What're you reading right now?

[Jazzey]

one of my favorite books has always been The Stone Angel (Carole Shields). But I've also been an avid fan of Margaret Atwood's (just for the sheer level of language). Granted, some of her later stuff was just a little too dark for me, but, I still think fondly of "the Edible Woman", "Cat's Eye", "Lady Oracle", "the Handmaid's tale", "Alias Grace", "the Robber Bride" and "The Blind Assassin". I just purchased "Oryx and Crake"...Although if it's too dark, I may not finish it...let you know in the process

 

[megk]

I really enjoyed The Handmaid's Tale. The movie was great too. I must say I haven't read enough Atwood.

 

[Jazzey]

While the Handmaid's tale was good, it's nothing compared to Cat's eye and the Edible Woman...

Handmaid's tale was fun because of the futuristic perspective which, honestly, I found quite interesting. But her other novels, I think anyway, have more "personality" and realism to them if you know what I mean?

 

[Into The Light]

i found the handmaid's tale a bit 1984-ish in its theme, if I remember correctly. spooky.

 

[Jazzey]

It was a little spooky. But I bet if you'd re-read it today, you'd see some themes which where not that far-fetched...Just my impression on the book. It is depressing, but you have to read between the lines with Atwood... But yes, some of her work can be darn right dark..

Personally, as a first novel of hers, I would read the edible woman...Not handmaid's tale...Cat's eye is good too...

 

[Into The Light]

that's the thing. big brother really is coming to life with today's technology. i must re-read those two books, it's been ages.

 

[Andy]

I have Cat's eye and the Handmaids tale. Loved them both. I would love to get more of her books but I can't concentrate well enough now. I have 5 books on the go that I will probably have to start over by the time I get back to them.

 

[Jazzey]

Don't worry about it STP...Do what you can, ok? This is a hobby -just remember that.

 

[Fiver]

I'm with STP. Open right now I've got "Something Under The Bed Is Drooling." Calvin and Hobbes never fail to put my mind where it needs to be.

 

[Daniel E.]

"Don't You Know Who I Am?": How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility

"Health and wellness campaigns preach avoidance of unhealthy foods, sedentary lifestyles, tobacco, drugs, and alcohol, but rarely preach avoidance of unhealthy, difficult or toxic people. Yet the health benefits of removing toxic people from your life may have far greater benefits to both physical and psychological health. We need to learn to be better gatekeepers for our minds, bodies, and souls."

 

[Daniel E.]

Earthly Possessions by Anne Tyler

A review of the book at Amazon:

The Lightness of Being

It could have been a day like any other in the dull life of housewife Charlotte but fate decided otherwise. Because of a failed bank heist, she finds herself taken hostage by the robber Jake. Then follows an improvised road trip across the US to escape police attention. Things slowly reveal themselves to be not so simple. Jake isn't the tough guy he tries to be and Charlotte finds a nearly perverse pleasure in being caught in a passive situation, having left her life behind without regret. It is a captivating story because you keep wondering how it could possibly end. In between chapters, we retrace Charlotte's strange and sad life until the bank kidnapping. She is a woman hard to decipher and probably don't quite understand herself and her motivations fully either. Possessions and attachments burden her. She seems on a search for an impossible lightness of being that life, with its bothering duties, can never provide. Hence perhaps, the secret pleasure in drifting away with Jake on the road towards the unknown. But then, what? I won't reveal the ending but it is a wonderful, if very melancholic, story. It raises questions about our choices, our duties, our bonds to things and people and how much of it all is really us? But then detached from everything and everyone, who are we? Charlotte definitely is on the search for an answer...

 

[Lufero]

Was reading an article "Why investors should not ignore Greece's golden visa program" and it actually made me shock. I didn't know that there is a country in Europe passport of which you can buy and it's legal.

 

[Mari]

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Interesting...

 

[Lufero]

Was reading an article "Why investors should not ignore Greece's golden visa program" and it actually made me shock. I didn't know that there is a country in Europe passport of which you can buy and it's legal.

I found out that there are similar programs in Spain, Montenegro and many Caribbean countries.

 

[Daniel E.]

Amazon product

A breakthrough in human cloning becomes one woman’s waking nightmare in a mind-bending thriller by the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the Gibson Vaughn series.

In the near future, advances in medicine and quantum computing make human cloning a reality. For the wealthy, cheating death is the ultimate luxury. To anticloning militants, it’s an abomination against nature. For young Constance “Con” D’Arcy, who was gifted her own clone by her late aunt, it’s terrifying.

After a routine monthly upload of her consciousness—stored for that inevitable transition—something goes wrong. When Con wakes up in the clinic, it’s eighteen months later. Her recent memories are missing. Her original, she’s told, is dead. If that’s true, what does that make her?

The secrets of Con’s disorienting new life are buried deep. So are those of how and why she died. To uncover the truth, Con is retracing the last days she can recall, crossing paths with a detective who’s just as curious. On the run, she needs someone she can trust. Because only one thing has become clear: Con is being marked for murder—all over again.

 

[Daniel E.]

A quote from the book:

“After the behemoth social networks had died off in the twenties—victims of changing legal and cultural privacy concerns—they’d been supplanted by self-managed private social networks. Designed by white-hat, open-source, anti-corporate coders, the new do-it-yourself PSNs were free, easy to set up, decentralized, and had no corporate overlords. Con had read somewhere that there were more than twenty billion private social networks worldwide interconnected in a complex latticework.”