Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by orlok

Be interested to know what you think. I've read #4, The Girl in the Spider's Web, and ATM have decided not to bother with any more.

I read The Girl in the Spider's Web as well, and I was glad I had got it on a free promotion. It just didn't have the spark of the first three. It's not really surprising, it's not easy to reproduce a best-selling style.

Also, I'm astonished to find that they did not use the same translator for the English language version as for the first three books.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

Finished listening to The Long Way to a Small and Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. Very enjoyable.

That is an excellent book. I loved it.

[Dngrsone]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

That is an excellent book. I loved it.

I am looking forward to her third book, due out next year.

[JSWolf]

I've been reading Bucky F&%@ing Dent by David Duchovny for the book club and so far, its rather underwhelming and it's supposed to be funny, but it's not. I'll give it a go again later and see if it gets better. It cannot get worse.

Ted Fullilove, aka Mr. Peanut, is not like other Ivy League grads. He shares an apartment with Goldberg, his beloved battery-operated fish, sleeps on a bed littered with yellow legal pads penned with what he hopes will be the next great American Novel, and spends the waning days of the Carter administration at Yankee Stadium, waxing poetic while slinging peanuts to pay the rent.

When Ted hears the news that his estranged father, Marty, is dying of lung cancer, he immediately moves back into his childhood home, where a whirlwind of revelations ensues. The browbeating absentee father of Ted’s youth tries to make up for lost time, but his health dips drastically whenever his beloved Red Sox lose. And so, with help from Mariana—the Nuyorican grief counselor with whom Ted promptly falls in love—and a crew of neighborhood old-timers, Ted orchestrates the illusion of a Boston winning streak, enabling Marty and the Red Sox to reverse the Curse of the Bambino and cruise their way to World Series victory. Well, sort of.

So for now, I've decided to read something different. I'm reading the 17th Spenser book. I'm now reading Stardust by Robert B. Parker.

Spenser's never had a client like Jill Joyce, the star of TV's Fifty Minutes. She's beautiful, bitchy, sexy--and someone is stalking her. Spenser can hardly blame the would-be assassin...until he means the true meaning of "stage fright."

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

I am looking forward to her third book, due out next year.

Sometime later this year I'll read the second book before the third is available.

[Dngrsone]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Sometime later this year I'll read the second book before the third is available.

Me too, LOL: it's queued up after Goblet of Fire. Meanwhile, I have Anne Leckie's latest queued up after my current non-fic read.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

The Ruin of Angels by Max Gladstone

Which was most enjoyable. A fascinating system of magic and divinity, and nice to see hints of future problems.

Next up: The Icarus Hunt by Timothy Zahn. Looking like a fun SF romp at the moment.

[onewiththeanswer]

I am currently reading The Hating Game: A Novel by Sally Thorne which a friend of mine suggested several months ago and I was postponing for so long. The book has a comic scent which I really enjoy!

[Cinisajoy]

I am currently reading Sweet Potato Queens Book of Love. It is a humorous book.
It is by Jill Conner Browne.
I already read the cookbook. Also hilarious. It went into the special category of read this and gain 10 pounds.

[issybird]

I've been immersing myself in darkest London lately.

I abandoned Little Dorrit as far too tedious as few months ago, so it was with some trepidation that I started what is supposedly Dickens's least-read novel, Barnaby Rudge, his "other" historical fiction, set during the Gordon Riots. I was enthralled, as it turns out. Wonderfully evocative setting and characters, marred only slightly by too much coincidence.

At the same time, I've been reading They All Love Jack by the film-maker Bruce Robinson, an excoriating account of the intentionally botched investigation into Jack the Ripper to serve the ends of the aristocratic and power elite. His tone of high umbrage suits the material and while I don't have the background to judge the merits of his own Ripper candidate, I am entirely persuaded by his account of corruption in high places.

Both of these books are easily among the best I've read all year.

[orlok]

Originally Posted by issybird

At the same time, I've been reading They All Love Jack by the film-maker Bruce Robinson, an excoriating account of the intentionally botched investigation into Jack the Ripper to serve the ends of the aristocratic and power elite. His tone of high umbrage suits the material and while I don't have the background to judge the merits of his own Ripper candidate, I am entirely persuaded by his account of corruption in high places.

Thanks for the recommendation. Having just recently listened to Jack the Ripper: Case Closed by Gyles Brandreth (a fictional account of Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde investigating the potential candidates for Jack), this looks worth a read. I haven't yet researched Brandreth's conclusion as to who Jack was, but it made sense at the time.

(And the director of the marvellous Withnail & I must be worth a try, IMHO )

[kansaskyle]

Originally Posted by issybird

I abandoned Little Dorrit as far too tedious as few months ago, so it was with some trepidation that I started what is supposedly Dickens's least-read novel, Barnaby Rudge, his "other" historical fiction, set during the Gordon Riots. I was enthralled, as it turns out. Wonderfully evocative setting and characters, marred only slightly by too much coincidence.

I'm sorry to see you abandoned Little Dorrit. I enjoyed the view into the debtor's prison system, love of family, and there was even a mystery thrown into the mix!

Thanks for mentioning Barnaby Rudge. I'll add it to my list.

I'm currently reading Dickens' Nicholas Nickelby.

[astrangerhere]

Been SUPER busy packing for the move, so I am behind posting here. Since my last check-in I have finished:

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (audio)
Shadows in Bronze (Flaco #2) by Lindsey Davis

[Rev. Bob]

DC Comics had a digital sale last weekend on several of their crossover books. In addition to the expected fare, such as the Batman/Predator collection, they also included their recent crossovers with the WB "Looney Tunes" characters. One of those handled the idea in the usual way, with the DC and LT universes meeting via Mr. Mxyzptlk, but the other six... well. Those were independent one-shots, each with a "lead" story in the DC style and a short LT-style backup feature. In no particular order:

Batman/Elmer Fudd
Legion of Super-Heroes/Bugs Bunny
Jonah Hex/Yosemite Sam
Wonder Woman/Tazmanian Devil
Lobo/Road Runner
Martian Manhunter/Marvin the Martian

Each of those took one of three general approaches. Batman gave us human versions of the LT characters - underworld characters with mannerisms and features reminiscent of the talking animals. MM and LoSH went to the other extreme, using a gizmo to bring the recognizable LT characters into their setting for a quick encounter. Hex, WW, and Lobo did something better, though: they made generally plausible (for comic book values of plausibility) attempts to put more realistic versions of the LT characters in the DC setting, then arrange meetings.

I liked the LoSH story the least, primarily because it was trying too hard to poke fun at its own tropes. A Legion fan might enjoy it more, but as a casual reader, it just fell flat. Similarly, the double-Martian issue got tired in a hurry. Yes, I get that it seems like a natural pairing, but like the LoSH tale, it relied too much on the "control the nutty visitor until you can send him home" plot for my taste.

The Batman story was a credible Batman tale, as told from Elmer's POV, but most of the entertainment value was in the novelty of the concept and in playing "spot the Easter egg" to identify the more obscure characters. WW was perhaps the most organic fit, using Taz as a guardian of the Labyrinth and thereby not having to change much of anything to tell the story. Jonah Hex was almost as good, but suffered IMO from the decision to use Foghorn Leghorn as a literal rooster-man circus freak. Aside from that, it played as a pretty serviceable Western.

Surprisingly, my favorite issue had to be Lobo/Road Runner. In this combo, Acme uses the Roswell crash to get into genetic tampering, using alien DNA and captured animals to create hybrids. The coyote engineers a lab accident MacGyver-style, then spends the next seventy years chasing the similarly-enhanced Road Runner. (Yes, that puts the assorted shorts squarely into the story's continuity, and a glorious one-page montage shows the passage of time.) Once they reach the present day, the coyote manages to hire Lobo to take out his nemesis, and what follows is absolutely priceless. All I'm gonna say is that Lobo made for an able stand-in, and the last panel left me green with envy.

These were definitely on the short side at about 40 pages each, and the normal price is too expensive (or maybe I'm just old), but they were generally decent reads, earning three to five stars from me.

Yes, I gave a Lobo story five stars. Never thought I'd see the day...

[BenG]

I finally got around to reading A Memory of Light, the 14th and final volume of The Wheel of Time. It took me about 21 years to get to this point.

I finished a few of those "I should read that someday" books over the summer: Jane Eyre, Brideshead Revisited, and Being There by Jerzy Kosinski. I liked them all, maybe Brideshead a little more than the others.

For October I'm listening to The Uninvited by Dorothy Macardle. A ghost story that was made into a 1944 movie with Ray Milland.

Valancourt books just released Blackwater: The Complete Saga by Michael McDowell. It's an omnibus version of McDowell's southern gothic/horror series, The Flood, The Levee, The House, The War, The Fortune, and Rain. It's as if The Shadow over Innsmouth were written as a generational family saga and set in rural Alabama. The horror takes a backseat to the Caskey family story. The individual books were less than 200 pages each so it's not as long as you might think. I'll be re-reading that next.

Also up is Malpertuis a surrealistic horror/fantasy by Jean Ray, the Flemish Edgar Allen Poe.