Golden Oldies out there...what books are you reading right now?

[daveb]

1 hour ago, imnotafreakofnature! said:

Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse

Good choices! And plenty to read.

[Nemophilist]

Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig found it through reading an interview with Wes Anderson on his movie The Grand Budapest Hotel. The book is considered a classic and deals with how having too much pity can be someone's downfall.

And Spark Joy by Marie Kondo.

[sunnytimes36]

I'm currently reading, How To Be F***ing Awesome by Dan Meredith, its good so far. It's basically about getting the best out of your life and not worrying so much about what others think. I read mainly non fiction, I enjoy psychology books, autobiographies, etc. 😁

[Tyke]

I read "The girl with all the gifts" in two days last weekend. By M R Carey. Sci-fi thriller. Completely not my usual genre. But it got its hooks into me and wouldn't let go.

[Blackthorn]

I am reading 'Death and Mr Pickwick' by Stephen Jarvis.  It is a novel, but also a kind of alternative history of how Pickwick Papers came into being.  It is similar to a Dickens novel as it is long and rambling - just what I like!  I prefer the original Dickens classics though

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

I'm not reading anything seriously at the moment, but in October I hope to be first in the queue at my local bookstore to get 'Lethal white' the new Cormoran Strike book from Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling).

[daveb]

Dragon and Thief by Timothy Zahn (I think it counts as YA sci-fi). So far so good.

[Gentle Giant]

I just finished The Time Travelers - Book One in The Gideon Trilogy. I enjoyed it very much and will read the later books whenever I have the chance. It's about 2 kids who go back in time to 1763 and are trying to get their antigravity time machine back from The Tar Man with help from Gideon Seymour and some other folks they meet up with.

 

I put a hold at the library to get Good Vibrations which is about Mike Love and the Beach Boys.

[Greenbeard]

Yippee! British Summer Time is here and there's now a lot more daylight to be had: time for me to start reading again! My first book of the year has been...

 

The Visitors by Simon Sylvester

I picked this up from the library thinking it might be some kind of creep-out supernatural tale. Instead, it turned out to be... Well, the first half of the book is, primarily, a coming-of-age story, about a 17-year-old girl eager to escape her non-life on a small Scottish island, and about the friendship she forms with an enigmatic newcomer. Then, about 180 pages in, it morphs into an offbeat murder mystery, inspired by old Scottish folk myths about mermaid-like creatures known as selkies. It's well-enough written, I suppose, and might be good to have on in the background as an audio book, but as I didn't identify much - at all - with the central character (her and her erotic fantasies), I found taking time out for a couple of hours each day, sitting down and actually reading it a bit of a slog. ...You win some; you lose some. 

 

[Gentle Giant]

@Greenbeard Good to see you!

 

I'm almost finished with the Good Vibrations book I got from the library. It is really good! It's an interesting perspective from Mike Love, one of the Beach Boys members.

 

I went to a couple rummage sales and picked up these books:

 

The Accidental Hero by Matt Mylusch
Elfshadow - Forgotten Realms series by Elaine Cunningham
Into the Labyrinth - A Deathgate Novel by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
The Seven Songs Of Merlin by T. A. Barron
The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones
Misty Gordon and The Mystery of the Ghost Pirates by Kim Kennedy

Icebound by Dean Koontz

[sparklingstars]

I'm reading a fascinating book called The Radium Girls (by Kate Moore).  It's a non-fiction book about the young women who were hired to paint radium on the dials of wrist watches back in the early 1900's, before anyone knew how toxic radium is.  

 

Another book that I would highly recommend is called The Foundling (by Paul Joseph Fronczak).  Another non-fiction book.  It's about a baby boy who was kidnapped from a hospital, and two years later a little boy (the author) was found who they assumed to be the kidnapped boy, and he was returned to his parents.  Years later, however, they confirmed with DNA testing that he wasn't the kidnapped boy, and so he goes on a quest to find out who his read family is.

[teatree]

I just recently heard about "The Radium Girls" on NPR. Am looking forward to reading it!

[daveb]

Just started reading Guardians of the Galaxy: Collect Then All. It's a written novel, not a graphic one or a comic (not that there's anything wrong with those; I read some of those, too).

[Gentle Giant]

@sparklingstars I remember hearing about the women who painted the radium on the wrist watches back when I was in school. The women were making their paint brushes more pointed by putting it in their mouths and that is how they got the radium in their systems.

 

I'm reading The Pinhoe Egg now. It's kind of similar to Harry Potter, but I'm not wild about the writing style of the author. Could use more descriptions of things.

 

@daveb I saw the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but haven't seen the second one. It's pretty good, but not a favorite.

[daveb]

2 hours ago, Gentle Giant said:

I saw the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but haven't seen the second one

I haven't seen the second one yet, myself, but certainly will at some point (I tend to wait a bit, let the crowds die down, and go in the middle of a workday/school day; which means I have sometimes waited too long and find the movie isn't playing in theaters anymore).  I enjoyed the first one, just thought it was fun.

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

I started reading 'Future' by Dimitry Glukhovsky, after abandoning it (daughter took it home with her after Christmas), and it's shaping up to being a page turner, set in an overpopulated future - a bit like Logan's run with other means of population control. I started it before and only got a few chapters in.

 

Hoping to see Guardians of the Galaxy today if it's still playing!

[Greenbeard]

On 4/29/2017 at 6:42 PM, Gentle Giant said:

@Greenbeard Good to see you!

Howdy, GG. I wonder: might this be of interest to you? I've just finished it.

 

The Rising by Ian Tregillis

The second installment of the author's retro-dystopian 'Alchemy Wars' trilogy revolving around the bitter enmity between the expansionist - and fervently Calvinist - 'Greater Dutch Republic' and the devoutly Catholic people of 'New France'. In this chapter of the story, the much-anticipated siege of Marseilles-in-the-West begins, and the city's flesh-and-blood defenders pray to the Blessed Virgin that their fortifications and chemical weapons expertise are up to holding back, and perhaps wearing down, a superhuman MECHANICAL enemy. ...Not so much steampunk, methinks, as cogpunk, and it's... well, not bad. I am starting to become really quite bored with one of the lead characters, and I still can't get my head round the idea that a sexless (but sentient) automaton might - itself! - identify as being either male or female. However, I'll definitely be reading Book Three*. ...A word of warning, though, to anyone thinking of giving this series a go: it does contain a lot of VERY strong language (religious profanities, too), and some of the descriptions of physical violence and bodily mutilation had even my toes a-curlin'.

 

- *The three books are: 1.) The Mechanical; 2.) this one, of course; 3.) The Liberation (already published).

[daveb]

I'm reading The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

By the title of that book, we can expect more expertly crafted puns @daveb!

I'm still ploughing through this Glukhovsky book, it's almost 1000 pages long!

[Semisweet]

Just finished reading a noteworthy nonfiction book, The Glass Menagerie, by science writer Dava Sobel. It's about a succession of women who worked as "computers" at the Harvard Observatory from the late 1800s through the early part of the 20th century. These dedicated women significantly contributed to modern astronomy, despite being (not surprisingly) underpaid and underrecognized compared with their male contemporaries.

[Greenbeard]

Another book read...

 

No Other Darkness by Sarah Hilary

A police procedural, this, in which the partially mummified bodies of two young boys are discovered entombed inside a mysterious bunker beneath the garden of a house in London's suburbia. ...Starts off brilliantly, I thought: lots of forensic-type stuff going on, and the slow, painstaking methodology employed by the police in their investigation had a definite ring of truth about it. Absolutely fascinating - riveting! ...Halfway through, though, the plot becomes a little too clever - a bit too contrived - for my liking, and overly dramatic, to the extent that members of the investigative 'team' find themselves imperiled. But maybe that's what crime fiction fans want: heightened reality. It lost me. But then I'm not a fan: I dip my toe into the genre only very occasionally.  

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

Finished the marathon 'Future' book and now looking forward to starting on 'The Handmaiden's Tale'.

[Greenbeard]

Just finished this...

 

Homunculus by James P. Blaylock

A Gothic/steampunk farce is how I'd describe this. Kind of puts me in mind of those old 1960s AIP horror-comedy movies starring Vincent Price and Peter Lorre. Or it's how I imagine Jeeves & Wooster might have turned out if Douglas Adams or Mark Gatiss had created them. Not really my bag: I'd have preferred some genuine - some genuine - darkness to balance out all the comedic stuff, but author James P. writes with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek throughout. If it's pantomime villainy, bumbling heroics and zombie flesh you're into, this is the book for you.

[daveb]

I really like Blaylock's books and his lighter take on things. Your description is precisely why I do like his work. He was one of the three authors who basically founded steampunk (as a named genre). But I get that the lighter side is not to everyone's taste. Fortunately for them (and you) there is a plethora of darker steampunk.  

[Greenbeard]

On 6/1/2017 at 4:31 PM, daveb said:

I really like Blaylock's books and his lighter take on things. Your description is precisely why I do like his work. He was one of the three authors who basically founded steampunk (as a named genre). But I get that the lighter side is not to everyone's taste. Fortunately for them (and you) there is a plethora of darker steampunk.  

I'm not totally po-faced: I do like a bit of humour. But, as I say, I like a balance of light and shade; Homunculus is just a bit too frivolous for me all of the time. ...I did enjoy the punchline, though, when the Keeble box opens and the crowd cheers as the crocodile pops out, and when the homunculus just climbs into it's spaceship and flies off without any explanations given: very Douglas Adams, I thought.

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

Oooh, Douglas Adams! I must re read some of his stuff. We went to visit his grave in Highgate cemetery once, and people put pens in the pot by his headstone that's meant to hold flowers. very fitting.

[daveb]

5 hours ago, Greenbeard said:

po-faced

Had to look this up!

 

I enjoy frivolous.

[Gentle Giant]

I finally finished "The Pinhoe Egg". It's kind of like Harry Potter in some ways. But not as good. It was an OK story, but was a little hard to follow at times because it seemed like it was too vague about some things. It needed a little more explanation about the people and things. Too many people are mentioned and came off a bit jumbled how things went on in the story.

 

Now I've started reading "The Thief" by Megan Whalen Turner.

[daveb]

Now I'm reading Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson

[arielle18]

I just visited Powell's City of Books in Portland, the largest new-and-used bookstore in the world. I picked up a ton of stuff, but I just started reading "When God was a Woman," a book about ancient Ishtar/Astarte cults in the Middle East. You can seriously find books about anything you like at Powell's. I definitely recommend it to anyone visiting Portland.