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What Are You Reading?
I have mentioned previously that I am an avid reader. Having recently completed my Masters Degree, I am reading for pleasure once more. :)
I have just finished Carl Sagan: The Varieties of Scientific Experience, which is the transcript from Sagan’s Gifford Lectures. This book is a fabulous read for anyone interested in Sagan’s work: the Q&A session (included at the end of the book) shows a man at the height of his intellectual powers.
Next up is, Russell: Why I am not a Christian. This is a collection of Bertrand Russell’s writings and articles over the years. The Times says of this book:
“There is no one who uses English language more beguilingly than Russell, no one smoothes the kinks and creases more artfully out of the most crumpled weaves of thought”
That quote alone should be enough to make one eager for the experience. :)
Anyway, I just thought it would be nice to know what everyone else is reading and why.
I also read an unhealthy amount (both for pleasure and work); indeed, so much so that I sometimes worry that I will end up like Diggory Venn.
As to current reading, my selection is enforced. You see, every year I spend a few weeks in France, and my promise (to myself) is that I take no work, and instead read all the books on that year's Booker longlist. So, my current reading can be found here. I have yet to read Grant, Berger and Rushdie, but my pick thus far is Adiga - his writing is not unlike Mohsin Hamid's, a shortlistee in 2007.
I've read a fair bit of Russell, though not that specific collection. Always makes me think, and laugh, and one would have thought that eliciting such a disparate pair of responses would be difficult indeed. Russell makes it seem wonderfully easy: his writing, to touch, is like velvet; to taste, like syrup.
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Michael Zeilik's Astronomy: The Expanding Universe and The Victory Garden Companion by Michael Weishan.
For my son I've finished up Baum's Oz series and have been reading him Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (his request, and it's been interesting paraphrasing archaic terms:)).
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Right now I'm reading Leviathan by James Byron Huggins. Why? Really had nothing to do so I got the first book that came to hand and it turned out pretty well.
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In an effort to foster hypochondria in me, my wife presented me with Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston. A large excerpt from his non-fiction on the topic can be found here. Scary stuff!
Quote:
In 1989, a Soviet biologist named Vladimir Pasechnik defected to Britain. British intelligence agents spent a year debriefing him in a safe house. By the end, the British agents felt they had confirmed that the U.S.S.R. had biological missiles aimed at the United States. This information reached President George Bush and the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Mrs. Thatcher then apparently telephoned the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and sternly confronted him. She was furious, and so was Bush. Gorbachev responded by allowing a small, secret team of American and British biological-weapons inspectors to tour Soviet biowarfare facilities. In January of 1991, the inspectors travelled across the U.S.S.R., getting whirlwind looks at some of the major clandestine bases of the Soviet biowarfare program, which was called Biopreparat. The inspectors were frightened by what they discovered. ("I would describe it as scary, and I feel a responsibility to tell the world medical community about what I saw, because doctors could face these diseases," an inspector, Frank Malinoski, M.D., Ph.D., said to me.) On January 14th, the team arrived at Vector, the main virology complex, in Siberia, and the next day, after being treated to vodka and piles of caviar, they were shown into a laboratory called Building 6, where one of the inspectors, David Kelly, took a technician aside and asked him what virus they had been working with. The technician said that they had been working with smallpox. Kelly repeated the question three times. Three times, he asked the technician, "You mean you were working with Variola major?" and he emphasized to the technician that his answer was very important. The technician responded emphatically that it was Variola major. Kelly says that his interpreter was the best Russian interpreter the British government has. "There was no ambiguity," Kelly says.
The inspectors were stunned. Vector was not supposed to have any smallpox at all, much less be working with it. All the Russian smallpox stocks were supposed to be kept in one freezer in Moscow, which was supposed to be under the control of the World Health Organization. For Vector to have smallpox would be a supreme violation of rules set down by the W.H.O.
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I'm taking my time with Russell, so far it's a fabulous read, but it doesn't do to hurry it. I've read a couple of the essays twice, just to make sure I've grasped the concept. Oh, how I love to be reading for pleasure again. :)
The Demon in The Freezer Article on the eradication and later illegal dissemination of the Smallpox virus that includes David Kelly's role in the investigation of the USSR treaty violations
Russell was doubtless a fascinating fellow to know.
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a really good superhero novel about people who have 'lame' superpowers. The ability to balance anything on a bar tray... the ability to control elevators and the ability to regrow your own legs!
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Currently I'm reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins(Thank you, Jogga. Excellent reading.), Xanth(8) by Piers Anthony and The Last Testament by Sam Bourne (might not finish it because of #1).
I'm thinking of trying Bertrand Russell for non-fiction next although I really need to start reading books in my native tongue because my grammar and lexicology is starting to fall apart.
When I try to come up with words in my own language only english words pop out. Quite annoying, actually. I used to pride myself in being eloquent.
Is Russel worth my eventual language collapse?
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