What Book Are You Currently Reading?

[politicus]

Katrin Himmler: The Himmler Brothers. Fascinating insight story of a seemingly fairly typical catholic German upper middle class family that produced one of the worlds worst mass murderers (who couldn't stand the sight of blood).
She is married to an Israeli by the way! Divine irony.

[politicus]

bought my first Eric Hobsbawm book yesterday, his most recent.  though I had pirated .pdfs of about three others.

You naughty boy...

[politicus]

Nations and Nationalist Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality by Hobsbawm

Good one.

[politicus]

"The Red Room" by August Strindberg. Very well written and sharp satire from one of my favourite eras (1870s) and a lot of it is still remarkably relevant.

[politicus]

A Norwegian Tragedy: Anders Behring Breivik and the Massacre on Utøya by Aage Storm Borchgrevink.

Very well written and a fascinating tale of class, race relations, politics, youth culture, internet culture, outsider dynamics and a dysfunctional family.

The sheer fact that Breivik was examined by a team of child psychiatrists when he was 4 and they basically knew that this boy had severe personality disorder and would be ruined if he wasn't removed from his mentally ill mother is scary and thought provoking.

[politicus]

"The Red Room" by August Strindberg. Very well written and sharp satire from one of my favourite eras (1870s) and a lot of it is still remarkably relevant.

It's a nice book. In English or Swedish?

Danish, I can only be bothered to read Swedish literature in the original if I know the Danish translation is sub-standard and Sven Lange's classic 1923 translation is excellent (which is no surprise since he was a great writer himself).

[politicus]

Robert Cooper: Laos - A Work in Progress.

Good stuff, but very heavy on facts. Cooper is a British anthropologist who has been living in Laos for the last 14 years (and owns one of only two bookshops in the country!).

[politicus]

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

Good one. Do you enjoy it?

[politicus]

Citizens, a milestone in the history of trolling (and also in the historiography of the French Revolution).

Trolling can be an artform.

[politicus]

Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes, The Birth of Islam

What do you think about it?

[politicus]

The Sea of Fertility tetralogy looms before me like an inevitability in my development as a reader and I really don't know what to do with how drawn to it I feel.

Do you plan to read them in translation or in Japanese?

[politicus]

Try Arne Dahl and Håkan Nesser for crime fiction, especially Dahl.

The Bo Balderson books were translated into German, Danish and Norwegian, but I am not sure they are available in French or English.

German posters should try them out.

[politicus]

Two small books worth reading:

Alan Blinder's Central Banking in Theory and Practice. Blinder is a renowned economist and former Federal Reserve vice chair during part of the Greenspan tenure. This book is astonishingly clear - it basically lays out all the heuristics and procedures a top central banker considers in maintaining the bank's objectives. And it quite literally can be read in an hour. Since so much of monetary policy post-crisis is unconventional, Blinder's framework is worth a second look.

How "US-centric" is it?

[politicus]

@Miles: Why do you read that thrash?