[Mudcat]

. . . if anything.

Sometimes it seems like the practice of reading books is dying off - but then I also hear stats on book sales and they seem okay. I'm not sure the bottom line on that.

I suppose this thread isn't necessarily "OFF-TOPIC." People may well be reading books about sports and betting.

Anyway, I am currently reading Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man by Joe Heller. I'm only about 50 pages in but so far so good. I have enjoyed a few Heller novels, Catch-22 in particular.

If I were to list some favorite authors it would start off with:

Kurt Vonnegut
Richard Brautigan
John Steinbeck
Irvine Welsh
Martin Amis


So, any readers around? Any recommendations?

[Ganchrow]

If I were to list some favorite authors it would start off with:

Kurt Vonnegut
Richard Brautigan
John Steinbeck
Irvine Welsh
Martin Amis

I'd have to add Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Milan Kundera to the top of that list.

[Ganchrow]

And as far as nonfiction goes, I've currently got a copies of Carl Sagan's rather excellent Demon Haunted World and Isaac Asimov's phenomenally fascinating Guide to the Bible sitting right in front of me on my desk.

[bookie]

Books next to my bed that I pluck away at daily are Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo which is about development in a fictional latin american country called Costaguanna a name which he riffed off of Costa Rica where I live. Then there's Tony Tanner's City of Words. Tanner was a literary critic who wrote some of the most clear-headed criticism I know. This one is about american fiction from the 1960's.

The other one is called Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart. It's an academic book about new advances in artificial intelligence that have to do with building into machines the techniques of "bounded rationality" (human have limited time, information, and resources to make decisions, yet they often make them effectively) as opposed to older models that took computers to be "calculating demons" whose capacity to sort through unlmited amounts of data was the best thing they had going for them.