What book are you currently reading?

[RomaMater]

Some variation of this exists on several forums that I've posted on over the years.



Currently I am reading two books.

The Awakening of American Nationalism, 1815-1828.
Spanish Observers and the American Revolution, 1775-1783.

[Piling]

Just finished The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender. A strange and melancholic fantastic story, half-sad half peaceful

[Anthea]

I am reading 'Darkest Fear' by Harlan Coben

I love tense thrillers with twists in them

Anything by Harlan Coben - Linwood Barclay - Lisa Gardner

Also reading Linux magazines

And studying marketing

[Piling]

P. D. James is dead.

[Anthea]

P. D. James is dead.

She wrote the excellent Adam Dalgliesh book

RIP P. D. James

[RomaMater]

I'm currently reading it and am--- speechless.

[Piling]

I am reading the Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. It seems good, for the moment (did not pas the 1/3)

"'Better' wasn't even the word for how I felt. There wasn't a word for it. It was more than things too small to mention –laughter in the hall at school, a live gecko scurrying in a tank in the science lab – made me feel happy one moment and the next like crying. Sometimes, in the evenings, a damp, gritty wind blew in the windows from Park Avenue, just as the rush traffic was thinning and the city was emptying for the night; it was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live. For weeks, I'd been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I'd been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold."

"On she prattled, friendly as a parrot. But my loyalties were elsewhere. And the flavor of Pippa’s kiss –bittersweet and strange– stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the city."

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt.

[Anthea]

Kama Sutra

[RomaMater]

Kama Sutra

Hindoo deviltry!

[RomaMater]

The Sun Over Breda.

Acclaimed author Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s internationally bestselling series, the saga of the swordsman-for-hire Captain Alatriste, continues in The Sun Over Breda. Fifteen-year-old Iñigo Balboa enlists to serve as his master’s aide, and narrates their further adventures of swordplay and skirmishes, mutiny and wartime honor, as Captain Alatriste rejoins his Cartagena regiment to take part in the battles and siege of Breda. In Spain, Alatriste’s nemesis, Luis de Alquézar, grows more powerful, as Iñigo’s mysterious friend Angélica hints at some plans upon his return. Once again the exploits of the seventeenth-century mercenary will thrill and delight the legions of readers eager to cheer a hero for the ages.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Over-Breda-Ca ... 0452289742

[Piling]

Not a bad book to read all a long, grey, cosy and lazy Sunday.

http://www.amazon.fr/Maine-English-Cour ... ords=maine

[Piling]

The Sun Over Breda.

Acclaimed author Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s internationally bestselling series, the saga of the swordsman-for-hire Captain Alatriste, continues in The Sun Over Breda. Fifteen-year-old Iñigo Balboa enlists to serve as his master’s aide, and narrates their further adventures of swordplay and skirmishes, mutiny and wartime honor, as Captain Alatriste rejoins his Cartagena regiment to take part in the battles and siege of Breda. In Spain, Alatriste’s nemesis, Luis de Alquézar, grows more powerful, as Iñigo’s mysterious friend Angélica hints at some plans upon his return. Once again the exploits of the seventeenth-century mercenary will thrill and delight the legions of readers eager to cheer a hero for the ages.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Over-Breda-Ca ... 0452289742

I have read 2 or 3 times, some years ago. Good swashbuckler stories, with the originality that the good guys are the Spanish and the rest of Europeans are just the vile heretics. Generally in most of such novels or movies, that was the contrary.

[Anthea]

That Book
By Mitchell Symons

Mitch knows more totally useless things
about useless subjects than anyone on earth
Chris Tarrant

[Piling]

Le Royaume, Emmanuel Carrère.

“The Kingdom” tells the story of the beginnings of Christianity, at the end of the first century after Jesus Christ. It tells how two men, essentially, Paul and Luke, transformed a small Jewish sect closely centered around its preacher, who was crucified during the reign of Tiberius and whom they believed to be the messiah, into a religion that in three centuries drained the Roman Empire and then conquered the world and that two thousand years later still concerns one quarter of humanity.

This story, related by Emmanuel Carrère, is a sweeping historical epic recreating the Mediterranean world at that time, a world agitated by intense political and religious movements taking hold beneath the deceptive pax romana. It is a tumultuous evocation, full of sudden developments, episodes and dramatic characters. But “The Kingdom” is also, skilfully woven into the historic framework, a meditation on what Christianity is, how it questions and involves us in today’s world, as believers and as non-believers, and how the implausible inversion of values it proposes (the first will be the last, etc.) has had such success and posterity. It is important to know here that this meditation is carried out with respect and a certain form of friendship for the actors of this astonishing story, the actors of the past as well as the actors of the present, which gives the book a profoundly human dimension. The respect and friendship that Emmanuel Carrère says he feels for the person he himself used to be, some time ago. Because, in all his books since “The Adversary”, his commitment is total.

For three years, twenty-five years ago, Emmanuel Carrère was a fervent Christian and a practicing Catholic, one could almost say an excessive believer. He also tells his own story behind the History, the torments he went through and how religion was once his haven of peace and his escape. And although he is no longer a believer, the desire he feels to question his belief is still intact. He sets out to investigate the person he once was, unrelentingly, with his famous brutal frankness and total absence of self-censorship. “The Kingdom” is an ample, complete, droll, serious book, both turbulent and interiorized, scholarly and trivial. Emmanuel Carrère’s masterpiece to date

http://bibliofrance.in/component/french ... ed&bid=299

I have just begun to read that autobiography/fiction which has a great success in France. I find it pleasant and interesting but something makes me smile : Telling its own period of crisis, faith, will to follow Christ's path, etc, the author reveals with ingenuity that, in the same time, he employed migrants as undeclared nursemaids. And he did not seem to think there is a problem in it.

Obviously, the most difficult part to apply concerning Christianity is its economical chapter : Matthew, 19, 16-30

[Piling]

Holiday at the end of the day !

Beside celebrations, I need fun and relaxing literature : let's start with Hamish Macbeth Omnibus, 1-4.