What are you reading the week of April 19, 2009?

[DUgosh]

Mourning Shift by Kathleen Taylor

[meegbear]

1. Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours

[panader0]

2. Mr Paradise by Elmore Leonard

A new one and a really good one.

[fadedrose]

9. I've been meaning to get started on Elmore Leonard...

never read any of his stuff. Where do you suggest I start?

[Xipe Totec]

3. Subspace-Based Noise Reduction for Speech Signals

via Diagonal and Triangular Matrix Decompositions

I laughed, I cried...

Cried, mostly....

[babylonsister]

4. LOL!

Riveting, I'll bet. :)

[fadedrose]

11. I'da unnerstood the title perfeckly..

if it just said "linear manifold" instead of "subspace." I bet that clears it up for everbody.

Thank the lord for dictionaries.

[Mist]

5. Bill Bryson's "I'm A Stranger Here Myself." nt

[netania99]

6. Just started re-reading 100 Years of Solitude

I'm also in the middle of Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors (short stories).

[OffWithTheirHeads]

7. The Plague by Camus

So far, so good.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

14. A really profound (at least for me) passage

The setup; A character called Grand is discussing his courtship, marriage and, ultimately, his wife leaving.

The passage:
"The common lot of married couples. You get married you go on loving a bit longer, you work. You work so hard that you forget to love. As the head of his office hadn't kept his promise (of future advancement and pay raises), Jeanne, too, had to work outside... Owing largely to fatigue, he gradually lost his grip of himself, had less and less to say, and failed to keep alive the feeling in his wife that she was loved. An overworked husband, poverty, the gradual loss of hope of a better future, silent evenings at home---what chance had any passion of surviving such conditions?

Man! If that doesn't hit the nail on the head...

[saltpoint]

8. Mary Renault's THE NATURE OF ALEXANDER.

[pscot]

10. House of Rain by Craig Childs

is the main course. Side dishes include novels by Steven Saylor, Elizabeth Peters and Terry Pratchett. Not a lot of nutrition in these latter, but they're great fun. House of Rain is a meditation on the mysterious Anasazi culture. It's quite good.

[YankeyMCC]

13. His "The Animal Dialogues" is a prized possession of mine

[likesmountains 52]

17. Not fiction.. Panama Fever

[likesmountains 52]

16. Just finished that...really enjoy all of his books.

[YankeyMCC]

12. Still working on "Wolf Totem" by Lü Jiamin aka Jiang Rong

But I've also started "Zen's Chinese Heritage: The Masters and Their Teachings" by Andy Ferguson

[MrCoffee]

15. The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littel

I can't tell if it's a well-written exploration of human weakness and depravity or a crappy shock novel. I'm leaning toward crappy shock novel.