What are you reading at the moment? - Page 12

Orpheus · #**276** March 19, 2010, 09:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Blah

Currently reading: "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

Good to know you finally catching up to the big high school boys in your higher education endeavor.

Ashraf-FTP · #**277** March 19, 2010, 10:31 PM

Last 5 books
Deception point by Dan Brown. gets 10/10. Amazing story with perfect details. Typical Brown stuff

Tom Clancy's Op-Centre by Steve Pieczenik. Crap novel, seriously. Gets 3/10. Dissapointed.

Shockwave by Clive Cussler. Gets 9/10. Good story. A bit unrealistic. Good use of vocabulary though.

Stones by William E. Bell. Gets 7/10. Decent, but not really my type. The beginning chapters are funny though

Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz. Gets 8/10. Missed the movie. The novel was pretty good, even though short. Gotta check out the movie now.

Dhruvo · #**278** March 19, 2010, 10:48 PM

Dracula by Bram Stoker, love it!

Zeeshan · #**279** April 11, 2010, 07:55 PM

What better way to get your post-Sherlock Holmes fix? This!

Just started reading it...

Zeeshan · #**280** September 5, 2011, 08:44 PM

^Never finished it.

Recommend:

Holler @ Sohel da, Asif da.... and other hockey fans. They talk about Gretzky having a mental model of games having a database like chess players where he forms complex patterns on autopilot to go where the puck will go and not where it was.....

On the same theme as Gladwell's Outlier et al.

FaHiMa · #**281** September 5, 2011, 11:22 PM

I wish I had the patience to finish a book

The only things I read are the readings assigned by my profs.

Are there any ways I can become a reader like everyone here? Any strategies? anything will do! Someone wanna recommend a good book that will keep my attention?

OHOH please no twilight/vampire stuff...its not my thing.

Zeeshan · #**282** September 5, 2011, 11:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FaHiMa
I wish I had the patience to finish a book

The only things I read are the readings assigned by my profs.

Are there any ways I can become a reader like everyone here? Any strategies? anything will do! Someone wanna recommend a good book that will keep my attention?

OHOH please no twilight/vampire stuff...its not my thing.

I am at the same boat sister. When I was a kid reading was FUN. Now it became chore and school assignment. Also, just because of sheer amount of books and online information overload it's hard to choose a good book and spend hours on it instead of just spending glued online and browsing pdfs.

Depends if you want to read for pleasure or to glean information. For latter, sit with feet grounded not on toes. Get a red bull or if you are underage vodka or jaeger. Then read fast. Of course this is rather vague but as the 'speedreaders' recommend, don't reread. Your brain is lot smarter than the respect you give it.

Another "trick" is not to get 'too attached'. If you have several copies of old book take a book and tear a page and read it quickly and throw it away in waste basket.

In short, it all depends whether what is your goal. As one guy mentioned once, you can't fly a Boeing 747 to your local supermarket. It's not worth it. So if you want idyllic time just read at your own pace.

Navo · #**283** September 12, 2011, 04:58 PM

I've just (apprehensively) started Ulysses.

Navo · #**284** September 12, 2011, 05:01 PM

I went through this thread and I have to echo the recommendations SohelNR and Electrequiem made, particularly Marquez and Murakami.

My recommendations:
For those who like crime/mafia fiction - The Day of the Owl (Il giorno della civetta) by Leonardo Sciascia
For those who like satires about War: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek
For those who like magical realism: Along with the above mentioned books by Marquez and Rushdie, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
For those who like short stories, which, for lack of a better word, warp your mind: Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (You'll see how Inception was inspired by a few of these stories)
For those who like cultural history/social anthropology: The first two parts of the Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke) by Amitav Ghosh; In Xanadu and City of Djinns by William Darlymple

Banglaguy · #**285** September 12, 2011, 05:18 PM

Cat in a hat = Êpic Shizzle fam...

BASSMAN · #**286** September 13, 2011, 02:16 AM

I have been reading a few range of books as repeats:
Finished the kite runner, 1000 splendid suns and currently reading Harry potter and the deathly hallows.
Will read the da vinci code again.

Posted via BC Mobile Edition (Blackberry)

lamisa · #**287** September 13, 2011, 09:55 AM

i am reading a book called something wonderful by judith mcnaught

FagunerAgun · #**288** September 13, 2011, 09:55 AM

BC alchona

SMHasan · #**289** February 3, 2012, 02:04 PM

Just finished 'touching the void' by Joe Simpson. It's a thrilling book based on a true story where Joe and his friend Simon went to conquer Andes peak Silua Grande and they fall into deep trouble. It says how they survived. It's a story about courage, humanity and friendship.

More lined up for me, bought 'True colours: My Life' - Adam Gilchrist's autobiography which should be an amazing book. Looking forward to read that.

zinatf · #**290** February 7, 2012, 02:04 AM

Just finished reading Jodi Picoult's "the Pact"

Zeeshan · #**291** May 8, 2012, 06:04 PM

How many have you read?

Quote:

The one hundred most influential books, according to Seymour-Smith, in the approximate chronological order he gives:

#	Author or source	Title	Date	Public domain?
1	Chinese classic texts	I Ching	11th century BCE	yes
2	Jewish scripture	Hebrew Bible	8th–4th century BCE	yes
3	Homer	Iliad and Odyssey	8th – early 7th century BCE	yes
4	Hindu scripture	Upanishads	9th^[1] – 6th^[1] century BC	yes
5	Lao Tsu	Tao Te Ching	4th century BCE	yes
6	Zoroastrian scripture	Avesta	1st millennium BC – 3rd century CE	yes
7	Confucius	Analects	5th–4th century BCE	yes
8	Thucydides	History of the Peloponnesian War	5th century BCE	yes
9	Hippocrates	Works	400 BC	yes
10	Aristotle	Works	4th century BCE	yes
11	Herodotus	Histories	5th century BCE	yes
12	Plato	The Republic	380 BCE	yes
13	Euclid	Elements	280 BCE	yes
14	Theravada Buddhist scripture	Dhammapada (Path of the Dharma)	252 BCE	yes
15	Virgil	Aeneid	19 BCE	yes
16	Lucretius	De Rerum Natura	55 BCE	yes
17	Philo of Alexandria	Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws	1st century CE	yes
18	Christian scripture	New Testament	ca. 50–100 CE	yes
19	Plutarch	Parallel Lives	120 CE	yes
20	Cornelius Tacitus	Annals, From the Death of the Divine Augustus	120 CE	yes
21	Valentinus	Gospel of Truth (Gnostic text)	2nd century	yes
22	Marcus Aurelius	Meditations	167	yes
23	Sextus Empiricus	Outlines of Pyrrhonism	150–210 CE	yes
24	Plotinus	Enneads	3rd century	yes
25	Augustine of Hippo	Confessions	400 CE	yes
26	Muslim scripture	Quran	7th century	yes
27	Moses Maimonides	Guide for the Perplexed	1190	yes
28	Text of Judaic mysticism	Kabbalah	12th century	yes
29	Thomas Aquinas	Summa Theologiae	1266–1273	yes
30	Dante Alighieri	The Divine Comedy	1321	yes
31	Desiderius Erasmus	In Praise of Folly	1509	yes
32	Niccolò Machiavelli	The Prince	1532	yes
33	Martin Luther	On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church	1520	yes
34	François Rabelais	Gargantua and Pantagruel	1532 and 1534	yes
35	John Calvin	Institutes of the Christian Religion	1536	yes
36	Nicolaus Copernicus	On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres	1543	yes
37	Michel de Montaigne	Essays	1580	yes
38	Miguel de Cervantes	Don Quixote	1605 and 1615	yes
39	Johannes Kepler	Harmony of the Worlds	1619	yes
40	Francis Bacon	Novum Organum	1620	yes
41	William Shakespeare	First Folio	1623	yes
42	Galileo Galilei	Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems	1632	yes
43	René Descartes	Discourse on Method	1637	yes
44	Thomas Hobbes	Leviathan	1651	yes
45	Gottfried Leibniz	Works	1663–1716	yes
46	Blaise Pascal	Pensées	1670	yes
47	Baruch de Spinoza	Ethics	1677	yes
48	John Bunyan	Pilgrim's Progress	1678–1684	yes
49	Isaac Newton	Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy	1687	yes
50	John Locke	Essay Concerning Human Understanding	1689	yes
51	George Berkeley	Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge	1710, revised 1734	yes
52	Giambattista Vico	The New Science	1725, revised 1744	yes
53	David Hume	A Treatise of Human Nature	1739–1740	yes
54	Denis Diderot (ed.)	Encyclopédie	1751–1772	yes
55	Samuel Johnson	A Dictionary of the English Language	1755	yes
56	Voltaire	Candide	1759	yes
57	Thomas Paine	Common Sense	1776	yes
58	Adam Smith	The Wealth of Nations	1776	yes
59	Edward Gibbon	The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire	1776–1787	yes
60	Immanuel Kant	Critique of Pure Reason	1781, revised 1787	yes
61	Jean-Jacques Rousseau	Confessions	1781	yes
62	Edmund Burke	Reflections on the Revolution in France	1790	yes
63	Mary Wollstonecraft	A Vindication of the Rights of Woman	1792	yes
64	William Godwin	An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice	1793	yes
65	Thomas Robert Malthus	An Essay on the Principle of Population	1798, revised 1803	yes
66	George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel	Phenomenology of Spirit	1807	yes
67	Arthur Schopenhauer	The World as Will and Idea	1819	yes
68	Auguste Comte	The Course in Positive Philosophy	1830–1842	yes
69	Carl von Clausewitz	On War	1832	yes
70	Søren Kierkegaard	Either/Or	1843	yes
71	Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels	Communist Manifesto	1848	yes
72	Henry David Thoreau	Civil Disobedience	1849	yes
73	Charles Darwin	The Origin of Species	1859	yes
74	John Stuart Mill	On Liberty	1859	yes
75	Herbert Spencer	First Principles	1862	yes
76	Gregor Mendel	Experiments on Plant Hybridization	1866	yes
77	Leo Tolstoy	War and Peace	1868–1869	yes
78	James Clerk Maxwell	Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism	1873	yes
79	Friedrich Nietzsche	Thus Spoke Zarathustra	1883–1885	yes
80	Sigmund Freud	The Interpretation of Dreams	1900	yes
81	William James	Pragmatism	1908	yes
82	Albert Einstein	Relativity	1916	yes
83	Vilfredo Pareto	The Mind and Society	1916	yes
84	Carl Jung	Psychological Types	1921
85	Martin Buber	I and Thou	1923
86	Franz Kafka	The Trial	1925	yes
87	Karl Popper	The Logic of Scientific Discovery	1934
88	John Maynard Keynes	General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money	1936	yes
89	Jean-Paul Sartre	Being and Nothingness	1943
90	Friedrich von Hayek	The Road to Serfdom	1944
91	Simone de Beauvoir	The Second Sex	1948
92	Norbert Wiener	Cybernetics	1948, revised 1961
93	George Orwell	Nineteen Eighty-Four	1949
94	George Gurdjieff	Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson	1950
95	Ludwig Wittgenstein	Philosophical Investigations	1953
96	Noam Chomsky	Syntactic Structures	1957
97	Thomas Kuhn	The Structure of Scientific Revolutions	1962, revised 1970
98	Betty Friedan	The Feminine Mystique	1963
99	Mao Zedong (attributed)	Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (Little Red Book)	1966
100	B. F. Skinner	Beyond Freedom and Dignity	1971

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100...ten_%28book%29

**Zunaid** · #**292** May 8, 2012, 06:12 PM

Good list but biased towards Western culture. I've only read 37. Looks like long way to go before I die.

Navo · #**293** May 8, 2012, 06:58 PM

The one hundred most influential books, according to Seymour-Smith, in the approximate chronological order he gives:
# Author or source Title Date Public domain?
3 Homer Iliad and Odyssey 8th – early 7th century BCE
4 Hindu scripture Upanishads 9th[1] – 6th[1] century BC (not in its entirety)
7 Confucius Analects 5th–4th century BCE (when I lived in China, it was one of the few books that you could get in English along with the English classics!)
8 Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War 5th century BCE
10 Aristotle Works 4th century BCE
11 Herodotus Histories 5th century BCE
12 Plato The Republic 380 BCE
13 Euclid Elements 280 BCE yes
15 Virgil Aeneid 19 BCE
18 Christian scripture New Testament ca. 50–100 CE
25 Augustine of Hippo Confessions 400 CE (law class)
26 Muslim scripture Quran 7th century
27 Moses Maimonides (never really read anything by him but know about him as I visited a museum which had information about him, his work and his life. Also, visited a house he was supposed to have lived in, in Fez, Morocco)
29 Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae 1266–1273 (Bits and pieces as part of land law and legal theory funnily enough - along with some St. Augustine)
32 Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince 1532
38 Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote 1605 and 1615
41 William Shakespeare First Folio 1623
44 Thomas Hobbes Leviathan 1651
50 John Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1689
52 Giambattista Vico The New Science 1725, revised 1744
55 Samuel Johnson A Dictionary of the English Language 1755 (Been to his house too!)
56 Voltaire Candide 1759
57 Thomas Paine Common Sense 1776
58 Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations 1776
60 Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason 1781, revised 1787
61 Jean-Jacques Rousseau Confessions 1781 (And his Social Contract)
62 Edmund Burke Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790 (and other essays and speeches by him)
65 Thomas Robert Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population 1798, revised 180
66 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Read Hegel, but not this particular text)
71 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Communist Manifesto 1848
73 Charles Darwin The Origin of Species 1859
74 John Stuart Mill On Liberty 1859 yes
76 Gregor Mendel Experiments on Plant Hybridization 1866
79 Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1883–1885
80 Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams 1900
86 Franz Kafka The Trial 1925 (Metamorphosis and Other Short stories as well)
88 John Maynard Keynes
89 Jean-Paul Sartre
90 Friedrich von Hayek (Read other books and articles by the above three but not the specific texts)
93 George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four 1949
95 Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations 1953
99 Mao Zedong (attributed) Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (Little Red Book) 1966

Surprised that St. Thomas More's Utopia or Ovid's Metamorphoses (greatly influenced Marlowe and Shakespeare) or Mein Kampf didn't make it to this list. Nothing by Bertrand Russell either - funny considering Wittgenstein was his protege!

Navo · #**294** May 8, 2012, 07:06 PM

Zee, from your posts I can surmise that you have an interest in religions, both ancient and modern, as well as the esoteric but are you also interested in political science?

Boss, if you want to catch up on this list, I would suggest collecting books from Penguin's 'Great Ideas' series :p - http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/u...s/index_1.html

Also, I agree that there is a great western bias in this list. The Penguin books aren't much better but they do have books by Sun Tzu (The Art of War is another jarring omission from the above list), Tagore, Chinua Achebe etc. I'm surprised that all these lists miss out on some Chinese epics such as Journey to the West which has influenced the childhoods of hundreds of millions of Chinese kids (and East Asians)

Sohel · #**295** May 9, 2012, 12:28 AM

The Lhasa Chronicles by my uncle Akhter Matin Chaudhury. The books a travelogue about his trip to Tibet, a boyhood dream coming true and is loads of fun. Here's a couple of excerpts from the bio:

Quote:

He was always keen on adventure but was severely restrained in his quest by a combination of lack of opportunity, parental control and spousal dominance. Being brought up in an environment that held conservative values where the pursuit of learning was considered to be the only worthwhile occupation, encouragement to risk life and limb in the seemingly aimless pursuit of fun was notably absent. Once free of the shackles and with a long leash grudgingly granted by an exasperated spouse, the author was at last able to indulge his adventure for passion in 2011. He not only made the momentous journey to Tibet but also braved chronicling it, the most thrilling adventure of his life. His earlier writings have been limited to prosaic offerings on technical subjects and some attempts at humor in short pieces mostly about airplane journeys.

When not an intrepid explorer, Akhter Matin Chaudhury leads a mundane life in the vulgar world of commerce which provides him with the means to keep a roof over his head and put food on the table for his family. Although he has a background in accounting, he is currently more involved in the innocuous field of general management. He laments the circumstances that forced him into the cut and dried world of number crunching and diverted him from his true vocation in life, that of the creative arts.

He's 60 and the Chairman & CEO of Nuvista Pharmaceuticals in Bangladesh.

Nocturnal · #**296** May 25, 2012, 11:55 PM

One of my favourite short stories ... ...

When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine
- Jhumpa Lahiri (From Interpreter of Maladies)

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1971 a man used to come to our house, bearing confections in his pocket and hopes of ascertaining the life or death of his family. His name was Mr. Pirzada, and he came from Dacca, now the capital of Bangladesh, but then a part of Pakistan. That year Pakistan was engaged in civil war. The eastern frontier, where Dacca was located, was fighting for autonomy from the ruling regime in the west. In March, Dacca had been invaded, torched and shelled by the Pakistani army. Teachers were dragged onto streets and shot, women dragged into barracks and raped. By the end of the summer, three hundred thousand people were said to have died. In Dacca Mr. Pirzada had a three-story home, a lectureship in botany at the university, a wife of twenty year, and seven daughters between the ages of six and sixteen whose names all began with the letter A. “Their mother’s idea,” he explained one day, producing from his wallet a black-and-white picture of seven girls at a picnic, their braids tied with ribbons, sitting cross-legged in a row, eating chicken curry off of banana leaves. “How am I to distinguish? Ayesha, Amira, Amina, Aziza, you see the difficulty.”

Each week Mr. Pirzada wrote letters to his wife, and sent comic books to each of his seven daughters, but the postal system, along with most everything else in Dacca, had collapsed, and he had not heard word of them in over six months. Mr. Pirzada, meanwhile, was in America for the year, for he had been awarded a grant from the government of Pakistan to study the foliage of New England. In spring and summer he had gathered data in Vermont and Maine, and in autumn he moved to a university north of Boston, where we lived, to write a short book about his discoveries. The grant was a great honor, but when converted into dollars it was not generous. As a result, Mr. Pirzada lived in a room in a graduate dormitory, and did not own a proper stove or a television set of his own. And so he came to our house to eat dinner and watch the evening news.

Full read - need to download pdf copy - Link

Sohel · #**297** May 26, 2012, 01:09 AM

^Thank you so much Noc. It was deeply moving reading this again after 12 years or so. Jhumpa is only 6 days older than I am and I too have vivid memories of that time. I cannot help myself from crying when I read this for a lot of reasons.

Antora · #**298** July 14, 2012, 07:18 PM

Has anyone read the book "Taliban cricket club"? I heard about it the other day and will be searching for it in book stores.

Antora · #**299** July 14, 2012, 07:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nocturnal
One of my favourite short stories ... ...

When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine
- Jhumpa Lahiri (From Interpreter of Maladies)

Full read - need to download pdf copy - Link

I loved that story. I had to read it for my English exam last year. It was a very moving and sad story

Navo · #**300** July 15, 2012, 04:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Antora
Has anyone read the book "Taliban cricket club"? I heard about it the other day and will be searching for it in book stores.

Haven't read it but read a review on it the other day: http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine...ry/568145.html

About Interpreter of Maladies - for some reason, I never really enjoyed it. Maybe it was because I was reading so much South Asian post-colonial literature at the time but I didn't find it to be particularly 'original'.

Bought 'Beyond a Boundary' a couple of weeks ago. Should start reading it soon - supposedly the best book ever written on cricket and perhaps sports overall!