There are few things in life better then sitting down in a comfy chair with an exceptional cup of coffee and a book you are excited about reading. I was wondering what any of you are reading or books you have read that afterward you couldn't stop talking or thinking about. I have a profound weakness for J.D. Salingers' Glass Family the enjoyment and interplay of his world is fascinating. I also love everything written by Richard Brautigan, Italo Calvino, Albert Camus, Aldous Huxley and Jorge Luis Borges. Hopefully we can talk more in depth about specific books but I figured this to be a good start.

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The book that I'm reading and re-reading over and over again for this last little stretch of time has been "Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape" by James Howard Kunstler. Pretty amazing read, and I would highly recommend it, especially to coffee people since we're always spouting the "community" word. It's thought provoking, challenging and will more than likely piss you off at some point. Cheers.
I agree, it was a really interesting book and a quick read, but I'm not sure about its credibility as a "historical" text. But a fun book's a fun book, and once you throw coffee into the mix, you're golden as far as I'm concerned! Ha.
I am constantly re-reading one or other of Truman Capote's books, but at the moment I'm utterly obsessed with biographies of long-dead old-movie actors (I have recently devoured such books about Vincent Price, Alec Guinness, Preston Sturges, William Haines and Orson Welles).

I have this really bad habit of reading the auto/biography of someone about whom I know almost nothing and then falling kind of strangely in love with them. It's a little weird; I mean, who falls in love with Vincent Price after the man's been dead for 15 years?!
As long as you don't go to their graves...and/or stalk their living relatives, I think everything is going to be alright. That just my 2¢.
Currently reading Taylor Clark's, "Starbucked." Seems to be pretty good 60 pages in. It's mostly been about the history so far....
So, I'm obviously really late to this discussion, but way to go with Being and Time, it was certainly one of the most rewarding books I've ever read. The notion of phenomenological ontology blew my mind and got me interested in phenomenology more generally. If you haven't yet, I'd read Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I think the notion of the embodied mind is one of the most convincing and interesting philosophical concepts I've ever examined. Plus, Merleau-Ponty's great, I've even heard critiques from analytic philosophers who think he's worth reading, which is something you can't even say for Heidegger most of the time. To throw my own reading projects into the mix, I'm in the midst of Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics and getting reading to delve into Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, I think it's gonna be a doozy.

jeff webre said:
I am about 70 pages away from.....finally....finishing Being and Time by Martin Heidegger, I am engaged in some Socratic dialogues by Plate (Crito, Meno, and Phaedo), and about to begin my next endeavor in ficiton, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. Yay for winter reading!!!
I just finished "Watership Down" and found it really interesting despite being shelved as "young adult" fiction. It's fascinating in that these rabbits do very rabbit-like things and yet, for the sake of storytelling, they also speak and have complex thoughts. I like books that use those differences to call into question those parts of human nature we usually take for granted.

I just started "God in a Cup" which seems promising but a little obnoxious at times (in the way the writer is so obviously trying to sound hip at every opportunity).
Jason Haeger said:
"The Devil's Cup" was certainly entertaining, though I thought it more of an opinion piece with historical cultural context. Almost a philosophy of the culture of coffee more than about coffee itself. It was an enjoyable read.

This + All quiet on the western front (sometimes in my underwear) + David Schoemer's book + On the Road(which i HATED(dont care what any of you english majors say!))
i've been re-reading the classics lately, and am finishing up madame bovary. i'm not really sure what i'll be reading next.
I've started reading The Physiology of Taste. More about gastronomy in a particular time period, and less about coffee, but there is some interesting stuff in it nonetheless.
Might seem egotistical of me, but Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power. If you want to learn where you stand in life and how you can get to be where you want, this is a great book. Otherwise, if you just like historical stories that correlate to power, greed, corruption, or war then that works.
Damion - if you liked Watership Down, I definitely recommend Richard Adams' other books, Traveler and Plague Dogs. They're both written from animal perspectives, but they never seemed very youth-oriented to me, given all the violence going on in them. Traveler is about the civil war from the perspective of Robert E. Lee's horse, and Plague Dogs is about a couple dogs escaping from a science facility (very NIMH-ish). I loved this stuff growing up, and fortunately it's still pretty reputable fiction ;)

I'm working my way through some coffee literature, myself. Uncommon Grounds, Devil's Cup, God in a Cup, those are all on my current reading list. I feel like reading about coffee while drinking coffee in a coffee shop might be a violation of the space-time continuum. I think I need some more fiction.

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