What are you reading?

Jeff Bond

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Took a break from my typical mercenary, in-my-genre titles to try Kevin Hart's I Can't Make This Up: Life Lessons. Very funny and a great change of pace.
 

Brightdreamer

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Wow - August slipped by. Well, time for a procrastination update.

Recently Read:
John Dies at the End (Book 1 of a series, David Wong, humor/horror, in paperback): Twentysomething slacker David can't tell you what Midwestern town he lives in, or the real name of his friend John, or much else about his life. It's too dangerous. Ever since his first accidental hit of the drug known as soy sauce, he's been plunged into an insane existence, wakened to the invisible forces all around us, often written off as paranormal nonsense or hallucinations or bad dreams. Now, his formerly dull hometown of "Undisclosed" is a seething cauldron of danger, shadow people and ghosts and improbable monsters - most of whom have an irritating penchant for stalking, maiming, and attempting to kill David and John. Can two slackers save Earth from an impending invasion by a force so evil it makes the Devil look quaint? More importantly, can they do it without dying?

This is one of the oddest, most memorable stories I've read in quite some time, a weird mixture of horror, surreality, and an often-dark sense of existential humor. At times it was vividly gruesome in its depiction of unreal beasts and hellish horrors straight out of Heironymous Bosch. I grew a little irritated and impatient with the narrator David, though; he's so reluctant to engage with the plot problem that he deliberately veers off onto tangents of dubious payoff, plus he sets up several bait-and-switch moments. While it had some fun tweaks of genre tropes, ultimately it wasn't my cup of cocoa.

Shadowshaper (Book 1 of the Shadowshaper series, Daniel Jose Older, YA fantasy, in paperback): Sierra never knew about the shadowshapers, the secret group of ancestor-channeling magic workers in her Brooklyn community of Puerto Rican immigrants, until the day she saw a tear fall from the eye of a mural in her neighborhood... and the night the walking corpse accosted her at a party. Now she's in a race to come to grips with abilities she never knew she had as a dangerous outsider seeks to usurp the power of the shadowshapers for his own ends.

This book has a very strong sense of culture and place, plunging me into a world that felt almost as alien to me as any secondary-world fantasy. Sierra not only deals with shadowshaping but with such problems as racism, gentrification, and machismo attitudes that kept her from being informed of her birthright. There's also a not-so-subtle jab at cultural appropriation; the antagonist is a white anthropologist who is convinced he can protect other people's culture and heritage better than they themselves can. The story moves very fast - almost too fast, with jumbles of names and relations thrown at me while I was still struggling to get my bearings in Sierra's corner of Brooklyn. Something about the ending also felt a touch unsatisfying. Overall, it's a nicely diverse change of pace, though I don't think I'll read the next book.

Currently Reading:
The Blue Fairy Book (Andrew Lang, anthology/fantasy/folk tales, on Kindle): The classic collection of folk tales and fairy stories, including versions of Beauty and the Beast, The White Cat, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and others.

A freebie Kindle download, I'd hoped it would kick-start my stagnant creative juices. It's readable, but the style tends to be stilted, the stories containing fragments of lost cultural touchstones and references filtered several times over. (One story was a thinly-disguised retelling of the Perseus myth, and another, The Bronze Ring, was likely inspired by Aladdin, whose tale was also reprinted. Lang also included a fragment of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the Lilliput encounter, which feels incongruous given that the author and satiric intent of that piece were well known, while the rest were mostly oral tradition from ages past.) Not bad for what it is, but not really my thing, and I'm not finding the inspiration I'd hoped to find, unfortunately.

I'm also poking at Guy Gavriel Kay's The Summer Tree, first book in his classic Fionovar Tapestry series, about five modern university students who are taken to another world by a wizard as part of a royal celebration, but wind up involved in deeper and more powerful problems. The style is somewhat stiff by modern standards, the cast and cultures very white (something that stands out a lot more these days, with more diversity on the shelves), but I'm still turning pages, and expect I'll finish it at this point, even if I'm not deeply gripped by it. Haven't totally committed to it yet, though.
 
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Mystery1995

It's all a mystery!
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I just finished "A Forest Divided" Aka, Warrior Cats. I am now on "Path of Stars"
 

DanielSTJ

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Room Full of Mirrors- Charles R. Cross
Jude the Obscure- Thomas Hardy
Go Down, Moses- William Faulkner
Voyage Au Centre De La Terre- Jules Verne
Parade's End- Ford Maddox Ford
Babylon: Legend, History and the Ancient City- Michael Seymour
The Ancient Mariners (The Seafarers)- Time-Life Books
Stances et Poèmes- Sully Prudhomme
 

EmilyEmily

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I just finished The Burning Girl by Claire Messud, who is one of my favorite authors. I loved the teenaged authenticity of the main character's voice.

I've just downloaded The Girls (Emma Cline) and The Beguiled (Thomas Cullinan) onto my Kindle; I'll be reading them for the next week. And my before-bed comfort reading at the moment is I Capture the Castle, which I've read about a dozen times. (Yes, I am one of those people who has multiple books going at once).
 

Brightdreamer

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Another monthish, another update...

Recently Read:
Meddling Kids (Edgar Cantero, horror/humor/mystery, in hardcover): In 1977, the four kids of the Blyton Summer Detective Club (and the dog, Sean) unmasked the culprit behind a series of monster sightings at Sleepy Lake in rural Oregon... a caper that got their pictures in the paper and everything, the crowning moment of their friendship - and their last case. Years later, in 1990, the kids are all grown up - but still haunted by that last case, particularly the things they saw that night in the old abandoned mansion that were too realistic to possibly have been thrown together by a half-baked crook in a cheap monster costume. Finally, wandering tomboy Andy decides enough is enough: she rounds up the other surviving members of the group (leader Peter having overdosed at the peak of a Hollywood career, though his ghost still haunts fellow member Nate), including a descendant of the original Sean, and heads back to Blyton Hills to re-open the case. This time, they find themselves meddling in something more sinister than a petty crook, a caper with Lovecraftian overtones and a villain they just might not live long enough to stop...

This is an odd tale, an homage to and sendup of classic teen detective series like Scooby-Doo and Hardy Boys, told in a borderline-hallucinatory style that often pauses to mention camera angles or close-ups, sometimes breaks dialog into script format, and even busts the fourth wall to acknowledge line breaks and chapter endings. This isn't set in Earth as we know it, but a sort of darker, grittier overlay on the cartoon-sketch world that old kid detective series inhabited. The characters are a little older, a slight bit deeper, but still caricatures at heart, befitting their world and the caper at hand. Some elements didn't quite come together right, and the ending clunked a little, but overall I found it a unique and worthwhile read, even if it wasn't quite up my alley. (And I'll admit I was attracted by the retro Day-Glo cover...)

Frindle (Andrew Clements, children's fiction, in paperback): Nick Allen doesn't mean to be a troublemaker; he just gets his big ideas and has to test them, plus he finds manipulating teachers more stimulating than the in-class lessons. In fifth grade, he finally meets his match in the legendary Mrs. Granger, a sharp lady who is the first to effectively counter his usual antics. An assignment to find out the origin of words leads Nick to his greatest idea (and teacher tweak) ever: he will invent his own new word, "frindle" instead of "pen." Even Nick becomes astonished at just how far this idea of his goes - through the school, the town, and across the nation.

This is a nice exploration of word origins, told in a story of student vs. teacher and innovation vs. tradition. Mrs. Granger insists that the dictionary holds all words in the language - but the words only mean anything if everyone agrees they do, and the language changes all the time despite being printed in a big, authoritarian book. Nick could've easily come across as a brat (at least, to grown-up readers), but he's rather sympathetic, a boy who is clearly underchallenged by the system and thus tends to turn his classrooms into real-world labs for his many big ideas... the kind of kid who might change the world someday unless stomped down by authority. (Perhaps the greatest flight of fancy Clements indulges in here is Nick not being stomped down harder and more thoroughly, as happens far too often in real life.) The ending shows how the experiment changed the lives of both boy and teacher with a rather sweet finale. Would make a good companion read with Bruce Coville's My Teacher is an Alien series (the premise of which involves how human children have spectacular potential that is usually destroyed during grade school.)

Starfire: A Red Peace (Book 1 of the Starfire trilogy, Spencer Ellsworth, sci-fi, on Kindle): After years of war across the sundered galaxy, the Resistance - rebellious vat-born crossbreed soldiers led by John Starfire - have finally thrown down their former masters, the blueblood Imperial humans. Bt the slaughter doesn't stop there, as Starfire places the entire human species in the cross-hairs for the next phase of "consolidation." One of Starfire's officers and a lowly crossbreed star pilot may be all that stands between the Resistance and a galaxy-wide fate worse than mere genocide...

A fast-paced space opera with more than a whiff of George Lucas about it, Starfire grabbed me fairly quickly and never let go. The characters are more Han Solo than Luke Skywalker, both jaded by harsh existences, yet forced to rise above their cynicism and and personal concerns when they realize the greater threat. I expect I'll follow at least through the second book.

Currently Reading:
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Frans de Waal, science/animals, on Nook/in paperback): An exploration of animal intelligence and consciousness, and how the notion of human uniqueness becomes shakier with each new discovery.

I started reading this on Nook via Overdrive, and wound up buying the paperback book. An interesting look at the field of animal cognition, a field tainted for too long (and still tainted) by antiquated notions of humans being the "top rung" of an imaginary ladder, or somehow separate from all other species. A few of these experiments were touched on in Virginia Morell's Animal Wise, but many here are new to me. de Waal's background in primate studies adds a different dimension than Morell's book, too. Enjoying it so far.

Imaginary Animals (Boria Sax, folklore/mythology, in hardcover): An examination of imaginary beasts and beings created by humans throughout the ages.

It looked like a decent bestiary-type book, looking at the mythic origins and "evolution" of beasts like unicorns and dragons through various cultures. Unfortunately, it keeps sidetracking itself with navel-gazing. It's like a book written that kid in class who, assigned to write a report on trees, instead composes a twenty-page essay questioning the origins and psychological connotations of the word "tree," speculating what a tree itself might think of this assignment or if it acknowledges fellow woody plants as trees, and asking whether anyone can definitively prove that the world in which trees exist, or students to write papers about trees, actually isn't just a passing figment of imagination. The author is also prone to making odd leaps of thought, such as a declaration that some monstrous human hybrids embody mankind's unconscious conflicts over eating animal meat. Where the heck did that come from, and why is that the only possibly interpretation? Tooth-grinding at times, though when it does talk about imaginary animals, it can be okay, touching on some beasts/beings I don't recall my other bestiaries covering. It also has several new-to-me illustrations of various imaginary animals. I'm having to take this one in small doses.

I'm also poking at a title on my Kindle, but - despite it apparently being an award-winning Western - it's just ticking so many cliche/stereotype boxes I'm having a real hard time getting into it. (Not long ago, a character was about to make a plot-progressing declaration... only to suffer a coughing fit, and the other character decided a walking tour of their town and a change of venue was called for, effectively padding the story by a few pages. My first thought was: was this a NaNoWriMo book? That's the kind of pointless padding one throws in on a slow day to meet the daily word count... but that's supposed to be first draft stuff, not published novel stuff.) I'm probably going to give up on it, as I have plenty or more interesting books in queue.
 
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Chris P

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Mrs. Fletcher - Tom Perrotta. It's one of his best so far.
 

Lakey

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Almost done Rosemary's Baby, by Ira Levin.
How is it? This Perfect Day was one of my favorite books as a ~12-year-old - the kind of book I read over and over until I had parts of it practically memorized (“Christ, Marx, Woods, and Wei brought us to this perfect day. Woods, Wei, Marx, and Christ, all but Wei were sacrificed...”). I haven’t reread it as an adult so I’ve no idea whether the fascination would hold up. But for Rosemary’s Baby I’ve only seen the film with Mia Farrow.

As for what I’m reading ... at the moment I’m tearing through Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and growing increasingly eye-rolly. Often I quite like melodrama but perhaps du Maurier drags out the tension a little too indulgently, to the point where it morphs from story tension into “get on with it already” tension. I’ve also grown a little tired of the narrator’s childishness and naïveté. I’ve read books that do a much more interesting job of capturing youthful moodiness and uncertainty.

I’ve also got a bunch of eyeball books (non-audio) that I’m a bit stalled out on, because work has been a beast lately and I haven’t found time/energy for visual reading. I haven’t all the way given up on Anais Nin, though I’m close to it; I’m halfway through the particular collection of excerpts that I’ve got, and she grows increasingly annoying. I’m also working my way through Sexual Politics, which I started after Kate Millet’s recent death, and it’s just flat angry making; I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dropped in a note to the effect of “STILL $%^#@% TRUE 40 YEARS LATER.”
 

Myrealana

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Almost through "What Happened" by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Good book. I thought it would be harder to get through, emotionally, but oddly, it actually makes me feel better. I also realize why I will NEVER accomplish everything she has. That woman works like a DEMON.
 

HarvesterOfSorrow

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I loved Rosemary's Baby. I've always wanted to read the novel, as the movie is one of my absolute favourites. I've always considered Rosemary's Baby to be one of the most perfect stories ever written---as both a novel and a screenplay. Everything fits perfectly together, and upon knowing the ending, if you go back and watch things again, you'll see that Ira Levin and Roman Polanski were playing fair, and not copping out on the reveal. The movie was very much like the book, with only a couple scenes that Polanski felt didn't really have to be shown. I'd say Polanksi put about 95% of that book into his movie. But if you just want to read a damn good book, definitely read it (just stay away from Ira Levin's Son of Rosemary, which I read about fifteen years ago and hated it even then).
 
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williemeikle

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Finished Peter Ackroyd's DAN LENO AND THE LIMEHOUSE GOLEM... and here's my 5 star review if anyone's interested

The play’s the thing.


I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for Victorian London fiction, whether it be fiction written at the time by Conan Doyle or Robert Louis Stevenson, or modern takes on it by the likes of Tim Powers, Dan Simmons, Kim Newman or, in this case, Peter Ackroyd.


As in all Ackroyd books, the city itself is a character, and in this one the cast and crew enact a drama while their lives and fortunes intertwine over a period of years. As ever Ackroyd’s literary mechanics are flawless, switching between voices seamlessly, whether it be in the form of trial transcripts, diary entries, or the over-arching, all seeing eye of the city itself. The plot moves along equally seamlessly, each cog in the clockwork moving as it must. At times I was greatly reminded of The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr Hyde in the way matters unfolded.


Reality and fiction are both at play, and they too are intertwined, as bloody murder is mimicked on pantomine stages, and grotesque pantomine is played out in the streets of Limehouse when the Golem walks abroad.


It’s a tour-de-force throughout, and Ackroyd keeps all his balls juggling in the air like one of his music hall performers.


A fine addition to the ranks of Victoriana. I loved it.
 

BenPanced

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Almost finished with Grace Jones's memoirs I'll Never Write My Memoirs so I can dive right in to Armistead Maupin's memoirs Logical Family.
 

Lakey

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I'm rereading Jane Eyre after twenty-five years and oh. my. goodness. I'm thinking ahead to my Goodreads review, and wishing I could give it six stars, or demote every other book I've ever given five stars to.

I recall enjoying it when I read it in college, but never like I am now. I suppose it's because I know comparatively more now about fiction, and about feminism, and about life.
 

HarvesterOfSorrow

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Whew. Finished Sleeping Beauties, by Stephen King and Owen King last night. I would have finished it a little sooner, but that was a book that reallt started sagging in the last two hundred pages or so. Great characterization and an interesting story. But not so much that it required 700 pages. At least a hundred pages could have been easily chopped out of that book and it would have made the thing move a lot better. It had to be 1000 pages long. Needful Things had to be 600 pages. The Stand had to be 1000 pages long. Sleeping Beauties did not have to be 700 pages long. King is my all-time favourite writer. I love him to bits, and he's my hero. But I really wish his editor would give him a kick in the pants every now and then.

Reading Lucky, by Alice Sebold right now.
 

Brightdreamer

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And another totally unnecessary (save for procrastination purposes) update for November:

Recently Read:
The Halloween Tree (Ray Bradbury, children's fantasy/horror, on Kindle): In yesteryear's Midwestern America, a group of boys hit the streets for Halloween trick-or-treating... but their best friend, Pipkin, is strangely absent. Thus begins a wild night that will take them around the world and through the depths of time to witness the origins of the holiday - and maybe save a friend's life.

As usual, Bradbury's prose is almost a poem, weaving strange imagery into a layered tale about fear, death, and time itself. Once again, Bradbury infuses childhood with a golden glow of pure nostalgia, into which terror and unpleasantness are rare intruders; if there is a heaven, and Bradbury made it, I believe this is where he went back to in the end, he had such evident love for those lost days. The plot is a bit thin, mostly a series of events witnessed and experienced by the boys with minimal active participation or cause-and-effect on their end, but it's memorable. The illustrations were clearly direct inspirations for Burton's animated The Nightmare Before Christmas. A good read for October.

The War of Art (Steven Pressfield, creativity, on Kindle): All of us have gifts to share and purposes to fulfill, but too often we let Resistance - the voices that hold us back, the mysterious symptoms that convince us we're too sick or too weak, the other obstacles large and small that perpetually appear just as we're getting up to speed - keep us from living our dreams. Pressfield, a successful writer, discusses creativity and that which opposes it.

Not a bad book on creativity, all in all, though it gets a little God-heavy toward the end: all creativity must come from Outside, all resistance is self-manufactured and against the will of the universe, etc. He also makes the questionable claim that ADD and other issues (like depression) are largely the creations of the ad and pharmaceutical industries... a potentially dangerous notion for conditions like serious depression. (I want to believe that he meant it's too easy to make up the excuse - "I can't finish a project, I must have ADD" - based on ads or cultural osmosis, but that was never clarified, and given how he seemed to consider that exercising creativity would cause even cancer to go into remission...) Otherwise decent, though I prefer Julia Cameron's take on similar subjects.

It (Stephen King, horror, in paperback): In the summer of 1958, seven bullied children in the New England town of Derry, Maine faced down a predatory creature lurking in the depths - the first to do so in its long centuries of existence. In 1985, It has returned, again preying on children. Now grown, having forgotten the horrors they faced, the seven must confront the monster again - but can they succeed, now that they're too old to believe in magic and miracles?

A doorstop novel, It is a classic for a reason, building complete characters and a complete town with a long history of horror. In many ways, it's not just a horror novel, but a story about the struggles of growing up, the repeated cycles in life that shape who we are and what we can (or cannot) become, and the necessary sacrifices of transformation that continue throughout our lives. The monster is a truly nasty creation, and the tale is infused with a sense of inevitable dread, the knowledge that nobody - not even the nominal heroes - are guaranteed safe passage or survival. Cutting back and forth between childhood and adulthood, King masterfully evokes the spirit of both the late 1950's and childhood itself; unlike Bradbury, who seemed to view youth as a magical and carefree time for the most part, King acknowledges that being a kid can be lousy at times even without supernatural forces preying on one's fears, a more nuanced and authentic vision. After a slow and a bit of a scattered start, it builds to a great climax and bittersweet but fitting wrap-up. Though some of the extra worldbuilding tangents felt a bit overlong, overall I quite enjoyed it. (This is also the second long King novel I've read, the other being the excellent 11/22/63; so far, I enjoy the doorstops more than the regular-sized novels.)


Currently Reading:
Unf*ck Your Habitat (Rachel Hoffman, organization, in hardcover): We all could use a little help cleaning up, but not everyone can afford custom closets; some of us have families or roommates or jobs or lives. Hoffman promises methods that will work for most anyone, not just Martha Stewart or Oprah.

The title grabbed me, and it got decent reviews on Amazon, so fingers crossed it delivers what it promises. I particularly like the idea of organization tips that will work when people around you aren't on board (or can't be relied upon)...

From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (E. L. Konigsburg, children's mystery, on Kindle): Two kids run away from home to live in a museum in New York City.

I just started this classic, and so far it's holding my attention.

And I still haven't finished Boria Sax's Imaginary Animals... tempted to just nuke it, but I don't want it to win...
 

DanielSTJ

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Little Dorritt- Charles Dickens
The Great Liners- Time-Life Books
Middlemarch- George Elliot
Akira- Katsuhiro Otomo
Les épreuves- Sully Prudhomme (in French)
 

Chris P

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About 10% into White Oleander by Janet Fitch. Nice atmosphere, but stuff needs to start happening.