What book is everyone reading at the moment? Part 2.

I think the sequel to House in the Cerulean Sea (Somewhere Beyond the Sea or whatever its name is) might be next on my reading list. Loved the first book despite the controversy, and I'm curious if the second will be as good. Then again I was kinda bummed on the author's other book about that inn that welcomed people who were on their way to the afterlife.
 
catsmate said:
Starting John Burtt's 'Operation C3 - Hitler’s Plan to Invade Malta 1942'.
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If I may quote myself, it wasn't worth it. The book needs proofing, editing and general work. It doesn't seem to know if it's an academic alt-hist or a thriller and does both badly. Completely ignoring the consequences of an Axis conquest of Malta was also annoying.
Oh and research is needed.
 
catsmate said:
Wrt mystery solving cats (and boat living) Shearer's The Cat Who Caught a Killer series is pretty good.
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Damn it! Now I have to get a look at that series and read it too... just kidding.

Thanx for the recommendation, catsmate!!


ETA: I put it on hold (with a four-week waiting period), but I was also able to borrow To Kill A Mockingbird, so that's what I'll be reading next after Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain.

Of course, this series is not to be mistaken for the Cat Who series by Lilian Jackson Braun.

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I am now reading a book called UFOs by Leslie Kean. It contains numerous reports of sightings of UFOs by all kinds of reliable witnesses. This includes Generals in charge of the air force, and many pilots, both air force and commercial and private pilots. The conclusion being that some thing we call UFOs (unidentified flying objects) or UAPs ( unidentified aerial phenomena) do exist. But they are as yet unidentified.
 
I've just finished reading Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain by Richard Roberts, and next I'm moving to
To Kill a Mockingbird, and then onto Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe. It's considered by many to be the very first "detective" story.

Anyway, I loved Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain, but it's definitely not your everyday superhero novel, because it's more of a parody or satire of the genre than an actual narrative of how an ordinary human becomes one, like how Peter Parker became Spiderman. At first, I was thrown by that, but as I continued to read it, I found it not only funny and heartwarming but also very entertaining. Some of the characters were a bit much, but some of them touched me deeply.

I recommend it very highly to anyone who loves superhero parodies or just as an off-the-wall story with some supervillains that weren't all that villainy.


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I'm on a Joe Lansdale kick right now. Like Stephen King, Lansdale is one of those authors that Just Keeps Writing. He's been around a while, and a lot of his work falls more or less into the "pulp" or "neo-pulp" meta-genres. That's the way it feels to me.

Lansdale is pretty comfortable writing in a few different genres and voices. He tends towards the macabre, but also has a good sense of the heartfelt and the soulful. He likes setting stories in the southwest. East Texas especially is a recurring backdrop for his thrillers. Currently I'm in the middle of Sunset and Sawdust, which functions as Wild West origin story for a town that has featured in several of his other stories. I'm also in the middle of a couple short story collections, which I'm pausing from so as not to get too saturated. One of the collections purports to be all his gunslinger Reverend stories, which are of the Weird West type.

I started reading his "men's adventure" series, Hap and Leonard, at the end of a Walter Mosley kick, and got it in my head that it was another Mosley series. I didn't much care for it, thinking it was a change of voice for Mosley. Coming back to Hap and Leonard knowing it's Lansdale, I like them better.

H&L is basically Lansdale's answer to Travis McGee and the Elmore Leonard pulps. Hap is a good ol' boy's good ol' boy, a cracker's cracker. He got up out of the river bottoms of East Texas to protest the Vietnam war, and went to prison for it. Leonard is a gay black man who volunteered and fought in Vietnam. The two of them are childhood friends, and after their respective travails, they get back together in the river bottoms of East Texas. Bromance, fish frys, and pulp thrills ensue.
 
I'm almost done reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and then I'll be onto Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe. It's considered by many to be the first detective story.

I enjoyed reading To Kill a Mockingbird very, very much. It's another classic novel that's written in the first person, and it's also one of the books I read AFTER I saw the movie with Gregory Peck. It also uses the "n" word quite freely, but not quite as freely as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. It's probably one of those books (like the former) that PC teachers will be reluctant to put on any student's reading list for that very reason.

Although it was written as a childhood memory of a long-ago event, you could almost swear it was written by a young girl who just happened to be a tomboy, and some of her expressions and explanations were hilarious.

I might've been influenced by the movie, but while I was reading it, I could see and hear Gregory Peck as Atticus and Mary Badham as Scout. They were the perfect choice to play each part, and the courtroom scene with Peter Brocks (playing Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman) is IMO one of the most riveting that I've ever seen in a movie.

I recommend it very highly, especially if you enjoy the good guys overcoming evil, but I'm not going to give away the ending to prove it.

I think I can explain why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird without it being a spoiler, but just in case:

SPOILER ALERT:


From the book itself:

"Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird."
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Finished Interesting Times, in which Rincewind visits the homeland of his old buddy Twoflower and reluctantly takes part in a very polite rebellion against the Emperor and an impolite barbarian invasion led by Cohen the Barbarian. Now into Rincewind's next adventure, The Last Continent, in which he visits the land down under and becomes an extremely nervous national hero.
 
I just got done reading the Murders in the Rue Morgue, and now I'm moving onto Oliver Twist for my next read.

The actual murders in the Murders in the Rue Morgue are at best a bloody mess, and at worst horrifying, but I won't tell you who did it. Anyone who has read it already knows who that is. What I found interesting was not only that many folks consider it to be the first detective novel ever (it's actually a short story), but that Edgar Allen Poe also referred to it as one of his "tales of ratiocination."

Ratiocination means the process of logical reasoning and considering that it was written in 1841, I think it can probably be construed that it helped to influence another great detective, because A Study in Scarlet was written almost 40 years later in 1887, and as any Sherlock Holmes fan knows, that's the first Watson-Holmes story ever written. Ratiocination is a very, very prominent feature in those stories too.

Now, I don't know if the last paragraph is true, but I contend that it's a logical inference, and although I recommend Murders in the Rue Morgue to anyone who loves Poe or just likes a good detective story, be forewarned that the murders themselves are pretty gruesome.


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Lennart Hyland said:
Finished with Eichmann a while ago. Due to family issues I had a involuntarily break from reading.
But the issues has been resolved and I've just started with Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
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Finished The Grapes of Wrath yesterday and what an fantastic novel it is! I love Steinbeck and this one got all the things he is so good at.
The characters, dialogue, environment etc etc everything is just so perfect. Is it better than East of Eden? Maybe...

Haven´t decided my next read yet.
 
I just got done reading Oliver Twist, and now I'm moving onto Fahrenheit 451.

There were so many hateful and evil people in Oliver Twist that when I read the parts about those who were kindhearted, it almost made up for all the darkness in the rest of the book. Unfortunately, there was one bit of evil towards the end that was so heartbreaking that its memory will never allow me to read another word or book by Charles Dickens.

Some authors (because they can) write into their stories a murder that is so evil it defies description, and it seems to me that they do it just to give their writing more realism and not because it advances the story one iota. I hate writers or stories like that. I've read enough of that type of evil in my research of serial killers and in the daily news to last me a lifetime, and I definitely don't need to read the same kind of thing while reading books for pleasure.

Some folks pretend like it doesn't bother them, and I don't like those people either.


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The Dark Half, by Stephen King

Part of my project of re "reading" old reads as audiobooks. The combination of time and a different voice gives a fresh experience of the work.

This is also part of my project to work backwards from Needful Things, through King's "Castle Rock" arc. Having recently given Needful Things the same treatment, I was struck by how much it really is a kiss-off to the metastasizing shared universe he'd been indulging. It's almost a pastiche of King's body of work up to that point. I think the main reason it's not a great book is that it takes itself too seriously. If it had been a little more satirical, it might have worked better. On the other hand, I'm not sure King could write good satire if he tried. So maybe it's better if he sticks to that earnest voice he's developed so well.

Anyway, The Dark Half is pretty good so far. Straightforward, earnest ghost story. My biggest complaint is that King is using a technique of very short, cliff-hanger sub chapters:


Chapter One: Something Happens

1
Something is going to happen.

2
Something is starting to happen.

3
It hasn't happened yet, but we're getting there.

4
The happening is almost upon us!

Chapter Two: Something Else Is Happening Somewhere Else

[ . . . ]

Chapter Three: That Chapter One Thing Is Still Happening

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It's not a huge problem, but sometimes the effect for me is more frustration than suspense.

I'm looking forward to listening to The Dead Zone after this. I don't plan on listening to Cujo, though. I never read it, and I intend to continue that streak. You ever have a book that you assume would be a fine read, but something about the premise just doesn't do it for you? For me, it's Cujo.
 
theprestige said:
The Dark Half, by Stephen King

Part of my project of re "reading" old reads as audiobooks. The combination of time and a different voice gives a fresh experience of the work.
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Yeah, my problem with King is most of his endings (not all, but most) suck.

When I read Salem's Lot, I decided to never read any of his books again, because he killed off a character that I really liked just because Bram Stoker did it. To me, what he did was stupid. The copy I read also had a foreword where he explained where some of his plot decisions came from.

I will give him credit for creating characters that make you want to keep reading his books, and the ending of Under the Dome was very intriguing.


ETA: Personally, I have nothing against the guy (and not to mention, he's a big fan of my favorite baseball team, and he doesn't particularly care for trump). I once sent him a letter asking for an interview, and he replied and apologized, because he was in the middle of a big project (the movie Creepshow) and was too busy at the moment, and I never tried again, because I just got too busy myself and forgot all about it until today.

As far as I'm concerned, he's one of the good guys.


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I've never really had a problem with King's endings. Whatever it is that other people think they see, I don't see it at all. Never have, never will. Like, I thought the ending of the Stand worked just fine, the first time I read it. Wasn't really in the mood on the second read-through though.

That said, the ending to Needful Things is pretty ass. But that's because the book overall isn't that great, so the ending fits just fine.

And the ending to the Dark Tower saga is an absolute banger.
 
theprestige said:
I've never really had a problem with King's endings. Whatever it is that other people think they see, I don't see it at all. Never have, never will. Like, I thought the
ending of the Stand worked just fine, the first time I read it. Wasn't really in the mood on the second read-through though.

That said, the ending to Needful Things is pretty ass. But that's because the book overall isn't that great, so the ending fits just fine.

And the ending to the Dark Tower saga is an absolute banger.
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Yeah right. The ending of The Stand was stupid. King was tired of writing the story and just wanted to end it quickly.


A guy riding into Las Vegas (while all the evil folks were at a meeting/rally at that very spot) on a nuclear missile that conveniently blows up and ends the evil empire was beyond unbelievable, even for a science-fiction horror story, although, I did enjoy reading it up until then.


The ending of Under the Dome was way better.


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theprestige said:
I've never really had a problem with King's endings. Whatever it is that other people think they see, I don't see it at all. Never have, never will. Like, I thought the ending of the Stand worked just fine, the first time I read it. Wasn't really in the mood on the second read-through though.

That said, the ending to Needful Things is pretty ass. But that's because the book overall isn't that great, so the ending fits just fine.

And the ending to the Dark Tower saga is an absolute banger.
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Isn't that the one where the main character...


...ends up going back to the very beginning and has to start all over again? A friend of mine read it, and he told me that's what happened. I could be wrong, but If that's true, that's another stupid ending.



Another stupid ending was 11/22/63.


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Don't get me wrong, the prestige, I love the way he writes his characters, but the endings don't need to be stupid. He's a better writer than that.


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