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What are you currently reading?
Clovis Man:
I just finished two by Russian authors (in translation, of course).
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, was recommended by an acquaintenance at the local coffee shop. It's a brilliant satire on late 1930s Moscow.
When I ordered The Master and Margarita, Amazon recommended We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It's set up as the diary an engineer, set in a failed scientific socialist utopia (think: H.G. Wells gone badly wrong) after a 200-year war. Published in 1921, it predates 1984 and Brave New World.
LeeC:
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is required reading in nearly all schools in the States. Like most of these schools, I too had to read Mark Twain's tale of a young adolescent as he went on his own Mississippi Odyssey with an escaped slave. The book is actually a sequel, and Huck first showed up with Tom Sawyer in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." I am vaguely familiar with the story of Tom Sawyer from made for TV movies and cartoons in my youth but never actually read it. When I saw it on Audible, and narrated by Nick Offerman himself (Ron Swanson of Parks and Rec), I decided it was time to know the chronicle of this little boy from Missouri.
"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" is truly a love letter to being a little boy. His adventures and superstitions remind me of when I was a little lad; trying to not get caught as I pursued my own fun with my friends and relations. What really struck me was how they think they know the world and proper incantations to bring about good luck or remove warts. It's a true insight on being a young kid. His adventures become the talk of the town as he witnessed a murder with the town delinquent and the wrong man was arrested, to striking it out as a pirate, and avoiding the real killer who may be out for vengeance. I would say that if "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was "The Odyssey" then "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" would be the stories with Thor and Loki from "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman (which is also a good read). The ending was amazing and could only happen to an 8 year old.
I did tell my wife that if our next baby is a boy, then this book will be required reading for her. :mrgreen:
NovemberX:
--- Quote from: LeeC on 17 Mar 2018, 12:44 ---"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is required reading in nearly all schools in the States. Like most of these schools, I too had to read Mark Twain's tale of a young adolescent as he went on his own Mississippi Odyssey with an escaped slave. The book is actually a sequel, and Huck first showed up with Tom Sawyer in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." I am vaguely familiar with the story of Tom Sawyer from made for TV movies and cartoons in my youth but never actually read it. When I saw it on Audible, and narrated by Nick Offerman himself (Ron Swanson of Parks and Rec), I decided it was time to know the chronicle of this little boy from Missouri.
"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" is truly a love letter to being a little boy. His adventures and superstitions remind me of when I was a little lad; trying to not get caught as I pursued my own fun with my friends and relations. What really struck me was how they think they know the world and proper incantations to bring about good luck or remove warts. It's a true insight on being a young kid. His adventures become the talk of the town as he witnessed a murder with the town delinquent and the wrong man was arrested, to striking it out as a pirate, and avoiding the real killer who may be out for vengeance. I would say that if "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was "The Odyssey" then "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" would be the stories with Thor and Loki from "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman (which is also a good read). The ending was amazing and could only happen to an 8 year old.
I did tell my wife that if our next baby is a boy, then this book will be required reading for her. :mrgreen:
--- End quote ---
I never actually had to read Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. I should really remedy that.
Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk
Cornelius:
--- Quote from: JoeCovenant on 26 Feb 2018, 08:27 ---Force your way through the first one... the second gets easier, after that.. it's all gravy! :)
--- End quote ---
To be honest, there's not much force necessary. I've definitely read worse.
I'm tackling them chronologically, and it's nice to see the development he's gone through.
Thrillho:
I finished the FDR Biography. I was very pleased that it immediately ended as soon as Franklin died rather than eulogizing him or going into the political events after the War. I was less pleased that it had 300 pages of notes and Bibliography in a 900 page book. Also irritated it didn't touch on the Newport Sex Scandal, like the Ken Burns ones didn't.
I have moved onto the first part of the Theodore Roosevelt biographies by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning ones from the early 1980s.
It's in a whole other league to the FDR one. The FDR one was crammed with information and analysis and was just a great big delicious cup of knowledge juice.
But Morris writes about TR, who was a larger-than-life character almost from birth, as if it's a novel. He writes a novel about a non-fiction individual. And it's beautiful and moving and brutal and honest and heartbreaking and epic and rage-inducing and so many more things in between. It's a fucking masterpiece and I've hoovered up 700 of its 800 pages in the past two weeks.
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