Care to share? (I’ve sigs turned off, and am curious. I should also dig out TRiH again soon…)
I’m still working on the Einstein biography, which is very good.
I’ve started Charlie Huston’s new novel, Skinner. So far it’s okay - it’s about espionage and cyber-terrorism, which isn’t really my thing. The blurb calls it “a combination of Le Carre spycraft with Stephenson techno-philosophy”. I’m a Stephenson fan, but I’m not a Le Carre fan
“I started To Reign in Hell, but was bored out of my mind.” - Doomtrain
Came from one of these threads, in fact.
Finished Rickman’s The Wine of Angels. I liked the characters, the Englishness, even the slow pace, then it seemed as if it all wrapped up very quickly at the end. Also dangit, the author Scooby-Doo’d me… I really dig the supernatural stuff (done well) but this was actually a murder mystery. I may try another of these sometime.
I’m currently reading Twilight Zone: 19 original stories on the 50th anniversary edited by Carol Serling, but it’s not wowing me.
I’ve just finished reading Leigh Perry’s A Skeleton in the Family by ,my acquaintance Toni L.P. Kelner. I attended the book launch party last week in Medford, MA and got her to autograph my copy. This is at least the third mystery series that Toni has started, and she decided to use a pseudonym. As everyone has told her, “Now we know what the “L.P.” stands for”.
It’s a good read, and is an interesting supernatural mystery, the schtick being that the heroine’s buddy is a walking, talking skeleton. It’s pulled off with humor and lots of nice touches and a lot of Bone jokes. Worth a read.
I’ve also finished reading A Dog Before a Soldier: Almost-Lost Episodes in the U.S. Navy’s Civil War by Chguck Veit. It’s also autographed (I bought it from the author at a mini Civil War “encampment” in Newburyport MA) Very interesyting little-known Civil War history impeccably researched. Veit has written about forgotten Civil War submarines and Ironclads, too.
On audio, I’ve finished Clive Cussler’s Medusa and Devil’s Gate, because I picked up the first cheap and got the second from the library. Clive Cussler writes wonderfully improbable adventures that ought to make great James Bond-like movies, except that the only times they tried filming them, they flopped (I think Sahara is one of the unintnetionally funniest movies I’ve ever seen. The book is better)
Next up: I’m going to finish Agnew Bahson’s only novel, the SF thriller The Stars are Too High. This book has a very weird and interesting background, but I want to finish it before going into that. I stumbled across this copy, which is crmbling apart. I keep it in a plastic bag, and intend to finish it before it disintegrates.
I was wowed with Paul Garrison’s Buried at Sea, a story set on a 50-foot sailboat crossing from Florida to Nigeria, to Buenos Aires, to the Falklands, to Patagonia, with two men on board, one of whom is being pursued by a giant black catamaran under the control of… well, it’s an excellent adventure, with fascinating twists and unusual characters.
A blurb on the back of the book calls Garrison the ocean sailing’s equivalent of horse racing’s Dick Francis.
Politzania, I’m about half way in. I like the book, but it isn’t what I expected. I thought there would be more time travelling going on and more suspense / horror. There also seems to be a lot of redundant info. I think the story could be 20 - 30 % shorter.
But maybe it signifies something about his state of mind, although I never really pick up on that stuff.
There has only been one moment that I felt a slight shiver run down my spine. When… …Jake for the first time describes the sensation he receives from “it”. It’s in Derry and it seems to be penetrating his mind / influencing his thoughts.
I hoped there would be a lot more of it.
I will give you a full run down when I finish the book. I am expecting a huge twist or something that will blow my mind. But to say the least I am very intrigued to find out what has been going on.
Which book of King can you recommend that will cause me sleepless nights?
I realize this is not addressed to me, but in my opinion, The Shining and Misery are the two best King books, with The Shining being the scarier of the two.
His scariest (again, IMO) are Pet Sematary and the short story collections Night Shift and Skeleton Crew.
My favorites by Stephen King are 'Salem’s Lot and Misery. The Stand is great but is more of an epic than a scary book, I think. I’ve had 11/22/63 on my stack for… well, too long now, but I hope to get to it soon.
Two of my favorite sf/espionage books are both by Joe Haldeman; you might like them. All My Sins Remembered is about a spy in a distant-future interstellar society who has had his personality and memories changed so often for various missions that he starts to lose track of who he really is. Tool of the Trade is about a deep-cover Soviet agent in Boston during the Cold War who develops a practical method of mind control.
Love 'em both.
Salem’s Lot and The Shining are my two favourite Stephen King books.
And I would heartily second Elendil’s Heir’s recommendation of Joe Haldeman.
I’d go with Dung Beetle - IIRC Misery doesn’t have a lick of the supernatural in it, just old fashioned whackadoodle human behavior to give you the heebie-jeebies. I can’t hear the phrase “number one fan” without a shudder! *Needful Things * is another personal favorite - supernatural elements kick things off but human behavior is still the driving force behind the awful things that happen.
The Stand has its horrific moments; but is more a survival epic - highly recommended, nonetheless. The Dark Tower series is epic Good vs Evil (not really horror) and has some **amazing **writing, but it just might break your heart (and not in a good way).
Definitely check out King’s short stories as well - “The Raft”, “Graveyard Shift” and “I am the Doorway” all haunt me to this day.
(Confession time: I’ve never read It, nor seen the whole film at one time - must remedy that here sometime soon)
Changing the subject - am really enjoying the audiobook of ***Drama: An Actor’s Education***as read by its author, John Lithgow. Yeah, he name drops a lot (tho the names don’t always mean too much to me), but it seems a relatively unvarnished look back at his life so far - am just up to his post-graduate London studies abroad.
Am also working on a non-SF Iain Banks novel: The Crow Road - with the first line of “It was the day my grandmother exploded.”, I was pretty well hooked. Having a bit of difficulty with the shifting timeframes/ character POV’s - but am also reading it in snatches here & there, which I’m sure contributes to my minor confusion. Really enjoying the setting(s) and the characters, even if I get them a bit mixed up!
Just finished Steel Drivin’ Man by Scott Reynolds Nelson, about who the real John Henry - the doomed railway folk-song hero - might have been. It came across as 'way too speculative, and pretty obviously padded to reach book length. Some interesting stuff about prisons and convict labor in Reconstruction-era Virginia, though. I had no idea the antebellum Southern railroads relied so much on penal servitude.
Next up: Starbound by Joe Haldeman, the second in his Mars trilogy. The first, Marsbound, was pretty good.
Finished Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov. An interesting read but not in the same league as his Lolita. The book has an unusual structure in that it consists of the 999-line poem “Pale Fire” by a fictional poet who writes it in the final days of his life (not a spoiler, as you know up front he’s a goner) and a Foreword and Commentary by his colleague, whose comments merge his own life with that of the poem’s author in such a way that he himself becomes a major part of the story.
I’ve already started The Great Bridge, by my favorite historian, David McCullough. A copy finally turned up in one of my regular bookstores. A history of the Brooklyn Bridge, which the wife and I walked across twice last year, once each way, and of the lives and times of those who built it. Very good so far, but I would expect nothing less from McCullough.
If you like those two I’d recommend Buying Time. Haldeman wrote that one during the same period and it has a similar feel to the two you mentioned. The premise is that a means of making people young again is discovered. But the catch is you need to redo the process every decade or so and the people that have the process charge people everything they own. So you have a group of immortal people who are constantly losing all their money and trying to get rich again quickly enough to buy another round of youth.
I’d also tentatively recommend Haldeman’s Worlds trilogy. The first one, Worlds, was great and you should definitely read that. The second book, Worlds Apart, was good but not as great as the first. The third book, Worlds Enough and Time, had problems. In the last part of this third book of a trilogy, Haldeman suddenly decided to go off in a completely new direction with the story - which was a bad decision. It seems like Haldeman had just gotten bored with the series and wrote stuff to finish it off without any regard for how it fit in.
Thanks! As it happens, I’ve read all of those. I thought Buying Time was great up to the last 20 pages or so, when it ended abruptly and not all that interestingly. I completely agree with your take on the Worlds trilogy (but would be even harsher about the second and third book; fortunately, the first can pretty much stand on its own).
As I posted in a previous sf thread, I’d also particularly recommend his Mindbridge and The Hemingway Hoax. Haldeman’s most recent books, The Accidental Time Machine, Old Twentieth and Camouflage, are pretty good but not great, I’d say. His short story collections *Dealing in Futures, Infinite Dreams *and A Separate War and Other Stories are a little uneven, but far, far more good than bad.
Dung Beetle and Politzania thanks. I’ll be sure to check them out.
The list of books I still have to read is a book by itself. There are worse things in the world.
There’s a reason I call it Mt. ToBeRead Which O’ertops Everest.
The missing “v” is because there’s poetry on that list.
I’m reading the Bahson book, but I took a detour to read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and the Madman and Tarzan and the Castaways. Although I’ve owned these books for years – decades, even – I never got around to reading them, and I needed something to read when I didn’t want to endanger the fragile copy of Bahnson. I bought all of the Tarzan books many years ago when I decided to read them all in one summer. I couldn’t do it – it was like trying to live on a diet of creampuffs. Taken at intervals, Burroughs is great. But in concentrated doses his repetitiveness and superficiality become all too obvious. Tarzn encounters a plethora of Lost Worlds and Lost Civilizations in his adventures, and in these two it’s an enclave of 15th century Portuguese descendants of Vasco da Gama’s bother, and a lost colony of Mayans on a South Pacific Island (!). And there are the requisite safaris containing criminals, along with his ubiquitous African Cannibals. (I’ve even read the Burroughs/Lansdale “Lost Adventure” years ago, but somehow never got around to these two volumes).
I’m also reading Chuck Veit’s Rasising Missouri: John Gowen and the Salvage of the U.S. Steam Frigate Missouuri 1843-1852, which has one of the all-time best opening sentences I’ve ever read:
The paragraph that follows lives up to the promise of this sentence, explaing what the hell a bear was doing on one of the U.S. Navy’s first steam-powered warships, and how the crew tried (unsuccessfully) to rescue it. I got this at the same time as the Veit book in my last post, and this one is autographed, too. Great stuff, impeccably researched, and completely true.
Naval History magazine had an article on the loss of the Missouri a few years ago. Don’t know if it would be available online.
Just started Francis Bacon’s Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall.
I’m glad Chief Justice Coke’s constitutional opinions won out over the long haul, but I think Bacon would have been a much more interesting dinner companion.