- Joined
- Nov 6, 2021
Empire of the Vampire
10/10 recommend for fellow vampire thirsters
10/10 recommend for fellow vampire thirsters
What are you reading right now?
- Thread starter AtroposHeart
- Start date
- Joined
- Nov 12, 2021
Just finished Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy….
Next up is Blood Meridian.
That ending really put a damper on my afternoon.
Next up is Blood Meridian.
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2021
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Check out the Black Company series by Glen Cook. OG dark fantasy written in the 80s-90s about an elite mercenary company that gets hired by female Sauron to crush a rebellion centered around a prophecy of a Chosen One who will rid the world of evil. Fair warning, Cook's writing style can charitably be described as 'terse' so jumping from Martin to Cook might take some getting used to.
- Joined
- May 9, 2020
I read Roosh's book on finding God and doing a tour across America. Much more entertaining than expected. He assesses cities based on the state of bathrooms in public libraries and a number of pride flags. It gets repetitive but never too boring as he's mixing the travel journal part with more spiritual stories from monasteries he visits and people he meets. Hard to distinguish humor from genuine autism at times, but I laughed a lot. He'd be a more likeable character if he slowed down on the preaching, but it's not like he has a history of moderation.
The ugliest part was a break up with his way too young Polish girlfriend. He jealously went through her laptop, set up a camera to have everything recorded "for safety reasons" and stuffed her belongings into an IKEA bag he pushed out of the door after her. Like a hysterical wife would.
There is a touching few pages at the end of the book where he describes an experience under the influence of some mushrooms. He believes he was killed by God for a moment just to see where his sister went after she died of cancer a year before. And how her life might have been a sacrifice for his. It almost felt like it was written by a different person, had a sort of depth and became very memorable to me. It's too long to quote though, so here are some funny bits.
Really enjoyed this mystery story by JK Rowling. It's the most comfy, unpretentious old-fashioned detective novel I've read in a while and the opposite of what I expected. I may even try to read some of the newer "tranny the killer" books now.
Half way through this Japanese thing - a great book for analytical readers as the characters trying to solve the murder mystery are supposed to have no more information than what is presented, so one can try to figure it out along. I am not that type of a reader, but I'll still finish it out of curiosity. Very different from Western novels.
Ronin Sanchez
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 6, 2021
Thanks a lot. For me, this book has always seemed like a book about love and for girls. This is what stops me from reading. I think this is a prejudice in my head, but there is still a mental barrier.
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2021
Finished up with Moby Dick on Saturday and am now reading through Dracula and Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
They complement each other. The show benefits from the performances of dozens of great actors and from excellent production design. On the other hand, the books include more detail and do a better job of fleshing out the environment than a TV show possibly could. (Some of the environments in seasons 1 and 2 aren't quite up to snuff, like Qarth; TV Qarth is a bit boring/cheesy. On the other hand, environments like Winterfell and the Red Keep are rendered wonderfully throughout the series.)
I would suggest watching until the end of season 4. There's a lot of great stuff in season 5, but season 5 is also when the real stupidity starts to filter in.
Leonard Helplessness
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2018
The Plague Dogs, by Richard Adams. It's got its ups and downs, a bit preachy at times in its tone, but overall enjoyable. Kind of left me in shock when one of the dogs fucking accidentally killed the magic jewgro
HunterHearstHelmsley
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2019
Yes, it is a prejudice. (You’re not just making a joke are you?)
I felt a similar way about The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice and Wilkie Collins. I enjoyed them all, particularly Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White is a great book.
- Joined
- Jun 24, 2020
Michael Crichton's Prey. As if I'm not already sufficiently paranoid about Big Tech and the hiveminds it is creating.
- Joined
- Jan 1, 2020
I’m making up for the fact that I never read this book when I was younger because they had the Bernstein Bears and the Rainbow Fish jammed into our brains.
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2016
Right now I'm reading Robinson Crusoe. I'll probably finish it in a day or two.
A lot of older books have have fat in them that modern books don't, which can get boring sometimes. But it's not surprising since you had nothing better to do back then.
Idk if this is an appropriate thread, but lately I've been watching a lot of documentaries and videos about space and I'd like to know more about it. Does anyone know any good books about it that are beginner friendly? Or just have recommendations on how to start self learning something like that.
I'm not trying to be the next Hawking, I want to understand better.
A lot of older books have have fat in them that modern books don't, which can get boring sometimes. But it's not surprising since you had nothing better to do back then.
Idk if this is an appropriate thread, but lately I've been watching a lot of documentaries and videos about space and I'd like to know more about it. Does anyone know any good books about it that are beginner friendly? Or just have recommendations on how to start self learning something like that.
I'm not trying to be the next Hawking, I want to understand better.
Phalanges Mycologist
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Sep 11, 2021
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2018
I finally got around to reading the Novelization of "Once Upon A Time... in Hollywood" by Quentin Tarantino.
I'm a guiltfree fan of Tarantino's movies. I think they're just well written little stories. The book starts off really strong in my opinion, it gives details that the film intentionally made hazy. Tarantino's greatest asset by far is his ability to write dialogue and when he's writing that it's a fun amusing read.
But my lord, I think we all knew the guy had Autism all the way back in the 90s. And sadly it confirms it when he decides to just make autistic lore building as a segueway to talk about his autistic obsession with old TV Shows and of course art housey cinema. Did you know that Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt's character) is a gigantic fan of Akira Kurosawa? Well I sure didn't because it seemed to be that Cliff was just your badass killing machine not someone who in the 60s would appreciate foreign films. Did you want all there was to know about the in-universe Western Lancer? Because Tarantino will give you pages upon pages of that.
If you loved the movie and you're the type of reader that's willing to skip boring pages I recommend checking it out.
I'm a guiltfree fan of Tarantino's movies. I think they're just well written little stories. The book starts off really strong in my opinion, it gives details that the film intentionally made hazy. Tarantino's greatest asset by far is his ability to write dialogue and when he's writing that it's a fun amusing read.
But my lord, I think we all knew the guy had Autism all the way back in the 90s. And sadly it confirms it when he decides to just make autistic lore building as a segueway to talk about his autistic obsession with old TV Shows and of course art housey cinema. Did you know that Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt's character) is a gigantic fan of Akira Kurosawa? Well I sure didn't because it seemed to be that Cliff was just your badass killing machine not someone who in the 60s would appreciate foreign films. Did you want all there was to know about the in-universe Western Lancer? Because Tarantino will give you pages upon pages of that.
If you loved the movie and you're the type of reader that's willing to skip boring pages I recommend checking it out.
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2021
I'm taking advantage of Stanislaw Lem's 100th birthday to get reprints of his harder to find books, and I got his complete short stories and Back from the Universe. Will probably read his short stories piecemeal over the next year, because it's a massive tome- the kind you can't even read in bed unless you have the forearms of Ronnie Coleman.
And I am still working through Gene Wolfe's Chronicles of the New Sun, which is an amazing book, but not for brainlets such as myself, so it's going to take a while too. Peace was very touching, but also the kind of book I would like to revisit to figure out a bit better.
EDIT: I saw that today is Thanksgiving for you burgers. Have the appropriate Gene Wolfe story for that day:
And I am still working through Gene Wolfe's Chronicles of the New Sun, which is an amazing book, but not for brainlets such as myself, so it's going to take a while too. Peace was very touching, but also the kind of book I would like to revisit to figure out a bit better.
EDIT: I saw that today is Thanksgiving for you burgers. Have the appropriate Gene Wolfe story for that day:
“Hey,” Richard Marquer said to his wife Betty one August afternoon. “Hey, ninety percent of the United States is uninhabited.” They were reading the Sunday paper.
“That’s right,” Betty said, “it’s parking lots.”
“No, really. It says so right here: ‘At least ninety percent of the land area of the United States is employed neither in agriculture nor as sites for roads and buildings.’”
“I didn’t know Texas was that big.”
“Listen, this is serious. Where the hell is it all?”
“Dick, you don’t really believe that junk.”
“It says so.”
“It says the department store is selling percale sheets twenty percent under cost too.”
Richard put down his part of the paper and went to the bookcase.
After five minutes work with pencil and paper he said, “Bet?”
“What?”
“I’ve been making some calculations. According to the almanac—”
“That’s an old one. Nineteen sixty-eight.”
“It still ought to be pretty accurate, and it says there are—get this—two hundred and ninety-six million eight hundred and thirty-six thousand harvested acres in the United States. Now there’s six hundred and forty acres in a square mile, so that means about four hundred and sixty-three thousand harvested square miles. Only the gross area of the United States is three million six hundred and twenty-eight thousand one hundred and fifty square miles.”
“So it isn’t ninety percent. You just proved it yourself.”
“I’m not arguing about the exact figure, but look at the size of the thing. Say that half as much is taken up for buildings and backyards as for all the farms. That still leaves over three million square miles unaccounted for. More than three quarters of the country.”
“Richard?”
“Yes?”
“Richard, do you really think that’s really there? That everybody wouldn’t go out and grab it?”
“The facts—”
“Dick, those are talking facts—they’re not real. It’s like what you were telling me when we bought the car, about the miles on the little thing—”
“Odometer.”
“You remember? You said they didn’t mean anything. It said thirteen thousand but you said it might be fifteen or twenty thousand really. Anything. Or like when they raised the city income tax. They said it was inflation, but if it was inflation everybody’s pay would go up too so the city’d get more—only they took another half percent anyway, remember? You could prove they didn’t need it, but it didn’t mean anything.”
“But it has to be somewhere.”
“You really think it’s out there? With deer on it, and bears? Dick, it’s silly.”
“Three million square miles.”
“When we drove to Baltimore last summer to see my mother, did you see any of it?”
Richard shook his head.
“When you flew to Cleveland for the company—”
“It was so foggy. Everything was socked in, and you couldn’t see anything but haze.”
“From factories! See?” Betty went back to her paper.
That night The Wizard of Oz was shown on television for the two hundredth time. Judy Garland sang “Over the Rainbow.”
Richard took to going on drives. He drove, sometimes for two or three or four hours, before coming home from work. He drove weekends, and once when Betty spent a weekend with her mother he drove from six A.M. Saturday until twelve P.M. Sunday and put sixteen hundred miles on the car. He knew all the best ways into and out of the city, and the best places for food and coffee. Once he was the first person to report an accident to the state highway patrol; once he helped college girls change a tire.
At a roadside zoo he made friends with three deer in a pen—a buck with fine antlers nuzzled his hand for popcorn, and Richard said softly, “I bet if they’d let you out you’d find some of them.” Later he asked the operator of the zoo if any animals ever escaped.
“Don’t worry about that.” (He was a desiccated man of fifty who wore checked sports shirts.) “We keep everything secure here. Look at it from my angle—those animals are valuable to me. You think I’d let them get out where they could hurt people?”
Richard said, “I’m not trying to accuse you of anything. I just wondered if any of them ever got loose.”
“Not long as I’ve had the place, and I been here eight years.”
Later Richard asked the boy who pitched hay into the deer’s pen, and he said, “Last year. The little buck. I guess the big one was giving him a rough time, and he jumped the fence.”
“What happened to him?”
“He got out on the highway and got hit by a car.”
Richard began measuring the farm woodlots he passed, and the little acres of waste ground. He carried a hundred-foot tape in the car and picked up hitchhikers—mostly college boys with beaded headbands and fringed buckskin shirts—who would help him, holding one end of the tape while Richard trotted past five or six trees to put the other at the margin of a county road.
He stopped more and more often to examine the bodies of dead animals. Betty asked for a trial separation, and he agreed.
He bought four new tires and had his wheel bearings repacked.
At a roadhouse he paid a three-dollar cover and seventy-five cents for beer to watch a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl with a feather in her hair being undressed by a trained raccoon. The girl was called Princess Running Bare, and after Richard had given the waitress five dollars more she sat at his table and sipped coffee royal for half an hour. “All us Indians are alcoholics,” Princess Running Bare said, and she said she was half French Canadian and half Cree, and had been born in a Montreal slum. Richard tried to call Betty’s mother’s from a telephone booth next to the bar, but no one answered. He left the roadhouse and drove all night.
Outside a steel-making town he took the wrong lane of a three-pronged freeway fork and found himself rushing, with a hundred other cars, in a direction in which he had no wish to go. He pulled off at a service park and asked the attendant.
“Lots of them does that,” the attendant said, pulling at the bill of his green cap. “You want to go—” and he waved in the direction from which Richard had come.
“Yes,” Richard said. He named the Interstate he wished to use, which was not the one he was on. “Southeast.” For some reason he added, “I want to go home.” It was about nine o’clock.
“Yeah,” the attendant said. He looked around conspiratorially. “Tell you what. Out that way ‘bout three-quarters of a mile is the eastbound lanes.” He waved an arm toward the back of the service park, where uneven, down-sloping ground was thick with dead grass. “Know what I mean? See, this here is four lanes goin’ west and over there is where they come back. Now if you keep going the way you are it’s seventeen miles until you can get off and cross over. But sometimes people just jump their tires over that little curb at the back of the station and drive across.”
“I see,” Richard said.
“Only when you come in you come into the fast lane, naturally. Course it’s against the law.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“And if I was you I’d walk out a little way first to make sure it isn’t too swampy. Usually dry enough, but you wouldn’t want to get stuck.”
It felt soft under his feet, but not dangerously so. The eastbound lanes, presumably a thousand yards or so ahead, were not visible, and as he walked the gentle slope buried the westbound lanes behind him, and at last even the red roof of the service park. The distant noises of traffic mingled with the sound of the wind. “Here,” he said to himself. “Here.”
His shoes crushed the soft tunnels of moles. He looked up and saw a bird that might have been a hawk circling. An old, rusted hubcap lying on its face held a cup of water, and mosquito larvae, and he thought of it springing from the wheel of its car and rolling, rolling all this distance across the empty ground. It seemed a long way.
At the top of the next rise he could see the eastbound lanes, and that the rest of the ground was dry enough to drive over. He turned and went back, but found he had somehow lost his way, and that he was a quarter mile at least from the service park where he had left his car. He began walking back to it along the shoulder of the Interstate, but the traffic passing only a few feet to his right at ninety miles an hour frightened him. He moved away from it, and the ground became really swampy, the mud sticking to his shoes and insects buzzing up with each step he took; so that he went back to the shoulder of the highway, still afraid.
“That’s right,” Betty said, “it’s parking lots.”
“No, really. It says so right here: ‘At least ninety percent of the land area of the United States is employed neither in agriculture nor as sites for roads and buildings.’”
“I didn’t know Texas was that big.”
“Listen, this is serious. Where the hell is it all?”
“Dick, you don’t really believe that junk.”
“It says so.”
“It says the department store is selling percale sheets twenty percent under cost too.”
Richard put down his part of the paper and went to the bookcase.
After five minutes work with pencil and paper he said, “Bet?”
“What?”
“I’ve been making some calculations. According to the almanac—”
“That’s an old one. Nineteen sixty-eight.”
“It still ought to be pretty accurate, and it says there are—get this—two hundred and ninety-six million eight hundred and thirty-six thousand harvested acres in the United States. Now there’s six hundred and forty acres in a square mile, so that means about four hundred and sixty-three thousand harvested square miles. Only the gross area of the United States is three million six hundred and twenty-eight thousand one hundred and fifty square miles.”
“So it isn’t ninety percent. You just proved it yourself.”
“I’m not arguing about the exact figure, but look at the size of the thing. Say that half as much is taken up for buildings and backyards as for all the farms. That still leaves over three million square miles unaccounted for. More than three quarters of the country.”
“Richard?”
“Yes?”
“Richard, do you really think that’s really there? That everybody wouldn’t go out and grab it?”
“The facts—”
“Dick, those are talking facts—they’re not real. It’s like what you were telling me when we bought the car, about the miles on the little thing—”
“Odometer.”
“You remember? You said they didn’t mean anything. It said thirteen thousand but you said it might be fifteen or twenty thousand really. Anything. Or like when they raised the city income tax. They said it was inflation, but if it was inflation everybody’s pay would go up too so the city’d get more—only they took another half percent anyway, remember? You could prove they didn’t need it, but it didn’t mean anything.”
“But it has to be somewhere.”
“You really think it’s out there? With deer on it, and bears? Dick, it’s silly.”
“Three million square miles.”
“When we drove to Baltimore last summer to see my mother, did you see any of it?”
Richard shook his head.
“When you flew to Cleveland for the company—”
“It was so foggy. Everything was socked in, and you couldn’t see anything but haze.”
“From factories! See?” Betty went back to her paper.
That night The Wizard of Oz was shown on television for the two hundredth time. Judy Garland sang “Over the Rainbow.”
Richard took to going on drives. He drove, sometimes for two or three or four hours, before coming home from work. He drove weekends, and once when Betty spent a weekend with her mother he drove from six A.M. Saturday until twelve P.M. Sunday and put sixteen hundred miles on the car. He knew all the best ways into and out of the city, and the best places for food and coffee. Once he was the first person to report an accident to the state highway patrol; once he helped college girls change a tire.
At a roadside zoo he made friends with three deer in a pen—a buck with fine antlers nuzzled his hand for popcorn, and Richard said softly, “I bet if they’d let you out you’d find some of them.” Later he asked the operator of the zoo if any animals ever escaped.
“Don’t worry about that.” (He was a desiccated man of fifty who wore checked sports shirts.) “We keep everything secure here. Look at it from my angle—those animals are valuable to me. You think I’d let them get out where they could hurt people?”
Richard said, “I’m not trying to accuse you of anything. I just wondered if any of them ever got loose.”
“Not long as I’ve had the place, and I been here eight years.”
Later Richard asked the boy who pitched hay into the deer’s pen, and he said, “Last year. The little buck. I guess the big one was giving him a rough time, and he jumped the fence.”
“What happened to him?”
“He got out on the highway and got hit by a car.”
Richard began measuring the farm woodlots he passed, and the little acres of waste ground. He carried a hundred-foot tape in the car and picked up hitchhikers—mostly college boys with beaded headbands and fringed buckskin shirts—who would help him, holding one end of the tape while Richard trotted past five or six trees to put the other at the margin of a county road.
He stopped more and more often to examine the bodies of dead animals. Betty asked for a trial separation, and he agreed.
He bought four new tires and had his wheel bearings repacked.
At a roadhouse he paid a three-dollar cover and seventy-five cents for beer to watch a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl with a feather in her hair being undressed by a trained raccoon. The girl was called Princess Running Bare, and after Richard had given the waitress five dollars more she sat at his table and sipped coffee royal for half an hour. “All us Indians are alcoholics,” Princess Running Bare said, and she said she was half French Canadian and half Cree, and had been born in a Montreal slum. Richard tried to call Betty’s mother’s from a telephone booth next to the bar, but no one answered. He left the roadhouse and drove all night.
Outside a steel-making town he took the wrong lane of a three-pronged freeway fork and found himself rushing, with a hundred other cars, in a direction in which he had no wish to go. He pulled off at a service park and asked the attendant.
“Lots of them does that,” the attendant said, pulling at the bill of his green cap. “You want to go—” and he waved in the direction from which Richard had come.
“Yes,” Richard said. He named the Interstate he wished to use, which was not the one he was on. “Southeast.” For some reason he added, “I want to go home.” It was about nine o’clock.
“Yeah,” the attendant said. He looked around conspiratorially. “Tell you what. Out that way ‘bout three-quarters of a mile is the eastbound lanes.” He waved an arm toward the back of the service park, where uneven, down-sloping ground was thick with dead grass. “Know what I mean? See, this here is four lanes goin’ west and over there is where they come back. Now if you keep going the way you are it’s seventeen miles until you can get off and cross over. But sometimes people just jump their tires over that little curb at the back of the station and drive across.”
“I see,” Richard said.
“Only when you come in you come into the fast lane, naturally. Course it’s against the law.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“And if I was you I’d walk out a little way first to make sure it isn’t too swampy. Usually dry enough, but you wouldn’t want to get stuck.”
It felt soft under his feet, but not dangerously so. The eastbound lanes, presumably a thousand yards or so ahead, were not visible, and as he walked the gentle slope buried the westbound lanes behind him, and at last even the red roof of the service park. The distant noises of traffic mingled with the sound of the wind. “Here,” he said to himself. “Here.”
His shoes crushed the soft tunnels of moles. He looked up and saw a bird that might have been a hawk circling. An old, rusted hubcap lying on its face held a cup of water, and mosquito larvae, and he thought of it springing from the wheel of its car and rolling, rolling all this distance across the empty ground. It seemed a long way.
At the top of the next rise he could see the eastbound lanes, and that the rest of the ground was dry enough to drive over. He turned and went back, but found he had somehow lost his way, and that he was a quarter mile at least from the service park where he had left his car. He began walking back to it along the shoulder of the Interstate, but the traffic passing only a few feet to his right at ninety miles an hour frightened him. He moved away from it, and the ground became really swampy, the mud sticking to his shoes and insects buzzing up with each step he took; so that he went back to the shoulder of the highway, still afraid.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2021
Just recently finished "The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop" by Dan Charnas. Interesting 600+ page tome about the history of hip hop and rap, starting from Personality Jock (King Tim III) and Sugarhill Records, going all the way through the 80's, 90's, and up to the sale of Rocawear and Glaceau (of which 50 Cent had a large stake in.) Pretty interesting to see the different personalities involved in the mainstreaming of a genre over the course of 30'ish years. Also a lot of jews.
Currently reading "Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream" by Jay Stevens. A nonfiction history of the development of psychedelics (mainly LSD, but also nods to Ayahuasca, Psilocybin, Mescaline, and DMT) and the culture that built around it. Funny tidbits are all over the place including the fact that Cary Grant used to do Acid a lot in the 50's as part of a form of psychotherapy. Lots of page time has been given to Aldous Huxley / The Doors of Perception as Huxley was very intent on finding his form of "Soma". I expected to go in on it being more about the darker side (i.e. MKULTRA, ARTICHOKE, and Operation Midnight Climax) and while it does mention them, it's more a historical timeline rather than dark conspiracy theories so there's a lot of points of research taken into LSD as a therapeutic drug, as well as Mescaline research as a way to simulate madness (in order to study afflictions like schizophrenia.)
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
Once you heard he used to work in a video rental store, back when those existed, you knew he was autistic.
wtfNeedSignUp
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Finished the fourth Sherlock Holmes novel, the mystery there is really easy and having half the book be a story about the murderer (though the final twist is nice) is a huge letdown. Really, the Hound of Baskerville is the best Homes long story and the rest are more of an adventure story than detective.
I kinda got sick with the other short stories (especially as the small cast makes deduction pretty easy) and moved to reading classic Lovecraft, which I always give up reading after a few shorts. But after getting to The Colour Out of Space the writing become far more interesting and engaging (before that the only story I enjoyed was The Reanimator but more for being comedic). Right now I'm midway through Mountains of Madness, but I already read most of the other classic stories.
One of the things I don't get is people using Innsmouth and Dunwich Horror as "this is why mixed race births are bad" despite both stories it's more comparable for people fucking demons than black people (I know it's hard to differenciate), which immorality is older than the bible.
I kinda got sick with the other short stories (especially as the small cast makes deduction pretty easy) and moved to reading classic Lovecraft, which I always give up reading after a few shorts. But after getting to The Colour Out of Space the writing become far more interesting and engaging (before that the only story I enjoyed was The Reanimator but more for being comedic). Right now I'm midway through Mountains of Madness, but I already read most of the other classic stories.
One of the things I don't get is people using Innsmouth and Dunwich Horror as "this is why mixed race births are bad" despite both stories it's more comparable for people fucking demons than black people (I know it's hard to differenciate), which immorality is older than the bible.