What Are You Reading Now.

I am re-reading another of my Calvin and Hobbes comics (The Essential Calvin and Hobbes) by Bill Watterson.

 

I enjoyed, The Terror so much by Dan Simmons that I decided to try another one of his horrors. I started Summer of Night yesterday. So far, really enjoying it. It's a little more popcorn fun, like King's IT. But I really enjoy his grasp on prose. It's simple and economical. Dig it.

 

Some of the best from the funnies section of the paper.

 

Im TRYING to read Yellowface, but all 6copies of the audio are unavailable (with 168 people on hold), and even double for the ebook. Fun fact: librarians automatically go to the bottom of a holds list . Lets see if i can get my hands on a hardcopy.


Also, no one showed up for my Book Club on The Wishing Pool
If anyone has read it/wants to read it..... I still have the discussion questions i made up for it....

 

I'm working my way through Sue Grafton's alphabet books, mostly skimming past her endless descriptions of every house and character, but enjoying the plots. It's not that I don't like descriptive language, but some details can be left to reader imagination.

 

Spoiler: Success

 

Aw, JT, you dressed for the occasion! Did you have to buy something new to match the cover or were you simply fortunate enough to have an appropriate outfit in your wardrobe?

 

Pure luck lol! I should wear yellow more often
this is the last copy.

 

Just finished The Appeal by Janice Hallett!

I enjoyed the mystery, even though the format of using only email/messages and letters to tell the story got a old a bit fast

 

I'm taking a break from Herodotus. I've got to many books at home on my shelves and so have decided to start to read neglected books, decide if I would want to re-read them in the future and throw away those I don't feel and think that I would like to revisit.

 

I've begun on Joyce's Ulysses, with the aid of a guide book. It seems the next natural step after studying poetry that veers toward prose, such as free verse and prose poetry. I'm interested in that grey zone where prose and poetry overlap.

 

Good luck with that! Ulysses is not an easy read. Haven't attempted it myself but I know it uses a stream of consciousness.

 

It's overhelming, amazing, intense, insane, and frustrating. And the hardest part is trying to figure out what the hell Irish people are trying to say, or rather what it means! I'll bet it's a lot easier if you're British.

So far I love it.

 

Good luck with it. Let us know what you think. I had it on my "to read" until I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I couldn't stand it. It was solipsistic, so self-aggrandizing as to be masturbatory. I've never come across someone more proud of their own brain. I didn't feature continuing with his catalog, especially knowing that his next and most famous work is considered one of the more dense tomes in the English language.

On a more fun note, I'm currently a book and a half into the Mithermage series by Orson Scott Card and enjoying it thoroughly. Is it as good as Ender's Game or Ender's Shadow? Not really, but it's still impressive that one of my favorite hard sci-fi authors can excel at Earth-bound fantasy as well.

I may have mentioned that my kid and I are making our way through the How to Train Your Dragon series on audiobook (read by my favorite Doctor Who himself, David Tennant!) We've just finished book five and are still enjoying the hell out of them. I highly recommend these books for anyone looking for a good kids' read. They have almost nothing to do with the movies, so one doesn't spoil the other a bit, and they're pretty funny. Useful phrases in Dragonese include:
Mi Mama no likeit yum-yum on di bum. - My Mother does not like to be bitten on the bottom.
Mi wobblediguts bigtime. - I am very poisonous.
Pishyou na munch-munch di miaow-miaow. - Please do not eat the cat.

 

Finishing Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Just a notch below The Martian, but a great read. One a mission to save earth, and scientist goes out of an induced coma, with his memory like Swiss cheese, and finds the rest of the Cree is dead.

 

I don't go to Joyce looking for a pleasant evening's entertainment. I go to be shaken up, to have my expectations exploded. I want to broaden my vocabulary, demolish my limitations. To see what language can do in the hands of a bombastic iconoclast. It's astonishing to be shown a very ordinary day in the lives of a few residents of Dublin, and yet it's also the Odyssey, and it reads in part like some bizarre sci-fi epic, or something from the avant-garde ends of a fantasy world totally unlike our own. I want to be shaken out of complacency, and out of my own too-ordinary habits of wordage and sentencing.

And it's certainly doing that.

I don't expect to like everything about it, or him. There are so many other aspects of it.

 

I’ve been reading Storm of Steel. It’s completely fascinating. Ernst Jünger was crazy. He fought on the Western Front for four years and basically had a pretty solid time; wounded 14 times, many decorations. It’s a masterpiece for sure. If you want a fun time, read Storm of Steel back to back with All Quiet on the Western Front, the other great German reflection on the war—especially the earlier, more nationalistic edition of Jünger’s book. There are certain parallel passages where Remarque and Jünger are saying the exact opposite about the impact of the war on their generation, almost as if in dialogue haha. Just goes to show the subjectivity of experience. Jünger was a real-life übermensch. Remarque was more neurotic. All Quiet is also more ambiguously personal.

 

Well, more power to you. I guess I don't feel the need to be shaken out of anything, but some of that does sound interesting. Portrait was none of those things, except possibly bombastic, but I've never heard anyone use that word as a compliment.

 

Is anyone here a Zadie Smith fan? I hear she's got a new book coming out this fall. I'm reading her Grand Union collection of short stories right now.

 

Do you think you'll pick up her new book when it comes out?

 

Read ‘The Thursday Murder Club’’ by Richard Osman today, which was a pretty gripping read, even for me [who famously cannot put books down after starting them unless they really are that bad]

Trying to pace myself with the mystery novels because I have a book idea floating around in my head [my dad suggested that I write a murder mystery about a drive-by shooting + fatality that is dubbed an accident but is it really?] and I’m trying to find story beats that I like that would work well for it

 

Im rereading Mystic and Rider and im rediscovering how its very much comprised of side-quests with no real plot. Literally, they said "we must do this task for the King".... and then from the opening chapter onward, they take detours, rescue an indentured servant (adding him to their group)....... save a town from a creature (adding it to their group)... sneak into a wedding... etc.
like, roll the dice and see where we end up, kind of thing.
Its entertaining, and i'm enjoying it (as i did in the past), but it makes me kick myself for how much i agonized over blended scenes or chapters together.