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A beautiful book I stumbled upon... 4 pages in I was hooked.


"Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet, is one of the most beloved classics of our time. Published in 1923, it has been translated into more than twenty languages, and the American editions alone have sold more than nine million copies.

The Prophet is a collection of poetic essays that are philosophical, spiritual, and, above all, inspirational. Gibran’s musings are divided into twenty-eight chapters covering such sprawling topics as love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, housing, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.

Each essay reveals deep insights into the impulses of the human heart and mind. The Chicago Post said of The Prophet: “Cadenced and vibrant with feeling, the words of Kahlil Gibran bring to one’s ears the majestic rhythm of Ecclesiastes . . . If there is a man or woman who can read this book without a quiet acceptance of a great man’s philosophy and a singing in the heart as of music born within, that man or woman is indeed dead to life and truth.”

"In a distant, timeless place, a mysterious prophet walks the sands. At the moment of his departure, he wishes to offer the people gifts but possesses nothing. The people gather round, each asks a question of the heart, and the man's wisdom is his gift. It is Gibran's gift to us, as well, for Gibran's prophet is rivaled in his wisdom only by the founders of the world's great religions. On the most basic topics--marriage, children, friendship, work, pleasure--his words have a power and lucidity that in another era would surely have provoked the description "divinely inspired." Free of dogma, free of power structures and metaphysics, consider these poetic, moving aphorisms a 20th-century supplement to all sacred traditions--as millions of other readers already have. --Brian Bruya"

Gotta be careful, or the Republicans will accuse such books of waging war on religion!

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Rereading Frederik Pohl's Heechee Saga for about the 5th time...

I just finished Gateway. It has aged pretty well for a 30+ year old SF novel... even made some pretty good predictions about things like heathcare access and Brazil as a rising power!

The story concerns Bob Broadhead, neurotic millionaire and is told in a series of flashbacks framed by Bob's therapy sessions with his AI analyst that he refers to as Sigfried Von Shrink.

Bob's stricken with guilt over the way he made his fortune on Gateway.

Gateway is an asteroid spaceport constructed by a vanished alien race (dubbed the Heechee) some 500,000 years ago. Run by the Gateway Corporation (formed by the governments of the US, USSR, China, and Brazil), the base contains nearly 1000 FTL ships. Prospectors take the ships and look for alien technology that can be salvaged and reverse engineered. Prospectors who make a good find get royalties on all applications of their finds--making a few lucky prospectors very, very rich.

There are a few problems, however....

The corporation hasn't quite figured out the ship's navigation system. They can select preprogrammed destinations for the ships, but they have no idea what the destinations are or how long the trip will be. Also, the ships are 500,000 years old--breakdowns are bound to happen.

Most prospectors don't come back rich. They come back empty handed, dead, or not at all....


Now I'm starting book 2, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon...

Bob Broadhead has financed an expedition (with a man-made spacecraft) to the Oort cloud to salvage an alien artifact, suspected to be a food factory, and bring it back to Earth...

I love this series. It has great characters, the science still holds up pretty good, and an overall intriguing story.

china mieville's Iron council. awesome author. he's writting the reboot of Dial H for Hero. so glad my comrade introduced me to him.

I said I wanted scifi space opera but reading this book is like trying to bite a chunk out of Gone With the Wind each night. I'm forcing myself to do AT LEAST 50 pages a day, but compared to Forever War, which took me 2 days to finish..this book is quite a monster. It has some good descriptions and if you're heavily obsessed with ancient Japanese feudalism and samurai you will LOVE this book..but I just wanted to read a good space opera. Its not a bad book, but its a slow, long read. 340 some odd pages which doesn't sound bad, but the print is small and sometimes a page feels like it goes on forever and it makes me think I have ADD.
I think book would make an excellent tv show or anime though.

Its picking up though and I have the Mobile Suit Gundam novelization and Armor to look forward once I finish.

I'm reading Walden by David Henry Thoreau.
Someone gave it to me and said to me that I shoul read it slow and think about it.
So I read it for three weeks and I'm only at the half of the book.

Rereading The Catcher in the Rye, I think I view this completely differently now.

Hyperspace by Michio Kaku

Tomorrow I start reading "The Inverted Forest" by John Dalton.

Has anyone here read this one? If so could you let me know what you thought of it.

"Tomato Girl"-Jayne Pupek

For eleven-year-old Ellie Sanders, her father has always been the rock that she could cling to when her mother's emotional troubles became too frightening. But when he comes under the thrall of the pretty teenager who raises vegetables and tomatoes for sale at the general store that he runs, Ellie sees her security slowly slipping away. Now she must be witness and warden to her mother's gradual slide into madness.

Told from Ellie's point of view, Tomato Girl takes the reader into the soul of a terrified young girl clinging desperately to childhood while being forced into adulthood years before she is ready. To save herself, she creates a secret world, a place in which her mother gets well, her father returns to being the man he was, and the Tomato Girl is banished forever. Tomato Girl marks the debut of a gifted and promising new author who has written a timeless Southern novel.

If you want a good tear jerker this is the book for you. I'm really enjoying it so far, I'm almost done. This book has made me bawl my eyes out and I'm not one to cry easily.

Clive Barker: The Great and Secret Show - The First Book of the Art

Now I am reading Entanglement by Amir Aczel. About quantum phenomenons and people who discovered them. It's really worth reading.

Moral Disorder-Margaret Atwood

In these ten interrelated stories Atwood traces the course of a life and also the lives intertwined with it, while evoking the drama and the humour that colour common experiences — the birth of a baby, divorce and remarriage, old age and death. With settings ranging from Toronto, northern Quebec, and rural Ontario, the stories begin in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe. Then the narrative goes back in time to the forties and moves chronologically forward toward the present.

In “The Art of Cooking and Serving,” the twelve-year-old narrator does her best to accommodate the arrival of a baby sister. After she boldly declares her independence, we follow the narrator into young adulthood and then through a complex relationship. In “The Entities,” the story of two women haunted by the past unfolds. The magnificent last two stories reveal the heartbreaking old age of parents but circle back again to childhood, to complete the cycle.

By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, tragic, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Atwood’s celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage. This is vintage Atwood, writing at the height of her powers.

I read this book last summer I'm not a huge Atwood fan but I found it an enjoyable read and her style is definitely engaging.

I am currently halfway through "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" by Susannah Clarke and finding it quite delightful. It has one of the most detailed and internally consistent portrayals of magic that I've encountered, as well as being well-written, highly characterized, and good for more than a few chuckles. Anything that manages to so successfully merge fantasy or magic realism with nineteenth-century British antiquarianism has truly found the key to my sad little archaic heart If I belong anywhere in human history, it's two hundred years ago as a retiring, eccentric gentle(wo)man in the English countryside, devoting my life to my peculiar interests. Perhaps I would have been somewhat like the curmudgeonly Mr Norrell. I think this is a book perfectly suited to the autistic mind, or at least to MY autistic mind: long, detailed, wryly humorous, and exceptionally imaginative. Highly recommended.

My next read will be "Britain After Rome," which I'm eagerly awaiting on interlibrary loan and which promises to sate my antiquarian curiosity It was recommended to me by one of the history professors at my university, and apparently looks primarily to archaeological rather than documentary evidence to extrapolate more detail about the daily life and culture of early Anglo-Saxon England, my passion and obsession. It only came out last year so it offers a very current viewpoint benefiting from the recent discovery of the Staffordshire Horde, and I can't wait to see what contribution in makes to the field of study. Be assured that I will post more information when I have read it, whether anyone is interested or not

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

A mixture of a story of a man travelling with his son on his motorcycle, and philosophy. Some bits are heavy going, but is really interesting.