Just finished reading a great book

[BlueFire]

The Giver

I'm sure many of you may have read this. This book is awesome. I love it.

The ending is so ambiguous. It can be happy or depressing depending on your interpretation

[GameKinG]

Is that the one about the boy who starts to see things in color?

I have read that.

[GameMaster]

So many people have asked the author questions, I'm not sure if he answers them or not.

[Stonecutter]

The Giver, AKA Fahrenheit 451 Lite.

Still a decent book, though.

[Vampyr]

I've heard of this book, and many many people claim that it is an awesome novel. If you cared enough about it to actually make a thread over it, then it must be worth it, so I'm going to have to give it a try.

This is the kind of threads we want to see more of in the artist's guild...+rep for making it.

I'm off to make one over the Trilogy I just finished. (Or am a few pages from finishing, rather.)

[KillerGremlin]

I read The Giver, and Fahrenheit 451. Both are basically dismal outlooks on a possible future. I though that The Giver was all right, although, there were some contradicting ideas. It was a neat read though, and I read through it in the first night I received it from school. I just felt compelled to read it. Fahrenheit 451 is good too, but that's more of a dismal outlook on society in general, whereas The Giver seemed to be more about some secret "great society."

Both are good, especially for mandatory reads for English.

[Vampyr]

I read The Giver, and Fahrenheit 451. Both are basically dismal outlooks on a possible future. I though that The Giver was all right, although, there were some contradicting ideas. It was a neat read though, and I read through it in the first night I received it from school. I just felt compelled to read it. Fahrenheit 451 is good too, but that's more of a dismal outlook on society in general, whereas The Giver seemed to be more about some secret "great society."

Both are good, especially for mandatory reads for English.

I have read Farenheit 451, and I enjoyed it immensely. Some of my friends that read it didnt enjoy it that much, but I'm not sure why. It's one of my favorite books that I have read. I really really enjoy reading fiction books that are symbolistic of reality, books like Farenheit 451, Animal Farm, 1984, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby...

I also just finished reading "The Crucible" today. It was a very very short book...but well worth it. I was able to get a lot of information on the Salem witch trials, and I also learned that it was symbolistic for the Red Scare (mass hysteria in the united states, people were fearing communism) that was taking place during the time in which Miller wrote the play.

[KillerGremlin]

The Crucible is a fine example of how powerful religion can be, and how people use religion to enforce retarded rules and break the same rules while everyone elses backs are turned.

Hooray for Jesus! Poopie on Stem Cell Research!

[Vampyr]

The Crucible is a fine example of how powerful religion can be, and how people use religion to enforce retarded rules and break the same rules while everyone elses backs are turned.

Hooray for Jesus! Poopie on Stem Cell Research!

I would be terrified to live in the days of "The Crucible". Everyone was extremely paranoid, and the days before seperation of church and state were very scary. I was appalled by the things I read and how the girls took control of everyone around them.

They fed everyone such ridiculus lies, and in the name of religion the court believed them. I think about 29 people were killed during the Salem Witch trials, and all the "hard evidence" they had were a bunch of young girls "crying out" that someone had used their spirit to try and kill them.

It truely was one of the most embarrasing and darkest times of human history.

[dropCGCF]

It truely was one of the most embarrasing and darkest times of human history.

I found 451 more interesting. It showed what the future could be like, instead of the past.

Try A Wrinkle In Time too. Also, I, Robot was pretty good untill Will Smith ruined it.

Oh, and I almost forgot, Alas, Babylon is creepy too.

[Swan]

Who is the author of The Giver ? It sounds interesting. I've never heard of it before though. I think I'll try to find it and give it a read.

[Vampyr]

I found 451 more interesting. It showed what the future could be like, instead of the past.

Try A Wrinkle In Time too. Also, I, Robot was pretty good untill Will Smith ruined it.

Oh, and I almost forgot, Alas, Babylon is creepy too.

I liked 451 better also, the "The Crucible" was still a good book.

I havnt read "I, Robot", but I did read A Wrinkle in Time back when I was in elemntary school. I cant remember much of what happened...just a few key parts. Was it a satire, symbolistic, or prophetic novel as well? I cant remember, and at the time I probably wasnt intelligent enough to see it.

[GiMpY-wAnNaBe]

I found 451 more interesting. It showed what the future could be like, instead of the past.

Try A Wrinkle In Time too. Also, I, Robot was pretty good untill Will Smith ruined it.

Oh, and I almost forgot, Alas, Babylon is creepy too.

"I, Robot in a nutshell" (http://www.maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=i_robot)

[BlueFire]

Lois Lowry is the author, and I've read both Fahrenheit 451 and The Giver. I enjoyed them both. They were great.

but The Giver has dead babies ;)

[thatmariolover]

The Giver is great. I enjoyed it much more than many of the more depressing novels mentioned in here (sad books just aren't my thing - I just don't enjoy them).

I'm more of a Fantasy guy in general, though. The Wheel of Time series, the Sword of Truth series, the A Song of Ice and Fire series and all of the Shanara series are among my favorites (and I'm awaiting sequels of all of them).

[Typhoid]

I know the books i am about to suggest are nothing like the posts you guys dis.

But these are two books by one man who is my hero.

The first book is called Brain Droppings
The second is called Napalm and Silly putty

The man IS George Carlin. The man is my hero.

The books are some of his stand up routine stuff, and some of it is stuff i havent seen him preform. Yet, if you like...nay....love to laugh, pick up both books. They are not sequential, so either order is fine.

I know whatt eh books say, because i have read them each about 10 times, yet its almost brand new each time you read it.

Give it a go.

[The Germanator]

Just thought I'd revive this because I'm reading a book for the first time in a long while and it's one of the most interesting and fascinating books. It's Sigmund Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and the first three chapters have all been about the reasons why you forget simple proper names or words. It turns out that the greatest reason is some sort of sub-conscious repression of either something associated with the word or name, or that the repressed item sounds similar to the forgotten word. It's sort of complicated for me to explain since Freud is way way way smarter than me, but if you have any interest in psychology, I reccomend this one.

[TheSlyMoogle]

Speaking of good books...

The Dark Tower Seven: The Dark Tower, will be released the 21st of this month.

*Changes underwear*

;)

[Acebot44]

Just Started Reading, "A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present", by Howard Zinn. I'm liking it so far.

[Ginkasa]

Is that the just the history of the US? Is it written like a test book, or am I correct in assuming from the title that it focuses more on the people rather than names and dates?

That might be something worth looking into, if so...

Side note: The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower? Isn't that a little redundant?


*shrugs and walks away*

[Acebot44]

It's written from the people's perspective during the events not the historical. I'll type this out:



" My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott's army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person however he or she strains, can "see" history from the standpoint of others.

My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

Still, understanding the complexities, this book will be skeptical of governments and their attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don't want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: "The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is."

I don't want to invent victories for people's movements. But to think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.

That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history of the United States. The reader may as well know that before going on."

[Acebot44]

Another book I heard of just 5 minutes ago is "Ghost Soldiers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/038549565X/102-2003015-2435348?v=glance)" by Hampton Sides. Described to me as "its about the Bataan Death March and the POWs that survived in the death camp. it has excerps from there diaries and pictures it was so moving". I think I'll pick this up next time I'm at B&N.