What books are you reading?

Recently finished The Colorado Kid. I found the whole thing tedious and the ending made me want to drive to Maine and punch Stephen King in the face.

craniac wrote: Stuff I've checked out and hope to read before it all comes due:

Planetary Omnibus
Animal Man Omnibus (will check out tomorrow)
The Big Sleep (want to study the style)
The Sheltering Sky (written by Paul Bowles, an expat who spent his life in Morocco. Hoping it helps me frame my experience in the Gulf)
Some practical books on writing poetry
The Man in the High Castle
I'm on page 280 of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Zzzzzz....

Planetary: great
Animal man: pretty good
The Man in the High Castle: I need to talk with someone about this.
Jonathan Strange: on the shelf, unfinished. Maybe I'll watch the TeeVee version.

Currently reading: Natural Born Heroes by the guy that wrote "Born to Run" which was really good. NBH feels like a glued together combination of adventure/health. Doesn't quite work for me so I'm going to speed read the remaining 150 pages. It feels like he's trying to sell movie rights.

Gary Sax wrote: Are any of you guys on goodreads? Goodreads is one of my favorite uses of social media because I can see what others are reading and see how they rate them---even if they very different tastes than I do. But it isn't like chatty and personal.

www.goodreads.com/user/show/919422-mark-c

Yes.

www.goodreads.com/user/show/10119901-paul

I am reading The Devil in the White City, a non-fiction book about the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and also the Holmes Murder Castle. The odd juxtaposition of the two topics works well, allowing the writer to examine various thematic differences and similarities and the overall zeitgeist that encompassed such wonder and horror in close proximity. It was an exciting time in the history of Chicago, to say the least.

Goodreads

www.goodreads.com/user/show/3979104-iguanaditty

I just read this post in the "What TV shows..." thread:

craniac wrote:

iguanaDitty wrote:

Not Sure wrote:

iguanaDitty wrote:

hotseatgames wrote: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a really cool BBC show about two magic users in the 1800's. I've never seen a more gorgeous show with the exception of Downton Abbey, and this show is more engaging than that one.

Ooh I've been looking forward to this one. Tried to read the book ages ago and kinda bogged down in the unrelenting period drama-ness of it, which I find slightly more palatable in video form.

Total opposite for me on the book, I really enjoyed it. The unrelenting footnotes were a feature for me, not a distraction.

I'll definitely have to check this out, I had no idea it existed until this thread.

(but I think your experience with the book is more typical. Most of my friends abandoned it quite quickly.)

I think I liked the footnotes more than the main story for the bits I read, actually. It just took so long to get anywhere; I tend to have patience but either I didn't when I read it or I ran out.

Ive ground to a halt about 220 pages into the book.

If you like footnotes in books, I'd recommend you check out Jeff Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen. It's a collection of shortish tales, each very different from the next, set in the alternate world city of Ambergris, and it's totally wonderful. Sequels Shriek: An Afterword and Finch (this one a noir detective tale) are also delectable. Literate fantasy at its finest with nary an elf or spell caster in sight.

I picked up The Atlantis Gene, (it's fiction and fiction doesn't hold my interest so much these days) and it was cooking right along. A good premise, good characters and the storyline was really tight. Even the techy stuff was on the mark. It had me fully engaged.

Then one of the characters started reading someone's journal, and the contents of the journal became the story. And I didn't give a damn about the journal's story. Then one of the characters in the journal started telling a story, and the story of the character in the contents of the journal that the character was reading in the actual story became the story. Three levels of recursion. The book has come to a complete stop at the moment, and I'm listening to it text-to-speech while I drive so I can't skip ahead very easily. I've gone from enjoying the book to "let's get this over with and move on" in short order.

One of the characters even mentioned the idea of skipping to the end of the journal to get to the important part, and I said "hell yes!" out loud as I drove hoping they would do that. No such luck. The main story in the book has extreme time pressure involved in it, and these two characters are casually reading this journal to each other while drones are trying to kill them.

Here's hoping things get back on track in the evening drive home, because if they don't I'm deleting this pig and moving on to Fire in the Sky, one of the other books I picked up for $0.99 at the same time.

Sounds like my experience with Infinite Jest. Couldn't get past few hundred pages of bleeech

I'm going back and reading a bunch of books that I should have read in high school but never did for some reason or another. Currently on my list are:

* Robinson Crusoe (halfway finished)
* To Kill a Mockingbird
* The last few Sherlock Holmes stories I hadn't finished.
* 1984

The Fold by Peter Clines.

Excellent hard sci fi with a quantum edge.

I'm reading a book called Fellowship of the Ring. Its about these things called Hobbits that seem to be a ripoff of Halflings from D&D.

I am never reading another goddamned fiction book ever again for the rest of my life. This I vow.

S.

I'm split between a lot of books. I just started "A Transformation of the World" about the 19th century. I hope I finish this one...