What book are you reading right now?

A hardback bargain (£4) from the Oxfam bookshop. There is a Naim product in there, an olive NAP250, as well as an LP12 and classic designs from [designers] Dieter Rams, Sapper & Zenuso, Jakob Jensen, Dan D'Agostino, Ron Arad, Jonathan Ive, etc; and firms sugh as Braun, B&O, Boothroyd & Stuart, Quad, Nakamichi, Apple, Day- Sequerra, Sony, Marantz, Oracle, Meridian etc

What's striking is just how beautiful good industrial design - as practiced by the Germans, Scandis, Italians, Japanese and (yes!) the British can be; and how unforgiveably ugly American muscle amps (Krell, Levinson) are.

Rudyard kipling, Kim, new german translation, have read it as a child, but was too young to unterstand.

Just finished this. An account of a young lady who will soon die from cancer. She tells how she gives meaning to her days left (it's unclear for her if that's months, or years)..., without working from a kind of bucket list. Touching read...

Autobiography of rock's coolest chick...

half way through, if i had read it every day from starting it would of been finished by the end of jan but ive hit a reading block or bookmark, so to speak.

BA was a dump last time we were there.

Part of its appeal for me. Added to the fact that it's 10 mins away.

Very well written and I am finding out a lot of other things about Churchill I did not know previously.  I did not know that he lead such an adventurous life and at the same time he was an intellectual.

Thanks for the recommendation. Great read, reminded me of Catch 22. Have you seen the film?

   Following a tip by Richard Dane, I managed to get hold of a copy from the County Library. This book gives a fascinating insight into the operations of Decca Records from the immediate post war years to the early 70s. Highly recommended, thanks Richard.

Yes. On top of the film I managed to serve two tours of reserve duty in Lebanon in the mid-eighties, fifteen years before the book was written. Reading it always stirs up a lot of ancient memories. 

There was a documentary on BBC4 last night about this guy and it was fascinating. I didn't even know I had his autobiography in my library...

What I'm reading is pretty far from that...

A story of an Italian army unit deployed in Afghanistan written by scientist turned writer Paolo Giordano.

A recent (2013) Llosa.

Gian,

I think that you will enjoy reading Giordano's "The Human Body".

Just started this:

steve

Another try with Erik Larson. I did not like his "In the Garden of Beasts".

One of the funniest books I have ever read:

Klein's book  is probably even further from Rand's book in quality than it is in ideology, Winky. Disregarding her half-baked "philosophy", Rand was an infamously terrible writer; she is so bad, in fact, that I just cannot take her seriously. Klein is adequate enough as a writer to get her points across and to keep the reader reading. Rand's writing is banal, prolix and boring - and blissfully unaware of its own shortcomings.

Starting:

http://www.penguin.com/read/bo...oyment/9780143126829

I love hacks' memoirs and this, so far, is one of the best. The prose is a tad clunky but her examination of the human fallout from the Balkans conflict of the 1990s is moving and she's not afraid to point the finger at those responsible.

That's a half heated critique. Don't you mean banal, boring, monotonous, tedious, vacuous and prolix.