What are you reading right now?

While searching for unrelated politics-related stuff, I came across this interesting news article from 1984 (from the book
Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie by H. Brandt Ayers). It was written in the immediate aftermath of Reagan's landslide 1984 election victory, and it's interesting for several reasons:
  • The author fails to foresee Reagan's long term impact, dismissing him as "no Lincoln or McKinley" and concluding that he probably won't substantially redefine American politics.
  • The South's days as a democratic stronghold were recent enough in 1984 that there's a refrence to people fearing that "[their] daddy or grandaddy will rise from the grave and come after [them] with a stick if [they] votes for a Republican."
  • The author speculates that there could be an "emerging democratic majority" if only the party was able to connect with small town people like those in the South, when as we all know they went in basically the exact opposite direction.
success is a permissive teacher 1.png

success is a permissive teacher 2.png

success is a permissive teacher 3.png
 
  • Informative
  • Like
Reactions: Misogenes, SpotOnTheWall, Vecr and 1 other person
Finished Wool. Wowee, what a ride. So much different from Silo, which was honestly convoluted at times, to tell the same story with different features and somehow more depth, despite each 'chapter' being from 3 to 6 pages if not less. It only makes Silo the series look even more impressive with how they invented plot details out of thin air (cough Fallout) to pad the run time. Bernard isn't even that big of a prick in Wool and he's just kicked to the curb on a page or two towards the end. He's the big evil in Silo, but just another cog in the books. Hope the last 2 books don't disappoint.
 
  • Thunk-Provoking
  • Like
Reactions: Richter Belmont and Vecr
I recently read “the Breach” by Nick Cutter. It’s a fun horror book, with bugs and body horror and body horror because of bugs.
It’s a bit lovecraft-lite, but thankfully Cutter doesn’t like the smell of his own farts so much as to try and make a whole cringy mythos out of it.
I did have a look around for opinions about his writing and I think I’m starting to understand why horror lit tends to be so toothless nowadays. I don’t know when, but the target audience for horror seemingly became “insufferable, whiny pussies”. you’d think this guy’s books are an all-out animal torturefest from the way people talk about them!
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Misogenes, Hugbox Kommissar, sleepermoded and 1 other person
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson. Follows the tale of a social worker in the late 1970s - '80s dealing with problem families while shouldering his own personal baggage but one case he gets tangled up in particular is one involving an emaciated 11-year-old boy and his schizo dad living up in the mountains waiting for the End Times.

Jeremiah, the boy's dad, is a very well-written character. He's clearly 'not well' but he's not stupid either and he does have some thunk-provoking statements on the modern world we now inhabit, such as our heavily placed importance on currency and its true value.

I'm currently halfway through and getting through his backstory; he and Veronica/Sarah could easily have a thread on here among the religious lolcows if they lived in the internet era.

My one criticism has to be with the female characters - in one of the blurbs praising this book it describes Smith writing every character as "sympathetic" but I'm really not feeling it with the likes of Mary and Beth. Maybe it's because I'm a woman that I'm feeling less lenient with them but Smith seems to offer more excuses than explanations for their behaviour and I'm trying not to focus solely on them because really, no character in this book is without flaws; Pete, the main character in particular is a drunk POS at times.

But this is a good book and I'm enjoying remmended.
 
Last edited:
  • Informative
Reactions: cold comfort, Misogenes, A Very Big Fish and 1 other person
Cinnamon Girl by Daniel Weizmann, the second of his series about Adam Zantz, Lyft driver and part-time private investigator. Zantz has been summoned by Charles Elkaim, his ailing former piano teacher (and friend of the uncle who raised him). A mystery man has approached Mr. Elkaim claiming he knows that his son, Emil, was innocent of the murder he was accused of back in 1984. Emil was the prime suspect in the murder of teenage drug dealer Reynaldo Durazo and was later shanked in prison while on remand. Charles, who has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and has only weeks left, has always believed his son was innocent, and craves the peace of mind of knowing for sure and Zantz, motivated in part by his fondness for Mr. Elkaim and by good old fashioned guilt, reluctantly decides to look into the case, thinking it may be part of a scam being run on a terminally ill old man.

To start, Zantz turns to the mother of Emil’s former girlfriend, Cynthia "Cinnamon" Persky. Cinnamon disappeared shortly after Emil was arrested but reappeared three years after, the victim of a drug overdose. The mother's house is also where Durazo was killed years before, and there Zantz stumbles across an unreleased test pressing of a vinyl LP, an album by a garage band called The Daily Telegraph that never saw the light of day. Part of the whole "Paisley Underground" of the 80s Cali music scene, the Daily Telegraph were either a potential Next Big Thing or just another nothing garage band, depending on who he asks. Emil and Reynaldo were both members of the band and good friends besides, and Cinnamon was the band's sort-of unofficial manager. Following that lead, he digs into the competitive, druggy and crime-riddled milieu the Daily Telegraph existed in, with the help of a burnt-out L.A. music historian, and wonders if Emil, Rey and Cinnamon were victims of a music rivalry gone bad...and realizes as the body count around the case starts anew, that someone is willing to resort to anything to keep a lid on what happened forty years previously. Sunny LA neo-noir detective fiction, more breezy and mellow than hardboiled, but it strongly evokes the 1980s LA music world.
 
Last edited:
I recently read The Heliand, it was a harmonized telling of the 4 Gospels that was written in Old Saxon from the 9th century and meant to imitate epic Norse poetry.

I will say calling Pontius Pilate "The Thane of the Emperor" sounds a lot cooler than "Pilate the Governor".
 
  • Like
Reactions: Misogenes and Karognis
Just finished A Scanner Darkly for the fifth time and, as always, the ending broke my heart (even if there's a sort of bleak optimism to it). I'm sci-fi'd out after reading nothing but that for most of the winter, so now I'm changing things up with a William Hope Hodgson collection I picked up today. I'd heard of him, but haven't read any of his work until now.
 
  • Like
  • Feels
Reactions: Misogenes, Otterly, Commander Suzdal and 5 others
I finished No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai. It was also recommended in the messed up book thread. I found it decent, but not super shocking or anything. I guess in context of post war Japan someone acting as the man does in that book would be considered wild and crazy. I actually emphasized with some of the situations the main character was in.

Currently reading Silence - Shusaku Endo - the story of Christian monks in Japan in the 1600's.
 
  • Informative
  • Like
  • Agree
Reactions: Misogenes, GameratePTSD, Commander Suzdal and 2 others
Just through Part One of Crime and Punishment and it’s been a treat so far. I really like Raskolnikov’s overthinking over everything - I haven’t really seen that in classic lit so far at least. That murder scene at the end got my adreneline going to as I was reading, just the descriptions of how he is feeling, the unplanned murder and his almost botched escape was completely enrapturing.

I’m just gonna predict that the rest of this book is him losing himself to paranoia and obviously his personality is gonna chnage for the worse, especially in regards to that guy his sister is to marry. And I’m thinking he’s gonna try and turn himself in near the end.

Anyway I look foward to finding out!
 
  • Like
  • Informative
Reactions: Misogenes, GameratePTSD, Deep Th0ts and 5 others
Baumstriezel said:
I recently read “the Breach” by Nick Cutter. It’s a fun horror book, with bugs and body horror and body horror because of bugs.
It’s a bit lovecraft-lite, but thankfully Cutter doesn’t like the smell of his own farts so much as to try and make a whole cringy mythos out of it.
I did have a look around for opinions about his writing and I think I’m starting to understand why horror lit tends to be so toothless nowadays. I don’t know when, but the target audience for horror seemingly became “insufferable, whiny pussies”. you’d think this guy’s books are an all-out animal torturefest from the way people talk about them!
Click to expand...
I think Cutter is decent nu-horror, although he does tend to harp on the same strings once his books get going. Hard to fault him I suppose, I get the feeling most modern horror writers are trying to thread the needle between King and Lovecraft.


Currently reading through Biohazard by Ken Alibek. Think it was recommended on here. Chronicles the Soviet bioweapons program as they weaponize and test dozens of viruses and germs for deployment against the West. Don't know how much of this is (or can be) verified, but it sounds like Russia should have turned into The Stand about a dozen times over.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Misogenes and Karognis
I just finished reading the book Tolkien and black magic (Tolkien och den svarta magin, 1982). It was written by the first Swedish translator of the Lord of the Rings, Åke Ohlmarks. He became openly hostile towards everything Tolkien at the end of his life after Christopher Tolkien wouldn't let him translate Silmarillon (because J.R.R. Tolkien disliked his translation of the Lord of the Rings).

In the first half of the book, he describes how Tolkien societies around the world are part of an international mafia that engages in nazi occultism, satanism, organized crime and human sacrifices. The mafia is controlled by the Tolkien family.

In the second half of the book, he talks about his negative experiences with the Tolkien fandom. Notably, he claims that one Tolkien fan, "Gandalf", unlawfully entered his house and then committed arson half a year before the publication of the book (it was actually because his wife fell asleep while smoking hours after Gandalf had already left, something which Ohlmarks admits but he accuses Gandalf of indirect arson anyway). This incident is what caused Ohlmarks to finally realize the truth about the Tolkien mafia.

The blurb (translated):
Especially in recent years, it has come out that the multitude of Tolkien societies (thousands in the whole of America and half of Europe, as well as a number of such societies in Sweden) have morphed into a kind of KU-KLUX-KLAN with a worship of open violence, crude orgies, alcohol and drug abuse. Murders have taken place, as well as recurrent cases of abuse, kidnappings and and desecrations of churches and sacraments.

Åke Ohlmarks, the man who translated and introduced Tolkien to a Swedish audience and who is also internationally recognized as one of the foremost experts on Tolkien, reveals in this truly horrifying book just how far things have gone even in our country.
Click to expand...
The book is funny as shit and I have no idea how he managed to get this published at all.
 
  • Like
  • Informative
  • Lunacy
Reactions: Misogenes, Otterly, Baumstriezel and 8 others
The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company: A Romance of Millions by James Howard Bridge

It's fascinating to me how books like this were, in a sense, kind of the KF thread OPs of their times
 
  • Like
Reactions: Misogenes, Karognis and Hweeks
pilgrim.png
Pilgrim: A Medieval Horror
A German knight fighting in the Crusades is tasked with smuggling a holy relic out of Jerusalem with the promise that doing so will save his son's soul. The knight, along with a rag-tag band of mercenaries, holy men, aids, and an Arab set off on their journey and it gets spooky and then weird real quick. Blends history with Christian and Islamic mysticism on an odyssey questioning the nature of good and evil. Found it captivating, well-paced, good characters, and fascinating imagery.
 
  • Informative
  • Like
Reactions: Misogenes, Otterly, Baumstriezel and 4 others
Cows by Matthew Stokoe

Late 90s edge, liberal use of the word cunt and some genuinely grotesque imagery of cattle slaughter. Had it recommended to me via a ‘controversial book’ conversation. Looking online people find it very divisive, thought I’m hardly surprised.

I’m into it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back