potter into a craze.

The first known fan site on the internet, the Unofficial Harry Potter Fan Club, was started in 1997, by a teenager from Nevada. Others, such as MuggleNet.com, came in 1999, and the Leaky Cauldron in June 2000. Social networks and blogs also blossomed, along with "fan-fiction", fans' own stories involving Rowling's characters or their own, and fan art, their own pictures. After initial tussles, according to this book, Rowling and film-makers went from trying to curb these sites to working with and encouraging those like The Leaky Cauldron.

Ms Anelli writes of being well and truly converted to the Potter books after reading Prisoner of Azkaban. She found herself "loving Harry himself" as he struggles with the memory and legacy of his dead parents, "the forlorn orphan who fights a mighty enemy with kid-sized fists, just because he should".

The book captures the flavour of Pottermania, where fans' e-mails fly like the owls' messages with the latest breathless news of the writer and her progeny. But it makes the mistake of treating Potter news as "real news" rather than the business of entertainment and the marketing of children's fiction. It fails to examine how the works really inspired children to read.

Nor does it quite answer what sites like Ms Anelli's will do now the books, and soon the films, end the series of seven. There will be a new generation of fans, presumably, that head eagerly for the web.
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FaTaL Sh0t X · Jun 5, 2010

Tweak by Nic Sheff.

It's a memoir of a drug addicts past.

Oprah reviewed this shit right here nukka

oprahs black ass said:

Nic Sheff, charming, talented, college bound, was 18 when he discovered crystal meth. As he graphically describes it, "when I took those off-white crushed shards up that blue, cut plastic straw.... There was a feeling like—my God, this is what I’ve been missing my entire life. It completed me." At first his father had no idea. Then came the warning call from the school, the late nights, the lying, the ghoulish pallor and the wasting away. David’s life became an eternity of waiting: for the phone to ring, the door to open; for a sign that his beautiful boy was safe. His fears were less gruesome than his son’s reality: begging, dealing, promiscuous sex—whatever it took to dull the ache, the "feeling of torn-apartness" that had terrorized him at least since his parents’ divorce when he was a child.

How does a father keep from drowning in guilt? How does a brilliant, tormented young man refuse a syringe full of bliss? Desperately seeking clues to Nic’s disintegration, David Sheff became "addicted to [his] addiction," obsessing about Nic at the expense of his second wife and their two young children, while Nic kept emerging from rehab only to boomerang into an emotional black hole. The struggle is ongoing for both. As these narratives show, fear still sabotages trust. Yet, David writes, "The constellation of these impulses that we call love feels like a miracle."
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source: http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Tweak-by-Nic-Sheff-Book-Review-Nonfiction

0wn_dem_rune_rocks · Jun 5, 2010

Never mind... didn't read the review. Sorry.

WeRnIE · Jun 5, 2010

Ernest Hemingway - The old man and the see

Pakistani · Jun 5, 2010

Chronicles of Narnia - CS lewis

R33l2r3al · Jun 6, 2010

Anthem by Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand espoused a hard line capitalist philosophy which she called Objectivism--'the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute.' During a period of years when one type of Collectivism or another (Socialism, Fascism, Communism) was regnant in virtually every nation in the West, she courageously swam against the tide of her time and demanded recognition of the primacy of the individual and of self interest as a force for good. As a result, she has been ignored by the arts establishment, by philosophers and by political scientists, but she has a strong cult following and nearly every young person has, at least, a flirtation with her ideas. There are legions of us who first read her in college and developed a ferocious intellectual crush on her for her iconoclasm and for the pure ferocity of her rhetoric. Here, at last, was someone telling us that the liberal pabulum we had been spoon fed for the first 18 years of life was moral poison. What a glorious moment when you discover that there are other people who, like you, think that individuals matter, that personal excellence should be celebrated, that anything that limits the rights and the abilities of individuals is evil.

One of the most telling indicators of the dichotomy between critics and the common folk is to compare her absence from the Modern Library Top 100 novels of the 20th Century list to the lofty placement of her novels on the lists where readers voted (i.e., Radcliffe's 100 Best Novels, Modern Library Readers' List & Koen Books Top 100) The critics may not respect her much, but we of the hoi polloi sure seem to like her. And, of course, Ms Rand has gotten the final laugh as it is her philosophy that has triumphed and, along with the careful tending of her acolyte and former boy toy Alan Greenspan, given the world a period of unprecedented economic growth and political freedom. The continued refusal of the intelligentsia to acknowledge her, merely serves to make her accomplishment all the more remarkable. When the dust has settled, a few decades or centuries from now, one assumes (okay, one hopes) that Keynes and Galbraith, Marx and Rawls, Dreiser and Lewis and Sinclair--all of the thinkers and writers of the failed Left--will have been consigned to oblivion and the names that are honored will be Hayek, Popper, Friedman, Orwell and Rand. .

The sheer length of her two masterworks, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, makes rereading them a pretty daunting prospect. They tend to be a little too hysterical, a little too repetitive and, with the end of the Cold War, they've lost a little of their edge. But her essential message is still as important and timely today as it was fifty years ago--freedom and human progress requires that the State stand back and allow the individual to act in his own interest. Every attempt to make one person work for another's benefit erodes all of our liberty and retards our progress as a society and a species -- charity needs to come about as a function of faith, not government mandate. So I highly recommend that you return to these shorter works and The Fountainhead stands up pretty well. It also looks, from the reviews below, like her collected letters and journals make for rewarding reading. This fine short novel is an excellent introduction to her passionate political philosophy and her emotional polemical style.
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Source: http://brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/768/Anthem.htm

Personally, I thought it was a very good book (if you call it a book given it's extremely short length). I enjoyed the story line behind the actual message of the book, being that individuality is essential to true happiness.

Now I'm tackling The Fountainhead, also by Ayn Rand

Necromancer24 · Jun 6, 2010

WeRnIS said: ↑

Ernest Hemingway - The old man and the see
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Pakistani said: ↑

Chronicles of Narnia - CS lewis
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Please post reviews. I don't want this thread to turn into a spam-fest like the other "What was the last-" threads.

The last book I read was Dracula by Bram Stoker.

To commemorate the centenary of Dracula, Carol Margaret Davison has brought together this collection of essays by some of the world's leading scholars. This book offers analysis of Stoker's original work, but also celebrates the influence this famous monster has had upon our literature and culture.
The history of Bram Stoker's Dracula begins with its publication in 1897, though that event was largely unheralded. In the years that followed, the book has become, according to Davison, "one of the rare popular cultural novels to be canonised."

Dracula Influences

While the popularity of the Dracula myth has helped to keep the story alive, it has also created a great deal of "critical molestation." No reader can come to the text without preconceptions, derived from the screen and other vampire literature. It's interesting to note that although we've been influenced by these literary progeny from Anne Rice and all of the other writers of vampire literature, none of these works has managed to overtake or overshadow the original Dracula. As James B. Twitchell says, "There have been many twentieth century novelists... who have dealt with the vampire, but none so strikingly as Stoker."
Whenever a vampire is mentioned, the monster Dracula invariably still comes to mind, even if that character has been dramatically altered by movies and other films. As Margaret Carter writes, "The figure of Dracula pervades our culture's conception of vampirism. Authors who choose not to imitate the plot structure and characterization of the model often deal with its influence by self-consciously subverting it."

Patrick McGrath describes the novel as a "sort of lens," which brings into focus Gothic motifs: vampirism, "madness, the night, spoiled innocence, disorder in nature, sacrilege, cannibalism, necrophilia, psychic projection, the succubus, the incubus, the ruin, and the tomb." He concludes: "Gathering up and unifying all that came before it, and casting its great shadow over all that came and continues to come after, its influence on twentieth-century Gothic fiction and film is unique and irresistible."
Teaching Dracula

In her essay, "Teaching the Vampire Dracula in the Classroom," Norma Roman writes about her experience in teaching vampire texts. She took several different approaches in her teaching: psychological, folklore, socio-cultural, Marxist, and spiritual/religious. She has found that the psychological aspect of a study of the vampire has intrigued students, as has the "socio-cultural connection with the alienated and marginal."

While the idea of immortality is often one of the most fascinating aspects of the Dracula myth, Roman says, "Dracula gave the students pause, prompting them to reassess their prior assumptions about the vampire." Not even immortality looked as attractive when linked with this monster. After all, "the journey into the dark and hidden reaches of the self is more difficult when the shadow/guide assumes the form, not of someone youthful and attractive â€” however murderous â€” but of a repulsive and unrepentant elder with bad breath."
Monsters in Literature

Richard Anderson writes, "Monsters have been a feature of western literature from Beowulf onward, but there seems to be something particularly interesting about the monsters of the modern imagination, and Dracula in particular." Beyond, the initial vision of Dracula as a monster, there's the image of him residing in terrible loneliness. But is his demise a tragedy?

In "The Death of Dracula," Benjamin Leblanc writes, "Dracula's death should not be considered a tragedy. After all, he died of 'natural' causes, and left a legacy to his descendants, one which is both dark and powerful. In a way, he will live forever through his descendants and in our memories."

Davison's collection draws from a variety of sources to create a comprehensive look at how Stoker's Dracula was affected by the culture of that day, of fear and uncertainties. But, the essays also dramatize the true importance of the work, as the last Gothic novel, as representative of the period, and as a work that has transcended time and place.
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Source: http://classiclit.about.com/cs/productreviews/fr/aafpr_bramdrac.htm

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