Do you read?

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

Read a few lately.

 

1.  Under the dome (S.King)

 

Small town USA,  The Town Chester's Mill has a giant clear Dome dropped on it.  Nothing in or out.

 

Really enjoyed it and finished it in a week.  A brilliant story and the characters and town in question were painted perfectly by a writer who is back to his best.

 

Its about 700 + pages but felt really short.

 

 

8/10

 

(The TV show while enjoyable is a pale reflection of the book and the inner workings of the story as a whole.  5/10)

 

2. 77 Days in September 

 

Describes the aftermath of a EMP strike on the US,  One man's journey to get home to family and kids.  1500 miles by foot.

 

Started brilliantly with a right nice accident which was really well written.

 

Goes downhill after that,  it's just all to nice,  and the guy in question is unbelievable in his actions and if you are traveling and there are no cars but the region is flat you don't walk do you ?  (Bike,  in line skates or pogo stick.....but walking ?)

 

4/10 (I am not 100% it's a adult book now,  thinking about it)

 

 

 

 

 

edit....Halfway through "The Shining" at the moment.  Can't believe I missed this book.  Utterly brilliant so far,  WTF was the film all about ?

Edited October 2, 2013 by Amsterdam_Neil_D

[leviramsey]

How many Cormac McCarthies does it take to change a light bulb?

Two or perhaps three, approaching now, from beyond the tree in the long low light of morning. From some black place: a reckoning neither required nor bidden, a reckoning no judge could have ordered, but a reckoning nonetheless. One of the men carries a single glove, ready to grip the hot, bright bulb and twist it dead. The other two follow, smoking, and whisper about what is to come: the treacherous scramble in wet woolen darkness, the fight to fill that space with light. One of them, the youngest, cradles the thin bowl of glass in his hands like a baby foal born too soon―partly out of gentleness, partly as if to shield it from the mare’s desperate inquiring eyes.

The men walk to the bulb. The Remover’s shadow blackens as he approaches it. A quick unnatural lunge.

Then all is dark.

(wasn't totally sure whether to post it in here or the joke thread)

Edited October 5, 2013 by leviramsey

[mjmooney]

Back in the 90s I was on the email list for fans of Patrick O'Brian (Master and Commander, etc.), and wrote a parody based on the premise of the O'Brian books if they were written by Cormac MacCarthy - and vice versa. Seems to be long lost now, sadly. 

[The_Rev]

Back to my thoughts on Ready Player One, I decided to stick with it to see if it gets better and I am really glad I did.  I still have the same problem that I think the protagonist is a whiny brat who I really don't like (he is the sort of kid who rolls his eyes and scoffs if he is asked to help his mum fix her computer, completely oblivious to the fact that she taught him to wipe his arse) but the plot of the book is actually very enjoyable.  There certainly are a lot of 'Chekhov's Gun' moments and I am almost certain I figured out where the story was headed ages before the book ended and everything wrapped up a little too neatly and happily for my tastes but again, that doesn't get in the way of a good romp.   

 

Also I realised quite quickly after my first post that I'm not really the target audience.  It's not designed for people who remember the 80s and 8 bit era of video games, it's aimed and people who are aware/interested in that time.  It's annoying that it just name drops constantly and doesn't really do anything with any of the references. I guess it's trying to trade on the ignorance of youth or something. 

[mjmooney]

David Bowie's top 100 must-read books

 

The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby (2008)

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz (2007)

The Coast of Utopia (trilogy), Tom Stoppard (2007)

Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, Jon Savage (2007)

Fingersmith, Sarah Waters (2002)

The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens (2001)

Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler (1997)

A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1890-1924, Orlando Figes (1997)

The Insult, Rupert Thomson (1996)

Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon (1995)

The Bird Artist, Howard Norman (1994)

Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, Anatole Broyard (1993)

Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective, Arthur C Danto (1992)

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Camille Paglia (1990)

David Bomberg, Richard Cork (1988)

Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, Peter Guralnick (1986)

The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin (1986)

Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd (1985)

Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music, Gerri Hirshey (1984)

Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter (1984)

Money, Martin Amis (1984)

White Noise, Don DeLillo (1984)

Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes (1984)

The Life and Times of Little Richard, Charles White (1984)

A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn (1980)

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (1980)

Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester (1980)

Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler (1980)

Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess (1980)

Raw, a "graphix magazine" (1980-91)

Viz, magazine (1979 –)

The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels (1979)

Metropolitan Life, Fran Lebowitz (1978)

In Between the Sheets, Ian McEwan (1978)

Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed Malcolm Cowley (1977)

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes (1976)

Tales of Beatnik Glory, Ed Saunders (1975)

Mystery Train, Greil Marcus (1975)

Selected Poems, Frank O'Hara (1974)

Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, Otto Friedrich (1972)

n Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture, George Steiner (1971) Octobriana and the Russian Underground, Peter Sadecky (1971)

The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, Charlie Gillett(1970)

The Quest for Christa T, Christa Wolf (1968)

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock, Nik Cohn (1968)

The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)

Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg (1967)

Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr (1966)

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote (1965)

City of Night, John Rechy (1965)

Herzog, Saul Bellow (1964)

Puckoon, Spike Milligan (1963)

The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford (1963)

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea, Yukio Mishima (1963)

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin (1963)

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (1962)

Inside the Whale and Other Essays, George Orwell (1962)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark (1961)

Private Eye, magazine (1961 –)

On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, Douglas Harding (1961)

Silence: Lectures and Writing, John Cage (1961)

Strange People, Frank Edwards (1961)

The Divided Self, RD Laing (1960)

All the Emperor's Horses, David Kidd (1960)

Billy Liar, Keith Waterhouse (1959)

The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)

On the Road, Jack Kerouac (1957)

The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard (1957)

Room at the Top, John Braine (1957)

A Grave for a Dolphin, Alberto Denti di Pirajno (1956)

The Outsider, Colin Wilson (1956)

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (1949)

The Street, Ann Petry (1946)

Black Boy, Richard Wright (1945)

Guardian

Edited October 7, 2013 by mjmooney

[leemond2008]

I have just finished reading a clockwork orange, it feels **** great to have read a book, for some reason I haven't picked one up in months, and on the odd occasion that I have I only manage about 10 or 20 pages and then don't go back to it.

Hopefully I have got the reading bug back, normally I fly through a books every couple of day's, I must have just burnt myself out I recon.

 

Anyways Clockwork Orange was pretty good, a lot of my mates have read it and said that it was crap but I really enjoyed it and was pretty shocked at how true the film was to it, yeah the language throws you to start off with but after just a few pages you just skim over it as though it was written in prefect English rather than a broken Russian fictitious sort of thing.

 

all in all after the slating my mates gave it I was pleasantly surprised so I'd give it a good 7.5 out of 10

 

 

 

now I am just about to start this one, its not my usual type of read but I thought I'd give it a go anyway.

 

 

 

 

Product Description "Mykle Hansen's book is the Scarlet Letter, the Age of Innocence, the Wuthering Heights of books narrated by a guy being eaten by a bear -- The Last of the Motherfuckin' Mohican's of ursine mastication. Just sayin'."
-Christopher Moore, author of Lamb, A Dirty Job, and Fool

Trapped in a remote Alaskan forest, pinned under his own SUV, gnawed upon by nature's finest predators, Marv Pushkin -- Corporate Warrior, Positive Thinker, Esquire subscriber -- waits impatiently for an ambulance and explains in detail the many reasons why this unfolding tragedy is everyone's fault but his own.

Edited October 21, 2013 by leemond2008

[coda]

 

Reading this at the moment and it's mind-boggling. 

[StigVillan]

Child 44 and The Secret Speech both by Tom Rob Smith

 

Drood by Dan Simmons

 

Labyrinth and Sepulchre both by Kate Mosse

 

ANYTHING by Bernard Cornwell...especially the Saxon Chronicles stuff.

[leemond2008]

Another brilliant book by Dan Simmons

 

could have been a lot shorter and they didn't need the 'monster' at all, that turned out to be just a small part of the story.

I have always meant to go back and re-read this one but just never got round to it (probably because it was pretty hard going in parts)

 

 

 

The Terror is the name of a 2007 novel by American author Dan Simmons.^[1] The novel is a fictionalized account of Captain Sir John Franklin's lost expedition of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to the Arctic to force the Northwest Passage in 1845–1848. In the novel, while Franklin and his crew are plagued by starvation and scurvy and forced to contend with mutiny and cannibalism, they are stalked across the bleak Arctic landscape

The characters featured in The Terror are almost all actual members of Franklin's crew, whose unexplained disappearance has warranted a great deal of speculation. The main characters in the novel include Sir John Franklin, commander of the expedition and captain of Erebus, Captain Francis Crozier, captain of Terror, Dr Harry D.S Goodsir, and Captain James Fitzjames.^[3]

In the final chapters of the book, Simmons explores and uses various aspects of Eskimo mythology to explain the existence of the monster (called the Tuunbaq) as a mythological creature made flesh, as well as its reasons for stalking and preying on the men of the Franklin Expedition.

The Terror was nominated for the British Fantasy Award in 2008.^[4]

[StigVillan]

 

Another brilliant book by Dan Simmons

 

could have been a lot shorter and they didn't need the 'monster' at all, that turned out to be just a small part of the story.

I have always meant to go back and re-read this one but just never got round to it (probably because it was pretty hard going in parts)

 

 

 

The Terror is the name of a 2007 novel by American author Dan Simmons.^[1] The novel is a fictionalized account of Captain Sir John Franklin's lost expedition of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to the Arctic to force the Northwest Passage in 1845–1848. In the novel, while Franklin and his crew are plagued by starvation and scurvy and forced to contend with mutiny and cannibalism, they are stalked across the bleak Arctic landscape

The characters featured in The Terror are almost all actual members of Franklin's crew, whose unexplained disappearance has warranted a great deal of speculation. The main characters in the novel include Sir John Franklin, commander of the expedition and captain of Erebus, Captain Francis Crozier, captain of Terror, Dr Harry D.S Goodsir, and Captain James Fitzjames.^[3]

In the final chapters of the book, Simmons explores and uses various aspects of Eskimo mythology to explain the existence of the monster (called the Tuunbaq) as a mythological creature made flesh, as well as its reasons for stalking and preying on the men of the Franklin Expedition.

The Terror was nominated for the British Fantasy Award in 2008.^[4]

 

Love DS

 

Big fan...

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

Between books at the minute. Fancy picking up a good book on the Easter Rising but I'm not sure where to begin on that one. Fancy a good read on WWI, particularly the Western front, too as I've really only approached that war from poets and other artists. Not a bad way but I fancy some cold, hard history.

 

In terms with fiction there are too many books I want to read and I fancy something new. I've heard 'The Circle' by Dave Eggers is good so I might plump for that. I may buy some Alice Munro but I've heard George Saunders is 'da man' when it comes to short stories. Oh I don't know. I really need to read Infinite Jest at some point too but it's like... big. I'll leave that one for winter.

 

First world problems, eh?

 

Oh and I also really, really want to read this, which is new and apparently amazing -

 

 

But it is also like 5843902- pages long so it'll have to wait until the nights get darker and I can sit down and plough through it.

Edited October 21, 2013 by CarewsEyebrowDesigner

[Pelle]

Just finished Die Teufelsbibel by Richard Dübell. It was good. Not as good as I thought it'd be, but good enough. 6.5/10.

 

Just started on Arne Dahl, Viskleken, The wispering game I think it is in english. Don't know if his books have been released in UK before, but I think they have. It's started quite good. Criminal novell about a special international police force who works over the borders.

[mjmooney]

Das Boot was ****ing awesome. 

[vandaq]

Might as well ask here. I am not a big book guy, if at all really. Problem is that I usually don`t come over anything that intrigues me and I never look for anything that could. There is a bunch of other things too, but it doesn`t matter.

 

My question is, does somebody have any recommendations for books on old civilizations and so forth? That stuff really intrigues me but then again where do you look? I would imagine you would find a lot of crap on the subject, and some really heavy based info stuff as well. Everything from aztecs,mayans,celts, byzantine...whatever. Would really appreciate some help on this.

[tonyh29]

David Bowie's top 100 must-read books

Not counting Viz I've read one on that list

1984

Guess me and David just like different authors

[mjmooney]

 

David Bowie's top 100 must-read books

Not counting Viz I've read one on that list

1984

Guess me and David just like different authors

 

 

Fifteen for me. And several others on the shelf that are on my 'to read' list.

[tonyh29]

mjmooney, on 22 Oct 2013 - 11:11 AM, said:

 

tonyh29, on 22 Oct 2013 - 12:27 AM, said:

 

mjmooney, on 07 Oct 2013 - 11:32 AM, said:

David Bowie's top 100 must-read books

Not counting Viz I've read one on that list

1984

Guess me and David just like different authors

 

 

Fifteen for me. And several others on the shelf that are on my 'to read' list.

 

 

As someone on the comments page has pointed out  ..if it's his top 100 , why are there only 75 books on the list

[mjmooney]

Good point.

[Nigel]

Between books at the minute. Fancy picking up a good book on the Easter Rising but I'm not sure where to begin on that one. Fancy a good read on WWI, particularly the Western front, too as I've really only approached that war from poets and other artists. Not a bad way but I fancy some cold, hard history.

 

You could try 'All quiet on the western front'.  Quite a short book but a fantastic read.

[leemond2008]

I'm currently reading 'The Shining part 2'

 

 

 

Product Description Review

'Obviously a masterpiece, probably the best supernatural novel in a hundred years.' (Peter Straub on The Shining )

'The most remarkable storyteller in modern American literature.' (Mark Lawson, Guardian )

 

Product Description An epic war between good and evil, a gory, glorious story that will thrill the millions of hyper-devoted readers of The Shining and wildly satisfy anyone new to the territory of this icon in the King canon.

King says he wanted to know what happened to Danny Torrance, the boy at the heart of The Shining, after his terrible experience in the Overlook Hotel. The instantly riveting DOCTOR SLEEP picks up the story of the now middle-aged Dan, working at a hospice in rural New Hampshire, and the very special twelve-year old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.

On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless - mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and tween Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the 'steam' that children with the 'shining' produce when they are slowly tortured to death.

Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father's legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him and a job at a nursing home where his remnant 'shining' power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes 'Doctor Sleep.'

Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan's own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra's soul and survival . . .