Mods - if this has been done (I couldnt find it in the search engine) just go ahead and delete it.

I am a reading fanatic - I blow through books like most people change their skivies . Generally, since I do have to work and such, (ah the life of a 'grownup') I read about 2-4 books a week. Currently I am on a biography kick and am right now reading "A Beautiful Mind." A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr. Mathematical genius. I'm just starting it and finding it a fascinating read.

What are YOU reading right now? (not have read! If you're like me, you'd never finish your post)

"Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you."
~William Arthur Ward

Right now I'm reading "The Gift of Fear". It's a national bestseller by Gavin de Becker, who worked under three different presidents. His job involves evaluating threats to government officials and movie stars, and predicting violence in the forms of domestic abuse, stalking, and kidnapping.

The book gives lots of examples of different kinds of attacks and shows you how to predict the violence before it happens. It is an amazing book! I think this book is an important read for any female. De Becker provides signals and warning signs to watch for in many different situations.

I'm glad I've found this book. I feel much safer already!

~ howdy ~

A Year in the Life of a Street Cop

by, Michael S. East



Burden of the Badge cuts through all the fluff and makeup of television police shows and fictional cop books. If you want to know whats its really like wearing the badge day after day, week after week, this is the book for you. Documenting nearly 1,000 calls over a full year in the life of a patrol officer, everything comes out in this book. Set against the backdrop of Saginaw Michigan, a violent, decaying former automotive boomtown, this book chronicles everything a street cops deals with on a daily basis. From the foul mouthed tirades of drunken street bums and crack addicts, to the most senseless and brutal murders, the mental and physical stress faced daily by the men and women in uniform is detailed within these pages. Whether you are dying to know what the job is really like, or you are considering law enforcement as your own career, this book is truly an eye opener!

This book was given to me by Michael S. East himself. Mike is a Saginaw police officer and also my brother Jim's partner. He signed it,..

Ken -

Welcome to Jim's world. I hope you enjoy the book, Mike

Right now I'm about halfway through, and may never watch a cop show or movie again in my life!

I am also an avid reader, I read anything and everything that I can get my hands on, I mostly like to read biographies and history books, but anything in print will do, poetry, mysteries, classics, anything, I have an extensive library, actually I find it very hard to give up a book, my husband used to say that if we ever were in need of money we could open a bookstore with just my collection and make a good living!
Anyhow, right now I am reading ”Chocolate Days, Popsicle Weeks” by Edward Hannibal.

"Do all things with love." Og Mandino

I'm an avid reader when I don't have school or work. I'm currently reading The Runaway Jury, John Grisham but I've been reading that for months...Each time I go to pick it back up, I have to start over. I'm not a person who can read a little every day. I have read the book...mostly in one sitting. I'm not normaly able to put a book down once I start it, so either The Runaway Jury sucks and I haven't figured it out yet, or I don't have the time or the energy (eyes are always tired) to read as I'd like to.

So, in reality, I'm currently reading my five technical writing textbooks and a collection of peoms by Phillip Freneau (in addition 5-27 books and who knows yet how many journal articals on him).

Life is real--life is earnest--/ And the grave is not the goal:/ Dust thou art, to dust returnest,/ Was not spoken of the soul. (5-8) Longfellow "A Psalm of Life"

"And if anyone says in a loud voice "Bother, it's Eeyore" I can drop out again."

The Messianic Legacy by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. It's their follow-up to Holy Blood, Holy Grail.




___________________________________________________________________

"Near this rose, in this grove of sun-parched, wind-warped madronas,
Among the half-dead trees, I came upon the true ease of myself,
As if another man appeared out of the depths of my being,
And I stood outside myself,
Beyond becoming and perishing,
A something wholly other,
As if I swayed out on the wildest wave alive,
And yet was still.
And I rejoiced in being what I was..."

- Theodore Roethke

Blackbird by Jennifer Luack,non fiction,sad but a really good read

Who stole the cookie from the coookie jar?

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

it's raw and cynical and angry but brilliant and emotional and sweet.

Well at this very moment im reading this thread but other wise i am reading, In Struggle SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960's It's a pretty good book if you like learning about the way blacks were treated.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Right now I'm reading 'The Blue Nowhere' by Jeffery Deaver. (Coronet)
It is a good computer crime/murder story that, although goes into some technicalities, is easy to understand due to the dialogue between the characters.
A good entertaining read, with an insight into the vulnerability or our computer identities.

'No flag, religion or uniform ever stopped a bullet'
Gary Moore

I finished Runaway Jury last weekend (I sat down and read the whole stupid thing). Then I started The Last Jury, John Grisham. Summer is near, and for 9wks I'll have nothing to do b/w 5pm and 7am but sleep, read and play on QL.

Life is real--life is earnest--/ And the grave is not the goal:/ Dust thou art, to dust returnest,/ Was not spoken of the soul. (5-8) Longfellow "A Psalm of Life"

"And if anyone says in a loud voice "Bother, it's Eeyore" I can drop out again."

"Montaillou: the promised land of error" by Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie.

Very well written book about everyday life in the medieval French village, with the emphasis on the Cathar heresy.
Entertaining and informative read.

"Language, Truth, and Logic" by AJ Ayer.

*********************
A discussion into language is inevitable because our attempt to understand the world and ourselves is an intolerable and never-ending "wrestle with words and meanings."

The Elements of Expression, by Arthur Plotnik

ex. Written with whit and humor, it offers writers, speakers and self-improvers a fresh look at how they express ( or fail to express ) their thoughts and feelings.

Rebecca by: Daphne Du Maurier

Simon Edge, Daily Express
'this chilling, suspenseful tale is as fresh and readable as it was when it was first written’

John Walsh, Independent on Sunday
‘complex and absorbing psychological chiller about empowerment and loyalty'

Synopsis
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again ... Working as a lady's companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. She accepts, but whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to the ominous and brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers ... Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the Other Woman. An international bestseller that has never gone out of print, Rebecca is the haunting story of a young girl consumed by love and the struggle to find her identity.

~Meg (P.S. Go to my website!)

Rubber Duckie, you're the one, You make bathtime lots of fun, Rubber Duckie, I'm awfully fond of you; (woh woh, bee doh!)

right now i am reading "journey to the river sea" by Eva Ibbotson. its pretty good.

"WHEN THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION ARE CLEANSED EVERYTHING WOULD APPEAR AS IT IS - INFINITE."
WILLIAM BLAKE

The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice again.

The Stone Diaries by Carol Sheilds

I'm adding a book review here to describe it - Im at a loss for words as Ive never read a book quite like this one before. It's good and I'm enjoying it

REVIEW:

The life in question belongs to Daisy Goodwill Flett, "a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck." In other words, a woman so commonplace that her story would seem barely worth remarking, were it not, perhaps, for her own determination to tell it. And in telling it, give it shape and meaning - even if she must supply these herself.

This is the problem that Carol Shields addresses in The Stone Diaries: how do small lives, the kind most women were once assumed to lead, assume significance and coherence? How closely do our versions of those lives correspond to objective facts? Can facts be said to exist at all in the context of something as changeable and arbitrary as a life? To what extent do "our" stories really belong to us, considering the tendency that other people - parents, spouses, children - have to intrude in them, interpret them, claim them?

The Stone Diaries approaches these problems with seductive prose, a serene wit and an artfulness that is all the more dazzling given the novel's apparent insistence on the ordinary. Indeed, one of Shields' conceits has been to disguise her fiction as a "real" biography, complete with period photographs and a family tree. But beneath the scrupulous - if spurious - documentation and bland rural and suburban settings lie incidents as fantastic as the inventions of Gabriel García Márquez: a hugely fat woman dies in childbirth without ever realizing that she was pregnant; a dour Orkneyman journeys back to the island he left decades before, severing ties, jettisoning possessions, and living on to the age of 115 (with the uncanny ability to recite Jane Eyre from memory); a young husband falls to his death ten days after his wedding, possibly as the result of an unexpected sneeze, and his wife, who did the sneezing, never mentions her marriage and its grotesque ending to another soul. Strangest of all, the heroine of this novel passes through her life without ever fully occupying it - an absence that this beautiful and haunting book attempts to redeem.

"Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you."
~William Arthur Ward

Dune. is good, but slow going

Another topic like this is What are you reading now???? started by bibliophile1.

I’m reading “Scruples” by Judith Krantz. I was in a mood to read something FULL of style, not necessarily very literary. This is the perfect book… quite entertaining, really mirroring the classy and stylish picture I had in mind before reading it (actually the book might be better than that image). I’ve read about one-fifth of it as of now. It revolves around this woman’s rise to fame from the ugly-duckling that she was in the earlier phase of her life, to the millionaire-owner-of-Scruples-the-luxurious-fashion-store that she is now. I like the fascinating account of the “erotic-narcissistic” (as the author describes it) atmosphere of Scruples and the dazzling, vain people associated with it. I really like authors who can make me feel for their characters, Judith would be one of them… I like the descriptions of each character that she/he describes (I think it would be a "she". Hehe, just did some google-ing and yes it is a “she”… I knew it… it HAD to be a female. Just had to be, I could feel in in the way she described the characters, there's something female about it… ).

We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
The trees that are broken
And start again, drawing up from the great roots.
~Robert Bly

[This message was edited by LetswriteNshare on 05-11-04 at 05:06 AM.]