What are you reading right now?

[Womble of Wimbledon]

Been trying to find a book on Jack the Ripper that actually is good and not just copypaste of wikipedia, the theories of it actually having been a woman were interesting, but after all the crappy books on the topic want to make sure its actually something academic and not another shock book for a cheap buck.

Too lazy to check if it's been mentioned already but The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden is my favourite. Academic and thorough but not too dry, not sensationalistic at all but keeps the story moving along nicely and gives plenty of context for the time and place. Offers up the main suspects but doesn't speculate as to who did it.

 

[WhiskeyJack]

"Clickers" by JF Gonzalez.

It’s basically a classic B-movie, gory and a fairly generic set of Stephen King type characters (redneck asshole sheriff, main character is a horror author, slutty druggy chick, etc) fighting prehistoric sea scorpions and eventually Lovecraftian deep ones/fish people.

It might as well be a direct novelization of “Humanoids From The Deep”, honestly.

Not terrible if like schlock, but I hate the cover:

 

[DoomsdayElite]

Just finished A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. Fantastic, I was disappointed when I finished it because I could have been reading a story like that for much longer.

 

[GatorAids]

Just finished Dune. I'm considering reading the sequels because I heard God Emperor was a batshit crazy read but I've also heard Messiah and Children are boring and meandering.

Might instead start either Adjustment Day or The Invention of Sound by Chuck Palahniuk. I've heard nothing but bad things about both but I'm curious. People told me Rant and Lullaby were shit too and I enjoyed those while I fucking hated Choke.

 

[le boucher]

I just finished Notes from the Underground and it was basically a direct attack on me personally. Also started reading the narrative history book The Great Mortality, about the the black death, by John something, very entertaining, well written book so far.

 

[CowPox]

Forever war

 

[Jewthulhu]

I just finished Notes from the Underground and it was basically a direct attack on me personally.

I feel you there.

Currently reading "The Iran-Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History." Only at the beginning, but there's a lot of interesting insight into Saddam and the Iraqi state to set the stage for the conflict.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

"Clickers" by JF Gonzalez.

It’s basically a classic B-movie, gory and a fairly generic set of Stephen King type characters (redneck asshole sheriff, main character is a horror author, slutty druggy chick, etc) fighting prehistoric sea scorpions and eventually Lovecraftian deep ones/fish people.

It might as well be a direct novelization of “Humanoids From The Deep”, honestly.

Not terrible if like schlock, but I hate the cover:

View attachment 4757153

I feel like this asshole redneck sheriff cliche probably came about naturally from specific sheriffs ruling their counties as fiefdoms/hostile to outsiders, and pissy outsiders upset that they got charged a speeding ticket, but it really bothers me because it feels tied up in the general push towards centralization of power. The Sheriff is an elected official, unlike municipal police chiefs. If the people dislike the sheriff they have the ability to directly remove them. Sheriffs also act much more independent of political pressure, making them (in combination with elections) responsive to public demands. I find the county sheriffs of rural places much more appealing than the corrupt circuses of big Northern police departments (your NYC, Chicago, LA) and god-forbid national gendarmeries (which I think is what the Left is ultimately pushing towards).

Just finished A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. Fantastic, I was disappointed when I finished it because I could have been reading a story like that for much longer.

It's a wonderful book. The middle section was the weakest but the first and last both struck me emotionally. The first one is incredible for the way it captures the magical worldview of Medieval people and portrays them with a sort of dignity I have never seen anything else capture. The whole concept of the illuminated manuscript - taking something as mundane and dry as technical blueprints and turning it into a work of beautiful art and holy relic - shows a much better faith in people and their intelligence than most apocalyptic fiction (where they would just blindly worship technology as magic) and at the same time a sort of tender, childlike wonder at the world that's inspirational. I've had a strong desire to see an actual physical version of it made (though it would obviously take to long to do for real).

The last section is dark, I'm not Catholic - not even sympathetic to it, though I seem to read a lot of shit with monks in it - and support mercy-killing. The prior is someone who, if I were in the shoes of the authorities there, would just beat down with my truncheon to get him out of the way. But the way it sells the fervor and desperation is compelling, and I could see into the mindset behind that. More haunting now with the MAID epidemic in Canada. The magical realism (which is always coming up throughout the book) with the woman with the inborn twin really sells it. There's a sort of sublime melancholy to the whole book.

I feel you there.

Currently reading "The Iran-Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History." Only at the beginning, but there's a lot of interesting insight into Saddam and the Iraqi state to set the stage for the conflict.

I wish I'd heard of/thought to look up one on that. Modern Middle Eastern history goes surprisingly underappreciated considering how its directly relevant to everything going on. Average American doesn't know jack shit about the history of any of those countries, even the basic governing ideologies (Saddam's Ba'athism being, for all purposes, Sunni Arab Nazism). I root for the Ayatollah in that.




I've got four going since I'm forcing myself back into reading again.
My nonfiction rotation:

Mind Over Matter
- Autobiography (by ghostwriter) of John Urschel, Black NFL mathematician PhD mandingo. Turns out his life was actually pretty boring and he doesn't have a ton of interest to say.

SOG: Something or other
- Book a Kiwi mentioned (many of the best books I've read have been) about commandos in Vietnam, seems okay at first

Furs, Fortune and Empire
- Book of the fur trade in America, starting (technically, from Vikings) with Dutch New York on up. Pretty fun so far.

My fiction:

Essex Dogs
- Book about mercenaries in the Hundred Years War. It's okay. Reads kind of pulpy, like those cheap-ass WW2/Vietnam commando books you see in stores. It's no Pillars of the Earth.

 

[Jewthulhu]

I wish I'd heard of/thought to look up one on that. Modern Middle Eastern history goes surprisingly underappreciated considering how its directly relevant to everything going on. Average American doesn't know jack shit about the history of any of those countries, even the basic governing ideologies (Saddam's Ba'athism being, for all purposes, Sunni Arab Nazism). I root for the Ayatollah in that.

Contemporary MENA history is something I've been fascinated with for a while, finally got around to reading a professional book on it. Would recommend so far, it's amazingly informative, and cites a lot of captured Iraqi documents.

Also, Saddam's Ba'athist party was functionally secular. He mainly wanted to unite the Arabs under Iraq (and, of course, destroy Israel). Komeni was a Shi'a revolutionary. He wanted to export his revolution to the rest of the Middle East (and, of course, destroy Israel).

 

[Wampak]

Just finished Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear.

It was pretty lousy. Glaring errors in the text that I'm shocked weren't caught by an editor aside, the book was mostly dull; the characters were hollow, and the prose was flat and dead, only really gaining vigor during the two or so big action scenes. The style felt like it was trying to emulate Hemingway of all things, a truly insane choice for a YA adventure novel about dinosaurs.

 

[Obscura-Justin]

I’m currently working on:

Starting G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown Stories

When Titans Clashed by David M. Glantz

Here to suggest:

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses

This one seems to never get read these days due to the popularity of The Road and Blood Meridian. But I find passages in AtPH to be more poignant, melancholy, and beautiful than anything Cormac has written.

“They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

Currently reading Listening to Killers while listening to The Word is Murder. After I'm done with Listening to Killers I'll probably read a few more old True Detective stories. Trying to get a feel for a 1970's horror/ psychological thriller story for the book I'm writing and getting not only a feel on how murderers think, but also how stories were written back in the 70s and the layout out of a good crime story. It's something that's missing in CoC books.

 

[GatorAids]

Finished Dune Messiah, I really didn't like it outside the last 15% or so.

Started Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Priest part was 10/10. Soldier part was 7/10, too much coom.

 

[Commander X]

Gotham City 14 Miles edited by Jim Beard, a 2012 book of 14 essays dissecting ABC's 1966 Batman program. Not a dry academic tome, various fans from different occupations like authors, illustrators, graphic designers, cartoonists and so on write about the show's visual style, the infamous theme music and Batman inspired music, the very nature of the "Batmania" craze and how insanely popular the show was for a time, how the show started to lose "it" during the third season, the show's affect on the Batman comics and influences on the Batman franchise in the future. One chapter, written by none other than Chuck Dixon, is about despite dismissing other elements of it, the larger than life, boldly hammy villains of "The Show" influenced him when he ended up working on Batman comics. Though when the show aired, he was just a kid who idolized the comic book Batman and like many die-hard comics fans was aghast at how silly they made the Caped Crusader.

To compound my miseries, the series spawned acres of merchandising both authorized and not. Bat-pencils, Bat-gum, Bat-candy, Bat-waterguns, Bat-yo-yos, and anything else that bat symbol could be pasted on crowded the shelves of newsstands, fives-and-dimes and department stores. it all seemed to spring up overnight, and there was no escaping it. Even the Top 40 radio stations were packing Batman-inspired songs onto their playlists. Long-forgotten R&B groups recorded deservedly-forgotten 45s about Batman and Robin, and the single of Nelson Riddle's arrangement of the TV show theme was on the chart and airwaves for months.

Later, he recounts getting his opportunity to write Batman comics for DC, being overseen by legends like Archie Goodwin and Denny O'Neil (under who Batman comics started shedding the BIFF WHAM POW legacy of "The Show" in the 70s). He's also got a Robin mini-series to script, even, but as he plotted his first plotlines, "The Show's" villains intrude on his thoughts. Which wasn't good since "The Show" still stung in the comics biz, especially at DC, and guys like O'Neil labored to "remove the Batusi from the zeitgeist". He also discusses the most obvious case of his being influenced by the show, a Detective Comics two-parter he worked on with artist Graham Nolan where a hammy but effective pirate-themed villain called Cap'n Fear is pulling off nautical heists, joined by a crew who pay lip-service to his corny "yo ho ho" nautical lingo to his face but are less enthusiastic behind his back. It was more a homage to Golden Age era Batman creatives with some sly references to the show, including a cliff-hanger ending and earned he and Nolan a scolding from the editorial people for being too much like the "Adam West series".

An essay near the end by author and pulp-era fiction expert Will Murray goes into how the show started running out of gas by season three as Batmania started winding down, how stingy the budget became in response to how expensive it had gotten to shoot, and all of the cut corners and increasingly sparse sets, and how the show went from cheeky deliberate camp to rushed scripts full of silly slapstick and overly broad farce - citing Adam West on how the Batman putting on shorts to surf in the Batsuit was a sign of how "we crossed the line between parody and stupidity in this show, I fear".

An on-set mishap became a metaphor for the decline of Batman. Carrying his surfboard atop his cowl, West accidentally squashed one bat-ear out of shape. It never stuck up properly in any of the remaining episodes, and no one seemed to care enough to fix it properly. Finally, the other ear was bent in a lame attempt at symmetry.

And the final piece, by novelist Jeff Rovin, who'd also worn the hats of "comics writer" and "editor" at times, is a brief piece about Rovin's experiences with the man at the center of Batmania, a "former Hawaiian TV personality and Warner Bros. contract player" born Bill Anderson but better known to many as Adam West, the man who'd been unable to get real acting work for a period of time despite people still recognizing him by his voice alone - but he was still a charming and gracious fellow and after some projects that failed to get traction, they finally collaborated on West's memoirs Back to the Batcave.

 

[CowPox]

There was an 18 men on two women orgy scene in the sci fi book i'm reading, it was just typical sci fi with a slightly dark bent to it, then bang out of nowhere there it was.

 

[The Taco Santo!]

A history of Irish gangsters in America called Paddy Whacked. TBH, I just bought it for the title, but there are some great stories in there.

 

[glass_houses]

@Commander X if you haven't already read it, look for Boy Wonder by Burt Ward. It's a lot of fun.

EDIT: or don't, holy fuck. It's going for $150 on eBay.

 

[A Grey Cat]

The old world blues are acting up, so im reading the bad beginning, R.L Stine's the haunting hour, and Jurassic park. Really a lot of old books from the old days. That happens when those blues act up.

 

[Power Glove]

Aaron Dembski-Bowden - Helsreach. Black Templars, cocky, arrogant and still my favourite Chapter.

The Boys Omnibus Vol 4.

 

[GatorAids]

Finished Hyperion. Overall I'd give it a 9.5/10
Priest>Poet>Scholar>Consul>Detective=Soldier

About half way through Fall Of Hyperion now. Sad it doesn't have the short story format but I get that it wouldn't make much sense for a more plot heavy book lile this.