Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine So what are you READING?

I just finished the Justice League series of novels (I started a thread about them)

I am currently reading "Misquoting Jesus" by Bart D Ehrman. It is not a novel, but about how the text of the Bible has changed, sometimes accidentally and sometimes intentionally. So far the biggest "shocker" was that the story of the Adulteous woman (Let he who is without sin cast the first stone) was an add in.

One of the reasons for accidental mistakes (aside from some of the "scribes" being illiterate) was that the early manuscriots were written without punctuation, all capitalized, and without spaces between words. And the problem with that is illustrated by this example in English.

GODISNOWHERE

Is this "God is nowhere" or "God is now here"?

Oh and Semi, I am glad you liked "Making History"

Quislet, I saw Misquoting Jesus in Borders a couple of weekends ago and almost picked it up. Bart D Ehrman has also written several books about the scriptures that weren't included in the Bible. I've not read them, but they look very interesting and I've had them sitting in my Amazon cart for many months now (that's my way of keeping track of the things I mean to read).

Finished the book about Basques a bit ago. Read the Case Book of Sherlock Holmes and now am reading the Return of Sherlock Holmes.

I love the old Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan-Doyle.

I'm reading Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome - part of the 'Swallows and Amazons' series. I'm steadily working my way through the series, which I've never read before. Why didn't I? If I had gotten to these when I was, say, ten, I would have thought they were the ocelot's overshoes. Oh well; I still like 'em.

Let's see... I haven't been on this thread since last September... So since then I've read...

The latest Star Wars PB trilogy by Troy Denning.
-The Joiner King
-The Unseen Queen
-The Swarm War

They were decent reads, but I'd recommend reading all of the New Jedi Order books first to really appreciate these three.

I read the HC Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader. Not a bad book by any stretch, but there's a little bit of a pattern here where you know the book has limitations going into it. I find I don't remember much about it other than it was a quick read with not enough Vader in it. I like the good guys, but unfortunately you know where the story is going way before the characters do.

I'm ashamed to admit that I've picked up the three available young reader books by Jude Watson, The Last of the Jedi. They are set inbetween Eps 3 and 4 and are surprisingly good, despite being geared at younger readers.

I recently picked up Outbound Flight by Tim Zahn. This is another Star Wars book that tells a pretty good story in its own right, but it also sets up just about all of the other Star Wars books that Zahn scribed. As far as I'm concerned... Zahn can do no wrong in the Star Wars galaxy. He is my favorite SW author.

Other than that... my Dad is in the process of writing his first novel. I've read about half of it. It's a little historical fiction piece set in the late 1700's America. There's a little adventure, a little romance, some Indians, some sci fi, some history, some Brits, a tad bit of combat, and a bit of irony/fate/serendipity. It also has a horse.

So far I'm pretty surprised by it. Taking away as much bias as I possibly can, and I'd tell you if it sucked, it's kept my attention fairly well. He's got a few places that need smoothing, but overall I find myself enjoying it. The best way I can describe it... It's alot like a Louis Lamour book, but with maybe a bit more intrigue or politcal wrangling and sci fi. Its an odd combination, but it works so far.

Best of luck to your dad on his writing efforts, minesurfer.

I've just reading "Mr Tambourine Man: The Life and Legacy of The Byrd's Gene Clark". A pretty sad story about an underrated singer/songwriter who just couldn't handle what fame he did get.

Next up is Tim Power's "On Stranger Tides".

I reading "Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book." I've had this sitting on my bookshelf for about a year now. I've heard great things about it. I'm at page 11, so I don't have a lot to tell you yet.

Just read "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman over the course of a long week-end stuck on a North Sea oil platform.

Very enjoyable read (over 600 pages in his 'preferred text' version). Very well written. Worth a read.

Thriller / mystery / ghost / love / religion / magic / road movie type book.

I enjoyed it. So much so that I hunted down a couple other books by that author (Gerard Jones) and liked them too (Killing Monsters and The Comic Book Heroes, if you're curious).

I recently read a few superhero-relate novels:

Those Who Walk in Darkness by John Ridley. Well-written.

Wild Cards XVII: Death Draws Five by John J. Miller. I'm a huge Wild Cards fan, and this book does tie up the biggest loose plot thread from the original run, but if Martin and co. aren't willing to devote more time to this series they may as well not bother, because this was not one of the stronger entries. I mean, it was okay, but the bar for Wild Cards books has been set pretty high.

Nobody Gets the Girl by James R. Maxey. It wasn't bad. Like a lot of superhero fiction, it was kind of underwritten.

Matthew, as I get more into it, I'll post what I think. So far I'm enjoying the descriptions of turn-of-the-century New York and Cleveland (yes Cleveland - apparently at one time it was the 5th largest city in the U.S. and the most progressive).

Just finsihed reading 'The Know-It-All' by A.J. Jacobs. Was a little hard to get into but overall an excellent read.

Have started two new books. 'The Alchemist' and 'Middlesex.' 'Alchemist' because all my friends tell me to so I finally broke down and bought it. Bought the other at Borders at the Buy Two get Thrid free. That always sucks me in to buying books.

So far I am enjoying 'Middlesex' more.

What sort of book is "Middlesex", rtvu? Sci-fi? horror?

"The Orientalist", by Tom Neiss - the biography of Assad Bey, aka Lev Nussimbaum aka a few other names. He was born in Baku in 1905, to an oil baron and a Russian revolutionary; a Jew who fell in love with Muslim culture just as European/Russian/central Asian society was falling apart. He and his father lived on the run from various revolutions and economic disasters for the rest of their lives. Bey/Nussimbaum ironically became the toast of Nazi society for his anti-Communist writings. A New York newspaper described him: "He hates trouble, but he's ready for anything". A fascinating, complicated look at a turbulent life in very turbulent times.

From Amazon.com

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.
Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:


Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." … I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.
When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas Parsons --

Thank you, Vu - I wonder if Middlesex will be made into a movie as "Virgin Suicides" was?

I bought the comics-industry Golden Age history "Men of Tomorrow" in paperback this past Sunday. I spent all of Sunday night, and every free moment I had yesterday, reading it. That's why I didn't visit LW yesterday. It's that good. And I've still got 100 or so pages left...

I also bought a Jack Kirby bio called "Tales To Astonish." I'll start it as soon as I'm finished "Men of Tomorrow."

Stealth, I'm reading "Men of Tomorrow" right now. It's fascinating adn well written.

Frederic Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, by Bart Beaty. I think every comics fan should read this book. We generally vilify Wertham; I know I did based on what I read from other comics fans and excerpts from Seduction - only a fraction of the man's work. He did condemn the comic books of the 1950s - but the story and his arguments were a lot more complex than we tend to believe. Wertham was a man dedicated to justice, equal rights, defense of the defenseless; he took on jobs as a pyschiatrist that others would not touch for political reasons, operated a free clinic in Harlem, and was often publicly at odds with the established powers.

Another book I read about someone who was seriously misunderstood was about the geneticist Barbara McClintock (A Feeling for the Organism, by Evelyn Fox Keller). This book was written before McClintock was nominated for and received the Nobel Prize (1983). McClintock discovered transposition ("gene jumping") back in the 50s, but was unable to communicate the importance of this discovery. (Being female didn't help.) Transposition was re-discovered in the 80s, and McClintock's work finally acknowledged. Quite frankly, the science rather bored me but the process was fascinating. She was a rare bird, a truly independent thinker. She had a different way of seeing things, more of a Goethean approach to science (my words), or that of a true naturalist (author's words). It's a very sad book, I think, because she was so long ignored, she was so hopeful that things would change, so believing in the merits of pure science. (Also, I suspect her work paved the way for GMOs and other nasty stuff, which I personally loathe.)

Cramer, Wertham is in several pages of Men Of Tomorrow, and the author is more fair to Wertham than the way he was portrayed in previous books about the comics industry.

I'll definitely read this other book you've recommended. Thanks.

Semi, glad to hear you're enjoying Men Of Tomorrow. I finished it, and still think it's a great book, but my one dissapointment (and it won't spoil anything) is that Julius Schwartz was mostly ignored.

We need a good Julius Schwartz bio, unless there already is one that I'm not aware of.

We also need a book that does for the generation of comics creators born between the late 30s and early 50s what Men Of Tomorrow does for the generation of comics creators born between the mid 10s and mid 30s.

The Kirby bio has been, so far, something of a dissapointment. The actual writing is flat, although there are fascinating bits in the chapters about the less-well-known parts of Kirby's life: his wartime experiences, the details about why the Fourth World saga was doomed almost from the start...

You know, it's funny that Wertham has come up. I'm reading an overview of these events right now.

http://www.sequart.com/columns/index.php?col=2&column=715

Jamie

At the moment I'm rereading a lot of P.G. Wodehouse.

For those of you who don't recognize the name, Wodehouse is the funniest writer in the history of the English language and comes with my highest recommendation.

I just finished reading The Historian this week.

On the whole, I enjoyed it, but I found the
author used coincidence way too much ...

Listening to Shogun by James Clavell. Boy, if you ever wanted to know about shogun-period Japan, this is the book for you. Detail, detail, detail. Hard not to have admiration for a very different society than we're used to...

Currently reading Common Sense, Rights of Man, and other essential writings of Thomas Paine

On deck is Frederick Douglas' autobiography