What Are You Currently Reading?

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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Sekhmet » Thu May 23, 2013 5:25 am

I am currently rereading the Series of Unfortunate events books. I had not read them in a decade and I had heard about all the in-jokes and references. There are a lot of things that I missed the first time I read it.

I am also reading the Devine Comedy by Dante but the version I have is a copy of an old translation and it is slow going.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby WaitYAmIHere » Thu May 23, 2013 7:21 am

I have just finished reading The Dresden Files. I'm now eagerly anticipating the next one.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Craic- » Mon Jun 17, 2013 3:37 pm

Dottoe wrote:Hey guys, Neil Gaiman's book How to Talk to Girls at Parties is a free ebook right now. It's been shamefully long since I've read one of his stories.


I've just finished Gaiman and Pratchett's Good Omens for the nth time. And now The Ocean at the End of the Lane has just been released. Woo!
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Glassjaw Girl » Mon Jun 17, 2013 6:15 pm

I just finished Stephen King's 11/22/63, and... yeah. Not his usual style, but... yeah. I'm thinking of rereading Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens or try plowing through Hard Times or Martin Chuzzlewit.

I should also get back to Anna Karenina. I love War and Peace to bits, but, I dunno, Anna Karenina has never done it for me.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby julyjack73 » Mon Jun 17, 2013 7:47 pm

John Dies at The End

Found it at a bookstore.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Aquila89 » Mon Jun 17, 2013 8:32 pm

Glassjaw Girl wrote:I just finished Stephen King's 11/22/63, and... yeah. Not his usual style, but... yeah.


What do you mean? Is that good or bad?

Spoiler: show
My main problem with that book was that it's a "shaggy dog story". The protagonist ends up nullifying his actions. In the end, you're left wondering: "What was the point of all that?"
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby D-LOGAN » Mon Jun 17, 2013 10:55 pm

Mate of mine got me a very belated birthday present- 'My friend Dahmer' the graphic novel of Jeffrey Dahmer's teenage years, written by one of his actual classmates in school.
Fascinating stuff, read it all in one day even though I normally ration this stuff out. But probably the thing I found most striking was on the very last page.

Spoiler: show
When Dahmer was arrested, the author of the book's wife rang him to tell him one of his old school "friends" had just been arrested for killing a bunch of people, shagging their corpses and eating them, she asked him to guess which one of his class mates it was.
JEFFREY DAHMER WAS HIS SECOND GUESS! What the hell kinda school did he go to, where Jeffrey Dahmer was only the second most likely guy in your class to become a cannibalistic serial killer!
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Glassjaw Girl » Tue Jun 18, 2013 8:30 am

Aquila89 wrote:
Glassjaw Girl wrote:I just finished Stephen King's 11/22/63, and... yeah. Not his usual style, but... yeah.


What do you mean? Is that good or bad?

Spoiler: show
My main problem with that book was that it's a "shaggy dog story". The protagonist ends up nullifying his actions. In the end, you're left wondering: "What was the point of all that?"


Spoiler: show
Exactly. It's little more than an 800+ page journey to find his, uh, true love.


Maybe it's my fault. I checked out Good Reads for reviews on the book before I started reading it and the many praises there must have upped my anticipation too much. I don't think it's a terrible book, maybe on the same level as Under the Dome, but even less memorable for me.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Aquila89 » Tue Jun 18, 2013 9:27 am

Under the Dome, I think, has a similar problem.

Spoiler: show
It ends with a huge anti-climax. A conflict is built up between Rennie and the protagonists for hundreds of pages. It's detailed how he's fanaticizing the population. And then, there's the big explosion, almost everyone dies and the final battle never happens. And again, you left wondering: "What was the point?"


With that said, Under the Dome and 11/22/63 are still better than Cell, Duma Key or Lisey's Story (which I couldn't even read). Stephen King is just not as good as he used to be. That's why I'm upset that he wrote a sequel to The Shining, one of his finest novels. Why, even? He never wrote a sequel before.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Glassjaw Girl » Tue Jun 18, 2013 10:54 am

Duma Key was just, I don't know, quite a slap in the face with "fishbelly fingers." I got halfway through Cell before losing interest. And yes, The Shining is great. I'm skeptical about Doctor Sleep but I will most likely read it when it comes out.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Aquila89 » Tue Jun 18, 2013 11:17 am

Fishbelly fingers? I don't even remember what that was.

Craic- wrote:I've just finished Gaiman and Pratchett's Good Omens for the nth time.


I've read Good Omens, and I felt like, well... not bad, far from it, but something that was written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett should be better.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Ivan Vodkov » Wed Jun 19, 2013 11:59 pm

Dovlatov's "March of the lonely". It's a collection of his columns from "The New American", the immigrant paper he founded in New York. Pretty interesting, captures the zeitgeist of Russian immigration in the 70s' New York pretty well.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Aquila89 » Fri Jun 21, 2013 11:20 am

Stephen King just did an AMA on reddit, and when he was asked which one his novels is his favorite, he responded... Lisey's Story.

Well... he once said that writers are often the worst judges of their own work...
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Glassjaw Girl » Fri Jun 21, 2013 7:18 pm

I'm rereading Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf for the third or fourth time, and although I do like it, it's not my favorite Woolf novel. I borrowed The Waves and To The Lighthouse from the university library and I loved those more. I remember reading The Waves during classes and just jotting down phrases and sometimes whole paragraphs from it on my textbooks. I think doing that was what got me a C in Spanish haha.
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Re: What Are You Currently Reading?

Postby Ivan Vodkov » Tue Jun 25, 2013 1:54 am

Aquila89 wrote:Stephen King just did an AMA on reddit, and when he was asked which one his novels is his favorite, he responded... Lisey's Story.

Well... he once said that writers are often the worst judges of their own work...


Never even read it. Shit, never even heard of it.

By the way, why does Stephen King has such a tremendous hatedom? I know, he's pretty much a craftsman now, but back in the early days you could tell he wrote because he had to, not because he got payed a bajillion dollars for every novel. And even his latest, post-sellout books... I genuinely like some of them, and even the ones I don't like I have to admit are very well-written.

Say what you want, but the man knows how to write characters. And a thing or two about worldbuilding. And he possesses a unique trait of being able to pull off even the most silly and outlandish shit like talking trains or zombie dogs with a straight face in such a way that you never once stop to think "wait, this is absolutely bananas" until the first time you have to describe it to someone. Point is, Stephen King is very, very talented, and there's no real reason to hate him so much besides his being so damn popular.
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