just finished Biggest Brother. bio of dick winters, the co of easy company WWII. (band of brothers). i bought that book right when it came out and was lucky enough to meet a few of the guys in social settings in arizona long before they became famous.

i'm not into celebrity worship/hero worship, but i still stand in absolute awe of some of those guys. i actually cried when the last one that i knew, John Martin, passed away earlier this year.

I've read about 3/4's of your list.

I'm reading Haunted by Chuck Pahaluniuk right now. Incredibly bizarre stuff.

Since you seem to like him, try American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, if you can find it.

"La Rose de Paris" : French book explaining how churches are built in an energetical purpose.
French cathedrals and some west european would also follow a map that would connect them to each other.
The same kind of geographical scheme was used :
- for Mitterrand "Grand Travaux" (Great Opera, Great Louvre Pyramid, Great Arch of La Défense...)
connecting them with french freemason's lodges.
- for French and some west european nuclear stations and nuclear waste deposits.
I haven't got the time to check if this theory is true and draw these maps myself but it explains me strange architectural details I've already noticed before.
Photo Grande Arche :
http://www.digischool.nl/ckv1/archit...che/arche1.htm
Photos "Grands Travaux" in Paris
http://www.architect.org/gt/gt_photos.html

If you're interested in that stuff, let me recommend the graphic novel "From Hell" by Alan Moore.

I've been listening to books on cd. Does that make me a dweeb? I just got 3: 1776, General George Washington, and another one the jinx picked out. I dont know why, but i am, all of the sudden, interested in the revolutionary war.

Thank you HM

That reminds me of a really excellent French "Bande dessinée" melting Jack the Ripper and... Peter Pan. Meanwhile it introduces logically Disney's story. It's sometimes tender and funny, often dark, misery and hard, and explains why PP chose dreamworld rather than reality :

"Peter Pan", 6 books, by Régis Loisel,
http://www.lefantastique.net/bd/doss...l/peterpan.htm (with I> at the bottom)
http://www.bdparadisio.com/intervw/loisel/loisel.htm
http://loiselpan.free.fr/opikanoba/p...cipales/bd.htm

Régis loisel also drawn "La Quête de l'Oiseau du temps", another masterpiece in heroic fantasy.
http://tnimai.ifrance.com/

i am reading "Desert Flower" by Waris (who is apparently a big model)

it is so inteesting to think that she is now a famous millionaire, but grew up in the desert, being genitally mutillated and chased by lions and now Elton John owns the rights to her autobiography!!

It is a bit of a stomach turner though, everytime she gets raped in the desert, or gets her naughty bits chopped off.. i get all woozy and have to put the book down and curl up under a blanket and rock myself to sleep :*

but all aside, it a great book, inspires you to get off the couch and do something useful.. like feed the cats or something.

meh, goodnight.

Just finished The Way Out by Craig Childs. Still ruminating on it but I would recommend. Other titles of his: The Secret Knowledge of Water and The Soul of Nowhere I would both highly recommend -- especially the latter.

Palahniuk is an amazing writer. He says he gets all his ideas from stories he's heard from other people's lives. I just read Haunted and Choke. They were both good, disturbing, but good. He is here to stay. He has a very interesting fan base. He sends people fake poop and rubber chickens as gifts when they write to him. He is gay and addicted to pills. He loves Vicadin (sp). Fight Club was amazing. I loved the philosophy behind it. It was actually very enlightening.

"The more shit you own, the more your shit owns you."

Set This House in Order, by Matt Ruff.
A novel about two people with multiple-personality disorder, attempting to bring order to their minds. Highly recommended.

The Big U by Neal Stephenson.
It starts as a hilarious exageration of campus life, and ends in lunacy (frat boys worshipping a neon sign, D&D nerds dying in dungeon adventures, armed student rebellion, and a Crotobaltislavonian conspiracy).

Megatokyo
Hehe.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman.
"A bad time for humanity", but a very cool book. It gave me a feel for the time period, and a sense of how history repeats itself (three Napoleon-invasion-of-Russia type disasters, five peasant revolts, four French military disasters...). Only a handful of the people in the book ever learned. I liked being able to come home from work and read about the epic battles of times past.

hmm in the last 6 months(I dont have a lot of time to read have a lot of parental responsibilities)
the one that stands out most would be 11th hour,11th day,11th month...a very good read about WW1 a subject Ive taken
an interest in the past couple years.

Ive read two books of Terry Brooks latest Shanarra series, I saw several posts with regard to Wheel of Time, I feel that Brooks is a much more accomplished writer in this genre than Moddisett, there is a lot more action and a lot more characters coming and going in Brooks books, at least the Shanarra series, I never took a shine to the Landover novels.

I saw King and Straub wrote another novel together at the book store or the library I know, it was in hardcover.

Ive read alot of L Ron Hubbard though ive never read the Dianetics? that I guess he has become most famous for. He wrote I think it was a 12 book series called mission earth that was really fun reading, I highly recommend it, Hubbard writes on many different levels and there is really something in it for everyone. At least read battlefield Earth, if you saw the movie(with John Travolta, a Dianetics guy) it really doesnt hold a candle to the book but do movies ever?

I was sad to hear about Hunter Thompson, if you havent read Fear and Loathing do its a riot. If you have? read it again its still funny as hell.

Of course natl Geographic comes to the house every month, last month it was stem ceels yesterday a special issue about Africa showed up, talk about a horror story, though they always manage to find some sort of hope.

if you cant find a thing to read I highly advise going to pbs.org probably the best site on the web, they have a webpage for every episode of every show they have aired over the last 5 or 6 years I would say, my favorite area is Frontline(one of the better shows on tv), go there and watch 'the man who knew', but only if you really want to understand why 9/11 happened.

Reassessing the Presidency : The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom- John V. Denson (editor)

It's nice to read something that reinforces your belief system once in a while as long as you read other stuff as well. That said, this book is right in my wheel house. There is a particularly good section on Andrew Jackson that I just finished but I have a lot more book to go. It is interesting reading this during the most grasping and least competent administration of my lifetime.

Rrrrff. Terry Brooks is slowly learning to write, but he's really somebody to write better than. Admittedly, that's not setting the bar as high as, say, writing better than Alan Dean Foster (always competent, always publishable -- and never great). Brooks' writing is amateurish: too many modifiers and a longstanding apparent fear of the word said. Hardly anyone in the Shannara books ever simply says anything; it's always an excess of synonyms. This kind of material niggles at me until I put the book firmly down (rather like in this post). It took me two tries to plough through Sword Of Shannara, and I've only leafed through the rest to see if Brooks had improved his prose. For years, he had not.

As for that sociopath Hubbard, who founded a "religion" for the money in it, the less said the better. Three paragraphs into the first chapter of the first book of BFE was enough for me to know the writing wouldn't get any better. That man desperately needed an editor, and never had one. I'm never picking up Dianetics or taking up Scientology; I read two biographies of the man back to back. Run, do not walk, from that stuff; no good could come out of the man in those bios.

For literary grace and style in the fantastic, give me a Zelazny or an Anderson any day. For philosophy and an admirable transparency of prose (a subtler gift than you might think), give me Heinlein.

Currently reading "Le Morte D'Arthur" by Sir Thomas Malory. It's primarily the Winchester manuscript with some of the missing pieces filled by the Caxton manuscript. The version I'm reading also maintains Malory's Middle-English spelling.

Excellent book, takes a bit of work to read but is more than worth it.

I've got a copy of that (probably not the same edition, though) that I bought in a books by the pound sale. I haven't read it yet.

Instead, I'm currently finishing up the latest Harry Potter book.