Metal Reviews

K.J. Parker- Devices and Desires

Heh, a part-coincidence here. I just started reading K.J. Parker's Shadow from the Scavenger Trilogy.

Just started Michel Foucault's Discipline & Punish.

How are you finding it? While sometimes the dialogue can be a bit annoying, I'm loving this book- lots of intrigue, grey characters, a good and believable plot, and a nice sense of British irony that makes a lot of it quite funny.

Well I haven't gone past the 100-page mark yet (I'm a veeery slow reader). I feel a bit lost and as if I'm not really understanding what's going on but I suspect that this is exactly what KJ Parker wants me to feel like in order to better understand his main character. To be honest, I'm not really excited yet but something just holds me there and I keep reading, and the more I do so the more I gradually start to like it. I think that's mostly for the reasons you described so well: "lots of intrigue, grey characters, a good and believable plot". What I especially enjoy is that it feels as if everybody is doomed, cursed or born under a bad sign.
Anyway, I'll give you another comment when I reach the middle of the book.

Fuck this book!

Beowulf, Hamlet, Fahrenheit 451, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women.

All for the same class, all at the same time.

Finished: Paul William Roberts - A River in the Desert, a pretty good travelogue of Egypt. His attraction to insane theories with dubious proof (he acts like Egyptologists being wrong about the age of the Sphinx proves that Egyptian civilization originated in some sort of Atlantis or something fucking nuts like that) makes some of his talking about Egyptian history a little hard to take at face value. However, he's a hugely entertaining writer and I burned through the book very, very fast and even though his theories need to be taken with a grain of salt some of the stuff he mentions is interesting. Worth reading although I think that his Empire of the Soul and A War Against Truth books r better.

now reading: Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

St. Augustine- Confessions

In Latin?

This site has a collection of e-texts from Augustine and other Christian writers if you are interested http://www.ccel.org/index/literature.html

Unfortunately, I'm only in Intro to latin at this point, so there's no way I could handle the Confessions in Latin right now. By the end of the year, I'm supposed to be able to handle Cicero, and I have 5 translation courses to take in the next 2 years, so hopefully soon I'll be reading this stuff in the original language.

And thank you for the website, its excellent. Here's another one that has an incredibly large number of texts from the ancient world, in Greek and Latin, along with modern translations:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/

If this is the series by the guy I think it is (the god in the cart?) it's not bad. The middle bit's too long, though.

Yeah that's the one. I've just reached the middle of the book now and I was intending to make another comment here. I'm still not blown out of my socks with this one. The story is intimidating in a good way with more twists and spins as the pages turn. But not twists the usual way but more of what the reader believes or understands/guesses about it. His writing style sometimes feels fresh and I like some ideas he brings to the fantasy genre but mostly it's just enough to get the pages turning. So as far as story goes, this book feels like a risky investment. 350+ pages past and I don't yet know if I will like it at the end. Either I'm going to love it or I will be very disappointed.
By the way, anybody else found chapter 17 almost unbearable ? It's the one with the button business and the button factory and bone processing and whatnot. I honestly can not imagine why those 20-25 existed, a quick summary or mention in one page would be enough to get the story going fast and without needing to jump over paragraphs or whole pages.

Heh, yes. Too much information!

you should be proud, cicero maybe isn't as hard as other Classical writers, but his works sometimes are pretty hard.

Pro Milone ftw!

I'm currently in a Latin course right now that is supposed to fit two years into one. I'm supposed to be reading things like Cicero and the Aeneid by the end of the year but I'm not confident about that.

Did you ever read Martin Luther's Table Talk?

I started reading The Lord of the Rings again because I am one of the cool kids.

I'm enjoying the hell out of it too, everything just seems to flow right off the page a lot easier than it did the first two times I read it.

It's pretty fucking great.

Now reading Coelho's The Alchemist, which I hadn't heard about even though it seems to be really popular and significant. I'm also reading Michael Guillen's Bridges to Infinity, The Human Side of Mathematics, very interesting ideas and views.

Theodore Ayrault Dodge- Caesar: A History of the Art of War Among the Romans Down to the End of the Roman Empire, With a Detailed Account of the Campaigns of Caius Julius Caesar

Military history, huzzah!