What are you reading right now?

[lhb412]

^That's... what's the word? Good? Benevolent?

That's benevolent work my friend.


Anyway, I'm getting my Beat Generation on with On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

[lhb412]

[Tiny Gigan]

In all honesty the longer I work with people in the sheltered workshop, the more concerns I have about the entire set-up. The disabled folks spend most of their time doing menial work for companies like Wal-Mart, DHL, and Office Depot (stuffing envelopes, sorting cardboard boxes for reuse, rolling crate upon crate of plastic tubes that are later shipped off-site to be unrolled again and used as the water hoses in refrigerator ice makers...). Any given client gets worked with by a life skills trainer like me for maybe 2-3 hours a week, many of them less than or not at all (if they're a group home client who is theoretically receiving skills coaching at home), and the rest of the time they just do work for a minuscule "piece rate" (e.g. each tube they roll is worth X percent of minimum wage) that is so low that I probably couldn't work fast enough to get up to minimum wage.

What really got to me was a couple of months ago when minimum wage went up - The company recalculated the piece rates so that the clients would still be making the same amount of money despite the change in minimum wage. The argument that is always made is "Well, these people can't get jobs in the community so anything is better than nothing", but I don't buy that when I'm handing out 2-week paychecks for 20 cents. But I digress...

I just started reading Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology, and Politics in Science by John Grant. I read his previous book, Discarded Science: Ideas That Seemed Good at the Time... when I was on vacation a couple of years ago and I thoroughly enjoyed it, so I'd been looking forward to this one. My only problem with Grant is that sometimes it seems like he's trying to cover so much ground in a relatively short book that he just kind of races by topics with "this happened" and little other explanation.

[lhb412]

^Have you by any chance read God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut? It's a sort of summation of Vonnegut's socialist/Christ-like feelings about loving your fellow man and taking care of the "poor, ugly, and stupid" (Vonnegut says that our system isn't designed for them and they just can't cut it). It's my favorite book by my favorite author, and it contains some of my all-time favorite lines:

"Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did."

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies — 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"

[lhb412]

Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut.

[lhb412]

[BruceAReville]

Rereading Simon Greene's Nightside series

[Reaper G]

"Gorgeous George" by John Capouya.

Another wrestling biography, this one about the man who was born and died penniless, but in between he changed the face of "sports entertainment," transforming himself from talented but simple wrestler George Wagner into a flamboyant pretty boy who became one of the first TV celebrities, hanging out with movie stars and influenced the likes of Muhammad Ali and James Brown, not to mention countless wrestlers. The book is not only a great account of George's in- and out-of-the-ring lives, but also captures the era of the 1930s-50s and is very detailed about the tough world of pro wrestling.

[lhb412]

The Soft Machine by William Burroughs.

[Tiny Gigan]

My reading is largely on hiatus at the moment because of my yearly pre-Halloween horror movie binge. I read the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs recently...that counts, right?

Annoyingly the Christopher Hitchens article promised on the cover is just a book review, but the featured article by former U.N Ambassador Holbrooke is pretty interesting,

[Tyler E. Martin]

Handling Sin by Michael Malone. Borrowed it from a friend, who highly recommended it, and it's a hoot so far.

[lhb412]

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

[Tiny Gigan]

Adventures in Paranormal Investigation by Joe Nickell. Nickell's pretty cool - he appears as the "token skeptic" on lots of woo-woo shows and he's currently working at the University of Kentucky, which is but a stone's throw away from where I live. (Too bad he's not at U of L.)

[lhb412]

After finishing a literary classic (and really good too, I'll read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn soon) that took me, beacuse of intense schoolwork, about a month to read, I'm jumping into some fantasy. That is a rather unexplored genre for me.


Swords and Deviltry by Fritz Leiber. The first of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books.

[Tiny Gigan]

I'm about halfway through Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan, but the whole holiday season affords me precious little time to read.

[lhb412]

Happy Birthday, Wanda June by Kurt Vonnegut.

It's a play he wrote, and out of print too! I found a copy for 75 cents at a used store a week ago. I always throught I'd pay quite a bit on the internet to get it eventually.

[lhb412]

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones.

[lhb412]

Baltimore or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden.

[Reaper G]

I Hate Your Guts by Jim Norton

[lhb412]

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke.

[canofhumdingers]

[godziwolf]

[lhb412]

[jellydonut25]

Misery Stephen King
and
Untitled work in progress by myself[/i]

[lhb412]

Gaurds! Gaurds! by Terry Pratchett.