What are you reading right now?

Wrath of the Wendigo by Clay Martin. If you locked Alex Jones and Brad Thor in a room with about fifty pounds of coke and DMT, this is probably what you'd get. Absolute batshit author manifesto in the best possible way, like TRVE ARYAN WARRIORS unlocking ancestral viking berserker memories and casting rune magic battling the globalist cabal of serpent possessed Black Cube of Saturn worshipping secret society elites batshit.

Also apparently this was all revealed to the author by some spirits while in the mountains out west.
 
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Huge wrestling nigger here, so I'm currently reading Bret Harts Hitman. Not bad at all, tells a lot about his family history. After that, might read some dystopia book.
 
Rebel Yell by S.C. Gwynne, about General Thomas Jackson. Incredible book. His other book Empire of the Summer Moon about the Comanches is excellent as well.
 
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I read Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon as my yearly doorstopper, and loved it. It's only the second book of his I've read. This one is obviously about slavery and colonialism, but also power and progress and violence and exploitation more broadly, history and myth, rationality and order vs. mysticism and nature. Mason and Dixon's contrasting characters tie into the themes, but their relationship and conversations are just really charming and fun too. The book is also a joy to read on a writing level, as the whole thing is in this beautiful 18th-century style:
Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr’d the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,— the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking’d-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel’d Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,— the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax’d and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy Advent, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.
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Just finished On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis.

It is one of the worst things I have ever read in my life, and I've read some absolute bottom of the barrel trash in my time. For a book with such a grandiose title it has nothing on strategy whatsoever other than some basic bitch Clausewitz and Sun Tzu quotes. Its mostly a collection of high school level historical anecdotes which he tris to shoehorn into his own warped view of history. On its own, that would be bad enough but this guy very clearly doesn't understand ancient Greece, doesn't understand Rome and barely understands modern European history. The whole book comes across like a smug midwit high off his own farts weighing in on topics he can barely comprehend. So your run of the mill western University academic.

What's horrifying is that the book cover is plastered with rave reviews from NYT, WaPo etc. and is apparently a bestseller. Jesus fucking Christ.
 
cold comfort said:
I read Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon as my yearly doorstopper, and loved it. It's only the second book of his I've read.
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I really liked this book, although it has a somewhat daunting prose style and doesn't even remotely attempt to dumb itself down. It is probably a trifle trickier to read than Gravity's Rainbow. If it had a theme song it would be "Sailing to Philadelphia" by Mark Knopfler (also about Mason & Dixon).

I had that album on infinite repeat much of the month I read that book.
 
The Scarlet Letter. Read it in high school, was curious if it was actually that bad as I remembered. Turns out it's.. eh.. very slow.
 
Finally got around to reading The King in Yellow, after three weeks or four weeks of various short stories from Lovecraft and co. The first King story, The Repairer of Reputations, was an absolute cracker, both from a thematic standpoint and the steampunk alternate timeline it was set in. Unfortunately, the rest of the collection has been rather.... disappointing. The heavy emphasis on romantic relationships through the four King stories really detracted from the psychological horror. The Yellow Sign picks up some with its vague assertions that the narrator deserves his fate, but after that I ran smack bang into The Demoiselle d'Ys and... feh. The author made his living writing romances and by god, does it show. I still haven't finished the final stories in the collection. Is it worth the effort? I don't mind romance, just not in my cosmic horror. It's untidy and clashes, like eating a savoury meal and randomly biting into a surprise sugar cube midway through a dish.
 
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Reading through a collection of Robert E Howard stories, they are pretty good turn off your brain swords and sorcery tales. Would recommend to anyone who likes fantasy, he wrote short stories so low investment if you don't like what you read.

It did make me think a lot of George RR Martin and not in a good way. Saying that Martin is derivative and "borrows" a lot from others is like saying the sky is blue but when you read some of his "inspirations" it gets ridiculous. There are parts in Howard that are lifted almost verbatim by Martin with some minor embellishments.

That cool scene in Martin where a shadowy demon attacks someone in a war tent before a big battle? Lifted almost line by line from a Conan story called Hour of the Dragon.

I wonder why Martin doesn't get more flak for this kind of thing. I guess people will forgive a lot if you are popular enough.
 
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Stasi said:
Reading through a collection of Robert E Howard stories, they are pretty good turn off your brain swords and sorcery tales. Would recommend to anyone who likes fantasy, he wrote short stories so low investment if you don't like what you read.

It did make me think a lot of George RR Martin and not in a good way. Saying that Martin is derivative and "borrows" a lot from others is like saying the sky is blue but when you read some of his "inspirations" it gets ridiculous. There are parts in Howard that are lifted almost verbatim by Martin with some minor embellishments.

That cool scene in Martin where a shadowy demon attacks someone in a war tent before a big battle? Lifted almost line by line from a Conan story called Hour of the Dragon.

I wonder why Martin doesn't get more flak for this kind of thing. I guess people will forgive a lot if you are popular enough.
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if Martin came out with those ASOIAF books 10-20 years earlier, he'd probably have been called out, right?
 
I’m finishing up House of Leaves I got like twenty pages left. I enjoyed it but I kind of have mixed feelings about it. The sequences that work, work really well and then other portions just feel like a chore. Anyways after this I was thinking about trying to read some medieval history. If anybody has a good rec I’m all ears
 
Fig Kommandant said:
Care to elaborate? It's on my radar but some of the more abstract parts of the book seem offputting.

Medieval Cities by Henri Pirenne is pretty good.
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Yeah for sure. I will say I think it’s probably worth a read and probably more so its worth a read blind. To keep things as spoiler free as possible a lot of horror in the book revolves around like the unknowable or impossible. It’s kind of eldritch-y but I hesitate to say that cause that tends to imply like Cthulhu or whatever which the book doesn’t really do. To be a bit more specific in the book there will be a really unnerving horror sequence leaving you on a cliffhanger followed by 20 pages of actual bullshit you don’t care about. This happens pretty consistently. And it’s an intentional choice danielesski to draw out the tension and play with the reader. I can be a bit more specific below and it’s not really spoiler-y cause it’s revealed in the first or second chapter but just in case imma blur it.

so the book is arranged as two or three stories all layered on top of each other. Our “main” protagonist is a guy named Johnny who finds a huge collection of documents written by a guy named Zampano. The documents are an academic work about a movie that may or may not exist called The Navidison record. The navidison record is the really effective and unsettling part of the book. It’s about a family that moves into a house that is more than it initially appears. So in his portion of the work Zampano is describing the fake? Movie as if he were an academic. And because of this he constantly dives into tangents about the speed of sound, or the symbolism of architecture or whatever and it can be used to kill pacing. On top of that you have Johnny interjecting his own notes to the document making his own story. And on top of that you have a third editor making notes correcting both of them.

It’s definitely a unique read a I’d say worth the trouble but it can be frustrating at times. Hope that helps!
 
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