Oh. :smack:
I just returned from a week-long vacation and didn’t get much reading done. I did finish “Shutter Island” by Dennis Lehane on the plane ride there. I have now started “It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis. It’s very promising so far, even though I’m only about 70 pages in. I also started “The Godfather” on audio book. Now that I’m back I plan to continue reading “A Farewell to Arms” as well.
Dostoyevsky’s Demons is going back on the shelf unread. His writing is lively enough, but I can’t relate to the characters or their situations, and I don’t like or dislike any of them.
I’ve been wanting to re-read some old favorites, see how they hold up – maybe The Postman or Second Son.
In the last few weeks, I’ve read:
Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Trilogy. I thought the first and second book, The Summer Tree and The Wandering Fire, started slow but each ended with a bang. The last, The Darkest Road, ended with a “meh” for me. I was able to guess who lived and died, who failed and triumphed about a hundred pages before the action. A friend loaned me the books and I felt obligated to finish them, but I might have put the last one down otherwise.
Hocus Pocus, Kurt Vonnegut. I discovered a Vonnegut book on my shelf that I’d never read before. To me, that’s like finding a delicious cake in the fridge that I didn’t remember buying. The main character was one of Vonnegut’s most lucid and sane, but also one of his least sympathetic.
The Virgin’s Lover, Philippa Gregory. I am always sucked in by Gregory’s books, despite knowing the history is crap and knowing that she’s shoving her own historical agenda down the reader’s throat. This one was worth the read just for the train-wrecky-ness of the story… the characters are all despicable and the one person who’s not outright horrible is pathetically stupid.
I’m currently reading:
The Great Influenza, by John Barry. This book is making me terrifically paranoid, but is really good so far.
The Talisman, by Stephen King and Peter Straub. I think I read this before as a kid, because the story and even specific moments and sentences seem really familiar… but I’m not 100% certain. It’s distracting, actually, and that niggling brain worm is keeping me from really getting into the story.
Yup, any time there are howling cultists worshipping things better left unnamed, they are bound to be of “mongrel race”. Though to be fair, poor Whites were also likely to be “degenerate” in his stories - he’s omnivorous in his prejudice. 
Oddly he expressed a positively physical loathing of Jews in his writings, yet married a woman of Jewish ancestry.
Just finished a book recommended by Gulo gulo in last month’s thread: Where the Wild Things Were by William Stolzenberg, on apex predators – the big carnivores at the top of the food chain. Turns out they’re absolutely necessary, to keep critters from lower down in the food chain from throwing everything out of whack. Those lower critters might be herbivores, like the deer currently destroying forests all over the Eastern U.S. (and elsewhere) or smaller carnivores like fox and raccoons. Interesting stuff, though the author doesn’t write nearly as well as he thinks he does. (Plus the book could have taken one more copy edit – there were a slew of homonyms that slipped through, like “free reign” instead of “free rein” and “flare” for “flair” [or maybe that one was vice versa]. There are times when I wish I could shut off the editor part of my brain.)
In one of the Lovecraft stories, “down” was swapped out for “clown.” It was very distracting.
Perhaps more oddly, *she *married him.
I assume he didn’t mention this loathing to her while a-courting.
"My dear, I’m afraid I find you and your mongrel degenerate blood positively abhorrent. It is mixed-race types like you whose threat to our sane White Protestant values is so aptly symbolized in my life’s work, where the debased hordes threaten to wreak unearthly insanity on a sleeping civilization by unleasing unnamable creatures from foul non-Euclidian dimensions to revel in abomination.
Let’s get married!"
"Oooh Philip, you have such a way with words … "
BTW I’m reading Johannes Cabal the Necromancer which was recommended by someone here, and I’m enjoying it very much. A real rip-roaring page-turner with a nasty sense of humour. In short, a good read.
Last week I read The Travelling Vampire Show/Dreadful Tales, by Richard Laymon. The Travelling Vampire Show had a decent plot which dragged me onward, but I didn’t much care for the ending. The Dreadful Tales…well, they actually were dreadful. At a conservative estimate, I would say these books were about 40% descriptions of breasts, so if you like boobies, these may be the books for you.
Next I picked up a recommendation from Elendil’s Heir: Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin. I read a few pages, then put it aside, not really intending to read any further. I just don’t dig science fiction. However, I was on a trip far from home, and hadn’t brought much reading material, so I soon picked it up again and was glad I did! Tuf is an unemotional, unprepossessing kind of character at first, but I was loving him by the end of the book. The plot (ecological engineering in space) was fascinating. I only wished it had been longer!
Now reading Columbine, by Dave Cullen. Every bit as engrossing as I knew it would be.
Ditto
I’m very glad you persisted! Without exception, all sf readers to whom I’ve recommended that book have loved it. I corresponded briefly with Martin a few years ago, and he told me that after he finishes his mammoth A Song of Ice and Fire series, he’d like to return to that lovable, bald, phlegmatic, sarcastic antihero, Haviland Tuf. The sooner, the better, says I!
Finished my Halloween book, The Haunting of Hill House, based on Dung Beetle’s recommendation, and I thought it was pretty great. I might read it again soon, since it was short and I think I missed lots of foreshadowing, but my MIL is borrowing it now.
I’m reading ***The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ***now. The cover says it won a Pulitzer and was a *NY Times *bestseller, so once again I’m on the trailing edge of cool…
I listened to this as an audiobook last month. As a non-Spanish speakers, I was glad I went that route… There’s quite a few Spanish words and phrases and the narrator conveyed the meaning even though I couldn’t understand the actual words.
When you’re through, I’d be interested to hear what you thought of the ending.
I have finished Echo in the Bone. I will need to get to the library to find some Lord John books.
I liked that one a lot. The opening would make an awesome real estate ad. 
My Halloween book this year is Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, by Richard Grant. Two old New England hippie cartoons get stoned, fall into a well and come back to haunt their town at the behest of a couple of cosmic woo-woo entities (Raven and Bear). Sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? Actually it’s pretty amusing so far, but then I’m only about 75 pages in. Too early to tell, but I have a feeling I’m going to wish these two groovy, laid back ghosts had the decency to shut up and decompose like everybody else. We’ll see.
That’s great! I could definitely read many more chapters on Tuf’s adventures. Should never have doubted you…
My life, it was not lived in vain.
Finished reading through the new Lonely Planet Vietnam guide and have our trip pretty much mapped out, flying into Hanoi and back from Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon. However, I think we’ll have to pass on eating at Cepage in HCMC, described as “a trendy wine bar with a lounge downstairs and a serious foodie place upstairs.” Or at least, we’ll pass on their “black box,” described as “a mystery three-course set lunch for 130,000 dong.” (130,000 dong = US$7.30) Don’t like no mystery meals anywhere let alone Vietnam.
But the tourism situation in Vietnam has vastly improved in recent years. I distinctly recall about 20 years ago, a Lonely Planet writer was in Vietnam doing research for a new edition when he was summarily yanked off the train mid-country by the authorities and kicked straight out of the country, because they weren’t at all sure about what he was up to. IIRC, he was even transported to the airport in a cage and not let out until they put him on the plane!
Enough travel guides now. My next read shall be Flashman and the Dragon, by George MacDonald Fraser, one of the last two in the Flashman series that I’ve not yet read. We have a holiday weekend coming up – Friday is Chulalongkorn Day, which commemorates the reign of King Chulalongkorn, or Rama V, the little boy in The King and I and who died in 1910 – and we’ll be up in Khao Yai National Park. I’ll start the book on the way up on the bus.