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

Slugfest sounds fascinating. Looking at the Amazon page, I see it has an audiobook version. The only thing that gave me pause was the Associated Press blurb describing it as "the story of Marvel's David toppling DC's Goliath." But based on your description, I am going to assume that is the simplistic reading of whoever wrote that quote, rather than an accurate summation. That's an accurate description of the 60s and early 70s, but by the time of the DC implosion DC was definitely the underdog.

"Slugfest" does indeed sound like a good read. I'll keep it in mind as my Christmas present to myself.

[snip]




No, she does not.

Proof positive that she was the only character in the book who deserved a better story to appear in.

Audiobooks that I'm listening to feel more at home in this thread then be listening, so I'm going to post about them here. I'm almost finished with dragonfly in amber, the second book and Diana gabaldon's outlander series. While I enjoyed the first, it felt too long and dragged in places. Despite the fact that this one is longer, I enjoyed it more and zipped right through it.

I was also possibly surprised by how well structured it is. Ongoing series sometimes have a tendency to just become one long narrative, and the authors don't bother to provide any structure to the particular installment. The opening of the novel set up a new situation that raised many questions. Did novel peers to be on track to answer those by the end, and there were a number of storylines that were introduced and have concluded or are concluding in the same volume. I guess I'll see if she manages to maintain that is the series progresses, but it's nice here.

Coming here to write this caused me to remember that I had intended to listen to slugfest. Since I expect to finish dragon fly tonight? I will make that my next listen.

Just got From a Drood to a Kill.

Just finished Part One of Neil Gaiman's View From The Cheap Seats.

He spends a great deal of time discussing his particular approach to writing. Very interesting.

https://www.creativeprocess.info/new-blog-1/2016/6/11/these-are-not-our-faces

Again, posting audiobooks in the read thread instead of the listen.

Just finished World of Warcraft: War Crimes by Christie Golden, narrated by my favorite audiobook narrator, Scott Brick.

I’ve been playing WoW on-and-off for about a year. I’m finally starting to get a grasp on the basic shape of the narrative, and this is my first WoW novel.

It’s a fairly important one, because it’s a transition/prequel between two of the games’ expansions. I couldn’t have picked a better first novel. It’s the trial of one of the game’s main villains, and the testimony winds up covering the events of several years’ worth of game in a way that is both easy to digest and quite emotional, coming as personal accounts of people involved.

It’s more involved with character than plot, with most of the characters wrestling with questions of justice, hate, mercy, and such. It also delves into the idea of trials and coverage of atrocities being turned into entertainment. It also made the defendant unquestioningly guilty and unrepentant, making easy solutions difficult.

It was much better than a media tie-in has any right to be. I wouldn’t say it transcends the genre, but it’s one of the best examples of it I’ve read.

The narration was of course flawless. If you haven’t discovered Scott Brick, I would highly recommend the audiobook version of Tom de Haven’sIt’s Superman, one of the best Superman stories I’ve ever encountered in ANY genre.

I just started Madame Bovary last night. It's been standing silently on my shelf for years.

I recently finished Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. It won the National Book Award last year, and I kept finding it on various respected recommendation lists. Ward's lovely lyrical language unveils the souls and struggles of a southern Mississippi family, especially 13-year-old biracial Jojo and his in-and-out mom. I'll remember the feeling of this book for a long time.

I keep falling asleep early on in the audiobook version of the Midwich Cuckoos. Oddly, it's just about the time the main characters fall asleep too. Coincidence? Really?

Waiting for Moonbreaker by Simon R. Green.

I am currently trying to read Neo-Platonist philosophy by Plotinus. It feels good to get the brain working in ways it hasn't since college.

Feeling sad because I'm about to finish book nine of the Iron Druid series by Kevin Hearne, and it's the last one.

Garden catalogues... again.

(I really want to plant some rhubarb this year, but still trying to figure out when I'll have time to prime the space for it.)

I recently posed the following hypothetical to all my kids:

“What one book would you recommend all children read before the end of 12th grade?”

#1 Child: The Samurai: The Philosophy of Victory, by Robert T. Samuel
#2 Child: Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
#3 Child: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (wanted to say The Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien, but lost courage)
#4 Child: The Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu, and / or The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff
#5 Child: The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank

As for myself, it would be The Carrot Seed, by Ruth Krauss, illustrated by Crockett Johnson, possibly the greatest one-hundred-and-one words ever written in the English language.

"A little boy planted a carrot seed.
His mother said, “I'm afraid it won't come up.”
His father said, “I'm afraid it won't come up.”
And his big brother said, “It won't come up.”
Every day the little boy pulled up the weeds around the seed and sprinkled the ground with water.
But nothing came up.
And nothing came up.
Everyone kept saying it wouldn't come up.
But still he pulled up the weeds around it every day and sprinkled the ground with water.
And then one day a carrot came up, just as the little boy had known it would."

Interesting topic, Klar. Being a visual person myself, I think I'd hand my niece or nephew a copy of Thirteen. I'm sure their folks know all the classics, but that one's kind of off the beaten path and undeservedly so.

I was never much for Tolkien, but for sure I'd see that Watership Down and A Wrinkle In Time were on my list, too. Maybe Ellin Greene's & Trina Schart Hyman's Clever Cooks would be there to help instill a love of fairy tales, food lore, and great childrens' art of course.

I just finished Rope Of Gold by Josephine Herbst. It took all my self-control to not sit down and devour the whole thing in a couple of days. A really compelling read from an unjustly forgotten author.

In her lifetime, she was sometimes compared to Hemmingway, but despite their mutual love for writing fiction about the political movements of their day, I'm not really seeing it. Herbst's style has a certain detachment in what would be very emotional events IRL, but it's not as sparse and (to me) off-putting as E.H's has always been. Plus, when her saga moves to Cuba and the sugar strikes of the 1930s, she refrains from dropping the N-Word all over the place. I know, I know... changing styles and mores and all that. But Hemmingway's penchant for the word was one of the things which made me slam one of his books shut without bothering to finish the story in question.

There's quite a large cast of characters, bound by family and business ties. She drops some truly upsetting revelations and occasionally hilariously vulgar moments on the reader with little build-up or warning. This might bother some readers, but I found the occasional shock kept me on my toes. It's a long book, and was originally the end of a trilogy, but to me it went by in a flash. I know I'll be reading it again soon.

Her Wiki Bio

I've just started reading Great Esquire Fiction: The Finest Stories from the First Fifty Years. I probably bought the book shortly after it was published in 1983 and until now have never read it.

It's quite the who's who of 20th century American fiction writers. Erskine Caldwell, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, William Styron, Tim O'Brien, Richard Ford, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, and 21 others. The selection is heavy with male writers, as one might expect.

Re-reading Butcher's Dresden.

Now diving into Vera Brittain's Testament Of Youth again, for the first time in a long time. (Non-fiction about her life as a young woman and Army nurse during WWI.)

I've been reading/listening to a lot of trashy LGBT romances, since stuff at work is so heavy it's all I can really handle. Did you know that if you search Amazon for "transgender romance," the search engine apparently can't distinguish between, y'know, transgender romance, magical gender switch stories, and MPreg? True story.

The search engine needs to attend diversity & inclusion training, stat!

Just finished Willa Cather's O Pioneers!

Bad Times book 4: Helldorado by Batman writer Chuck Dixon.

I just finished Contact by Carl Sagan. Having only seen the film, I enjoyed this one quite a bit and appreciated the differences between them,

Night Fall by Simon R. Green. Wraps up two series, the Nightside and the Secret Histories.