DU Book Club: What Book Have You Read That You Recommend Reading In 2010?

[TomCADem]

This is not a new book, but I would recommend reading the Two Income Trap. To me, it provides a great explanation of why so many American families became over-extended:

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[saltpoint]

1. THE TONGUES OF ANGELS, by Reynolds Price.

An oldie but a goodie.

[TomCADem]

2. Image? One Sentence Synopsis Of Why You Liked it?

The title sounds like a Dan Brown book. ;)

[saltpoint]

11. We're far from Dan Brown and back into the American South.

The novel is a memoir, or if you like, the memoir is a novel.

It is a telling of a life lived very vividly, at times humorous and at times heartbreaking.

Wikipedia synopsis here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_Price

http://www.twwoa.org/Photos/reynolds2.htm


Reynolds Price is one of the writers who has earned a Nobel Prize but who has yet to receive one.

[ananda]

3. OK, here goes.

Animal Farm

Monsignor Quixote

Darkness at Noon

The Communist Manifesto

Utopia



In a MacLuhenesque strain, the message is the
medium of my mood.

[Gabi Hayes]

4. very entertaining/informative....

''Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid''

J. Maarten Troost



Amazon Best of the Month, July 2008: Maarten Troost is a laowai (foreigner) in the Middle Kingdom, ill-equipped with a sliver of Mandarin, questing to discover the "essential Chineseness" of an ancient and often mystifying land. What he finds is a country with its feet suctioned in the clay of traditional culture and a head straining into the polluted stratosphere of unencumbered capitalism, where cyclopean portraits of Chairman Mao (largely perceived as mostly good, except for that nasty bit toward the end) spoon comfortably with Hong Kong's embrace of rat-race modernity. From Beijing and its blitzes of flying phlegm--and girls who lend new meaning to "Chinese take-out"--to the legendary valley of Shangri-La (as officially designated by the Party), Troost learns that his very survival may hinge on his underdeveloped haggling skills and a willingness to deploy Rollerball-grade elbows over a seat on a train. Featuring visits to Mao's George Hamiltonian corpse and a rural market offering Siberian Tiger paw, cobra hearts, and scorpion kebabs (in the food section), Lost on Planet China is a funny and engrossing trip across a nation that increasingly demands the world's attention. --Jon Foro
Maarten Troost's Travel Tips for China

1. Food can be classified as meat, poultry, grain, fish, fruit, vegetable and Chinese. Embrace the Chinese. If you love it, it will love you back. True, you may find yourself perplexed by what resides on your plate. You may even be appalled. The Chinese have an expression: We eat everything with four legs except the table, and anything with two legs except the person. They mean it too. And so you may find yourself in a restaurant in Guangzhou contemplating the spicy cow veins; or the yak dumplings in Lhasa, or the grilled frog in Shanghai, or the donkey hotpot in the Hexi Corridor, or the live squid on the island of Putuoshan. And you may not know, exactly, what it is you’re supposed to do. Should you pluck at this with your chopsticks? The meal may seem so very strange. True, you may be comfortable eating a cow, or a pig, or a chicken, yet when confronted with a yak or a swan or a cat, you do not reflexively think of sauces and marinades. The Chinese do however. And so you should eat whatever skips across your table. It is here where you can experience the complexity of China. And you will be rewarded. Very often, it is exceptionally good. And when it is not, it is undoubtedly interesting. And really, when traveling what more can one ask for. So go on. Eat as the locals do. However, should you find yourself confronted with a heaping platter of Cattle Penis with Garlic, you’re on your own.

2. To really see China, go to the market. Any market will do. This is where China lives and breathes. It is here where you will find the sights, sounds and smells of China. And it is in a Chinese market where you will experience epic bargaining. The Chinese excel at bargaining. They live and breathe it. It is an art; it is a sport. It is, above all, nothing personal. If you do not parry back and forth, you will be regarded as a chump, a walking ATM machine, a carcass to be picked over. And so as you peruse the cabbage or consider the silk, be prepared to bargain. The objective, of course, is to obtain the Chinese price. You will, however, never actually receive the Chinese price. It is the holy grail for laowais--or foreigners--in China. Your status as a laowai is determined by how proximate your haggling gets you to the mythical Chinese price. But you will never obtain the Chinese price. Accept this. But if you’re very, very good, and you bargain long and hard, and if you are lucky and catch your interlocutor on an off day, you may, just may, receive the special price. Consider yourself fortunate.

3. Travelers are often told to get off the beaten path, to take the road less traveled, to march to a different drum. You don't need to do this in China. The road well-traveled is a very fine road. The French Concession in Shanghai is splendid. The Forbidden City is a wonder of the world. So too the Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an. Indeed, the Chinese say so themselves. There is much to be seen in places that are often seen. And yet... China is not merely a country. It is not a place defined by sights. It is a world upon itself, a different planet even. And to see it--to feel it--means leaving that well-traveled road. And China is an excellent place for wandering. From the monasteries of Tibet to the rainforests of Yunnan Province and onward through the deserts of Xinjiang to the frozen tundra of Heilongjiang Province, China offers a vast kaleidoscope of people and terrain unlike anywhere else on Earth. This may seem intimidating to the China traveler. Will there be picture menus in the Taklamakan Desert? (No.) Is Visa accepted in Inner Mongolia? (Not likely.) Still, one should move beyond the Great Wall. And if you can manage to cross six lanes of traffic in Beijing, you can manage the slow train to Kunming.

4. Hell is a line in China. You are so forewarned.

5. Manners are important in China. How can this be, you wonder? You have, for instance, experienced a line in China. Your ribs have been pummeled. You have been trampled upon by grandmothers who are not more than four feet tall. You have learned, simply by queuing in the airport taxi line, what it is like to eat bitter, an evocative Chinese expression that conveys suffering. This does not seem upon first impression to be a country overly concerned with prim etiquette. But it is. True, hawking enormous, gelatinous loogies is perfectly acceptable in China. And a good belch is fine as well. And picking your teeth after dinner is a sign of urbane sophistication. But this does not mean that manners are not taken seriously in China. It’s just that they are different in China. And so feel free to spit and burp, but do not even think of holding your chopsticks with your left hand. You will be regarded as an ill-mannered rube. So watch your manners in China. But learn them first.

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Planet-China-Understand-Comfortable/dp/076792200X

high percentage of consumer reviews are four/five stars

[timeforpeace]

5. The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson, actually 9 books in the series. Amber Chronicles

by Roger Zelazny. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Not political but nearly as much fantasy as DC.

[juno jones]

20. May I add Zelazny's 'Lord of Light' to that.

And his stort stories such as 'Rose for Eccliesiastes'. His poetical SF is some of the most amazing writing I have ever read.:)

[Mike Nelson]

6. Bookmarking

the recommending!

[UTUSN]

7. An oldie, but describing TODAY - SCHAMA's "Citizens" (French Revolution)

This magnificent book first appeared in 1989, so BecKKK and other screamers were just twinkles in our national eye, although LIMBOsevic was already our growing anal cyst who was just being discovered and pushed by G.E. RUSSERT in hour-long interviews for re-running over long Thanksgivings.

**********QUOTE********
from Citizens (A Chronicle of the French Revolution), by Simon SCHAMA, First Vintage Books Edition, March 1990, paper

p. 859 Historians are also much given to distinguishing between "verbal" violence and the real thing. The assumption seems to be that such men as Javogues and Marat, who were given to screaming at people, calling for death, gloating at the spectacle of heads on pikes or processions of men with their hands tied behind their backs climbing the steps to the rasoir national were indulging only in brutal rhetoric. The screamers were not to be compared with such quiet bureaucrats of death as Fouquier-Tinville who did their jobs with stolid, silent efficiency. But the history of "Ville-Affranchie," of the Vendee-Venge, or of the September massacres suggests in fact a direct connection between all that orchestrated or spontaneous screaming for blood and its copious shedding. It contributed greatly to the complete dehumanization of those who became victims. As "brigands" or the "Austrian whore" or "fanatics" they became nonentities in the Nation of Citizens and not only could but had to be eliminated if it was to survive. Humiliation and abuse, then, were not just Jacobin fun and games; they were the prologues to killing.

********UNQUOTE********

[Vinnie From Indy]

8. Death From The Skies

I just finished reading "Death From The Skies" by astronomer Phil Plait. It gives a laundry list of the ways that the universe can kill all life on our fragile planet in the blink of an eye. It was actually quite disturbing. The amount of energy that exists in the universe is truly mind boggling. For example, the Earth could easily be sterilized from a Gamma Ray Burst originating many tens of light years away. GRB's are second only to the Big Bang in energy released. If we were to be in the crosshairs of a GRB, it would simply show up as a very bright light that fades away in a minute or so. The dying would commence very soon after regardless of where you were when the GRB hit.


Another chapter was on black holes. They are of differing sizes and we could wander into one or it could come to us. One of the scenes Plait sketches in this chapter is the approach of a black hole into our solar system's neighborhood. The first sign would probably be astronomers not being able to find Uranus or Saturn where they were supposed to be. Then it would appear as though the Sun was not where it was supposed to be, but it would really be the Earth being pulled out of our regular orbit around the Sun. As the black hole got closer and closer the gravity on the Earth would get less and less because we would have two gravitational masters fighting over us - the sun and the black hole. At the very end, the black hole's immense gravitaional influence would be so great that we would become weightless just before being sucked off the face of the Earth with everything else coming with us including oceans, cars, trees etc.

Some of the other ways include solar flares, asteroid strikes, supernova.

[Fumesucker]

9. Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness

Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner

The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we *can* imagine.

http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/quantum.enigma.html

[TlalocW]

10. "The Family," by Jeff Sharlet

It can be a little hard to get through because the names come at you fast and furious, but it connected a lot of dots for me.

TlalocW

[AndyA]

12. What?!?!?! Going Rogue by Sarah Palin isn't listed???

Oh...sorry...my bad...I didn't see that it said recommended reading. :rofl:

[TomCADem]

13. "McGee & Stuckey's Bountiful Container: Create Container Gardens of Vegetables..." - My Biggest Rec!

This book has been my bible this past year, since I don't have a lot of available area, but I have been able to grow vegtables in containers without using too much space.

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McGee (Basic Herb Cookery) and veteran gardening writer Stuckey (Gardening from the Ground Up) share their expertise and experience in the art of container gardening. Armed with this manual, frustrated apartment dwellers can indulge their passion for growing edible things. If there is an available balcony, porch, front or back steps, according to the authors, growing produce in containers can be easy and rewarding. With some limitations, it is even possible to grow foods in a window box or on an indoor windowsill. This compendium of practical advice includes detailed information on the types of containers to use, equipment needed, the right soil, when to plant which seeds and how best to deal with problems such as too much or too little sunlight. They also explain more sophisticated techniques like succession planting, whereby ongoing seasonal planting takes place in the same container. This can yield a harvest of peas in early summer, tomatoes in late summer to early fall and kale that will grow into winter. Included are mouth-watering recipes for harvested container crops. Written for the beginner as well as for those with a background in gardening, McGee and Stuckey's directions are comprehensive, clearly written and frequently inspiring.

[pscot]

14. Nixonland, by Rick Pearlstein

Pearlstein is a good story teller and he creates the big picture out of lots of little ones, which keeps things moving. He thinks Nixon was responsible for a lot of what's wronng with the way we do politics today. He has a website, rickpearlstein.org I got the book at my local library.

[H2O Man]

24. Very good choice.

I enjoyed reading that.

[C_Lawyer09]

15. Seeds of Terror

How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and al-Qaeda, by Gretchen Peters.

[spoony]

16. I'm probably the last DUer to read it, but I just finished The Shock Doctrine

I'd heard so much about it and finally picked it up for someone for Christmas this year. I'd gotten it early so I read it before wrapping it (is that cheap of me? I dunno, lol). I have to say I've never felt nauseas reading a book, but the utter inhumanity Klein describes did it. I had to read it in little pieces.

[HopeHoops]

17. "The Christian Agnostic" by Leslie D. Weatherhead

http://www.amazon.com/Christian-Agnostic-Leslie-D-Weatherhead/dp/0687069777/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261199949&sr=1-1

One of the best books ever written.

[dmr]

18. For Christmas I bought 4 books for my son:

I wanted to introduce my son to old books I enjoyed reading long ago, & am looking forward to re-reading.

John Irving
The Hotel New Hampshire (1984)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/034541795X/ref=oss_T15_product

Ken Follet
The Pillars of the Earth (1989)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0451207149/ref=oss_T15_product

William Stevenson
A Man Called Intrepid (1976)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/158574154X/ref=oss_T15_product

Gary Webb
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (1999)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1888363932/ref=oss_T15_product

I also bought him a new dictionary. I always have a dictionary close by when I read.

I'm currently reading:

Jeff Sharlet
The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (2007)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060560053/ref=oss_T15_product

Edward M. Kennedy
True Compass: A Memoir (2009)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446539252/ref=oss_T15_product

For Christmas I asked for:
Steven King
Under the Dome: A Novel (2009)
http://www.amazon.com/Under-Dome-Novel-Stephen-King/dp/1439148503/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261203290&sr=1-1
I need a break from politics & haven't read fiction in a very long time.

Edited to add that I love threads like these. I get so many good ideas. I put them on my wish list over at Amazon just to keep track, then I try to find them at the library.

[roguevalley]

19. Bugliosi's book on bush will make you smile. Also, Eisenman's book

on James, the Brother of Jesus is great.

[Are_grits_groceries]

21. Here are a few rec'd for different reasons:

'Plain Song' by Kent Haruf
A novel of remarkable simplicity that is heartwarming, heartbreaking, gently humorous and ultimately uplifting without a note of preaching or self-righteousness. Add an unwed pregnant teenager, 2 bachelor brothers on a farm, a caring counselor; set it in a small mid-western town and gently mix for a great read.

'The Honk and Holler Opening Soon' by Billie Letts
A tale of a group of ordinary and yet remarkable people who struggle to make it through each day. One happens to be a Vietnamese man named Bui Khanh who speaks little English. Set in Oklahoma. Zany and unforgettable.

'A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East' by David Fromkin
A clear history which will give you an idea about why the Middle East is so screwed up. The Great Powers meddled and set the region on a path guaranteed to lead to chaos of some kind. It is not a dry recitation of facts, but instead it's a well told story.

'Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living' by Bailey White
I can't explain the South and I live here. A hilarious book of sketches that might give everyone a clue.

"The Long Haul' by Myles Horton (The Highlander School)
If you don't know anything about Horton or The Highlander School, then you have missed one of the most effective and progressive forces for change in the South and the US.
A synopsis:
Highlander has provided training and education for the labor movement in Appalachia and throughout the Southern United States. During the 1950s, it played a critical role in the American Civil Rights Movement. It trained civil rights leader Rosa Parks prior to her historic role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as well as providing training for many other movement activists including Martin Luther King, Jr., James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, Ralph Abernathy and John Lewis in the mid- and-late 1950s. The resulting backlash of the school's involvement with the Civil Rights Movement led to the school's closure by the state of Tennessee in 1961. It reorganized and moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where it reopened, later becoming the Highlander Research and Education Center.

(A lot of people don't know that Rosa Parks and others were provided training and support by this group. It was closed in 1961, but by then it had set a large group of activists in many areas on a path to change America.)

[denem]

22. 'Going Rogue'. I've read the index, it's outstanding.

[LeftyMom]

23. The Tyranny of Oil

http://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Oil-Worlds-Powerful-Industry/dp/0061434515/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261226425&sr=8-1

[H2O Man]

25. Among the books

that I am reading now is "Legacy of Secrecy," by Lamar Waldron, with Thom Hartmann. It is a follow-up to their earlier book. It contains information from a wide variety of intelligence agency documents, and shows -- among other things -- the way that intelligence agencies manipulate the corporate media. I strongly recommend this 2009 book.

[Melissa G]

26. Anything by Roger Zelazny. I deeply mourn his passing. William Gibson

if you are into cyber punk.

I like novels that take me into different environments and cultures, esp if there is a juxtaposition to where I currently am. For example, Texas drought/heat 108 plus in August reading Smilla's Sense of Snow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Smilla's_Feeling_for_Snow. I read a bunch of Alaska books after that and it was the coolest summer I ever spent.

I also enjoyed books by Peter Bowen. I think I have read all of them. Mythic Montana and the Metis Indians.
http://www.fictiondb.com/author/peter-bowen~17961.htm

The midbook Deshi in the 3 book series about a scholar/ japanese swordsman martial artist was pretty fun. John Donohue was the author.http://www.amazon.com/review/R3R0GZT5DHQ9BJ/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R3R0GZT5DHQ9BJ

I generally read about 3 books a week. I have a voracious appetite for books. If you like this stuff pm me, I'm always looking for recommendations.

[WCGreen]

27. American Rust. and Fellow Traveler

American Rust is a great novel exploring what happens to the people when a small steel town in PA shuts down...

It's also a first novel...

Fellow Traveler is a very good novel about what it was like being gay while the McCarthy era was playing out in DC. A lot of politics, good amount of history and really good writing by Thomas Mallon...

[Melissa G]

28. For whimsy. The Old Buzzard Had It Coming

A great first book I read in 2005. I've been waiting for a follow up novel. Set in 1912 Oklahoma by Donis Casey.
http://christinesreadingcorner.blogspot.com/2007/10/old-buzzard-had-it-coming-by-donis.html