What are you reading right now?

I finished How to Murder your Employer and it was the worst book I've read in several decades. Written for midwits by an author who writes how dumb people think smart people would reason and act. Complete waste of time.

Next up is a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories to cleanse my palate.
 
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Gilgamesh said:
Does anyone have any tips for Pynchon or recommendations for books to get into his style? I got around halfway through Gravity’s Rainbow and while I was invested I had to disregard several paragraphs just because I didn’t see how they related to the story or just couldn’t parse it. It was a library copy that had been paged so I had to return it but it left me thinking if there were easier introductions to him.
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His short stories. Crying of Lot 49 is a lot shorter than his other novels. I read Gravity's Rainbow but it took me something like five tries over as many years before I finally got into it enough to finish it. I consider it well worth the read but actually getting started on it is PAINFUL.
 
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Gilgamesh said:
Does anyone have any tips for Pynchon or recommendations for books to get into his style? I got around halfway through Gravity’s Rainbow and while I was invested I had to disregard several paragraphs just because I didn’t see how they related to the story or just couldn’t parse it. It was a library copy that had been paged so I had to return it but it left me thinking if there were easier introductions to him.
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Vineland and Inherent Vice, though neither of his best, are far more accessible and straightforward than his earlier (and greater) work.
 
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The 4chan /lit/ wiki was wiped, but some Redditor backed up the recommendation charts, which is what that wiki was mostly for an archive for. They're on this MEGA so download them if you need/want em. I'll probably make a simple webpage for them soon.

It's a stretch to call it a book, even though the author does, but I've also been reading David Chapman's meaningness site. I don't know about the actual advice it gives but it has a lot of interesting observations, especially about western thought being fucked for far longer than I expected. Some of his criticism of religion (or rather, 'eternalism') rings a little hollow when you find out the guy is a Vajrayana Buddhist, though.
 
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Lords of Mars, 2nd book of the 40k series about the Mars lads going on a space adventure. I still don't know if I like the series or not. The last book (Priests of Mars) was half nothingburger, half worldbuilding for the next 2 books. And the 2nd book so far has just been the main faction being idiotic cartoon villians who get their evil plots crushed by everbody. The first book had plenty of that, with every chapter having being some major calamity where horrible thing happens but that doesn't really affect the plot or pacing for some reason (like ohh noooo we just lost a gorgillion ships in our fleet and our ship is in shambels but its okay we just fixed it all lmao).
 
Hazel Motes said:
Vineland and Inherent Vice, though neither of his best, are far more accessible and straightforward than his earlier (and greater) work.
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Vineland is also pretty funny.

If you want a return to his more inscrutable form, Mason & Dixon is worth a fairly difficult read. The prose isn't too ornate, but the plotting is pretty dense.
 
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My recent reads are:

1) Hildegard von Bingen. Ein Leben im Licht: Biographie by Heike Koschyk. Wanted to read something in German and decided to try something about this quite outstanding woman. This is what feminists should talk about, not "sex work".

2) As I lay Dying by Folkner. I read it as a part of my quest to read authors who inspired Cormac McCarthy and I did not expect to like it that much. Some shit in this book hits really close. Also, there is an adaptation of the book that I watched after I completed it.

3) The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. Well, that has already become classic, isn't it? Although, the topic is rather interesting I found some moments and characters rather cringey, perhaps they just did not age well. Anyway, if you watched the film (Blatty wrote the script), your imaginative memory would do the thing.

4) Invisible women by Caroline Crisdo Perez. Feminism done right and a quite sad book that makes you hate humanity a tiny bit more.

5) Finally, ILLIAD. I read it first as a kid (an adapted version ofc) and back then it seemed just nice fantasy action. Decades passed and I decided to give it another shot, now with much better historic background and having read some commentaries on it beforehand (e.g. The war that killed Achilles). Boy, what a ride it was. You read it and you hardly believe that it was written that long ago, so up-to-date some things are. Homer (whether he existed or not) is indeed one the foundations of western civilization.
 
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Just finished Tales from the New Republic, am also about 2/3rds of the way through Tales from the Empire. Some of the short stories are pretty good. In particular, The Longest Fall was a very solid little story about the last moments of a Star Destroyer Captain being strangled to death by an Inquisitor. There was a nice 2-parter as well about a fallen Jedi actor whose melodrama was a pretty interesting part of his character rather than being overly annoying or ‘lolsoquirky’. Pretty unstable dude though, reminded me of Dooku. I know Star Wars books are generally considered lower quality fare but I got really into the series when I was younger and it’s got a lot of good or decent books.
 
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Reading more collections of vintage pulp, in this case the first of two volumes collecting...
The Complete Cases of Steve Midnight, Volume 1 by John K. Butler. Before breaking into movies and television, pulp author John K. Butler wrote nine novellas about a mystery solving cab driver prowling the streets of Los Angeles, Steven Middleton Knight, AKA Steve Midnight. Published in the pages of Dime Detective Magazine between 1940 and 1942, the first four stories are collected here. Steven Middleton Knight was once a moneyed gadabout, who enjoyed partying it up during the late hours, gaining a reputation as “midnight playboy on a nation-wide scale.” Even after the Crash of 1929, when the King family lost a lot of money and his father committed suicide, he kept up with the playboy life until the money started running out. One day he woke up and realized he was broke and the sole source of support for his aging mother and invalid sister. So he went out and got a job, working hard at jockeying the sort of cabs he once used to ride on the midnight shift, for the Red Owl Cab Company. He takes on the name "Steve Midnight" as a way to protect what's left of his family's reputation. Now, he keeps getting mixed up in situations where he ends up solving crimes, for personal reasons, to collect a fare he's owed, or to get himself out of a jam. Butler's Midnight is a tough but not-as-hardboiled as he thinks he is kind of guy, a decent, honest protagonist, a former playboy turned working-class hero in an LA that's depiction is up there with Raymond Chandler's.
 
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Reading Gristle and Bone by Duncan Ralston. A collection of short horror stories that are neither scary, horrifying nor interesting.

I just read one where the twist is that someone shapeshifts into a dog. This one story, with a ton of set up, very long and meandering, and the pay off is "this one character is a dog?". I wrote that as a question because the story never elaborates on that. How, or why. It wasn't established in any way, the story wasn't about that.

Wait a fucking minute-
Did I just get shaggy dogged?

It's a long, meandering story with an anticlimax with a literal dog. Is this some kind of meta-ironic joke?

Spoilers for this shitty fucking book below. I don't recommend it to anyone, and Duncan Ralston? How about you Dunk On these nuts?

I don't think that stort is a shaggy dog story because every other yarn in this cum-pilation is like that. A bunch of boring, meaningless twaddle that suddenly ends.

The first story is about a woman who wants to have a baby, but can't because she's infertile. She putters around her house for a few pages, hears a noise in the attic, it's a demon baby, so she unbirths it. Wow. How horrifying. Instead of going for any of the possible plot threads established earlier, about cancer, motherhood and desperation, in the span on two pages she finds it and shoves it up her pussy and it ends. I had to re-read the ending several times, not because it was a shocking thing I couldn't believe, but because it happens so quick, comes out of nowhere and it's only implied. I was left scratching my head thinking "that's it?"

Then there's one about a reporter investigating a girl who disappeared on video. Not like a scary kidnapping, the girl literally started turning invisible while recording a vlog and the reporter wants to investigate why. She putters around, does nothing, hints vaguely at something in her past, putters around some more, watches the video again with a friend of the disappearing girl, learns nothing, then she confesses her sins and disappears, too.
What was the reporter's terrible sin, other than wasting my time? She knew a girl who commited suicide. That's it. The reporter didn't attempt suicide, she didn't cause anyone to do it, she didn't even SEE it happen. She knew of a girl when she was in college who was teased and so she jumped out of a window, and she didn't do anything to stop it. She wasn't her friend, she didn't know her. She doesn't even get a vague description in the story. She was "teased", but it never says how or why. Who was teasing her? How could the reporter have prevented it? Is her life so bland that she is still traumatized about hearing of someone's suicide? Again, she didn't even see it happen.

There's one story of a group of guys who run a Bangbus type porn site where they bang chicks off the street. One of the actresses girlbosses too hard and gets off (as in she leaves) the bus without fucking and some unrelated rapist finds her a while later and rapes her, as rapists tend to do. Then he murders her and there's a description of the mutilation that reads like a kid trying to shock you. He cut her pussy off!
Then ten years later they pick up another chick, she gets possessed by the dead one and she kills everyone and there are bugs and glitched video and loud noises. It comes out of nowhere after pages wasted on "Haha bro sexporn! Brazzers.com, porn stats, namedropping porn stars, hey did you read Chuck Palahniuk's Snuff? Yeah, man! Porn sex cum fuck! Porn is bad because one girl got raped, dude."
This whole story reads like a bad Chuck Palahniuk knock-off. In fact, it's more like if Chuck Palahniuk tried to write after a horrific brain injury and someone else finished his manuscript.

That someone being a fucking H A C K.
In short, fuck this book, fuck Duncan Ralston and fuck the niggers at goodreads who think this is anything worth reading.

With a hefty toss across the room, a hard thud and a new hole in the drywall, I officially enter this pile of shit into The Wall Slapper's Club. Rest in piss.
 
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Commander X said:
Reading more collections of vintage pulp, in this case the first of two volumes collecting...
The Complete Cases of Steve Midnight, Volume 1 by John K. Butler. Before breaking into movies and television, pulp author John K. Butler wrote nine novellas about a mystery solving cab driver prowling the streets of Los Angeles, Steven Middleton Knight, AKA Steve Midnight. Published in the pages of Dime Detective Magazine between 1940 and 1942, the first four stories are collected here. Steven Middleton Knight was once a moneyed gadabout, who enjoyed partying it up during the late hours, gaining a reputation as “midnight playboy on a nation-wide scale.” Even after the Crash of 1929, when the King family lost a lot of money and his father committed suicide, he kept up with the playboy life until the money started running out. One day he woke up and realized he was broke and the sole source of support for his aging mother and invalid sister. So he went out and got a job, working hard at jockeying the sort of cabs he once used to ride on the midnight shift, for the Red Owl Cab Company. He takes on the name "Steve Midnight" as a way to protect what's left of his family's reputation. Now, he keeps getting mixed up in situations where he ends up solving crimes, for personal reasons, to collect a fare he's owed, or to get himself out of a jam. Butler's Midnight is a tough but not-as-hardboiled as he thinks he is kind of guy, a decent, honest protagonist, a former playboy turned working-class hero in an LA that's depiction is up there with Raymond Chandler's.
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oh this looks fun. I grew up reading the classic noir pulps by Chandler, Hammett, and so on. There's a lot that just slip under the radar because there's a metric shitload of excellent and fun ones that don't get attention.

hell it ain't just this genre of pulps but all of them in general.
 
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... Is there really no general book suggestion thread on here? Wack.

Anyway: Offspring of Düné. I liked the mysticism of "there's big worms and we just need to deal with them" of Dune, but I see how it's necessary to unravel the whole thing and make sense of it to write fucking what, 8? 10? books. Messiah felt like 80 pages of in-between. No clue how they'll make that into a movie if not to depict the entire jihad and yknow. Include Alia, at all.
 
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