What Are You Reading Now.

Deaf Republic is a collection of peoms by Ilya Kaminsky. It was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is a deaf poet origionally from the Soviet Union. I think it was on NPR or something like that where I was first introduced to his work. This is a stunning and important collection. I picked it up on a recent trip to my favorite bookstore. If you want to know some of the cool things going on in poetry, check out this guy's work.

 

The Fires of Heaven by Robert Jordan
Circe by Madeline Miller

I recently read Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and I didn't hate it, but it was really slow in places and Circe is the same. If I weren't such a sucker for mythology stories, I don't think I'd keep going with it.

 

I finally finished off the last book of the A Dream of Eagles series. I really enjoyed it, but it took me over a year. Why? Doing too much writing stuff, of course. Now that I am more into the editing and querying stages of things again, I am more free to read.

So - I finally got started on a book that's been on my shortlist for a long, long time now - The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
I'd never read anything by him before. First impression was, "Huh? Why is it written like this? That's annoying." He doesn't use quotation marks, skips commas far too often, and skips apostrophes for some contractions but not all, ie. cant, dont. It's off-putting, and sometimes it's not clear which character is speaking. It's weird. If he wasn't a household name already, any agent or publisher would've tossed this in the bin after a few pages, if they even got that far.

But - I did get used to it, more or less, after say a half hour or so. Though the style does still trip me up at times even after a hundred pages. I'll definitely finish it as the story is quite captivating, and I am a big fan of the movie, bleak as it all is. I love how nothing is explained. The world is just the way it is and that's it. It doesn't seem too long, so I'll probably finish it soon. All of the books in the Eagles series were humongous, so it'll be kind of nice to read some different stuff for a change.

 

That stuff is pretty common on the more literary end of things, and he's definitely a literary writer. I read his Child of God and it's like that, plus the MC is a real nasty son of a bitch, almost more animal than human.

 

This also describes Child of God, except for the empathy part. I got it because parts of it are extremely lyrical, in the sense of lyric poetry. I found it when I was studying the Lyrical Novel.

 

I didn't get that because I heard the audiobook. No punctuation errors in those, lol. See? There are advantages.

I feel like The Road is to McCarthy as The Old Man and the Sea is to Hemingway. It's accessible on levels his other work isn't. It can be thoroughly enjoyed by readers who hate his other work, which if Blood Meridian is any indication, I do.

 

Can anyone out there convince me to listen to the 3 hours of appendices at the end of The Return of the King? I gave up 15 minutes in. The 3+ hour epilogue was hard enough to get through. I was very ready for that book to be over. Is there any value in the extra stuff at the end?

 

There are some good poetic moments in it. Listening to it on audiobook sequentially would be terrible because a lot of it is linguistic or technical and a bit boring, but the narrative sections are great. It has some interesting historical stuff about Moria and Rohan; the must-read is the Aragorn-Arwen story. If you liked the book you’ll like that. But they’re appendices: great to flip through if you’re interested, but not worth powering through if you’re not.

 

A Court of Thorns And Roses by Sarah J. Maas. It was recommended to me in a book group.

 

I just wanted to mention that the style in this book did make me think Hemingway. Lots of similarities in the narrative style, though McCarthy uses fancier words.

 

How do you decide what book to read next when you find yourself buying too many books at once and you can't wait to read all of them? This is a problem I have every time I go to the bookstore. I've goy a few short story collections, but I feel like I'm in the mood for a novel. I'm deciding between So Lucky by Nicola Griffith and Paula Spencer by Roddy Doyle. I've read some of each so far just to get a feel for each. IDK has anyone read either of these?

Does this situation (choosing what to read next) seem familiar to any of you? I mean who buys and reads one book at a time? There have been a few times where I've bought a book I can't wait to read and even if I pick up a few titles, it's a no brainer what I'll go for first. But when I'm just browsing I end up with several books I can't wait to read. My bookstore has a large used book section in the basement. Somebody sold them their whole Roddy Doyle collection. I wanted to buy them all since I'm a huge fan, but I was good and just bought one. Was that a mistake? Shoot, I've got to go back.

 

I typically have around a 5-book short list, and a longer list of ten or a dozen or so. What's next often comes down to mood, though at times, like the other day, I've known for a long time which book is 100% next.

I'm more disciplined with video game purchases than books. Probably because video games typically get heavily discounted after 6-12 months, so it makes little sense to let 'em pile up when purchased at high prices. For books, once the paperback is out there, the prices tend to remain the same for a long while. For heavily anticipated books, I do preorder the hardcovers, but it's fairly rare. Next hardcover will of course be the next GoT book. I will preorder it for $200, G.R.R. Just write it already !!

 

I tend to be a mood reader with an average of 6 - 8 books in active stages of perusal. (Rereads, favourites, a whole lot of genre fiction, science, psychology, poetry, etc...).

These are my stacks this week.

 

Trial transcripts of The State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes. Seeking to find the differences between reality and the brilliant cross examination scene between Spencer Tracy and Fredric March in Inherit the Wind. It is quite condensed, but fairly faithful to the actual testimony. "I do not think about that which I don't think about" is verbatim from the transcript. The calculation of the age of creation by Bishop Usher is mentioned though Darrow did not get Bryan to state date and time as he does in the dramatization.

 

I am fascinated by creationism. (Yes, I know the proponents of creationism changed the name to "Intelligent Design" after the court cases of the 80s made it clear that creationism had no place in school science classes, under the law that separates Church and State. But a turd by any other name still stinks as much...)

Anyway. I'm fascinated by the idea that people actually believe this stuff. The Bishop of Ussher's calculations led him to the conclusion that the world was created by God at 9:00 AM on October 23, 4004 B.C.

Isn't that swell? Gee, what precision. And yet there are still people who actually believe this, in the same way that they believe in biblical inerrancy.

All right, I have one question: Dinosaurs. (Thank you, Bill Hicks -- a classic comedy bit from 1992 that still has legs). It's a valid point: if everything in the world was created by God, and everything in the world is mentioned in the Bible, how come the Bible doesn't mention dinosaurs?

Come to think of it, the Bible doesn't mention three-toed sloths, funnel web spiders, or belladonna either. Maybe there just wasn't room? *ponders*

And by the way, Deuteronomy 14:10 states "And whatsoever hath not fins and scales ye may not eat; it is unclean unto you." The same verse is repeated later in Leviticus 11:10: "And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you."

Seems clear enough, and yet many believers in biblical inerrancy, both Christians and Jews, still eat shellfish -- shrimp, crabs, lobster, squid, oysters, scallops and snails -- that have neither fins nor scales. Um, slight hypocrisy there? I don't know, I'm not a theologian ...

 

I got Kindle Unlimited and have been reading a lot through that. Still hard to adjust to a screen, but I do still read physical copies of books. I stalled on Circe, and I am still reading Fires of Heaven, but I started Blindsight by Peter Watts. Just finished the prologue and I am intrigued.

 

Ken Follet The Pillars of the Earth

 

Re-reading the The Five by Hallie Rubenhold. Very important, very moving, very informative. A must read.

 

Halo: First Strike

I do everything on audio books nowadays, but it's close enough to reading. This reader isn't my favorite though. I'm on the third book in the series he does and I know the next book it's someone else. Hoping the next one is better. He has the absolute perfect sound for reading 1950's science fiction. That doesn't work in this instance I feel.

The book is simply a connection point between the earlier novels, the end of the events in the first Halo game, and the new start of Halo 2. As well as setting the characters and places for the series to then advance off of. Essentially what I'm saying is, this book does a really fantastic job of being a middle man crossover and still maintaining a coherent story of it's own. I can't imagine taking on a task like that.

 

Picked up a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's collection Bagombo Snuff Box this weekend at a used bookstore. Any other Vonnegut fans out there?

 

There's a few. And then there's others that haven't read Slaughterhouse 5. I have that collection, also from a used bookstore. I've read a couple and must go back to it, enjoyed them but, while the stories I read are good, they're not within an ass's roar of Slaughterhouse 5. Then again, one could say the same about an awful lot of books.

 

My copy says 1999. I've liked what I've read so far.