I’m reading Travels with Herodotus.
This is Ryszard Kapuscinski’s last work, part memoir and part reflection on Herodotus' Histories, which he takes along during his travels.
I like it so far. I loved Imperium. Kapuscinski’s writing follows a narrative similar to the stories told to me by my own family and their experiences in post civil war and pre-Soviet Russia. He captures the mix of beauty and starkness
and what happens to regular people when empires fall and a society restructures and rebuilds. I don’t think it’s an easy dichotomy for a writer to process and retell with any balance, but he does it well.

Next up is The Long Falling by Keith Ridgway. I've heard great things about it.

Russian ballet..
 

Have read the Bill Bryson - i liked it - i enjoy most of his writing.

I also enjoy Bill Bryson's writing. I have read A Walk in the Woods, it inspired me (partly, but largely) to want to hike the AT. :)

I am reading Wilderness Essays by John Muir.... Excellent book :) Even the introduction was good, and I typically just skim them ;)

Punk History: American Hardcore by Steven Blush

The Century Trilogy by Ken Follett. I am half way through "Fall of the Giants" and I have Winter of the World waiting for me.

There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

Reading these "love stories" is like chewing on broken glass.
Petrushevskaya is an excellent writer, however, so the bleeding is worth it. Kind of.

Wish I had time to bury my nose into a good book, but lately the extent of it has been studying for my national licensure exam. Oh wait!! I did buy and go through the book! It was called CRC Exam: Guide to Success by Roger O Weed, PhD, CRC and Joseph A Hill, PhD, CRC 9th Ed. *Sighs...
But to be able to get back to reading for pleasure.......*another dreamy sigh

The Vanished Man .. (Lincoln Rhyme Series)
By Jeffrey Deaver

At the Heart of History- Forgotten battlegrounds of the Norse
:pirate-steer:

I have been reading from two books from a former English & Women's studies class I took a few years ago. At the time, we had to read both books side-by-side; as well as provide a highly developed research appendice to our study papers. I didn't like it at the time because I felt my head was on fire. But I saved my books from that class because it's important to internalize the tremendous struggle women have endured and how we still continue to liberate ourselves from constraining, and what feels like at times to suffocate our very existence, socially held agenda.

Authors of Classical literature that was considered highly controverial during their time:

North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell, 1855)
Ann Veronica (H.G. Wells, 1909)

(both boths are reprints and published by Penguin Books)

Coming soon in May:

And The Mountains Echoed
(Khaled Housseini)

A novel about how we find a lost peice of ourselves in someone else: How we find love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations. In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most. Following its characters and the ramifications of their lives and choices and loves around the globe—from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos—the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page (Amazon, 3/2013).

I have read two other books by Hosseini:
The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns
Both books affected me profoundly - Housseini definately
has a way of illustrating the human condition in timeless ways.

http://covers.booktopia.com.au/big/9...ins-echoed.jpg

This is a beautiful book , with some of the greatest gorillas photos taken by Bob Campbell. Such amazing grueling work Dian did for our Gorillas.
She was one tough lady.
http://images.bookstore.ipgbook.com/...0956444899.jpg

I am reading......

All That Is Bitter & Sweet - Ashley Judd with MaryAnne Vollers

its pretty good

Low Back Disorders: Evidence based prevention and rehabilitation
Dr Stuart McGill

The Essentials of Sport and Exercise Nutrition
Dr John Berardi

Yeah, light fluff.

I'm reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It came out in 2006- I'd never heard of it, but it's come up a few times lately so I'm taking that as a cosmic nudge.

Just started it, but so far so good. It focuses on Lincoln's gift for turning his political opponents into allies by making the message more important than the ego.

Like potato chips, you can't have just one....
 

"Incarnate" by Jodi Meadows. (a trilogy....NEWSOUL, NOSOUL, HEART)

NEWSOUL
Ana is new. For thousands of years in Range, a million souls have been reincarnated over and over, keeping their memories and experiences from previous lifetimes. When Ana was born, another soul vanished, and no one knows why.
************************
"Sensual Reading; New Approaches to Reading in its Relations to the Senses."
Edited by Micaehl Syrotinski and Ian Maclachlan

Sensual Reading is a collection of essays that attempts to rearticulate the relationship between reading and the different senses as a way of moving beyond increasingly homogenized discourses of the ‘‘body’’ and the ‘‘subject.’’ Contributions engage with the individual senses, with the themes of sensory richness and sensory deprivation, and with the notion of ‘‘telesensuality.’’

Katniss~~(Thank you Kätzchen, I liked "A Thousand Splendid Suns" and now have "And the Mountains Echoed" on order with Amazon.)

I am currently reading "Undefended Love," by Jett Psaris, PH.D and Marlena S. Lyons, PH.D.....It's an inspiring and practical approach to lasting, loving relationships. The message is clear and the effect is profound. I'm learning alot.

Politics and Pasta~by Vincent "Buddy" Cianci.

A Pacific Northwest Author...
 

Have any of you ever heard of Lucia Perillo?

She's a Pacific Northwest author who lives in the state of Washington and I came across a book of hers, the other night, which I plan to purchase next week - since I couldn't find a copy of it at the library.

The title of her book is: Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain (2012).

Here's a book review (LINK)

Here's a brief excerpt of her writing from chapter 1 (Bad Boy Number Seventeen):

....."I think he's funny," she says in that woofy voice of hers. "I think he's cute. I think that boy wants to be my boyfriend."

.....This is the kind of thing Louisa'll say that drives a stake into our mother's heart. Lately Mum's been talking about getting her tube tied, a plan I could condone on pragmatic grounds but against which I've nonetheless felt compelled to launch a squeak or two of protest. Louisa's been living with Mum ever since she got kicked out of the group home for repeated makeup theft, and even though Louisa's relatively sulf-sufficient - she can ride the bus, she has a job assembling calendars and pens - my mother won't rest easy until Louisa's fate is sewn up. I mean, Louisa needs a baby about as badly as she needs a scholarship to MIT, but then part of me says: What right do we have to go monkeying around with Louisa's body? (pp. 3; Perillo, 2012).

Book Description

Publication Date: May 7, 2012

A stunning debut from an award-winning poet.

Populating a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the characters in Lucia Perillo’s story collection all resist giving the world what it expects of them and are surprised when the world comes roaring back.

An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and the people who sell them door-to-door. An abandoned woman seeks consolation in tales of armed robbery told by one of her fellow suburban housewives. An accidental mother struggles to answer her daughter’s badgering about her paternity. And in three stories readers meet Louisa, a woman with Down syndrome who serves as an accomplice to her younger sister’s sexual exploits and her aging mother’s fantasies of revenge.

Together, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain is a sharp-edged, witty testament to the ambivalence of emotions, the way they pull in directions that often cancel one another out or twist their subjects into knots. In lyrical prose, Perillo draws on her training as a naturalist and a poet to map the terrain of the comic and the tragic, asking how we draw the boundaries between these two zones. What’s funny, what’s heartbreaking, and who gets to decide?




http://covers.feedbooks.net/item/310...e&t=1359403964

reading
 

Biography of Christopher Reeve

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Lover-At-Last-Dagger-Brotherhood/dp/0451239350"]Lover at Last[/ame] by JR Ward.

I started hearing a lot of chatter about this book last year. J.R. Ward writes a series called the Black Dagger Brotherhood which is about vampires. It's romance but it's somewhat edgy. One of the books in the series included BDSM, and people were all frowny about it (this was pre-50 Shades).

So J.R. Ward decides to step it up a notch and make the latest installment of her series about the love story between two men. Two beloved characters that have been in earlier installments.

People lost their ever-loving minds. People flocked to her message board and vented their spleens about how they didn't want to read a love story about two men, and how they especially didn't want to read the sex scenes. They blogged about it. They cried on Goodreads. And so on.

This of course made me want to buy twelve copies, but in the end I only bought two (one for my kindle and one for my local library). I read it yesterday and while it didn't blow my mind, I liked it. J.R. Ward is a good writer and I admire her courage in writing this story despite the criticism.

I am reading The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. I find the author to be a bit full of herself but damn the woman can craft a sentence. I'm about 100 pages in and find myself quite glad that this book is a little over 600 pages. I want to be able to wade in it for a while.

I also loved the 'great and small' series, makes me want to re-read them too!

An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales by Oliver Sacks (I love all his books)

"...seven narratives of neurological disorder....These men, women, and one extraordinary child emerge as brilliantly adaptive personalities, whose conditions have not so much debilitated them as ushered them into another reality"

Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes

http://img1.imagesbn.com/p/978081299...2_s260x420.JPGhttp://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...R%26MaxW%3D620

Just started this one a few days ago ... Its memoir of this women growing up with a drug addicted mother.
Read a review in the new york times recently .
So far its been very good.

The life of Emily Dickinson.

I'm so excited! One of my favorite authors, Mary Roach, just released her latest book: Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.

Her books tend to pick a subject- sex, death, ghosts, space travel-- and answer all the quirky and obscure questions you've never thought of, but once you hear the question, you HAVE to know the answer (or at least I do). She's a writer of (weird) science who uses lots of humor and outsider perspective to make her subjects accessible. About once a year, I re-read her first book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, because it's just that good.

Her latest book focuses on the digestive system, starting with the sense of smell (and what makes a good wine taster), down through the stomach (where she explains why it doesn't eat itself), and on down to the anatomy of the rectum, and of course what comes out of it (and answers the question: did Elvis really die of constipation?). In the introduction, she writes that her aim is not to gross the reader out, but to fascinate...though she admits being grossed out is probably unavoidable. And I admit I look forward to being grossed out, because she'll have me laughing and learning the whole time.

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1352232547l/13615414.jpg

Still working on Memoirs of a Geisha. I started reading this before news of the movie came out- then I had to stop. I finally picked it back up a few months ago.... and i'm still not done. Need to get on the ball!