What are you reading?

[J.H.]

On Wednesday night, while M'Lady was playing the World of Warcraft, I sat down and read all of Storm Front, the first Dresden book. I found a captivating read that got through the whole thing in 3 hours. It was a totally predictable story but Butcher builds a pretty nice and fun world and it just kind of sucks you in. I've been told Butcher really hits his stride as the series progresses and I liked the book enough that I'm going to keep reading the Dresden Files series.

 

James

[jaedmc]

I just finished Little Star by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who wrote Let The Right One In. I'd never read anything by him before, only seen the movie, but based on this one book - he's fucking aces and I'll read anything he's written now. Little Star involves a man who finds a baby buried alive in the woods. He rescues her and it turns out she can sing. A Baby - it's crazy. And it turns out he and his wife were a former pop duo, so he decides to hide the baby in his basement and raise her as a music prodigy. 

 

To say things get out of fucking hand is an understatement. Great bloody time, I highly recommend checking it out.

[assfax]

Tokyo Vice.  Highly recommended. His accomplishment is kind of insane.

 

Then, when I looked shit up on the internet afterwards I got bombarded with Harry Potter shit because they're making a movie with him as Adelstein.

[SirSmUgly]

I was on my fourth or fifth re-read of Hit & Run by Kim Masters and Nancy Griffin, so I decided to see if a bookstore had Hit Men by Fredric Dannen, a book about the development of the record companies and the history of payola in the business. One did, and I'm really enjoying it. It's a fast-paced read, much like Hit & Run, and because I've incidentally read quite a bit about companies now affiliated with Sony over the past few months, I feel like I have a surprising amount of useless knowledge regarding that company. 

[Johnny Sorrow]

I just ordered "Hope: Entertainer Of The Century" and I can't wait to read it.

[J.H.]

Downed books 3 & 4 or Dresden Files (Grave Peril and Summer Knight). I'm starting to dig the world even more now. Harry Dresden is a character I can get behind. I really like the supporting cast in these books and especially The Knights of The Cross. Just really good reads. Butcher can be a little predictable interms of setting up his two-tiered plot format for the books but they always converge and make for good reading. I hear things really pick-up in Dead Beat.

 

James

[Jingus]

One of the nicest things about the Dresden series is that Butcher really pays attention to the long-term continuity.  He's produced fifteen novels over the past fourteen years (plus one short story collection), and the books happen more or less in real time.  It's not like the Anita Blake series where each novel seemingly takes place just a month after the last one; we really see Harry and all the others feel the weight of the years as they grind past.  All of Harry's drastic actions frequently lead to unforeseen consequences sometime down the road.  Michael's daughter Molly starts out as just some random kid in the background, but over time she turns into a VERY different character with a truly epic story arc of her own.   And also unlike the Blake books and many other long-running series, nobody's safe in the Dresden series; pretty much any character is capable of being killed off at any time, no matter who they are.  

[J.H.]

I've gone through everything (save for Fool's Moon) upto to Dead Beat (which I started on Saturday). The fallout from Death Masks and Blood Rites are amazing. I like that Drseden doesn't know for sure that Raith is cursed but kind of pieces it together to use to hi own advantage. Thomas becomes a very sympathetic character in Blood Rites and I was legit upset with what happned i nthe end to Shiro in Death Masks.

 

James 

[Wrangler]

Finished Chris Jerichos book, full of cheezy jokes but in general, a good read with funny stories. 

 

Amazing how he has written like 3 sizable books in the last  7 years. Never a real disappointment. 

[Cliff Hanger]

After hearing people rave about both the book and the film, I started Gone Girl in a dead period today. Read the first chapter, Flynn seems to be really good at evoking a mood and painting a picture.  If she can tell a story, this will be a great read.

[Liam]

Really didn't enjoy Gone Girl. I can see why people like it, but just really didn't work for me.

[OSJ]

Re-reading Fredric Brown's The Lenient Beast, as I have to write the intro for a new edition. While Brown is best-remembered for his SF, it's really amazing just how much he did in the suspense genre and how far he pushed the boundaries. One doesn't generally look to the mystery genre for innovation, as it has so many well developed formulas for telling a story, but Brown with three books, The Screaming Mimi, Here Comes a Candle, and The Lenient Beast really showed what could be done. The fact that he did this in the 1940s and 1950s makes it all the more impressive. Back in the 1980s a small-press publisher (Dennis McMillan) did a 19-volume set of Brown's work from the detective pulps; I passed at the time as I thought $35 was a bit spendy for what were generally 160-180 pages books. In retrospect, I wish that I'd picked them up as the set now runs for over $3000 (several are still reasonably priced in the $50-$75 range, but then you have other volumes such as Sex Life on the Planet Mars that's signed by introducer Charles Willeford and runs around $600 by itself... At least his SF has been collected in one fat volume that runs about $30, Hopefully, someday his detective fiction will get the same treatment.

 

FWIW: Brown also authored the shortest, most chilling horror story on record, here it is:

 

Knock by Fredric Brown

 

The last man on Earth sat alone in his room, there was a knock at the door...

 

BTW: The Lenient Beast kicks all sorts of ass, I recommend it highly and would even were I not involved with the project. Look for it in early 2015 from Centipede Press. They're not just about horror, they're doing some excellent noir with five volumes of Cornell Woolrich already out an the "black novels" to come in 2015 along with a bunch of Jim Thompson. Yeah, I get to introduce a Woolrich and a Thompson and couldn't possibly be more stoked. ;-) Looks like I get to do The Golden Gizmo by Thompson (perhaps his oddest novel) and as for Woolrich, I don't know which one I'll get assigned, but I'm hoping for Black Path of Fear.

[Randy]

I recently finished reading On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee.  It is set in the near-future in a strictly-structured class-based American society.  It is also set a few generations after a mass emigration of a chinese population to America.  The top 2 of the 3 classes live in walled-off communities and there is a dystopian element in the book because in the bottom society it is basically lawlessness and there is some sort of blood disease that effects the entire population.  I really enjoyed this book, especially what it had to say about a classes within society and upward mobility.

[bobholly138]

When I was sick the night before X-mas Eve I finished up Joyland by king. Good novel,but nothing great.

[Sutekh The Destroyer]

In one of the locked 2014 omnibus threads in the "Movies & TV" section, someone complained about how all the old Mike Hammer novels (I, the Jury specifically) were about a sexist, ultra-violent thug who passed himself off as a private eye and slept with every woman and blatantly murdered the bad guys.

 

Um, that's kinda the whole point/appeal of the Mike Hammer novels.

[Sutekh The Destroyer]

First, Do No Harm by Lisa Belkin.

 

1994 non-fiction book by New York Times (current Huffington Post) reporter Belkin, who spent several years at Herrman Memorial Hospital in Houston, Texas, chronicling the lives of the doctors on the hospital's "death committee" who decide which patients to end treatment for and to not revive.

 

A very interesting time capsule of the late 1980s and early 1990s in the medical field, before "do not resuscitate" orders were a common thing for a person to have, and doctors were genuinely anguished over whether or not to pull the plug on people in irreversible comas or who had suffered catastrophic injuries (not that today's doctors aren't) and were destined to live their lives as wheelchair-bound vegetables.  

 

Today, of course, almost all hospitals will comply with Do Not Resuscitate orders without question, and the idea of a patient's family members having to appeal to a committee of doctors to get their comatose loved one taken off life support seems surreal to many people.

 

Still, an interesting read, even if Belkin's writing is sometimes overwrought.

[Randy]

I am almost finished reading The Kept by James Scott.  It starts out at an isolated farm in upstate NY in the late 19th century.  Almost all of the family are murdered by 3 men, except for the mother and one of the children.  The kid was in the barn at the time that the men came, and the mother was away because she spent months away from the family at a time working as a midwife in different towns.  As it turns out, all of the children of the family were taken by the mother in her work as a midwife.

 

The mother and son set out to get revenge on the men for the murders.  They settle in on a town that they think there is a good chance that the men are at.  This happens to be one of the towns that she worked at and stole a baby from.  She has to avoid having her secret discovered by anybody that might remember her from her time in the town, while at the same time working to get vengeance for the murder of her husband and other children.

 

She committed this heinous crime on multiple occasions, so you don't really empathize with her.  She hadn't had a good life prior to her marriage, but that isn't enough to relate to her personal issues, considering her sins.  It's an interesting book, that flows well.

[Sutekh The Destroyer]

I didn't care for Doctor Sleep.  Just too much a hodge podge of different ideas and cliches from King's other works all mixed together.  King took what was a pretty tight ghost story (The Shining) and went off into some bizarre directions that read like a 16-year old's bad creative writing.

[J.H.]

and I'm now caught to Dresden as far as Changes. That book was crazy, as all the threads that had been building since book3 finally came to  a head. The war with the Red Court closed out in a novel way, closure on Harry and Susan one helluva cavalry saves the day moment at the end. I mean after how Turn Coat made me sad that one of the biggest dicks in the series bit it, Changes had to be even more crzy in scope!

 

James

[Randy]

I'm currently reading Mercy Snow by Tiffany Baker.  It is set in a paper mill town in New Hampshire.  There is a bus accident on a dangerous road; and the book is about what caused the accident and the impact the accident has on different people in the town.  There are obvious comparisons to The Sweet Hereafter, but the accident here is high school age students as opposed to elementary students.  I'm only about 75 pages in, but it is good so far.

[Roman]

I've just finished Cold Harbour by Francis Brett Young. I had expected much more of it, given that it was recommended by H.P. Lovecraft himself. It's descriptive, sure, and it's all about atmosphere, but... it was also dull. At no moment did the atmosphere actually grab me and make me tense. Pity.

 

Now onto either Lucius Shepard's Viator, Yasmina Reza's Happy Are The Happy or Richard Marsh's The Beetle. We'll see.

[J.H.]

Finished "Cold Days" so I'm only a book and the short story collection behind on The Dresden Files. Butcher isn't trying to be subtle anymore, he's straight up setting up a big showdown between the White Council and The Black Council with the Outsiders playing a more overt role. I mean at this point if Outsiders aren't directly involved with the Black Council I'll be genuinely shocked. I mean this all leading to a War Ganes scenario in my head. Also Butcher pulled a really good swerve at the end of Cold Days. Queen Mab is one masterful manipulator of events

[Jingus]

The short story collection is worthwhile.  I especially loved the one about Harry's "day off".  His showdown with a bunch of wannabe-evil sorcerers is priceless.  

[AxB]

I'm reading the Hunger Games trilogy; Just starting the third one now. It took two days to read the second one (and I still had time to start and complete Star Wars Force Unleashed II). The first book is a lot better than the first movie (I've not seen movie number 2 yet), and a lot not as good as Battle Royal (movie or novel). 

 

I read The World of Ice and Fire before that. It's big. Before that, Half a King by Joe Abercrombie, but I basically read all the Abercrombie from Blade Itself through to Red Country before that. Half a King may be the least of them. Looking at his two first trilogies, it's odd how they make a big deal of the Union being atheistic, when Bayaz basically has been a very interventionist God since before the nation was founded.

[twiztor]

having finished the first Dr. Fu-Manchu novel, i was debating about jumping into the next novel.  Instead, i downloaded a complete Sherlock Holmes book, so i guess i'll be reading that over the next few months. have never read any Holmes and interested to do so.