Jul 17 2009
More book group news
This Sunday we’ve got another Potluck and Prose, the lazy person’s book group, where you don’t technically need to have read your book, and bringing one is only suggested. As long as you’ve got a dish then all is fine.
Thankfully, after a bad start with Swallows and Amazons which I took two months to get through, I’m on a roll. This month I finished my own Foundation and Helen’s book too, Flowers for Algernon. Since then I’ve also been reading Innocent When You Dream (a compilation of interviews with Tom Waits) and started Quicksilver.
This latter is another seriously hefty book from Neal Stephenson, and is something like a prequel to Cryptonomicon. I cannot praise Cryptonomicon enough and would recommend it to anyone who asked. It was a fictionalised account of cryptography in the Second World War and modern computing, and riveting to boot. In order to outdo himself, Stephenson has chosen “science” as his theme and “the Age of Enlightenment” his time period. I’m only a few chapters in but it’s not disappointing so far!
Back round to the other book group, for science stuff, the next few books have been announced. One in particular looks very interesting, and will no doubt be particularly enjoyable once I’ve finished Quicksilver. It is Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. That’s not until March next year though.
But before that we’ve got:
- How Babies Think: The Science of Childhood by Alison Gopnik, Patricia K Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff
- Genesis Machines by Martyn Amos, which I own and have read
- Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
5 Responses to “More book group news”
you’re going to have to publish a new post soon. there’s something about the More in that title that gets me everytime- rings some bell in my brain that says ‘new!!’ and then I feel dim-witted for not even spotting that it’s the same title as before. Not new book group news, which there could sort of be, seeing as we’ve been to book group since you posted.
Ah. “Lashings of ginger beer” and all that. I was never a Swallows & Amazons bod. Famous Five was more my thing. Until I read the line “Oh Timmy, you’re so licky” - even at the age of 12 I knew that’s a line that should never appear in any book anywhere.
Quicksilver took me a year to read. Not because it was agony, but because I savoured it. Neal Stephenson rocks my world, and Quicksilver is a rambling, insane, occasionaly ludicrous, deeply clever, historically fascinating masterwork. (And there’s 2 more!). Hope you enjoy.
I am nearing the end of Quicksilver and it has been as good as I suspected (more so, even) and I’m disappointed that I’ll not be moving on to the follow-up but starting on the book I picked up at last month’s Potluck and Prose: The Eyre Affair. I’m glad it’s such a small and apparently light-hearted book after the deep work of Quicksilver.
Egad, you’re a quick reader!
Ecky-thump. I’m stunned.
we unplugged the internet for four days when we did the painting in the front room. this had a most productive effect on both our reading and on my knitting. Dougal only cracked and plugged it back in last night because I was out all evening. I’m quite tempted to leave it unplugged a bit longer. I’d been getting a bit net-obsessive. Stillness is good.