The Book Thread! What are you reading?

[erilaz]

^ E-books are generally less expensive than their print counterparts, but they can still be quite pricey. I was looking at Otto Jespersen's Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin yesterday. There's a hardcover reissue from 2006, which has a list price of $220 and which Amazon is selling for $209. The Kindle edition is $168.

http://www.amazon.com/Otto-Jespersen-La ... 415402476/

The book was originally published in 1922 and is therefore in the public domain. And yes, there's a completely free and legal e-book on Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=z7NFAQAAIAAJ

I like real books, though, so I bought a used copy of the original 1922 hardcover at a local independent bookstore for $12.

[koregaboku]

I caved and bought Lauren Graham's Someday Someday Maybe.

It's a decent book, especially for a first book if not a little predictable.

Hardcover books are expensive. Lauren Graham's lucky I'm a diehard Gilmore Girls fan.

[erilaz]

I recently read The Fall of Arthur, a newly published poem in alliterative verse by J.R.R. Tolkien. The poem was never completed, and the final text as presented only runs to some 956 lines. Most of the volume consists of commentary and notes by Christopher Tolkien. Though the unfinished poem itself is quite interesting, my favorite part of the book is an appendix on Old English verse, taken from a lecture by JRRT on the subject.

I'm currently reading Runor och ABC, a collection of scholarly papers dealing with various types of contact between the Germanic runes and other alphabets, presented at a symposium in Stockholm in 1995. For now I'm only reading the five papers in English and the one in German. I wish I were more capable of reading the four in Swedish and especially the one in Norwegian, which looks particularly interesting, since it compares characteristics of historical runic inscriptions with samples of writing by modern-day children.

[koregaboku]

The cool thing about Swedish and Norwegian that I learned after making a Norwegian best friend is that the languages are so similar you can largely understand both languages even if you technically only speak one.

And I'm reading World War Z right now but I don't find myself picking up the book too often since it reads like anthologies so I just read a few of "interviews" at a time and then put the book down.

I have a pile of books I've been meaning to read though....

[Moh]

Read Gillian Flynn's Dark Places. I liked it, though some parts were a tad disturbing. It'll be interesting to see how the movie turns out, anyway.
I just started The Shining today, hopefully I'll finish it before the end of the week.

[erilaz]

I'm currently reading The Pronunciation of Japanese by Masatoshi Gensen Mori, published in 1929. Mori describes the fine points of Japanese pronunciation in minute detail (for 300 pages), saying little about historical development but giving lots of information about dialectal variation. Some of the pronunciations he discusses may be old-fashioned or even obsolete by now, but much of what he describes is still valid. Sometimes he'll point out a phonetic peculiarity that I never realized before, and it's particularly satisfying when I can hear it in my own pronunciation. Case in point: "Before [ma], [me], and [mo], the vowel [u] becomes [m], as in [mma] for [uma] ("a horse"), [mme] for [ume] ("the Japanese apricot")...." I hear it now.

[DSQueenie]

I'm reading Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hondgson Burnett, it's apart of my desire to read books that were extremely popular when they were released (LLF was so popular that middle class mothers in America started dressing their son's in the same outfit as the aforementioned Lord) but not the authors most popular work now.

So far I understand why Burnett's book The Secret Garden is more popular now since is has a very unique sense of wonder that LLF and A Little Princess don't but I've all ready cry once at how sweet LLF is so it's is differently are very good book so far!

[erilaz]

Today I started reading Der reparierte Scheinwerfer, a collection of theatrical scenes and dialogues by the great German comedian and folk singer, Karl Valentin. It's in the original German, of course. I don't think much of his stuff has ever been translated into English, since a lot of his humor relies on wordplay and his use of Bavarian dialect.

This film is an excerpt from "Tingeltangel", the first piece in the book:

[youtube]uL8BcKBWe04[/youtube]

[koregaboku]

My bestie and I want to start a "Book Club" together. Lol.

[erilaz]

I just finished Mu Revealed by Tony Earll, more evidence "proving" the existence of a lost continent that sank beneath the Pacific Ocean thousands of years ago.

Quoth the blurb:

in 21,050 B.C., at the age of twelve, a boy entered the ancient Temple College of Mu to begin his training for the ruling priesthood of that extraordinarily accomplished society.

During his second year there, the boy—Kland was his name—began to keep a journal, which he brought with him when he emigrated later to Mexico. There, in 1959, the diary scrolls were found in the buried ruins on an earthquake-devastated temple.

Translated at last, the scrolls are here available to the public for the first time—an incomparable record of the nearly forgotten supercivilization of Mu!

I was rather disappointed to learn that this book was an outright hoax, written by Raymond Buckland, the author of numerous books on Wicca and the occult. His pseudonym, Tony Earll, is merely an anagram of "Not Really." I somehow find it more satisfying when the crackpots actually believe the drivel that they write.