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

I'm also in the process of reading She Is The Ancient, a sourcebook/companion/supplement for the D&D campaign Curse of Strahd.
It'd subtitled 'A Genderbent Curse of Strahd Guidebook' so no doubt it drives those TTRPGamers who take the Woke Menace seriously into hysterical fits......
;)

I'm considering running part of Strahd reset into a large depression within my Glimmer Drift setting as a different campaign.
 
catsmate said:
I'm also in the process of reading She Is The Ancient, a sourcebook/companion/supplement for the D&D campaign Curse of Strahd.
It'd subtitled 'A Genderbent Curse of Strahd Guidebook' so no doubt it drives those TTRPGamers who take the Woke Menace seriously into hysterical fits......
;)

I'm considering running part of Strahd reset into a large depression within my Glimmer Drift setting as a different campaign.
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That is relevant to my interests.
 
Just finished Unruly by David Mitchell, a somewhat brisk and potted history of the Kings and Queens of England.

It broadly covers the period from Alfred the Great in the early 9th century, to Elizabeth I in the 16th/17th century. The justification for this period is basically that it starts around the same time as the concept of 'England', and monarchs after Elizabeth were rulers of Scotland and England, or Britain, and also slightly less interesting because Parliament became more of the political centre.

It covers enough ground to be interesting without trying to be exhaustive. It's not all serious, but isn't just silly. I found it very readable and well-paced, though it perhaps skipped over some of the characters a little quickly. It does all get a little confusing at times with the aristocracy's habit of giving everyone the same name, but as a place to start, it does the job of bringing the characters to life a little and making them feel a little more real.

What I found he did well was give the big picture of what the concept of a monarch was, how it changed over time, and why that mattered.

No history buff is going to find out anything new, but the novice (like me) may well at least have more of an idea of how things developed over this time.
 
I got a little more than halfway through The Deluge by Stephen Markley when I ran up against a scene that I DID NOT LIKE. As a matter of fact, I HATED IT. If I wanted to read crap like this, I could read the news, so I've returned it unfinished, and now I'm onto The Cat Who Cracked a Cold Case by L.T. Shearer.

I'm not saying don't read The Deluge because some folks love that kind of crap, but I don't.


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In the middle of a rediscovered book series from my childhood public library days. The "Chris Godfrey of UNEXA" series by Hugh Walters. An extensive collection starting with a space race with the Russians to the moon, written AS the space race was happening. Except in this story, a young Englishman is the first on the Moon. As the series went on, the characters visit planets and moons all over the solar system in turn, incorporating the latest space science as the author presumably became aware of it. That makes the early installments kind of wonky: for example the book "Expedition Venus" was written before we had any idea what might be found on the surface.

The stories quickly escalate past what the actual space program achieved.

Currently in "Spaceship to Saturn" (1967) and they're introducing the concept of cryo-sleep for long space missions. Ion engines were already used in previous books, and nuclear reaction assisted launches. It's an interesting experience having it be both ahead of and behind the times all at once.
 
AmyStrange said:
I got a little more than halfway through The Deluge by Stephen Markley when I ran up against a scene that I DID NOT LIKE. As a matter of fact, I HATED IT. If I wanted to read crap like this, I could read the news, so I've returned it unfinished, and now I'm onto The Cat Who Cracked a Cold Case by L.T. Shearer.

I'm not saying don't read The Deluge because some folks love that kind of crap, but I don't.


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What kind of crap is it that turned you off? Because if it was animal torture I'm right there with you.
 
theprestige said:
What kind of crap is it that turned you off? Because if it was animal torture I'm right there with you.
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You may think it's ok, but it just made me sick. I don't need to read about this kind of crap when I'm reading a book for pleasure. I can read this same stuff in the news.


Killing a father (because they couldn't trust him not to rat the killers out), and then his wife, and one of their children, who just happened to be home at the time.



ETA: Of course, I know I'm being hypocritical, because I wrote the same kind of thing in the first chapter in the first book of my talking cat series, but the result of what I wrote was that the guilt forced the criminal to spend the rest of his life saving abused animals. It actually becomes an obsession with him, but I still can't read that part of my book again, and I wrote that crap.


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Worm said:
Just finished Unruly by David Mitchell, a somewhat brisk and potted history of the Kings and Queens of England.

It broadly covers the period from Alfred the Great in the early 9th century, to Elizabeth I in the 16th/17th century. The justification for this period is basically that it starts around the same time as the concept of 'England', and monarchs after Elizabeth were rulers of Scotland and England, or Britain, and also slightly less interesting because Parliament became more of the political centre.

It covers enough ground to be interesting without trying to be exhaustive. It's not all serious, but isn't just silly. I found it very readable and well-paced, though it perhaps skipped over some of the characters a little quickly. It does all get a little confusing at times with the aristocracy's habit of giving everyone the same name, but as a place to start, it does the job of bringing the characters to life a little and making them feel a little more real.

What I found he did well was give the big picture of what the concept of a monarch was, how it changed over time, and why that mattered.

No history buff is going to find out anything new, but the novice (like me) may well at least have more of an idea of how things developed over this time.
Click to expand...
Good review! I've been reading Unruly off and on, and am two thirds of the way through it.
 
The Fourth Protocol, by Frederick Forsyth.

Classic cold war competence porn. Part of my program to rediscover old favorites via audiobook. Just got past the opening set-piece, which is every bit as cool as I remembered it. Looking forward to the rest. Even as a teenager, I remember being surprised that Forsyth dared to cast the then-living Kim Philby as a major character. Literally the real life spy and traitor, not an expy or fictionalized "loosely based on". I'm still surprised today, especially because Forsyth has the cheek to invent a whole inner life, family, and busman's retirement for him. All in service of this thrilling bit of fiction.

Forsyth, like Ludlum, is one of those thriller writers of which I had the mixed fortune of reading their best works first. Imagine my disappointment, upon discovering that some of their other novels weren't as good as The Fourth Protocol, or The Bourne Identity. It's always weird to me when an author manages to write an absolute banger of a narrative, and then never really demonstrate that level of talent again. Even Tom Clancy managed a pretty good run, to begin with.
 
The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann.

Just finished The Buddenbrooks which I hadn't read since my 20:th. Likewise, The Magic Mountain was some decades since I last read it. Some heavy ◊◊◊◊, both of them!
 
I've been reading the classics since June. Classics like the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Dracula, Moby Dick, Oliver Twist to Alice in Wonderland by C.S. Lewis.

While in College, I took a double-credit class that linked the History of Western Civilization (for the first hour) with the History of Literature (for the second hour), and as we went through each historical period, we also studied the literature that was prominent at the time---from the Odyssey, Epic of Gilgamesh, The Canterbury Tales, La Divina Commedia di Dante, to War and Peace.

IMO, they're all great classics, but to make a long story short, I just got sick of reading them, so until I get I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin from the library (2 more weeks, YEEEEEEEEEha!), I'm gonna read a bunch of pulp fiction books by Erle Stanley Gardner (that are classics to me) for the rest of the year.


ETA: Here's my post with all the books I've read since June (except for the last one):

AmyStrange

Post in thread 'What book is everyone reading at the moment? Part 2.'

Oooops, I forgot that my next book after Mayhem and Madness: Chronicles of a Teenaged Supervillain won't be Murders in the Rue Morgue but instead will be Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain.

And if anyone really cares, here's my list of books in an easier to read format (the one with an X is the one I'm currently reading):

1984
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Dracula
Lord of the Flies
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
Frankenstein
The House of the Seven Gables
A Study in Scarlet
the Hound of the Baskervilles...


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Just finished reading a biography on Frederik III of Denmark, who outplayed the nobility and introduced absolute monarchy in Denmark. Besides that he had some almighty scraps with the Swedes, and tried to juggle a number of alliances and treaties with various other countries, with varying degrees of success.

I've now moved on Antony Beevor's book on the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed. I've made it through the first part of the book, which covers the revolutions of 1917, and jesus wept, if ever there was an event that could have benfited from a bit of hindsight, this was surely it. So many freaking opportunities to curb Lenin and the Bolsheviks...
 
Okay, just finished Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, by Jason Pargin, whom I gushed over when discussing his newest book (I'm Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom). It's about a girl, Zoey, who inherits a mansion and fortune in a near-future dystopian city without police or laws, where everyone broadcasts everything on a network called 'Blink', new skyscrapers can pop up virtually overnight, and billionaires have a lot of power and influence. Oh, and she has people with horrific implants come after her and a huge bounty put on her head. It's basically a thriller with some of I'm Starting to Worry's themes taken to the extreme. In that respect, it was a good pick for a second read.

Surprisingly, though, I... Didn't really care for it. It was his third book, and maybe that's part of the explanation, but in my eyes the setting and plot didn't really make sense. Not sure if I can list examples without spoiling anything. Also, after the two initial horrible villains to come after the hero, the primary villain of the story (Molek) was just... Shallow and irritating. Also, the misogony. God, the misogony. I guess the main villain was supposed to be a laughable parody of an insecure incel manchild compensating by turning into a supervillain (and a contrast to the two that came before him, who were actually genuinely disturbing, and I mean that in a good way), but in the long run, it just got gross, especially with his constant SA threats. Also the heroine gets beaten up horribly towards the end of the book, which coupled with all the hatred of women you encounter in this book was just... Gross. Also pretty much every character in the story was either really shallow and/or really unlikable. Honestly, while I think I got what Pargin was going for throughout most of the book, all in all it just felt... Edgy.

I'll definitely read more from Pargin, but I think I'll try out the John Dies at the End series before reading more of the Zoey trilogy.
 
I've just started reading a bunch of pulp fiction by Erle Stanley Gardner. He is the creator of Perry Mason, probably one of the most famous fictional lawyers of all time, and that's the series that I'm reading right now.

I'm sure everyone has heard the name before, and it's probably more from the 1957-1966 TV series than from the books written by Gardner.

I'm reading the series in order because I've got a little OCD going on with things like that, and after I read each case, I'm also going to watch the corresponding episode of the TV series (the numbers in parenthesis are in the season.episode format). These are the first five "cases" of the book series that I'll be reading (until I can borrow I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin):


#1 The Case of the Velvet Claws (6.22)
#2 The Case of the Sulky Girl (1.5)
#3 The Case of the Lucky Legs (2.2)
#4 The Case of the Howling Dog (2.23)
#5 The Case of the Curious Bride (2.5)


I love Perry Mason, and over the years, I've read each one of the books of the whole series at least six times. This is my seventh time.

IMO, one of the biggest differences between the books and the TV series is the murderers are not the same ones. The writers found a way to pin the murders on someone else, except there was one that did follow the book to the end, but that was rare.

The really BIGGEST difference (IMO) was the relationship between Perry and Della. Don't get me wrong, I loved Raymond Burr as Perry Mason, and Gardner was even quoted as saying the he was the lawyer that he envisioned when he wrote the books (or something to that effect), but for some reason the network (CBS) wouldn't let them have a relationship. As a matter of fact, in the books, Perry asked Della to marry him a least three times.

I think that would've made for a better series, but that's just my opinion. Your mileage may vary of course.

Gardner even put some easter eggs in some of the episodes to hint at it, and there's even a book out about it that someday (when I have some extra money) I'm gonna buy.

Out of all the books in the series that Gardner wrote, only one of them has (what I think is) a very unique aspect to it that is very, very different from the rest of them:


The Case of the Howling Dog has the only client of Perry's that was ACTUALLY guilty of the murder.


And finally, another aspect of Erle Stanley Gardner that not a whole lot of folks know about is that he IS the father of (if not one of the forefathers of) the Innocence Project and other similar organizations.

He deserves this recognition, because of his work with an organization he started called The Court of Last Resort:

The concept for The Court of Last Resort was developed from a popular true crime column of the same name. Written by lawyer-turned-author Erle Stanley Gardner, the column appeared in the monthly magazine Argosy for ten years beginning in September 1948. Gardner enlisted assistance from police, private detectives, and other professional experts to examine the cases of dozens of convicts who maintained their innocence long after their appeals were exhausted.
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When first being adapted for TV, Perry Mason was supposed to be an afternoon serial (soap opera) with a developing love story between Perry and Della. Gardner protested and pulled the rights, but the producers had gone so far that they changed character names and professions and launched (The) Edge of Night, a long-running soap opera, first with and later without the "the" in the title.
 
I've both read the books and seen the show, so I can't remember where this happened, but I remember one case where a prospective client turned up in Perry Mason's office who was about to be arrested for something. Perry Mason then got some people who looked like his client to meet the police witness several times that day in order to confuse the witness identification of his client. Highly unethical, of course, and not the only time something like that happened.

That's when I stopped reading/watching them.
 
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