What Are You Reading

[catdaddy]

Originally Posted by Haasome

I ordered this book a couple of weeks ago and it was temporarily out of stock. Delivery this week and I’m looking forward to it.

It's an easy read, and offers a lot of insights about Mel's formative years and many of the people he worked with during his career. Enjoy!!

[KenL]

This one. It's a biography of Kit Carson, who roamed the American West in the mid-1800s.

Especially interesting to me as I now live in the country he used to travel.


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[frankmcr]

Originally Posted by catdaddy

Inspired to read by the 19th Century thread on this forum. Twain's storytelling is a joy to read.

Totally agree about Twain. But darn, that is a weird cover for that particular book of his!!!

[Don Lampson]

Originally Posted by Glennwillow

Hi Jim,

Yes, I am really enjoying Moby Dick. This is my third time around. I read this in high school as required reading, and I certainly enjoyed it then. Then I read it to my kids when they were fairly young, but I edited out a lot of stuff that I thought would be too confusing or frightening.

Now as an old guy, I am really finding the book fascinating. Yesterday afternoon I drank too much high octane coffee and I couldn't sleep last night. I haven't done that in decades. As a result I finally came downstairs to let my wife sleep in peace, and I read Moby Dick on my Kindle until past 2 am. I'm only about 27% through the book, so there is a long way to go, but me and Herman Melville are getting along quite well.

It's fun rediscovering some of these classic works. My wife and I have read a bunch of Dickens works out loud to each other. I know Jane Austen is not normally considered a guy's kind of writer, but I enjoyed reading "Pride & Prejudice" and "Sense & Sensibility." I have read a bunch of Sinclair Lewis, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, John Steinbeck. I got a huge kick out of listening to my wife read "The Wind in the Willows" by Kenneth Graham.

I am not a fan of Ernest Hemmingway's writing, as much as I tried. I read "The Sun Also Rises" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Previously I had read "A Fairwell to Arms." And in high school "The Old Man and the Sea," which I liked very much.

I'm sure I have forgotten some of the books I or my wife and I have read over the last five years. I should have kept a log. We are going through a lot of books and really enjoying the time together.

We are reading all kinds of stuff, a pretty even mix of fiction and non-fiction, classics and modern stuff. We have read through some political works, too, but I won't get into details on that.

- Glenn

I read both Moby Dick, and Kon Tiki, while on a ship going to Vietnam... It was the perfect environment for reading those sea yarns.....

Don

[Don Lampson]

I just finished "The Bakersfield Sound", by Robert Price... It was the story of how a musical genre came, and then went, as the venues folded, and its stars died off....

Don

[jseth]

Well, let's see... currently I've been reading Jeff Tweedy's book, "Let's Go (So We Can Get Back). So far, it's reasonably entertaining, especially considering that, prior to yesterday and YT, I had never heard anything by either him, solo, or Wilco...

I love Nick Petrie's books with Peter Ash, there's 6 or 7 of 'em now, but I also love the fact that Petrie will recommend books he's reading, via his newsletter. He's steered me to more than a few books that have been great. The latest is Timothy Hallinan's Junior Bender Series... I read "Crashed" and liked it a lot, and I have another, waiting in the queue. I've just started another of his series with a private eye named Simeon Grist; this one's called "Everything But The Squeal"...

[catdaddy]

Originally Posted by jseth

Well, let's see... currently I've been reading Jeff Tweedy's book, "Let's Go (So We Can Get Back). So far, it's reasonably entertaining, especially considering that, prior to yesterday and YT, I had never heard anything by either him, solo, or Wilco...

I love Nick Petrie's books with Peter Ash, there's 6 or 7 of 'em now, but I also love the fact that Petrie will recommend books he's reading, via his newsletter. He's steered me to more than a few books that have been great. The latest is Timothy Hallinan's Junior Bender Series... I read "Crashed" and liked it a lot, and I have another, waiting in the queue. I've just started another of his series with a private eye named Simeon Grist; this one's called "Everything But The Squeal"...

Have you read any of Timothy Hallinan's Poke Rafferty books? If not, I highly recommend it as one of my all-time favorite series. More serious and dramatic in nature than Junior Bender, but terrific writing and his music suggestions in the Afterword of each book are worth exploring.

[Highroller]

Originally Posted by David Eastwood

I just finished this, based on your recommendation.

What a terrific read. Based on this, and "Beyond", I'll be looking for more of Mr. Walker's work.

Cool, glad you liked it! I'd sure read another Walker book, too. All he has to do is write one!



This is the time of year in Portland when you get a lot of reading done. Non-stop rain outside for over a month now.

After reading Carrie Brownstein's Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl earlier this year, I blasted thru a couple more "women in rock" memoirs recently - Kim Gordon's Girl In A Band and Patti Smith's Just Kids.

Patti's book was great - not the typical rock memoir, focusing on her pre-rock years and her early friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. In fact, the book pretty much ends with the release of her first album Horses, so it avoids the usual "we made an album and did a tour" baloney.

Kim's book was good, especially if you're a Sonic Youth fan (like me), but was more of a traditional memoir, and devoted a more than expected amount of time to her breakup with Thurston Moore. I get the feeling maybe writing about it was good therapy for her. She seemed to be in a pretty good place by the end of it.

Both were better than Carrie's book, to be honest.


After a quick spin thru Al Franken's Giant of the Senate - which was exactly what you'd expect from Al Franken - settling in this week on the latest from my favorite sci-fi writer, cyber-punk maestro William Gibson.

First, The Peripheral, with Agency cued up to go. The first two of his so-called Jackpot Trilogy.

I've always liked Gibson, even though his writing style's a bit on the dense side. You really have to think about what you're reading with him. He assumes you know what he's writing about - which sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. You might even have to stop and look something up, because he won't spoon feed you the explanations for anything.

Never heard of a "sigil" ? How 'bout a "thylacine" ? Look 'em up! - Ha!

Anyway, so far, so good. The Peripheral's shaping up to be a cyber-noir murder mystery of some kind, maybe involving time travel. LoL! I dunno, we'll have to see where it goes. Could be anywhere.


---

[220volt]

Just finished.


Andy knows his science, and the story is interesting, but the writing...is just bad. I mean, it is really bad. One-dimensional characters plucked straight from Sears catalog photos. Internal monolog is just awful. As many have already mentioned, juvenile "attempts" at humor. Cliche after cliche.
Huge round plotholes that the writer tries to plug with square pegs. It does not work, but he tries to make it work by just inventing convenient situations and by giving characters new abilities as the story goes along. It gives the story a very clunky and unbelievable feel.
I loved the Martian but this is just bad. I only gave it two stars for his science and engineering knowledge, and somewhat entertaining action sequences.


Only 30 pages into this one. So far, a little preachy and repetitive. We'll see how it progresses.

[catdaddy]

Just started on John Steinbeck's The Pearl. First chapter sucked me right in with his eloquent writing style and sense of culture. He was my father's favorite author, and I still remember the original hardback copy of East of Eden that he kept on his nightstand for the last fifty years of his life.

[studio1nz]

Originally Posted by catdaddy

Just started on John Steinbeck's The Pearl. First chapter sucked me right in with his eloquent writing style and sense of culture. He was my father's favorite author, and I still remember the original hardback copy of East of Eden that he kept on his nightstand for the last fifty years of his life.

I’m currently reading East of Eden and before that, The Grapes of Wrath. I really enjoy Steinbeck - having read Of
Nice and Men and Cannery Row previously. I seem to connect with the prose and themes in the same way I do with Graham Greene.

[Banter Shack]

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This is an interesting read.

[Dru Edwards]

Started this today. Dean Koontz's The City

[Bix-B]

Just finished "Death with Interruptions" by Jose Saramago. I had to finish it since he won the nobel prize for literature, but it was a tough slog.

28 pages into The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin, an author I've read alot of.

[ssstewart]

January 2022 edition of Acoustic Guitar magazine..a good read pretty pics