What book are you reading now? v. 2.0

"At The Earth's Core" by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Yes, I know it's an old thread from the dark ages.

No, I don't care.

It's a good thread, and I haven't seen a more recent one. If I have missed such a thread I am very sorry.

Actually, no, I'm not sorry. Reading is goooood . . . .

 

Re: What book are you reading now?

Just finished Back Fire by Catherine Coulter. Before that I read her book Knockout. Both good FBI Thrillers.

 

Never Go Back (a Jack Reacher novel) by Lee Child and James Patterson's Cat & Mouse.

 

John Grisham Books: The Runaway Jury, The Testament, and The Brethren

 

I just finished re-reading Jimmy Buffett's Swine Not? and Peter Benchley's Beast. I was putting off going to the library until I finished my backlog of magazines, but now I can get back to my normal 4-6 books a week. :-D

 

Linux in easy steps..
Totally stupid as I'm trying to configure Debian

 

Started with No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. I am not impressed. The writing style is at best goofy; there are no quotation marks, no apostrophes, barely any punctuation at all...it's really hard to follow what is dialogue and what is narration. The characters are flat and really pretty uninteresting, and the conceit of printing whole chapters in italics because they are either the private thoughts or perhaps a journal of one of the characters is annoying. Then there's the story line. Which I sort of followed. Kind of. But I still have no idea who was supposed to be who, or why most of them were doing what they were doing. There is barely a string to hold it together, chapters start and all of a sudden you think there must have been pages torn out, and there is no climax or ending of any sort. What is supposed to be the penultimate moment happens in one of those apparently missing areas, although the page numbers tell me there weren't any missing. I never saw the movie, and now I'm glad. What a piece of crap.

From there, I moved on to Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell. Another one I haven't seen the movie, although I might. It's an interesting story if an incredibly quick read, with a little confusion as I am completely unfamiliar with life in the Ozarks as depicted by this, although it appears to be set in at least recent times based on the drugs they're using and making. Not a bad story, a little predictable, a little confusing, overall readable if not something I would write home about.

To round it out, I just now finished Christopher Moore's The Serpent of Venice. Words cannot express how much I love Chris Moore! This one is a mishmash of Othello, Merchant of Venice, and the Cask of Amontillado, plus characters first introduced in his earlier book Fool. And a ghost. "There's always a bloody ghost". However, he puts his own goofy slant on things, spices it up, adds and subtracts, rewrites history to suit his story, and in general makes it a whole lot of fun while at the same time making several statements on society. It's a quick read, but a thoroughly enjoyable one, especially after waiting so very many months for it to finally get released!

 

I'm reading Absolute OpenBSD 2ND edition by Michael Lucas. If you are curious about the inner workings of OpenBSD and want to learn more about this proactively secure operating system then this book is a must have. Michael has a dry wit; his writing is interspersed with humorous anecdotes. I'm enjoying the book immensely.

 

SO very jealous!! He never is anywhere near here when he's out signing books. Lamb is the best one, I think. :-D And yes, Serpent of Venice is the sequel to Fool, just released at the end of April.

You probably already do, but do you also read Carl Hiaasen and/or Tim Dorsey? They're Florida authors, but definitely the same sense of humour.

 

You're welcome! I started reading Hiaasen first, then saw him and Chris Moore together somewhere and figured if they hung out together I should read him. LOL He has a lot of recurring characters, but it's not strictly necessary to read them in order. Dorsey intends for his books to be read in publishing order even though that's not chronological order for the story (it makes sense, honest). :-D

I'm about to dive into books 7-10 from Tim Dorsey, which should take me through next weekend.

 

what are these books you speak of?

 

Pictorial History of the War Walter Hutchinson ..... WW1 amazing how this was . The string and gum equipment . The photo's of the Norwegian subs blew me away.

 

"A Storm of Swords" By George R. R. Martin. I have the rest of the series sitting with it too.

After I finish that series, whenever that may be I'm going to start "Department Nineteen" By Will Hill.

 

"The Last Planet" by Andre Norton (another old Sci-Fi favorite to re-read).

Saw the movie and it pretty much ran like your review of the book. Hated the movie but thought about giving the book a try should I ever run across it . . . often a movie does not do a book justice (like that horrific movie "Battlefield Earth" . . . yeesh), but you have saved me from a terrible mistake!

 

Just started The 6th Target by James Patterson.

 

Finished Tim Dorsey's The Big Bamboo, and started Hurricane Punch. This entire series is silly good fun, but with some social observations some people won't like. Mostly, Serge Storms is a serial killer and a crazy man, and his sidekick is perpetually drunk and on drugs, and they get into some utter ridiculousness of situations, and I love them.

 

Since then, I finished the next two in the Dorsey series, Atomic Lobster and Nuclear Jellyfish.

Since I can't read more than four in a row in this series without starting to wonder if I'm as crazy as Serge, I then moved on to Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh. Not far enough into it to decide how much I like it yet, but it was hard to put down for dinner so that's a good sign.

 

Just started reading Steve Berry's new book The Lincoln Myth. Enjoyed reading his books.

 

Thanks for the great tip on Christopher Moore. Because of these comments, I picked up a book Friday afternoon and spent last night enjoying it.

I'm a big Hiaasen fan and can heartily recommend that anyone starts with his #2 book (DOUBLE WHAMMY), then #3 (SKIN TIGHT) and then probably my favorite set of characters, his #4 book (NATIVE TONGUE). (His later books can be excellent reads, too, but I usually shove his #2-3-4 books off onto first-time readers for a laugh-out-loud intro to his oddball style. And nothing tops a pro-bass-tourney murder for oddball.)

Also, if someone ever feels like our world is going to hell-in-a-handbasket, I can recommend reading Barbara Tuchman's excellent history, A DISTANT MIRROR about the 13th-and-14th Century. We're not doing too bad, after all. Things have been worse.

 

Yay! More new Chris Moore fans! :-D Which one did you get?

Shovel Ready was OK. Hard to follow since the author chose that new annoying, "Let's not use quotation marks ANYWHERE" styling format, so you can't tell if it's supposed to be dialogue or inner monologue or just narration. Also, although it's supposed to be the first book in a series, it feels like it's at least the second due to all the stuff you've already missed, but that keeps getting referred to.

Now I'm about 60 pages into The Zero by Jess Walter. I'm having a really hard time with it, not only because it takes place almost immediately after a 9/11-type attack (or, you know, 9/11 without saying so, because everything described is what happened), but because the story line jumps around with the main character's mental breaks. It might work if you're crazy, but I just want to know what the heck is going on. We'll see if it gets better.

What's odd is both of these books I purposely ordered from the library. They're not authors I knew, so I must've read something somewhere that made me want to check them out.

 

COYOTE BLUE and PRACTICAL DEMONKEEPING. LAMB and a few others were available as well, but I grabbed those two for now.

Thanks for the tip about the print-style choices. Ken Kesey's excellent SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION has his characters ping-ponging back and forth with plain, BOLD and Italics fonts, not just parentheticals, to illustrate 'self talk' or narratives on, over or under dialog. It's very confusing for the first 10 or so pages. "Who's 'talking' now?" In the end, it was such an effective style.

But I've seldom seen it used.

I am sometimes a fan of "series" books - where a central character is repeatedly given the same role, book to book to book. But when that central character gets boring, ugh - series can be a stake-in-my-reading-heart at that point.

Last year, I read a "6-novel collection" of Ian Fleming's James Bond and those were pretty interesting. Not because they were good, really, but more interesting to see why anyone would want to film DR. NO first, and then to chop it up so lasciviously.