Brilliant The Evolution of Artificial Light by Jane Brox
I’m about a third of the way through. Interesting.
Finished Ghost Story by Peter Straub. Eh, it had a few spooky moments, but overall not that great.
I have no idea what’s next. Can’t decide if I should dive into a fantasy series like Mistborn or a classic like Wuthering Heights or something. I’ll toss a coin tonight.
I just started the free Kindle version of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, and… I gotta ask. Has anyone else encountered incredibly basic spelling and syntax errors in a free Kindle edition of a classic book?
I’m prepared to be embarrassed by hearing “Dreiser DELIBERATELY wrote that way, you Philistine!”
But it looks more like a sloppy, incompetently edited ersion to me.
Finished The Death Cure. As expected, it was unsatisfactory. Please don’t make these books a movie, please don’t make these books a movie…
Next I read Unhooked: How to quit anything, by Frederick Woolverton and Susan Shapiro. I had picked it up thinking to quit a nervous habit; of course, it’s more about quitting stuff like drugs and alcohol. I don’t know if it would be very helpful for those sorts of problems, but I read it anyway because I like case studies.
I do not have a Kindle, but in reading Amazon reviews, even of classic literature, the biggest reason for negative reviews is that the text was poorly transferred electronically.
I just started Blackout the third of the Newsflesh trilogy by Mira Grant and Ghost Story the latest Dresden Files novel by Jim Butcher. I’m also re-reading The General series of books by S.M. Sterling and David Drake, all on my Nook. My current dead-tree book is The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.
I just finished Moscow Option: An Alternative Second World War by David Downing and found it to be extremely dry, like reading a history textbook and overall an unsatisfying read.
Certainly, technical problems could account for SOME of the errors… like duplication of passages of dialogue, for instance.
But even a cursory examination of the text would have revealed the dozens of errors I’ve found, and most could have been fixed very easily.
Which makes me wonder… was the transfer done in someplace like India or China by people for whom English is only a second language?
Or did Amazon’s subcontractors just figure, “We’re giving it away for FREE, so who cares if it’s good?”
Finished that. Interesting, but not compelling. A bit too US-centric for my tastes, but that’s a common compliant from me.
And now for something completely different:
Making Rumours by Ken Caillat, “the inside story of the classic Fleetwood Mac album”.
I’m not a fan of the 70s Fleetwood Mac, though I quite like the original 60s version.
So why am I reading about the pinnacle of 70s Fleetwood Mac albums? Because I am a fan of books by record producers. And I’ve heard that it’s an amazing story. Reading the book will probably make me want to listen to the album, once. Something I’ve never deliberately done before. I don’t hate it, but I find Stevie Nicks irritating, both her vocals and her persona.
So, yeah, we shall see. I hope the writing is decent quality, something that’s always a gamble in rock music related books.
So Zone One, by Colson Whitehead, I thought was pretty good, if you are looking for a more contemplative zombie apocalypse novel as opposed to a gory action type thing. I think the heart of this novel deals with how you look back at an individual life, or a society, after a cataclysmic event.
I also read Swamplandia!, after all the churn about how no Pulitzer was awarded for fiction this year (this had been on the short list) … yeah, I can how this didn’t make it. I thought the writing was very good and interesting, but the plot was a mess (and then ended up completely off the rails).
OMG, and The Fault in Our Stars, a YA novel from John Green. Bring Kleenex! It tells you right on the cover that this is a tragic romance story, and it delivers tenfold. I can see how some people might not like it because it’s overly sentimental and contrived, but I think Green has a great voice and I love his characters.
Still working throughThe Annotated Huckleberry Finn, but the book is too heavy to cary around. I’m also finishing up the Hunger Games trilogy with Mockingjay.
I’ve finished with Tales of Hoffman and The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes.
I’ve got North and South (AKA Texar the Southerner and Burbank the Northerner, AKA Texar’s Revenge), Jules Verne’s attempt to write an American Civil War novel as an e-book on our Nook. It was free, and it’s clesarly been electronically transcribed by computer. It’s worse than what they did to my book – many of the transcription errors aren’t even words – just collectioons of symbols that sorta resemble the original words, and you have to figure out what the word is. It’s an interesting game. The book isn’t as bad as I’ve been lead to believe. Plus, it was free.
I picked up a Nero Wolfe novel for some traveling I have to do, since it’s easier to carry than any of the above. And I can’t take the Nook.
Picked up the library’s Kindle version of Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith by Studs Terkel in honor of what would have been his 100th birthday; as well as having an interest in the topic. It’s almost completely interviews with people from various walks of life (from the Chicago area, natch) about their relationship/interpretation/experiences with death and dying. Published in 2002, there was a section that dealt with HIV/AIDS which felt oddly dated; yet still incredibly moving. Coincidentally, one of the interviews was with Doc Watson (who just died over the weekend) and of course, he talked about losing his son, Merle.
It’s worth at least a library read, especially if you have an interest in peoples’ perceptions of death and dying. I plan on reading more of Terkel’s work, if it’s similar to this.
Heard an interview with the author on NPR back in Oct 2011 & finally got around to checking Brandwashed: How Marketers and Advertisers Obscure the Truth, Manipulate Our Minds, and Persuade Us to Buy by Martin Lindstrom out from the library. I’ve done previous reading on the topic, and I’m not sure I learned anything earthshakingly new, but the material was presented well, with sources and examples galore. I was intrigued to read about the experiment where his company “planted” a family in a typical suburban neighborhood & had them talk up specific brands to test the effects of peer pressure … and it was chillingly effective! I was also fascinated by the use of mRI’s to study what is going on in our brains when we are exposed to advertising. He’s not as strident/ ax-grinding as Morgan Spurlock (thank goodness) - more along the lines of “this is how advertising works & why, and what lengths companies will to go in order to get you to buy their stuff.” Whether or not that’s evil is up to you to decide.
Worth a library read at least if the science of marketing/advertising is of interest.
Right now I’m putzing around with American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps, and American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s Until Now. These are part of an anthology series edited by Peter Straub.
Have you read Carl P. Wrighter’s I Can Sell You Anything? He covers the same ground in this 1970s book. The examples are dated, but I’ll betr the spin is the same:
I don’t think I have, but will keep an eye out for it - or possibly finally get around to joining PB Swap… 