What are you reading?

Aside from Tolkien and the His Dark Materials series you will be very hard pressed to even find mediocre fantasy.  Its a shame in theory it would be my favorite genre but like other things like anime and pop music 95% of it sucks.

You guys are all lucky.

Currently, the only things I am reading are client business requirements.

Ernest is good...

The History of The English Speaking Peoples: Volume One

Is it just me, or do the women on this foru only like British and Roman history?

Eesh, I'm reading so many books, and I've had to put them on hold while I'm finishing up my summer homework .  A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.  Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche.  The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky.  The Persian Boy by Mary Renault.  Imperial Hubris by "Anonymous".  Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle.  Paradise Lost by John Milton.  The Divine Comedy by Dante.  Still struggling through Peter Green's Alexander to Actium.  The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and some other guy.  Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.

MoP:  Do you have access to books in English?  If you do, I would suggest you try to pick up Robert Fagles' translation of the Odyssey, and the Iliad too.

so many books, so little time

I have a shirt that says that, haha.

Aside from Tolkien and the His Dark Materials series you will be very hard pressed to even find mediocre fantasy.

Have you tried Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series?

Edited by BattleGlory

Originally posted by Master of Puppets I stopped in the sixth chapter and started all over again. I plan to take notes on each chapter I read and make plans of the rooms Kafka is describing. Kafka seems obsessed with rooms and the way they relate to each other, there must be something about them...

Obsession about rooms... Interesting observation there. Here's a quote from the Kafka short-story The Burrow, which is written from the POV of a mole:

When I stand in the Castle Keep surrounded by my piled-up stores, surveying the ten passages which begin there, raised and sunken passages, vertical and rounded passages, wide and narrow passages, as the general plan dictates, and all alike still and empty, ready by their various routes to conduct me to all the other rooms, which are also still and empty, -then I know that this is my castle that I have wrested from the refractory soil with tooth and claw, with pounding and hammering blows, my castle which can never belong to anyone else, and is so essentially mine that I can calmly accept in it even my enemy's mortal stroke at the final hour, for my blood will ebb away here in my own soil and will not be lost.

And a parable from the short story Great Wall of China;

There is a parable that describes this situation very well: The Emperor, so it runs, has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun; the Emperor from his death-bed has sent a message to you alone. He has commanded the messenger to kneel down by the bed, and has whispered the message to him; so much store did he lay on it that he ordered the messenger to whisper it back to his ear again. Then by a nod of the head he has confirmed that it is right. Yes, before the assembled spectators of his death- all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and on the spacious and loftily mounting open staircases stand in a ring the great princes of the Empire- before all these he has delivered his message. The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng; if he encounters resistance he points to his breast, where the symbol of the sun glitters; the way, too, is made easier for him than it would be for any other man. But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. If he could reach the open fields how fast he would fly, and soon doubtless you would hear the welcome hammering of his fists on your door. But instead how vainly does he wear out his strength; still he is only making his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he get to the end of them; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; he must fight his way next down the stairs; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; the courts would still have to be crossed; and after the courts the second outer palace; and once more stairs and courts; and once more another palace; and so on for thousands of years; and if at last he should burst through the outermost gate- but never, never can that happen- the imperial capital would lie before him, the centre of the world, crammed to bursting with its own refuse. Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. -But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.

Both show an interest in architecture.

Edited by Beylerbeyi

Reading..

The Second Demonwars Saga by Bob Salvatore, currently on the last book "Immortals".

And for my history report, Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer... again.

bah, i'm finished with the osprey book about the persian army (560-330 BC), not only the plates were ugly, the text was horrible, basicaly everyhting is guesswork...

Now I'm reading "Mendizabal"  by Gald�s