Tried to read Brad Taylor's Hunter Killer. Got eighty pages in and closed it up and took it back to the library. Thirteen NYT best-sellers, and the boy can't write a lick. Now I'm reading Charlaine Harris' A Longer Fall, the second in a series that I can only describe as alternate-future/fantasy/Western. Strong women, Russian wizards, and lots of gunplay. A lot of fun to read.
Between other books, a (rather long) chapter or two at a time, I'm steadily making my way through Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 by the inestimable Hunter S. Thompson. My pacing might make it sound as though I'm not that into it, but really I'm loving it! I wouldn't picking it up and put it back down so often, but I craves me some science fiction and supernatural nonsense on an almost daily basis. If you've never read F&L'72, and you're paying any attention to American politics right now, I highly suggest you pick up a copy. I read Confessions of a Political Junkie years ago, but I'm so glad I never got around to this one until now. There's never been a better year for it! I can't imagine finding more perfect political parallels than those between the 1972 and 2020 presidential races, what with the anyone's-guess cluster-hump of a Democratic primary and the (depending on whom you ask) psycho-tyrant incumbent. Besides all that, it's just a great read. It's hilarious, insightful, bizarre, all that great HST shit, and I'm only halfway through. This book is even helping me cope with some of my more depressing thoughts on the state of America, mostly by finding gobs of almost morbid humor in face of the most crushing realizations. It reminds me that reality is fucking absurd, that human beings, the author and myself included, are way too serious, way too often and that we're never getting off this coaster until we die, so we may as well throw our hands in the air and enjoy the ride to hell. Yay America!
Well I was reading The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson but I only got a hundred pages into the second one before I needed a slight break. Those books are long (and I'm not the most avid reader, though I am trying to improve on that front). So instead I decided to read a book that my sister had just finished. The Secret of Pembrooke Park by Julie Klassen. I wouldn't consider myself a fan of romance novels (I am a guy, after all) but the gothic setting and elements of mystery made it very engaging. Plus it was nowhere near as dense as The Stormlight Archive, which is exactly what I needed. But now I think it is time to resume where I had left off, before I forget what was going on.
Finally finished Paradise Lost. It was good. Won't be reading it again, but it was good. No idea what to read next since every book I pickup leans toward the boring after a few chapters. Recently picked up The Strain By Guilermo Del Toro and written by Chuck Hogan. Story starts off with a great hook then falls flat on it's boring ass. Long pages of mundane shite no one needs to know. Example: About six pages of the MC gushing about his love for his son while an interesting hook is playing out. Hell, author goes into every single thing about this brat, even down to the kids fucking knuckles and how they were the same ones he had as a kid, blah blah blah shut up already, man, get back to the story. Eh. I'll look for something on Amazon, since I can't wander a bookstore in my condition. >_>;
This book . . . disappointed me so hard. I predicted the ending almost immediately, and when I did reach the end, it wasn't even that good of a payoff. That said, I appreciate what it wanted to do, and the historical fiction element was rather well done. The narrator was incredibly full of herself, in a way that distracted mightily from the story, even if it was about her life. I don't know. I feel like even if you have a first person narrative, you still have the ability to make it less narcissistic than I feel this book was. Ugh. So let down. I had high hopes and they were dashed on the jagged rocks below. My next book will be one of the two I mentioned last time: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and the literary theory one.
A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay was a charming and enjoyable novel. It turned out not to be the conventional plot-driven Fantasy I was expecting. More of a quasi-historical piece with some lit-fic qualities (or so I think, though I'm not entirely sure what that means). It jumps back and forth between characters, places, times, viewpoints, and tense. There's a fair bit more narration, or "telling" than I'm used to seeing in modern Fantasy. Worked very well, if you ask me. Some beautiful writing in it. I think I'll be reading more from this author before long. I picked up the H. G. Wells Sci-Fi omnibus on sale. It contains The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon and The Island of Doctor Moreau. A real steal at €3. Never read Wells before. Looking forward to it. But first things first. I'm continuing with Mark Lawrence's Red Queen's War. Book two, The Liar's Key, promises to be every bit as good as the first. As far as Discworld goes, I now have Moving Pictures and Interesting Times under my belt. I seriously cannot get enough Discworld in my life. It's so good. Terry Pratchett has to be my second favorite writer of all time. The first would be Mervyn Peake, if anyone's wondering.
That's pretty much how I felt on that book. I wasn't really sure how I felt until the end, when I saw there were two sequels. I thought about reading them and my immediate thought was that it would be a chore, so I left it. It's an interesting take on the traditional vampire but the family drama was overplayed. Definitely lost steam as it went on. I've been reading Stephen Baxter - Titan. It's my first Baxter, despite being a huge sci-fi nerd. At times the jargon can be quite heavy, even if it's very scientifically accurate. But the overall pace is great and it's extremely prescient. Definitely liking it so far.
Instead of a silly sports car, my midlife crisis is comprised of diving back into old books from my youth...
Wow, that viking is really hitting the gym hard, huh? I just finished Gardner's The Art of Fiction and The Art of Poetry Writing, by William Packard. Both excellent books. Currently working through Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing. Weird trend going on with the titles here, but I'll break it with my next order from Amazon, which will include Stephen King's On Writing and Gardener's On Becoming a Novelist. Wait... Meanwhile I downloaded the free versions of several classics from Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. Oh boy is it fun wading through all the mistakes in those machine-printed books or whatever it's called, where the computer 'reads' the text from a scanned old book and the result gets distributed as an ebook apparently with no human input at any point. What I downloaded was Ovid's Metamorphoses, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Homer's Odyssey—several different translations of each. Some versions I had to dump for complete unreadability.
It's an unusual set of books. Sometimes dead serious; other times goofy as all get out. There's a character who, upon exile to the Pliocene epoch, believes it to be Narnia.
My fifth Palahniuk book. I tried to pick out a novel because I've already read a couple of his books of shorts, but it turns out this book is a set of linked short stories, so I messed up with that! haha. There's a connecting story, which is . . . improbable, maybe a bit too casually extreme. But the short stories are unbelievably good. I'd give the connecting story 3 stars and the short stories 5 stars. If that connecting story would have been more grounded in reality I feel that it would have been a perfect setting for the shorts. As it is, it reminded me of an 80's splatter movie, say, early Peter Jackson. Slapstick gore. It was too surreal of a foundation for the short stories. It also didn't help having this giant cast of characters appear like something out of a perverted Cannonball Run. I've got to say, if you are triggered by . . . well, if you find the word "triggered" useful, then stay far away from Chuck. I'm trying to think of any story that wasn't vile on some level, and I can't think of one. I thought I was going to be sick during that first one, but I was laughing so hard! So gross. Oh my god. Almost the most messed up thing I've ever read by Palahniuk. It's a tough call. There is one chapter . . . 12, 13? I don't have the book in front of me right now. It's called "The Nightmare Box." Now I've read a lot of horror, especially horror shorts, but this is one of the most effective stories I've ever seen. What's strange about it is that it's not lurid at all, certainly not compared to the surrounding stories. It's almost out of place here. I would call it a perfect horror story. Very elegant, extreme tension, effectively disturbing. The premise is this: An art gallery has a box. It looks a bit like one of those old-fashioned cameras on tripods that used flash powder. The box has a single eye hole, but it's always dark inside when you look. You can hear the box ticking. There's some manner of timer inside that runs for a random amount of time. Days, weeks, months? When the timer stops, a viewer can look inside and the box will light up. Then they'll see something terrible that ends their will to live. Supposedly, it's the true nature of the world. So as the story begins, a mother and her daughter are at the gallery and the timer stops. The daughter looks in. The story is about the mother trying to learn the history of the box as she deals with her daughter's sad state. You NEVER see what's in the box, and I think that's critical to the story. At the story's final line, there's a chance for the mother to look in too and finally understand, but she can't bring herself to do it. I want to write something like this. I think it's one of those rare stories that has the power to shift another author's writing. It's so beautifully done. If you are a horror writer, I would urge you to read that one chapter. If nothing else, you can pick it up in Barnes and Noble and finish it in 15 minutes while you sit at the Starbucks.
I'm picking through literary theory and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. I also started reading Clariel by Garth Nix, the prequel to the Old Kingdom series and it's not the same caliber writing I remember the other books having, but I'm enjoying it nonetheless. I don't know why I can't read just one book at a time.
Moone Boy: The Blunder Years. It's as funny as the show, maybe funnier, but there's also an eye-rolly middle-grade element to it here and there, like they spliced in tiny snippets from Diary of a Wimpy Kid or something. That might not be the right example. I don't know. I never read those books. So far, it's pretty great though, and Chris O'Dowd narrates the audiobook, so yay!
New member here! I majored in Creative Writing but I'm embarrassed to admit that I have been a terrible reader since graduating over 10 years ago... For this past Christmas, I asked for and received The complete Sherlock Holmes works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I am also embarrassed to admit that I had never read it until now and greatly regret denying myself the pleasure of this....
Hi, my name is Dogberry's Watch, and this was a fucking lie. This book was perfect as a prequel and I discovered there's another book in this series out there I haven't read yet, so I'm going to get that next paycheck (FRIDAY) and read that as soon as I can. It was nice to be back in a world I loved so much as a kid. "Does the walker choose the path or the path the walker?"
OMG.. you could literally write a story based solely around what YOU think is in that box. Or start a writing prompt and get a lot of creative juices flowing and come out with different possibilities what it could be. Sounds like an interesting book, though.
Ha! You don’t really actually know how GREAT a book is until you finish the entire thing! So awesome you stuck with it even at a point when you thought it was a disappointment. Then.. to find out that it’s really no disappointment at all.. is like the icing on a cake .
Meh, I was an English Lit major and had never read the scarlet letter, great Gatsby, Dracula, Frankenstein, wuthering heights, and many of the "greats" that most people read in high school until college. You get to it when you get to it
@Seven Crowns . I decided to take up your author recommendation and look up Chuck Palahniuk. I’d never heard about him before and didn’t know he was the author of Fight Club. So I did a search on him on my library book account and a few results came up.. and I’m currently reading “Beautiful You” by Chuck Palahniuk. It’s not actually a very long book (500 ebook pages is not very long) but you’ll be intrigued by it from the very first few pages. It’s incredible how it draws you in from the start. If you haven’t read this one yourself.. I do recommend it! It’s different to the sort of style that I’m used to reading.. and a book that holds you in suspense is pretty OK in my opinion. It’s about an ordinary woman who suddenly finds herself thrust in the limelight.. but all is not as it seems. See spoiler for synopsis: Spoiler: Beautiful You Penny Harrigan is a low level associate in a big Manhattan law firm with an apartment in Queens and no love life at all. So it comes as a great shock when she finds herself invited to dinner by one C. Linus Maxwell, aka 'Climax-Well', a software mega-billionaire and lover of the most gorgeous and accomplished women on earth. After dining at Manhattan's most exclusive restaurant, he whisks Penny off to a hotel suite in Paris, where he proceeds, notebook in hand, to bring her to previously undreamed of heights of orgasmic pleasure for days on end. What's not to like? This: Penny discovers that she is a test subject for the final development of a line of sex toys to be marketed in a nationwide chain of boutiques called 'Beautiful You'. So potent and effective are these devices that women by the millions line up outside the stores on opening day and then lock themselves in their room with them and stop coming out. Except for batteries. Maxwell's plan for erotically enabled world domination must be stopped. But how?
On the insistence of a friend, I'm reading the online serial Worm by John McCrae. It's actually what got me writing, again. My friend is someone whose intelligence, wit, and tastes I respect, and he raves about it. Superhero stories really aren't my thing, but I've been enjoying it, and I think I could write something at least as good, something which will impress my clever friend. Palahniuk is a writer I have mixed feelings about. He's always interesting, but some of his characters feel empty, to me. Maybe that's the point: the last book of his I read was Lullaby, and It didn't strike me favorably.
Unexplained - Supernatural Stories for Uncertain Times I'm not actually reading it yet as I've only just bought it, but these days I can only manage books that I'm free to dip in and out of.
