The Grapes of Wrath

Towing Jehovah by James Morrow.

In which God dies. The Old Testament, 10 Commandments-type God. He's 2 miles long, grey beard, floating in the ocean.

Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer.
The Awakening, Kate Chopin.

i think my ex took Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man so I guess I'll never finish that. or Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy, but that wasn't really my thing anyway).

1491 by Charles Mann. It's awesome. Here's a summary:

Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago; existed mainly in small, nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last thirty years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong.

In a book that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques came to previously unheard-of conclusions. Among them:

In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe.
Certain cities–such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital–were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets.
The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids.
Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science recently described it as "man’s first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering."
Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it–a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge.

Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively "landscaped" by human beings.

Mann sheds clarifying light on the methods used to arrive at these new visions of the pre-Columbian Americas and how they have affected our understanding of our history and our thinking about the environment. His book is an exciting and learned account of scientific inquiry and revelation

The pilgrams at Plymouth learned to plant fish with their maize from Tisquantum (Squanto), who spoke fluent English, and had been back and forth to Europe three times...He apparently learned the fish trick from European farmers.

I'm really digging the horticulture and agricultural practices that were being implemented by the native people. SO fascinating.

wow that sounds amazing. maybe that'll be a christmas read. after i'm done sobbing about Eating Animals.

Just in the "mind blowing" kind of way.

Leonardo, Inventor-A book on Leonardo daVinci's grace, and insane genius.

Pandora's Star, then Judas unchained, and now The Dreaming Void. All by Peter F. Hamilton. He is totally the shit.

Also waiting on the next George R.R. Martin Novel to continue the "Song of Fire And Ice" Series, and the ghost writer finishing Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time Series. (Both Totally Rad)

Neal Stephenson's Anathem

and study materials for my USCG 200 ton Master's test.


I'm not sure which is the drier, though Anathem has better character development.

Discussion about it by vegans here.

A friend took this from me about two years ago and I've been meaning to re-read it. Pretty sure they are making a movie of it because McCarthy is so hot right now.

That would be a terrifying movie.

Plus who could really play the Judge?

Just started Stephen King's The Dark Half.

Clancy Brown, the hardass prison guard from Shawshank and the Kerghan from Highlander. I think he has a true understanding of evil and the judgment thereof in his soul. The Kid and Captain Glanton and Toadvine could be played by any number of people, but the Judge is so deliberately contradictory and enigmatic that he'd be a hard role to cast.

I've always thought that is a book that demands its own 400-level seminar. In many ways the quintessentially American novel.