What are you reading? V1

[Fresh Prince]

10 hours ago, StevenK said:

Just finished reading - A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. It’s free on Prime, so I said why not. 
 

Wow! It was enjoyable and thrilling. Interested to see if they would turn this into a movie because I think they easily could. Pretty good twist, especially the ending. 

What’s it about?

[StevenK]

34 minutes ago, Fresh Prince said:

What’s it about?

It’s a horror/thriller. Without giving away too much information. The book is set in current time through the eyes of Merry, their 8 year old daughter. Her older sister Marjorie starts acting weird as if she’s possessed. Her dad who recently has been laid off requests that she has an exorcism. A network hears about the situation and gives them a contract to record their family during the timeline for a reality show - The Possession. 

[Daniel]

So Underworld is overrated.  It was an enjoyable read, but it was a little bloated.  And there was pretty much no central arc at all.  One of those books that's written around theme more than plot, and I can get behind that (Blood Meridian is one of my favorite books of all time, and the plot is weak as hell), but here it was really all over the place.

It reads more like a collection of vignettes that are vaguely intertwined more than a novel.  There are over a dozen POV characters (including J Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, and Jackie Gleeson) and the novel skips in time from the 50s to the 80s, not in chronological order.  Still, an interesting read, but I don't think it's the masterpiece it's supposed to be.  Mao II was better.

Starting The Black Company now, because some lighter reading is needed after a dense 800+ page novel.

[skywindO2]

Finished the second book of the Arcane Ascension series(On the Shoulders of Titans) and I'm hooked. The author actually recommends 5 other books of his in the same world before starting the next in the series. About to go all in on Andrew Rowe.

Great fantasy series if you like detailed magic systems. Like, quite literally the rules of D&D magic or magic in a video game, but in a book. 

[Fresh Prince]

200 pages into Salems Lot and it’s a slow burn, not much has happened yet. Hopefully it picks up.

[MikeT14]

9 hours ago, Fresh Prince said:

200 pages into Salems Lot and it’s a slow burn, not much has happened yet. Hopefully it picks up.

Honestly? It's down the list of King books for me. I didn't hate it but didn't love it either. 

[MikeT14]

Reading my first Harry Hole novel, Knife. I actually really enjoy it so far. 

[Daniel]

Finished The Black Company yesterday. It was fine. Pretty predictable genre fiction, but decent character work.

I had things I didn’t like about the writing style, but it’s an extremely easy read. Gonna finish the series between more difficult books.

Started The Tall Woman by Wilma Dykeman because I am trying to read more local writers.

[skywindO2]

On 6/25/2022 at 8:27 PM, skywindO2 said:

Finished the second book of the Arcane Ascension series(On the Shoulders of Titans) and I'm hooked. The author actually recommends 5 other books of his in the same world before starting the next in the series. About to go all in on Andrew Rowe.

Great fantasy series if you like detailed magic systems. Like, quite literally the rules of D&D magic or magic in a video game, but in a book. 

 

1 chapter in and I'm hooked.

[Daniel]

Finished The Tall Woman.  Follows a woman from marriage to death in Appalachia starting in the Civil War.  Husband a Unionist, most others in the community confederates.  Pretty good.  Very familiar for someone like me who grew up in Appalachia.  Very reminiscent of stories my grandmother would tell about her childhood.

Started the second book of The Black Company, called Shadows Linger.  Not super high expectations, the first one was pretty tropey, but it was also an easy read, so this one will probably be too.

[titansNvolsR#1]

On 6/26/2022 at 9:27 AM, skywindO2 said:

Finished the second book of the Arcane Ascension series(On the Shoulders of Titans) and I'm hooked. The author actually recommends 5 other books of his in the same world before starting the next in the series. About to go all in on Andrew Rowe.

Great fantasy series if you like detailed magic systems. Like, quite literally the rules of D&D magic or magic in a video game, but in a book. 

Going to start book 1 of this series after I finish Red Rising trilogy. Just finished book two if that one. 

[Daniel]

Shadows Linger was about what I expected. Not as tropey, told from two different viewpoints, and the author added “Uhm”s to the dialogue—author trying to flex a bit more.

Still well paced, easy reading. Would recommend to people who like dark fantasy stuff. It took me, what, four days to read?

Starting A Summons to Memphis now. Second book set in Tennessee, but this from an outsider perspective. Will finish the Black Company trilogy after that.

 

[JohnChimpo]

On 3/1/2022 at 9:13 AM, Daniel said:

Portrait isn’t a light read, but it is way less work to parse out than Ulysses. Minus the slog in the middle where he makes you read an entire church sermon, its one of my all time favorite books.

If you have any familiarity with stream of conscious, it won’t be tough.

Dubliners isn’t bad either. It’s a bunch of short stories, and some are really good, some not as much. Some characters reappear in Ulysses, iirc. But it’s not required reading.

My college professor that taught the course on James Joyce told people not to bother with Finnegan’s Wake, because “Ulysses can be near incomprehensible, Finnegan’s Wake just is.”

I finally finished the Ulysses audiobook yesterday. It’s normal for a book of that size to take me that long because I bounce back and forth between a number of downloaded audiobooks at any given time, but you were right that Ulysses was particularly difficult.
 

I didn’t even try to understand it like I would with a normal book. I just let it play without focusing too hard, and honestly, it was really enjoyable that way. The narrators were amazing. The last couple chapters from the woman’s perspective really caught me off guard. I didn’t expect that kind of language from a book published 100 years ago. Lol

[Daniel]

6 hours ago, JohnChimpo said:

I finally finished the Ulysses audiobook yesterday. It’s normal for a book of that size to take me that long because I bounce back and forth between a number of downloaded audiobooks at any given time, but you were right that Ulysses was particularly difficult.
 

I didn’t even try to understand it like I would with a normal book. I just let it play without focusing too hard, and honestly, it was really enjoyable that way. The narrators were amazing. The last couple chapters from the woman’s perspective really caught me off guard. I didn’t expect that kind of language from a book published 100 years ago. Lol

Yeah, it's a tough one.  I tried multiple times, and I like Joyce's earlier works, read mostly modern lit, and majored in English.  Anyone who claims to have understood it straight up the first time through is full of crap.  Especially with how so much of it involves Irish politics from that specific time in 1922.

Still, it's worth the read.  I'm glad I got through it, and you should be too.

I think I need to reread To the Lighthouse.  I remember I enjoyed Woolf way more than Joyce in general, even though their writing styles are very similar.  She and Ford Maddox Ford are (to me) the more interesting of the super heady early modernists.

I finished A Summons to Memphis, and while the plot was very weak, it was well written.  I really enjoyed how rooted in time and place it was.  Article that recommended it and The Tall Woman as representative of Tennessee was spot on.

Finishing up The Black Company trilogy now.  Next up after that is Call for the Dead, a John Le Carre novel (one of the George Smiley novels).  Very much like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, so I'm looking forward to this one too.

[JohnChimpo]

43 minutes ago, Daniel said:

Yeah, it's a tough one.  I tried multiple times, and I like Joyce's earlier works, read mostly modern lit, and majored in English.  Anyone who claims to have understood it straight up the first time through is full of crap.  Especially with how so much of it involves Irish politics from that specific time in 1922.

Still, it's worth the read.  I'm glad I got through it, and you should be too.

I think I need to reread To the Lighthouse.  I remember I enjoyed Woolf way more than Joyce in general, even though their writing styles are very similar.  She and Ford Maddox Ford are (to me) the more interesting of the super heady early modernists.

I finished A Summons to Memphis, and while the plot was very weak, it was well written.  I really enjoyed how rooted in time and place it was.  Article that recommended it and The Tall Woman as representative of Tennessee was spot on.

Finishing up The Black Company trilogy now.  Next up after that is Call for the Dead, a John Le Carre novel (one of the George Smiley novels).  Very much like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, so I'm looking forward to this one too.

I am glad I got through it. I haven’t read any of Woolf’s work, but it’s funny you should mention her because I just read on the Ulysses Wikipedia page yesterday that she said this about it:

"Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster."

I haven’t read any Le Carre either, but I am planning on it. I have heard great things.