OK looking for something to read.. what do ya recommend

[southernleftylady]

:)
nothing TOO heavy but entertaining at least.. or interesting ..
tia!

[DebJ]

1. I just finished Jeffersons Vendetta. Could have been headlines

for today... Jefferson wanted to squash the power of the Judiciary (John Marshall et al). Lots of things that happened back then are just being repeated today. Never fails to amaze me.

Good book, interesting... entertaining for ME because I constantly read about the Founding Fathers.

[acmejack]

9. What would Jefferson do?

Or anything else by Thom Hartmann. Lighter would be Bushwacked by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose. So many good books, so little time...

[cestpaspossible]

2. Japanese Inn by Oliver Statler

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0824808185/qid=1117385383/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/104-5155533-5859159?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

[The Blue Flower]

3. Freedom from Fear

David Kennedy: America in the Great Depression and WWII. Past is prologue.

[MuseRider]

4. You need Mom books.

I have always read a lot but when I had small kids I could not ever remember anything I had read so I skipped over to lighter stuff. I read tons of Fantasy/SciFi because they followed a similar plot line but often the characters were very engaging. The best part was I did not remember much about them so I could read them again at a later time and it was familiar but not enough to ruin it! I also read a lot of what most would call vacation books, light stuff.

Just a thought knowing what your life is most likely like right now. :hi:

[alfredo]

5. "Reading Lolita In Tehran" by Azar Nafisi. Energizing and

hopeful in that it shows that even the most brutal theocracy cannot stifle all independent thought.

This book has made it into a lot of reading group's list. I can see why. The writer's love of literature is infectious.

[Sapphire Blue]

6. Promises Betrayed - Waking Up from the American Dream by Bob Herbert

[warrior1]

7. The Secret Life of Bees.

http://contemporarylit.about.com/cs/currentreviews/fr/secretLifeOfBee.htm

Lily Melissa Owens has a special relationship with bees. At night, they squeeze through the cracks of her bedroom wall by the hundreds and fly circles around her room until the air itself is pulsating with the beat of their wings. Finally, when she can no longer stand being the only witness to this apiary wonder, she rushes to awaken the only person available - her father. But the bees don't stick around and T. Ray, who is not amused with this apparent prank, promises to get out the Martha Whites if Lily wakes him again.

"Martha Whites were a form of punishment only T. Ray could have dreamed up."

T. Ray Owens is the hateful, peach-farming antagonist of Sue Monk Kidd's "The Secret Life of Bees." When T. Ray is feeling particularly mean towards Lily, he pulls the Martha White grits down from the pantry and pours an anthill-sized pile on the kitchen floor for Lily to kneel in. It's a unique torture that inflicts Lily's knees with hundreds of tiny stinging wounds that turn into tiny blue welts over time.

snip

[SalmonChantedEvening]

8. Terry Pratchett's Discworld

Any of the 27 in the series will do.

But as a starter I suggest Wyrd Sisters, a takeoff on MacBeth and a primer for the Witches subseries. Then Lords and Ladies. Evil, vain Elves. :D

Maybe Guards! Guards! as a primer to the Sam Vimes and Ankh-Morpork set. Here be Dragons...

7 bucks a pop at almost any Barnes & Noble or Amazon.

WARNING: Addictive, funny and insightful. Memorable characters galore.

http://www.lspace.org

[Pharaoh]

10. "Waking up in Time"

by Peter Russell

subtitle "finding inner peace in times of accelerating change"

[wtmusic]

11. The Bush Hater's Handbook

The best-documented book on the administration's transgressions to date, ordered by topic. If you want sheer firepower in your talking points, this is the one to get:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1560255692/qid=1117386892/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-3871288-1163235?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

[Psephos]

12. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

"I WAS SITTING IN a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster."

That's the first line in the book. It just gets better and better.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743247531/ref=wl_it_dp/002-5575623-4847238?%5Fencoding=UTF8&coliid=I1S655YFLEXFKE&v=glance&colid=17K5610Z6E2UB

[DiverDave]

13. Pastwatch The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

By Orson Scott Card

http://tinyurl.com/9fqfn


Absolutely riveting, and thought provoking.

What if Columbus treated the natives in the new world as equals, rather then slaves and animals?

A great read.

[Stinky The Clown]

14. Total mind candy and no political undertones ......

Set in 1939 Hollywood. No messages. Nothing heavy. Good guys and bad guys clearly drawn. Fast read. 100% escapism.

The height of mind candy. I'm about halfway through it.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

15. Here's a few recent reads.

I read aloud to my wife every evening for our mutual enjoyment. We've always been readers but reading aloud makes it a different experience.

Anyway, here's some we've enjoyed recently:

"Anna Karenina" Tolstoy has the reputation of being the greatest novelist of all time. I consider that an underestimation.

"Dangerous Liaisons" The book is even better than either of the movies "Valmont" or the not nearly as good "Dangerous Liaisons". It's all in the form of letters between conniving people who all get their comeuppance.

"Swimming Lessons: and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag" by Rohintan Mistry. Mistry is an Indian Parsi (Zoroastrian) writer of immense talent. Sort of a combination of Tolstoy and Steinbeck. The stories are entertwined about the residents of a building complex in Bombay. They're funny, sad, insightful, erotic, touching, and just great writing.

For non-fiction try:

"I Will Bear Witness" The most devastating book about Nazi Germany I have ever read. It's a diary kept by Victor Klemperer, a German Jew, all they way from Hitler's rise to the end. He was a professor of French Literature, a non-practicing Jew married to an Aryan woman. There's no slaughter, no torture, no scenes of Auschwitz or concentration camps. Just the slow descent into fascism for an individual, patriotic, conservative, German. He kept an almost daily journal that portrays what fascism is like for "average" people. No great heroics, no tanks in the streets, no narrow escapes. Just the grinding humiliation, hunger, fear, corruption, and overwhelming power of the state. It answers the question, "Why didn't they resist?", far better than any treatise directed to the question. Once started, it is almost impossible to put down.

[unhappycamper]

16. "The Two-Mile Time Machine" by Richard Alley

Richard Alley, one of the world's leading climate researchers, tells the fascinating history of global climate changes as revealed by reading the annual rings of ice from cores drilled in Greenland. In the 1990s he & his colleagues made headlines with the discovery that the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years. Here Alley offers the first popular account of the wildly fluctuating climate that characterized most of prehistory--long deep freezes alternating briefly with mild conditions--and explains that we humans have experienced an unusually temperate climate. But, he warns, our comfortable environment could come to an end in a matter of years. The Two-Mile Time Machine begins with the story behind the extensive research in Greenland in the early 1990s, when scientists were beginning to discover ancient ice as an archive of critical information about the climate. Drilling down two miles into the ice, they found atmospheric chemicals & dust that enabled them to construct a record of such phenomena as wind patterns & precipitation over the past 110,000 years. The record suggests that "switches" as well as "dials" control the earth's climate, affecting, for example, hot ocean currents that today enable roses to grow in Europe farther north than polar bears grow in Canada. Throughout most of history, these currents switched on & off repeatedly (due partly to collapsing ice sheets), throwing much of the world from hot to icy & back again in as little as a few years. Alley explains the discovery process in terms the general reader can understand, while laying out the issues that require further study: What are the mechanisms that turn these dials & flip these switches? Is the earth due for another drastic change, one that will reconfigure coastlines or send certain regions into severe drought? Will global warming combine with natural variations in Earth's orbit to flip the North Atlantic switch again? Predicting the long-term climate is one of the greatest challenges facing scientists in the twenty-first century, & Alley tells us what we need to know in order to understand & perhaps overcome climate changes in the future.

[housewolf]

17. Jane Fonda's biography and "Confessions of an Economic Hitman"

Jane Fonda's biography is long - about 600 pages but very easy reading and fascinating. She's led such an interesting life and leaves no holds barred - it's quite revealing and answers many questions about her life, her loves, her realtionships, her movies, her children, her activism, her parents, her men... and so much more.


"Confessions of an Economic Hitman" is the story of a man who worked in industry but with the World Bank, IMF and CIA to extrort developing nations of their natural resources. After 911 he went through a transformation of thought and belief and now is telling the tale of how the system of globalization works. VERY interesting.