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What's on Your Summer 2002 Reading List?
Quixote asks: "Well, summer is upon us, and I'm wondering: what does Slashdot read? I'm thinking of non-geeky, non-SciFi books. Anything out there that has caught your fancy? Would you like to share your reading list (stuff that you've read and/or plan to read)."
No lie. With all the anti-Muslim propaganda currently in the news, I feel it's best to try to understand things from another point of view.
Because in the end, we're not that different!
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
I'm glad you asked!
Murakami is one of the better fiction writers today. He's not a bad non-fiction writer either as evidenced by his treatment of the Aum Shinrikyo Tokyo subway sarin attack in his book Underground.
Murakami's fiction runs the gamut from love stories to fantasy, and his writing style (at least his translator's interpretation of it) is exciting and quite beautiful in its descriptions of surroundings and exposition of his characters. He writes primarily in the first person so it may take a little getting used to, but the stories really come alive as a result of this technique.
I recommend all his English translations except for Sputnik Sweetheart which felt like a simple rehashing of his older works.
If you read his stuff in order:
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World Reminiscent of Philip Dick's works. It isn't quite technothriller, it isn't quite fantasy, but it is a blast to read.
A Wild Sheep Chase THE Murakami book to read.
Dance Dance Dance Sequel to Wild Sheep Chase. Quite a bit darker in tone than Sheep.
Norwegian Wood Murakami's first novel. Pure fiction, no fantasy beyond the narrator's imagination.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle His magnum opus. It draws all of his themes from other books into a single narrative. It's long, but I didn't lose interest at any point.
South of the Border, West of the Sun My personal favorite because it touches on a lot of themes of love and infidelity. I won't go into the infidelity, thank you very much.
The rest of his stuff is short stories, so read those at your leisure.
Tanizaki is a Japanese writer who has an impish streak running through him. His stories and writing are ebullient and discuss all matters of things from politics to sex. No sci-fi here. I recommend The Makioka Sisters
Mishima is another writer who was a contemporary of Tanizaki. His writings are infused with Japanese Nationalist themes. Even his love stories have nationalist undercurrents. I liked the autobiographical Confessions of a Mask.
Michio Kaku is an American (as far as I can tell). His main topic is Superstring theory, so he doesn't quite fit with the fiction writers that I listed above, but hey, some people think that string theory is fiction.
I have been pwned because my
One tends not to "read" the Talmud.
None of the translations do justice to the interplay of commentators on the subjects discussed. There are also 38 seperate books in just the Babylonian Talmud, not including the Jerusalem Talmud, and most Jewish Scholars would agree that studying a page would take at least half an hour (in an english translation) and this would be without any commentaries that explain the reasoning behind the logic, and what the actual law derived from the text is, since is is rarely obvious based on the text of the talmud itself. There are just under 3000 pages of talmud (front and back, otherwise about 600 pages, obviously.) Perhaps you would be better off reading a book written in english about modern Orthodox Judaism, and would like to suggest some authors:
Aryeh Kaplan
Akiva Tatz (Especailly "A Thinking Jewish Teenager's Guide to Life)
And for lighter reading, Hanoch Teller's Books
I'm a concientious