I’m almost halfway though George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons and have been making much better progress. I’m finding it pretty engrossing.
I’d always heard so much gushing about Jim Thompson, here and elsewhere, that I finally read The Killer Inside Me, which many told me was his best, a few years ago. I just didn’t get what the big deal was. Meh. Haven’t read any Thompson since.
As for Hound of the Baskervilles, you’re in for a treat! It’s deservedly a classic.
I think it’s still the only Holmes novel I’ve read, though I think I’ve read all of the short stories.
The Sign of Four is equally good, but the other two - A Study is Scarlet and The Valley of Fear - do not hold up as well. For one, they both include lengthy flashbacks involving non-Holmes characters in which most of the action takes place; for another, in both cases those flashbacks take place in a sort of mythical America as imagined by Doyle, involving subjects (Mormonism and labour unrest, respectively) he had only a cursory knowledge about.
I will take your undying admiration and nothing more.
I’m surprised at how absent Holmes is from Baskervilles so far… it’s all Watson!
I just finished Journal de mes mélodies/Diary of my Songs, by Francis Poulenc. (French composer, member of Les Six, contemporary of Cocteau, Picasso, Apollinaire among others. Now most famous for his opera ‘Dialogues des Carmélites’ and his prolific Art Song settings of contemporary French poets.) It’s a book which snuck up on me; I only wanted to look up what he had to say about ‘Le Travail du peintre’, a cycle of 7 of his songs that I’ve just started working on. The entire, all-too-short book was interesting enough that I took it out and read it cover to cover, even though Poulenc himself said it was something he thought of as ‘to be consulted rather than read’. Absolutely fascinating to read about the composer’s relationship to poetry and to singers. Among his best quotations - “If on my tomb could be inscribed: Here lies Francis Poulenc, the musician of Apollinaire and Éluard, I would consider this to be my finest title to fame.”
It was also fun to force my way through the original French, using the English translation only to confirm or correct what I thought it had said. I need to read in other languages more often; I’m getting rusty.
Still reading through ‘Tishomingo Blues’ - thoroughly enjoying it, though I don’t get much time to read these days.
Many thanks for the GoodReads suggestion - I’ll think about it. I have to say, though, I much prefer discussing books with real live people (even if I only know them by a curious pseudonym) than getting recommendations via a social networking thing… I value the opinions of fellow Dopers or fellow regulars at my favourite bookstores far more than I value those ‘people who bought that also bought this’ suggestions that Amazon, Indigo and iTunes always present me with.
I use Goodreads mostly just to list my books. I did join some discussion groups, but for the most part I don’t participate in those anymore. The SDMB’s a lot better for that.
Look! According to Goodreads, I read 76 books in 2008, 78 in 2009, 66 in 2010, and 48 in 2011. Cool stat, huh?
Actually I see a disturbing trend here…
:dubious:
I finished The Satanic Verses on Friday. As it happened, Rushdie canceled a trip to an Indian literary festival that day because a local organized crime boss supposedly ordered a hit on him. To hear him tell it, the problem isn’t just that there was a threat made, it’s that the government of the province put pressure on the festival to keep him from showing up - there are elections soon and the government felt Muslim voters would be upset if Rushie came.
The book itself was better than I expected it to be and I thought it got better as it went along, although I was sometimes frustrated- considering the Good and Evil themes, it wound up being a smaller book than I thought and that threw me.
Next I’m moving on to 1,000 Years of Solitude.
And now I’m reading A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Barely into the second chapter and I’m loving it 
Fair enough, but Watson is, after all, the narrator in almost all of the stories. 
And Holmes does make his appearance.
The problem with the two long stories is that much of the action mostly revolves around characters who are not part of the Holmes/Watson duo and who are, basically, never seen again in the series - the mystery Holmes/Watson investigate is mostly the framing device around a story that has nothing to do with Holmes, Watson, and the whole millieu.
This is particulary egregious in The Valley of Fear, that features - a whole different detective, in a different country.
Now I’m the one having flashbacks, but mine are to the long middle mythical America slog in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. gurgle
There are four novels – A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear – and 56 short stories. The wife and I have read the entire collection. Recommended.
When The Satanic Verses first came out, it was banned in Thailand to keep from upsetting the Muslim minority here. My father was still alive then and mailed me a copy. Kind of thrilling to read a banned book in a country in which it was banned. I see it on bookstore shelves here now; it could be a case of it’s still banned but no one cares anymore or maybe the ban was lifted, dunno.
Do you mean One Hundred Years of Solitude? You’ll find some hate for the book, but I found it wonderful. I was lucky to have studied it in a Spanish-lit class (in English; I don’t speak Spanish) taught by a Colombia expert. He pointed out all the little inside jokes and comments that relate to Colombian history and the author’s own experiences. (For example, every name has a specific meaning that may not be readily apparent to an English speaker.)
Reading three different books at the moment: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children on my phone, Percy Jackson #4: The Battle of the Labyrinth on my Kindle, and listening to the first Skulduggery Pleasant book when I’m at the gym. I’ve read Skulduggery already on the Kindle and enjoyed them all very much, so it passes the time nicely.
Inflation strikes again.
A man after my own heart - I almost always have multiple books (in multiple formats) going!
Recently finished: The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes: The quickie review: a poor-man’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
Set in Victorian England, an unreliable (and 4th wall breaking) narrator introduces the reader to Edward Moon, a magician whose career is (forgive the pun) waning, and his enigmatic partner, The Somnambulist. Moon is also a celebrated detective, tho it seems his last case went poorly; so when he is approached by the police, to investigate a bizarre death, it is reluctantly at best.
The story gets somewhat complicated from here: a louche murderer (and former partner of Moon) dying in Newgate, a cult dedicated to the ideals of a long dead (or is he?) poet and an enigmatic time traveler are all thrown into the plot, shaken well and poured out on the page, with shifting viewpoints thrown into the mix. The phrase “trying a bit too hard” comes to mind.
Also finished a library Kindle re-read of Feed by M.T. Anderson. We meet a group of teens, who, like most Americans, are connected to “The Feed” 24/7 via brain implants. Their lives are quite vapid, yet Titus, our protagonist seems to realize there should be something more. He meets Violet, who seems different - this difference is confirmed after they get taken off The Feed due to an accident, and start learning about each other in person.
Current library read: The Book of Joby by Mark J. Ferrari. God and Lucifer have another wager going - whose influence will succeed in the life of young Joby Peterson, whose burning desire is to emulate King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, while living his life out in late 20th century California. I’m really enjoying the story so far: both sides have exerted just a bit of influence - nothing totally outside the boundaries of a typical kid’s experience - but a small nudge here and there can be the key to Joby’s fate. Reminds me a bit of Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, tho I can’t quite say why at the moment.
I’m about 1/4 through that and I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the subject or a love of the scandalous history. Amazing stuff.
I took time out from that to read Apathy for the Devil - A Seventies Memoir by Nick Kent.
I enjoy Kent’s writing style and I’d recommend his 70s memoir to anyone interested in the bands/scenes of the time, with the proviso that Kent, while entertaining, can be a somewhat unreliable narrator. I’m sure he claims more credit than he deserves for the creation of the English punk scene, but he does deserve some credit, which is more than most who claim it.
just finished “the chalk girl”.
i do love the malory series.
I just finished Tishomingo Blues by Elmore Leonard. What a blast! That’s the first of his books I’ve read, but certainly not the last. I thoroughly enjoyed all the twists and turns, and the backdrop of a bunch of Civil War reenactors was wonderfully bizarre. I saw the film version of ‘Get Shorty’ when it first came out; I’ve no idea why it has taken me this long to hook up with one of his books. It reminded me of all the things I enjoyed about Donald Westlake.
Next up - Augustine’s Confessions - a Biography, translated by Garry Willis. I’ve also started a dual language collection of Italian short stories to scrape the rust of my Italian.
I read most of Elmore Leonard’s books back when I read fiction, he’s one of very few fiction writers I’d still consider reading. Even his westerns are enjoyable.
(In case you’re wondering, I gave up on fiction because almost all fiction writers, including “literary” fiction writers, just write about Mary Sues, and I got sick of it.)
January’s been a moderately successful reading month for me. I read loads of guilty pleasure stuff:
Naked Heat, by “Richard Castle,” one of the Castle TV show tie-in crime novels. They’re good crime novels and it helps to imagine the Castle characters.
The Haunted Air, Crisscross, Infernal, Gateways, and Harbingers from F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack series. I’m increasingly impressed by Wilson’s writing, which, while never exactly subtle, is always good for a moral twist and a blown opportunity. With the “Castle” book above, I could be reasonably sure that at the right moment, someone would be at the door to save a character. With Wilson, not so much. He doesn’t (so far) kill off characters that we’ve come to be attached to (with one possible exception), but he’s always good for Jack messing up something. I’ll still take a short break from the series, to save some up…
The Borgias, by Christopher Hibbert. A good read and a balanced review of the lives of perhaps the most infamous of papal families.
Forged, by Bart D. Ehrman. Tells us which of the books of the Bible were not written by the claimed authors and why we should be okay with calling that “forgery”. I’ve also started on Jesus, Interrupted, which I found much more engaging. Forged somehow seemed to miss a central conflict that might make me care. Well written, though, even though the device of always introducing his crucial points with anecdotes from his personal life get tiresome. They’re still interesting, but used too frequently.
Deviant, by Harold Schechter. On Ed Gein, perhaps the most notorious serial killer in American history (but then again, perhaps not). Good book, though clearly mass-produced.
Newton and the Counterfitter, by Thomas Levenson. I’ve been looking forward to this one, and if I wasn’t disappointed by it, I was somewhat struck by how little actual conflict between Newton and the counterfitter there was.
That about it. Right now I’m on Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, which is quite interesting: a family of alligator-park owners off of Florida cope with the death of the mother and…I’m not much further into it than that.
I’m also reading Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? by Mark Fisher, a somewhat disquieting book about capitalism’s pervasive insistence on its own alternativelessness–as well as its consequences for areas were you think you might yet escape it. Halfway through and waiting for the alternative. And in the same vein, albeit with a more professional touch, William Dowling’s Jameson, Althusser, Marx, telling me about reading literature with the same wariness of capitalisms influence in mind. Good stuff.
Finished Trick of the Light (Trickster, Book 1). It was a fast paced urban fantasy which held a couple of surprises for me at the end - too often I see the end coming, so this was a nice switch. However IMO part of the reason for the surprise was the utilization of unreliable narrator. Not to egregious, but still there. I am getting tired of the both-heaven-and-hell are assholes meme that is going through fantasy right now, but it was good enough that I will read the second book.
Trixa Iktomi’s brother was killed by a demon and she has made it her life’s mission to find and kill said demon. In doing so, she is hunting for The Light of Life, an artifact that can defend anyone against either heaven or hell.