Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mack4289]

The blues book sounds outstanding. I'm reading "Barbarians at the Gate", about the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco (and if you don't know what a leveraged buyout is, I've almost finished an entire book about one and I don't really know either). But it mostly stays out of the financial terms deep water and makes the story about the people behind the buyout. Good reading.

[tsumetai mizu]

SCUM by Isaac Singer

Meet Max Barabander. Max is a diaspora Jew from Argentinia who returns home to post-revolution Warsaw in 1906. He is seeking relief from the depression, despair, and grief that followed his son's death. Shortly after his arrival he is entangled in the lives of Tsirele the Rabbi's daughter, Reyzl the mistress of a crimeboss, Theresa the medium, Basha the housekeeper, and Esther the baker's wife. Max is stunningly callous and vicious in his behavior with these women as he relentlessly seeks to fulfill a dream.

This is the first novel I've read by Singer. I enjoyed it. Any recommendations as to other good books by Singer?

[luvnpeas]

[butlerian]

[Trumpcard]

Cold Water, that Scum book sounds quite interesting, will have to look it up! Just finished reading Memoirs of a Geisha, thought it a great read but a little too romantic/over the top. Watched a poor quality dvd in a dvd bang yesterday - was good but didn't do the book justice, cut out sooo many major points and distorted others.

Today started reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova - 3 chapters in and it's already living up to the hype!

happy reading!

[ajuma]

My reading is all over the place!! Binchey, Pratchett, Auel, Buffett, Willis and Keyes!!

Questions: At what age did you learn to read? Do you remember learning? When you read, do you see the words or "pictures" in your mind?

[gypsyfish]

Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years

[luvnpeas]

My first memory of any sort of understanding of text was when I was about six. Ironically, amusingly, it was during a time when I was staying home from school. I had had my tonsils out.

The first time I discovered I could read indefinitely, i.e. a big long book, was, ironically, amusingly, a time when I was staying home from school. I was faking that my recent cold was lasting longer than it really was, so I could stay home and under the covers read The World of Pooh. That was third grade. Later that year, I read some Oz books.

[lawyertood]

Just finished


From Publishers Weekly
Few mystery sequels have been awaited with as much anticipation as this one, and in many ways this is a worthy successor to Pattison's first novel, the Edgar- winning The Skull Mantra (1999); it too is full of reverence for the beleaguered people of Tibet, especially its tortured and imprisoned Buddhist monks. "I know that of all the world I have seen, the lamas are the best part of it," says Shan Tao Yun, a former high-ranking police investigator from Beijing who because he looked too deeply into some financial scandal was disgraced and imprisoned in a Tibetan gulag, where his life and his soul were saved by the monks who were his fellow prisoners. Released without official consent after his investigations into a murder exposed Chinese corruption, Shan has been living quietly among the monks, awaiting his chance to escape the country with the UN's help. Will he now risk his freedom to find out who killed a revered teacher and several wandering orphan boys? To Pattison's credit, he makes Shan's choice to roam across the wastes of northern Tibet in a virtually endless and dangerous search seem inevitable and totally believable even if some readers would rather see him in action on the streets of London or San Francisco. And Shan's companions are largely fascinating: a vast gallery of Kazakh resistance fighters, White Russian smugglers who ride camels along the old Silk Road and Chinese officials of varying degrees of nastiness. Finally, though, there are too many people, places, events and questions and pages to sustain the amazing energy of Pattison's initial creation. (June 2)Forecast: Given the critical success of The Skull Mantra, which is being released simultaneously in paperback, and continuing political controversy surrounding China, this book has real breakout potential.

Recently purchased and will read soon


From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In an impressive debut that calls to mind such mystery thrillers as Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park, the pseudonymous Church, a former intelligence officer, provides a rare look into one of the world's most closed societies, North Korea. When Inspector O, a state security officer, is called on the carpet for botching a sensitive surveillance assignment, O soon realizes that competing forces in the military and intelligence hierarchies set him up to fail and that his personal and professional well-being depend on his walking a tightrope. The detective's pragmatic if unwavering commitment to the ideals of pursuing justice in the face of serious obstacles makes him a heroic figure who's well suited to carry future entries in what one hopes will be a long-lived series. Despite the exotic setting, Hammett and Chandler would have had no problem appreciating this hard-boiled narrative. (Oct.)

[stevemcgarrett]

At the moment, I am escaping to a bygone era and reading (or is it savoring?) the best Western novel ever written, Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry. If you enjoy this genre and have never read it, you don't know what you're missing. And if you don't like this genre or it's unfamiliar to you, this novel both epitomizes and transcends it. The characterization is of the rich sort one might find in a story classic and the characters are believable. The humor, too, is splendid.

[knee-highs]

but maybe you wanna kick some azz, since you and POK are the same person...

xny556 Mcgarrett is POK (and probably a mod)

[PeeWee]

SteveMcG,
I'm with you. Lonesome Dove is the best I've ever read, regardless of genre... Although if I had shared that with my English major peers or profs in college, I might have been kicked out of the program.

[faster]

Re-reading one of the most important books to me, _Between Life and Death_ by Nathalie Sarraute.

Just finished re-reading _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ (teaching it) and _The Language Instinct_ (Steven Pinker, teaching it later).

[SuperFly]

I just got Best American Short Stories (5 volumes) for years: 2000, 2001,2003,2004 2006. I need to stop by Kyobo and pick up 2005. Good stuff, thanks Ya-Ta for recommending this series to me.

[VanIslander]

How to be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

Essays, from lt crit important re-printed extended Harper's essay "Why Bother?" on the so-called end of the American novel, to something about privacy and politics told through his experience of his own credit card use, I found the collection as a whole a bore. I am glad to have read his reflections on his father's failing health and the various ways his mother failed to recognize it, an insightful reflection on not just Azheimer's but on what we identify as the self, when and to what degree we continue to be who we were, and when we loose that identity and our individuality, at both ends of life, babyhood and ill elderly years. His essay on the post office in Chicago would make a good case study of mismanagement for business classes. The third essay I appreciated was about his interviews and visits to small town modern prisons and the industry it has developed, echoing general concerns of many through a case study description of what he saw and heard in his trip to one such place.

Allah's Torch by Tracy Dahlby

I thought it was gonna be a journalist's report and insight into the growth of Islamic extremists in Indonesia by someone who was there at times of conflict but instead it was mostly a diary-like documentation of his fears and trepidation while traveling from interview to interview, most fears unfounded, and perhaps that's his point, to be a first-person example of the world's obsession with a few terrorist events and how the actual underlying issues are couched in violent terms but predominantly about religion and national identity and economics. The best part of the book isn't any of his personal experiences nor the content of his interviews but instead his researched summary of events I hadn't been familiar with in the history of the spice trade, notably nutmeg thereabouts, and the longterm effects of colonial battles for it on local politics in Indonesia.

India: A wounded civilization by V.S. Naipaul

This anti-sympathetic book is knocking my socks off about a country I'd such romantic views of. Sadly, the Nobel lit winner, an Indian of the diaspora who recounts his first visit and reflections on Hindu India through the lens of a century-displaced Trinidad Indian community member educated at Oxford, and in the process is dissuading me from wanting to go to India. His thesis i think, halfway through the book, is that India died before the Moslem invaders six centuries ago, and that the Hindi caste and social system in general has created generation after generation of pathetic stunted immature masses, and yet Naipaul SHOWS such instead of just claims it. He conveys the shock, horror and disgust that many must feel returning to their homeland with Western ideas and values superimposed on a fossilized migrated lifestyle unrecognizable in modern India. I have to keep putting the book down because he is quite good at getting the reader to see things through his jaded eyes, and it's a headshaking condescending feeling one is left with. Skip this book if you ever plan to go. It's a literarily excellent description of what otherwise could be seen as a barstool level prejudice against the foreignness of the culture one finds oneself in while traveling. This book is a MUST for anyone wanting a refreshing perspective on Gandhi, in fact, the whole book could have been written from that angle, as everything is one with his account of Gandhi's life and values and role in India.