I need to reread Asimov. Dammit there are too many things I need to read for the first time too why the smurf is there so much good literature.
I need to reread Asimov. Dammit there are too many things I need to read for the first time too why the smurf is there so much good literature.
Crawling through Their Eyes Were Watching God, but the phonetic dialogue is killing me.
I put that book down for the moment and have instead started Cheryl Strayed's Wild for work. I'm only fifty pages in and I already want to throw the damn thing at the wall. I will, however, keep reading - the story is entertaining, but the concept is just so tiresome to me now.
Last edited by Calliope; 01-26-2014 at 06:36 PM.
Sweeney Todd AKA The String of Pearls
The original penny dreadful serial edited into book form. I've already read it once and found it boring. But I'm thinking it was because I'm used to older styles of storytelling. I'm giving it another whirl, and I'm going slow... like a serial.
Finally started reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I bought a copy a few years ago that I forgot about, and found that I had apparently lent it to a friend. A few months ago I picked up another copy, and it's been gathering dust on my bookshelf.
It's... interesting, to say the least. I am picking up little flecks of foretelling (like a character named "Low Key" that I can't not translate into my head as "Loki"). I've just read past, uh, a sex scene that I was not anticipating, and it made me a little shaken that lovely innocent Neil Gaiman, author of literary wonderment and imaginative children's book, could write such a thing.
So far, the beginning reminds me a little of Poppy Z. Brite's Liquor/Prime books, which I didn't totally love, but I am trying to separate the authors' works so as to enjoy this one. American Gods has been highly recommended to me by a few people, and I have high hopes for it.
Currently reading two books. Aftershocks, by Harry Turtledove, because I love stupid pulpy alien invasion sci-fi, and City at the End of Time by Greg Bear, which is pretty wild so far and only growing moreso.
I started and finished Appointment in Samarra over the course of two days, which was excellent, and am now on track to finish Darkness at Noon in even less time. It's rare that I have a book suck me in so forcefully, let alone two in a row.
Finished it this morning, and it was quite good, a fair bit different than The Shining, but still a great book.
I'll probabaly be putting The Long War on hold, because despite how good the first book was, this was is not. So I'll move onto Pratchett's Bromeliad trilogy, starting with Truckers.
David Sedaris - When You Are Engulfed in Flames - 10/10
I've never really been interested in biographies, autobiographies, non-fiction and the like. I just can't get into them. Why would I want to read an account of someone's life? I can do that on Wikipedia. Give me fantasy, damnit!
This book has changed my mind. I have never read any of David Sedaris' works before picking this one up. Reading some reviews that called this particular book "lukewarm at best" and "not funny in comparison to his other works" was a bit off-putting, but I decided to take a gamble and put my nose in it anyway.
If When You Are Engulfed In Flames is lukewarm and not considered funny in contrast to his previous books, I will be racing to the shelves to hoard them all from now on. I have been howling with laughter throughout this entire book, sometimes to the point of tears. I posted this on facebook already, but he makes his creepy obsession of catching flies and feeding them to the spiders inhabiting his windowpanes the most hilarious thing ever. It boggles my mind that someone can take such a weird, droll, mundane act and turn it into a hysterical essay that makes me laugh out loud. I cannot get enough of this man and I truly cannot wait to move onto the rest of his collection.
Our father worried that our grandmother was setting a bad example, but, actually, it worked the other way. None of us would ever think of throwing something out a car window, unless, of course, it was a cigarette butt, which is not just trash, but red-tipped, flaming trash. “Shame about that forest fire,” we’d say. “You really have to wonder about people who do things like that. It’s a sickness of the mind.”