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

I signed up for one of the online book services, Scribd, so I've been doing a bit more reading lately. I read a couple of newer Stephen King books, "11/23/63" and "Under the Dome."

I really liked "11/23/63" which felt like King put a lot of honest effort into, but "Under the Dome" was kind of a typical King potboiler and I labored to finish it. "11/23/63" probably benefited greatly from a small cast of characters and a change in primary venue from Maine to small town Texas in the early 60's and a reasonably interesting approach to time travel story involving the JFK assassination. "Under the Dome" felt like 60% "'Salem's Lot" with the other 40% made of bits of other King novels with a big dollop of "Animal Farm" thrown in.

On the other hand, I've been reading over "The Beatles: The BBC Archives: 1962 -1970" by Kevin Howlett. I am a big Beatles nerd, and this is a very thorough look at all the Beatles appearances on BBC radio and BBC television during their time together. They did a prodigious amount of work with the BBC at the start of their rise to fame, which has so far spawned two double disc sets of "live in the studio" music. There are a lot of transcriptions of interviews they gave as well, and it's pretty interesting to see the questions and answers becoming more serious as time went along and they proved not to be a flash-in-the-pan act. There are a lot of images of contracts and other documents and behind the scenes pictures (although unfortunately the resolution of the documents is pretty bad at smartphone size.

I had to go to Baltimore and back yesterday via train which gave me ample time to totally immerse myself in a great novel, which I was more than ready to do. So, on the recommendation of my younger brother and sister, I read in one day Ernest Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises. And I totally loved it, became totally immersed in the characters and setting, and found it to be very moving.

I've been prepping myself for Hemmingway for a few weeks, and so I was very prepared for his terse writing style and the "iceberg theory" approach to writing he helped invent. Having this in mind definitely helped me easily enjoy the writing style from the get-go.

I really loved the deep characters that Hemmingway presents, and I loved how the narrative moved and changed as the location changed throughout the story. I found the story to be very moving; there were sad elements throughout and you can't help but feel the tragedy that is always under the surface. But I thought there was a certain uplifting element to the ending too, as if Jake Barnes was stronger than he realized and was starting to understand that.

This is a Jazz Age classic and I can easily see why.

Just discovered Stephen King's son, Joe Hill. Whoa!!! Since Monday I have read Heart-Shaped Box, 20th Century Ghosts and just finished N0S4A2 at 6:00 am this morning. Some of the stories in Ghosts were rough but the ending novella, Voluntary Committal, was worth it alone. I'll be diving into Horns and Twittering from the Circus of the Dead as soon as I finish up his comic book collaboration with his dad, Road Rage, which also contains Richard Matheson's excellent Duel.

Has anyone ever read anything by Margaret Atwood? Spefically Blind Assassin? I'm curious about it but admittingly know little of the author.

Scooter, I've often wanted to check out Joe Hill's works. Based on your post I may do just that!

I tried to read Oryx and Crake, the first in her MaddAddam series and couldn't get past the first few chapters. But I've not heard of Blind Assassin.



Start with 20th Century Ghosts, his short story collection. It will give you a good taste of his style.

re: Joe Hill
I've never read any of his novels, but his IDW comic book series "Locke & Key" was pretty good. Well worth checking out.

Eh. It's all right, I guess. But it's not a favorite of mine. That honor belongs to CatsEye, with The Edible Woman coming in second.

My feeling about Atwood is that she loves comics and SciFi, but for some reason... there's a condescending tone to her attempts at writing Science Fiction-- even when the themes are interesting.

She also breaks the mold for me in the sense that I'd rather read her novels than her short stories. With most fiction writers, it's the other way around. Because she spends a lot of time setting mood and going into detailed visuals, it takes time for her to establish characters and make them interesting. In a short story, she usually doesn't have enough space for it.

To any resident science fiction aficionados, do you guys have any recommendations for pulp sci fi novels like the John Carter novels or Doc Smiths's Lensman series?

Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett!

Seriously, any John Carter fan should check out Brackett's Stark stories/novels!

Thanks, EDE! Those sound right up my alley.

The first four collections are actually on my reading list right now! Assuming I can ever finish the awful The Circle that I'm trying to finish now.

Started "Into the Storm," the latest in the Destroyermen series by Taylor Anderson.

This series is getting long in the tooth and repetitive. Not sure I'll finish the read.

I listened to "The Guts" by Roddy Doyle on audio (Scribd did not have a text version.). It revisits the character Jimmy Rabitte who was introduced in the book "The Commitments" which was later turned into one of my favorite movies. It's really in a larger sense a sequel to all three of the original Barrytown trilogy (the others being "The Snapper" and "The Van."). This time the middle aged, married father is dealing with a diagnosis of intestinal cancer on top of worries about his job. That might not sound too funny but like the other books, Doyle's characters always keep a dark sense of humor about them. I don't know many native Irish but I assume Doyle knows what he's doing there. An interesting undercurrent is the way the post-Celtic Tiger Dublin during the recent global recession bleeds I to the narrative. The Rabitte's neighbors who looked slightly down on Jimmy's working class roots disappear in the middle of the night one step ahead of their home being foreclosed upon. There's a slightly caper-ish subplot with Jimmy and his sons fabricating a song to pass off as a lost work of an unremembered singer from the late 1920's that could have sunk the book if Jimmy's enthusiasm hadn't caught me up. I'd love to see it filmed especially if they could get Colm Meany to reprise the role of Jimmy's father as he did for the previous three films.

All year, I haven't read much beyond the papers, loan application documents, and gardening catalogs. But I'm trying to make up for it this summer.

I read Nadine Gordimer's Jump last month. Some good short stories in there, but the quality is uneven for her. In the title story, the characters never escape cardboard cut-out level. The tragedy never transcends what you'd get from a TV newsclip. Some of the others are pretty good, though. The world lost one hell of a writer when she passed on. I'd totally recommend July's People or Burgher's Daughter or Something Out There for you fiction fans.

Then I moved on to Doors To Madam Marie. A memoir by Odette Meyers of escaping the Nazis during the French occupation. The daughter of secular, working-class Jews in Paris, Odette was hidden in the French countryside and learned to "pass" as a Catholic peasant. She dealt with inner religious conflict for the rest of her life, which still left her more fortunate than most of her family. A few inexplicable typos in my copy, but still a good read.

Right now, I'm nearing the end of Chris Albertson's Bessie, a biography of Bessie Smith. I've been deliberately reading it at a very slow clip, because I know I'm going to hate getting to the end. I was already a fan of Smith's work, but her life was so fascinating-- warts and all. It might make a believer even out of Blues fans who only know the more modern-day stuff.

So as usual, I’ve been reading like crazy during my train commute and general travels for work, and I have a backlog of books I’ve read that I haven’t reviewed or talked about. Here are some general comments of a few.

I read a Dostoyevsky book I haven’t read before, Notes From the Underground, which my sister recommended for me. It’s his shortest novel at only 80 pages or so and famously features a member of the Russian poor during the 19th century, revealing the shame of living in such poverty that many must have felt. I have to say that I found this book incredibly difficult to read, much more so than any of Dostoyevsky’s works I’ve already read. At 80 pages it took me like two weeks and I’d often find myself totally overwhelmed by the dense prose, needed breaks after 15 minutes. The first half is purely psychological, with the narrator talking to the reader, and it’s a very difficult approach. I wonder how much has been lost in translation? It’s the first Russian Romance Era novel I’ve truly not wanted to finish, and the reason I did was I felt obligated given the tiny page count.

From there, I read Thomas Pychon’s The Crying of Lot 49 which is the first Pychon book I ever read. This also had a low page count, 150 pages or so, but I wanted to give myself a primer to see if I liked Pychon’s work enough to do a deeper dig. Ultimately I both liked it and disliked it for various reasons. On the one hand, the prose is just wonderful: it’s colorful, hilarious, witty, full of puns and irony and just both doesn’t take itself serious but has something meaningful to say. On the other hand, the general plotline is so ridiculous and such parody that its hard to become attached to the characters, especially the protagonist Oedipa Maas. There’s no doubt the book is full of deeper meanings and metaphors, and a lot of them you can spot easy or work out when you think about it after, but others you need a study group to decipher, and I think I was still recovering from Notes From the Underground to do that. The book did give a great view in the mid-60’s culture that was changing and I can see why Pychon began to have such a staggering effect on American Literature.

I then read William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury which was brilliant. This too was not an easy book to read though—it’s the kind of thing college courses spend two weeks on with stringent analysis. This makes three in a row that I did (so I now need a break). But the first chapter, which is perhaps a precursor to the post-modern movement, has a great stream of consciousness structure to it which Faulkner does incredibly well, and if you can read it in one sitting, it really has a great effect. The second chapter, featuring another member of the Compton Family, is much more difficult. It has all the difficulty of the first chapter but with little of the charm as it focuses on Quentin, a family member so depressed and distraught that he is obviously working to a sad end. I’m glad I read the book but I’ll certainly not be reading it another time. I do, however, want to read his Sanctuary, which I’ve been told is right up my alley.

Lastly, I’m currently reading Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, which was recommended in this thread earlier by Cleome, and I seized an opportunity to grab it when I saw a used copy for a good price. Thus far, I’m simply loving it. In fact, I really needed this one, as I’m only at the halfway point and I already love it more than all the ones I’ve listed above. The prose is simply beautiful, and the story feels epic: both real yet almost mythical. The premise, featuring a French missionary Priest in the recently formed American territory of New Mexico, is not one that would come to mind as something interesting but Cather crafts multiple scenarios and characters that draw you right in and fascinate you. I will definitely read more Willa Cather after this.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walker Miller Jr. 1960.

Supposed to be a sci-fi classic. Strikes me the type of book a bunch of penantist read so they can sit around a coffee shop imagining meaning. To each their own.

I was surprised by the Pythonesque/Pratchett humor shown in spots. I can't recall reading an American author with that patter, certainly not before Python.

Finished William S. Burroughs' "Exterminator!" and enjoyed it enough that I jumped right into "Cities of the Red Night", a book I had tried about ten years back but couldn't finish. This time I'm enjoying it much more and am savouring it. It's got a slightly more traditional structure than other Burroughs work, in that there's definitely some narratives (in chronological order even), but it still plays with structure in interesting ways, telling two seemingly separate stories that aren't so separate as you think.

Cobie, I'm so glad that you're enjoying the Cather book!

(I've just started re-reading Ursula LeGuin's A Fisherman Of The Inland Sea. I've read a novel or two of hers, but it's her short story collections which I actually own.)

I am currently reading "The Islands of Boston Harbor" by Edward Rowe Snow. It was originally written in 1935, but this is an updated version. but not by the original author as he died in 1982. Lots of old photographs, which I love.

If you like old photographs, particularly of urban landscapes, do I have the website for you.

http://www.shorpy.com/



I was googling to find anything about my end of town and came up with an AMAZING photo. 1909 and the resolution totally took me by surprise. You have to click the photo to get the full resolution. I can still see some of those buildings looking out my classroom window.


http://www.shorpy.com/node/10239

For pleasure, just finished rereading Elizabeth Hunter's Elemental Mysteries series and just started the new Sandman Slim novel Killing Pretty

I read a lot for research - just finished Heather Love's Looking Backwards and starting Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology

This summer I have been reading celebrity autobiographies, for some reason.

“Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang” by Chelsea Handler
“The Wild Oats Project” by Robin Rinaldi
“Screw Everyone : Sleeping My Way to Monogamy” by Ophira Eisenberg
“Bossypants” by Tina Fey
“Born with Teeth” by Kate Mulgrew
“Not That Kind of Girl” by Lena Dunham
“Yes, Please” by Amy Poehler

It’s kind of been a waste of time.

Sci-fi of course.

Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick


Definitely worth the time of the Sci-Fi fan, if only to compare to which hit the big screen, which ones haven't (yet)...


I don't know the chicken and the egg of it, but even beyond all the adopted to screen stories, many of these have that Twilight Zone, ironic ending. Might that have been a bigger part of Sci-Fi in general?

I'm not a historian to tell if he was ahead of the game or part of the game, but this book has alternate history, which is so popular now, lot's of dystopian future type stuff like "The Days of Perky Pat." Almost too bizarre to describe, it has to have some meaning that I totally missed but it was amusing to say the least.