Literature What are you currently reading?

Lorrie Moore's Anagrams ... "A wry, crackly voice ... Fine, funny & very moving pictures of contemporary life" from a New York Times review ...
 
Amor Towles "A Gentleman in Moscow" and "Strangers in Their Own Land" by Arlie Hochschild (trying to understand the right wing).
 
What to expect when you're expecting. My wife is 7 weeks pregnant. Planned of course, and I'm wetting my pants here in excitement for our baby....figuratively of course :p

Congratulations!

This is entirely coincidental, but we have this game on the board called A to Z, and I just started a new theme: We're having a baby! I swear I didn't know you and your wife actually are having a baby. If you're interested, you can contribute to the game. :p

Game - A-Z Alphabet Game
 
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The book I read about Brexit, The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart, was very interesting. One thing that particularly stood out to me was that he said that some of the people (like me) who voted against Brexit are socially and economically liberal, but are not politically liberal. He said that those people and the political elite have been ignoring and dismissing the concerns of (mostly) working-class people for decades. It made me understand more why some people voted to leave the EU. It also drove home to me again how I only listen to one point of view all the time!:oops:
 
Believe it or not... the "Tao Teh Ching" (sometimes spelled "Tao Te Ching"), by Lao Tzu. Maybe I shouldn't actually say I'm "reading" it... yet... The chapters are quite short but one is meant to really think about them. I'm just reading it through to get an overview of what it's about, at this point. Its overall mood is very calming to me so far, and I'm not sure that is its intended effect.

I forget the translator's name, and that is important. There's almost certain to be differences depending upon the translator's choice of this English word to use as opposed to that one. Even if I were to learn Chinese, it was written so long ago that there would still be variations from one text to another.
 
One thing I was doing with the Tao Te Ching... Languages interest me, although I'm not an expert- and this translation had each chapter on two facing pages: Chinese text on the left, and the English translation on the right. I was trying to figure out what Chinese characters on the left were by comparing them to the English text. I might have figured out how "merciful" is written, but I probably had better luck figuring out the page/chapter numbers- those seemed to follow a consistent pattern. I couldn't really figure out how the end of a sentence is indicated in Chinese.
 
I am reading a vegan guide to Taiwan you can buy on Amazon, claimed as the first vegan travel guide. Before that I was reading We Are The Weather Makers by Mike Berners Lee.
 
Believe it or not... the "Tao Teh Ching" (sometimes spelled "Tao Te Ching"), by Lao Tzu. Maybe I shouldn't actually say I'm "reading" it... yet... The chapters are quite short but one is meant to really think about them.

Hehe, I remember that I bought that book to read when I was about 13, as I had heard about it and was curious.

Then some friends older brother (think he was studying philosophy at the time) explained to me that you typically would not read that book on the train during your morning commute, but rather retire to your countryside estate for a week to meditate about one of its pages, to truly understand it ;). I realized that I might not yet be ready for that book, when I continued my reading...