What are you reading right now?

Anything I can find on North Korea. I've been asked to do some writing and design for a game set there, so I'm reading everything I can. That includes 'Selected Works of Kim Il Sung' in english, which was surprisingly easy to get hold of.
 
Anything I can find on North Korea. I've been asked to do some writing and design for a game set there, so I'm reading everything I can. That includes 'Selected Works of Kim Il Sung' in english, which was surprisingly easy to get hold of.

If you have the time to dedicate to it, I'd recommend Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader. Pretty much the Bible of North Korean history written by a longtime journalist. Lots of detail on Kim the First and his son and daily life in North Korea up until about 2010. There's also Nothing to Envy, which is the story of a number of refugees from the country who escaped during the famine in the 90s.

As far as what I'm reading: Batman Eternal comics and My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. It's a weird little book, sort of philosophical murder mystery where the narrators are objects and things and concepts, like the victim's body. Only a couple of chapters in.
 
Approaching Oblivion by Harlan Ellison and High Cotton by Joe R. Lansdale

I also want to read all the 87th Precinct novels that feature the Deaf Man villain but so far I've only read The Heckler. Going to be reading Fuzz next.
 
Just finished reading The Drought by J. G. Ballard. I've recently got into his stuff. It's really hard to categorise, falling somewhere between contemporary and sci-fi. Basically, his books tend to take some aspect of modern urban life and crank it up to create insane, dystopian scenarios.

I'd previously read the oft-ripped-off Concrete Island, which is about a man who crashes his car on a motorway intersection in West London and finds himself marooned in a sea of never-slowing traffic, and the frankly disturbing Crash, which is about a group of people who get sexually aroused by car crashes.

In general I would recommend Ballard to all who like weird shit and are a little bit misanthropic.
 
I just finished The Grifters by Jim Thompson. I picked it up because I want something noir that I had never heard of before from an author I'd never heard of before (to-read lists are a burden sometimes) and I loved it. Loved the twists in it, loved the attitudes. Basically about a small-time con man who runs into a situation involving his bigger-time con-mom and his fuckbuddy. Apparently it has a movie adaptation - I've never heard of that either.
 
I have three books going right now
The newest is called the Zombie Autopsies which is the fake journals of a coroner during a zompie plague
The Dirt on Clean which is a cultural history of sanitation and
A Trojan Feast: The food offerings of aliens, faeries, and sasquatch Which is a very strange book about real life accounts of people being offered food and drink by mythical creatures and the ways that all of these accounts relate to each other.


My current shower/bathroom books are 3,096 Days by Natascha Kampusch, A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard, and A Beautiful Child by Matt Birkbeck. All about child abduction because I'm creepy and obsessed with true crimes.
 
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. Story of a deputy sheriff who masks his violent psychopathy under a demeanor of a, as he puts it, "corny bore". Rational, logical, and thinks out the reasons he wants to hurt/kill person A but not person B, but secretive and subtle too. Manages to fly under the radar and not get detected for what he is and that comes through the text in the way he subtly builds up his back story through offhand remarks and single-sentences that go nowhere in their immediate context but when combined form the whole story.

I'm loving this book.
 
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story by John O'Dowd. It's the story of the most epic Hollywood crash and burn you've never heard of.

1950 - Barbara Payton was a rising star, making $10,000 and co-starring with the likes of James Cagney, Gregory Peck, and Gary Cooper.
1967 - Barbara Payton died at the age of 39 as a bloated, battered, alcoholic junkie prostitute who was missing her front teeth.

Behold the before and after photos:
babspayton.jpg
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Toyminator by Robert Rankin, sequel to The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse which I recommend if you like the comedy of Terry Pratchett's novels.

Also I got a signed copy of a Steven Bell's IF... Marches On at a charity shop. (UK political cartoonist)
 
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Trollslayer by William King (book 1 in the Gotrek and Felix series)
Mystery by Matthew Paris (a paperback detective novel from the 1970s that is as strange as it is obscure)
 
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One of Neil Gaiman's short story collections, Trigger Warning. The introduction was about how he doesn't feel that fiction should be a "safe space"--it should expand your horizons :). Just finished Anansi Boys-I'm enjoying Gaiman's writing a lot.
 
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I'm reading Dead Boys by Gabriel Squailia. It's about a pair of living corpses traveling across a nightmarish netherworld to find a way to return to life.
 
I'm reading Dead Boys by Gabriel Squailia. It's about a pair of living corpses traveling across a nightmarish netherworld to find a way to return to life.

Sounds interesting. How're you liking it?
 
Sounds interesting. How're you liking it?

Love it. It reminds me a lot of the early Dark Tower novels but with snarky alcoholic British zombies.

Here's the plot synopsis via Goodreads.

A decade dead, Jacob Campbell is a preservationist, providing a kind of taxidermy to keep his clients looking lifelike for as long as the forces of entropy will allow. But in the Land of the Dead, where the currency is time itself and there is little for corpses to do but drink, thieve, and gamble eternity away, Jacob abandons his home and his fortune for an opportunity to meet the man who cheated the rules of life and death entirely.

According to legend, the Living Man is the only adventurer to ever cross into the underworld without dying first. It’s rumored he met his end somewhere in the labyrinth of pubs beneath Dead City’s streets, disappearing without a trace. Now Jacob’s vow to find the Living Man and follow him back to the land of the living sends him on a perilous journey through an underworld where the only certainty is decay.

Accompanying him are the boy Remington, an innocent with mysterious powers over the bones of the dead, and the hanged man Leopold l’Eclair, a flamboyant rogue whose criminal ambitions spark the undesired attention of the shadowy ruler known as the Magnate.
 
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Love it. It reminds me a lot of the early Dark Tower novels but with snarky alcoholic British zombies.

Here's the plot synopsis via Goodreads.

Appreciate the response. I think I'll grab it next time I'm at the library. Been looking for something different.

As far as the thread's question goes: right now, one of those dinky Star Trek pocketboots. I just finished The Killer Inside Me and need a palate cleanser. Genuinely enjoyed the book, but it's a bit intense.
 
I also want to read all the 87th Precinct novels that feature the Deaf Man villain but so far I've only read The Heckler. Going to be reading Fuzz next.
I read everything I can get from Ed McBain [a sizeable collection, considering he wrote from 1952 to 2005] but the 87ths are my favorites.

I read lots of murder mysteries. Right now I'm reading the works of a British crime writer, Ruth Rendell. I just finished The Killing Doll.
 
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