Books : What are you reading February 2017.

Please post titles of books that you are reading along with comments, suggestions,recommendations etc

Not a book but a play.

I am reading the acclaimed drama, Frost/Nixon by Peter Morgan about British journalist, David Frost, famously interviewing with disgraced ex-president, Richard Nixon.

We try but we didn't have long
We try but we don't belong

-Hot Chip (Boy from School)

Still reading All The Light We Can Not See.

About 340 pages in. They should rename this book 'WW2 for dummies'. As usual the golden rule of when something becomes wildly popular it's probably *beep* holds true

They all fúcking rave about that in the tiresome Facebook book club I'm part of.
I usually avoid the stuff they rave about, seems to work.

I prefer my WW2 stories without magical pixie children with special powers and enchanted diamonds.

I can see why it's been popular - very easy to read and tackily sentimental. The crowds eat that stuff up

Finished All The Light We Can Not See.

Avoid it if possible. Very forgettable and melodramatic.

The last book I will be reading in the history of the IMDb message board is NOS 4A2. My first taste of Joe Hill.

I'll miss you all. I'm done w/message boards. Taking this shut down as a sign it's time to move on in life.

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I'll miss you all. I'm done w/message boards. Taking this shut down as a sign it's time to move on in life.

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You'll be back




But if not, all the best. I have enjoyed bashing Murakami with you.

I was in a book store last night here in Melbourne and they'd made a mistake - someone put Wind Up Bird Chronicle in the classics section!
Thought about letting them know their error but ultimately it's their business to know these things

A little over halfway through Don Quixote.
I guess I'm enjoying it overall and I admire it, yet it's kinda weird how it's essentially the same joke over and over again for 1000 pages at the expense of a mentally ill man.

It's probably never a good thing really when I say I "admire" a book.

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Don Quixote.

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Finished that on Friday and hmm, yeah Book I was funny and stuff. Book II was a huge repetitive bore.
And I never quite got over the fact that the whole book is about the "hilarious" adventures of a mentally ill dude.

Started Don Delillo's Running Dog this morning. Because it's short.

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Don Delillo's Running Dog

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I thought that was a goddamned mess with the occasional moment of kickassery. Uh yeah. Bursts of awesome writing lost amongst weird plot-turns and endless interchangeable characters.

I think Jane Smiley's Greenlanders will be my final contribution here; started it this morning and will definitely still be reading it when we all die on Monday.

Nah
On monday the boards get closed.
All the amount of data might get sold to some low/high ? Bidder
But we Are going to move on.


The imbdb will probably turn into something like allociné. Instead of discussion, there will be provided access to online movies (for a fee), via amazon or some other commercial venture.

Is this going to improve the quality of movies ? How could that be.

No, we won't die. (Or, do you, like me, have the flu and no more internet home ? Yesterday I almost sneezed my brain out And I do not talk about what is happening to my lungs. That is disgusting.;)


Manelle
"to tax and to please, no more to love and to be wise, is not given to men"

My reading list for this month:

On Being Certain by Robert A. Burton
Good For You Great For Me by Lawrence Susskind
The Art Of The Deal by Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz
3-D Negotiation by David A. Lax and James K. Sebenius


μηδὲν γαν

Despite being very sick and tired today, I managed to read a small amount of material from those 1980s British computer magazines I love so much. Today I read:

From an unknown edition of "The Home Computer Course", an article on cassette storage (audio cassettes were commonly used to store computer programs during the 1980s), and an article on ROM and RAM.

An article describing the pros and cons of various business computers from the May 1982 edition of "Micro Computer Printout". Most of these used CP/M, an operating system popular at the time.

An article comparing the Dragon 32 and Camputers Lynx (yes, the name of the company was "camputers", a truly weird name) in the April 1983 edition of "Which Micro?". The magazine wasn't particularly positive about either. Nevertheless, the Dragon 32 would prove to be a popular computer in Britain, although not a long-lived one. The Lynx, meanwhile, was a bomb. It wasn't suitable for games (although some were released), and it wasn't good enough for the business market.

When I finish with the UK computer magazines, I will do the US ones, and maybe then Australia if I can get scans of magazines from there. I'm mainly interested in 1981 to 1984, the height of the 8-bit microcomputer.


New Du Mont high-resolution picture tube and high picture power give a fuller tone range

Have you not got any copies of Input magazine? My brother drove me around the bend on the Commodore 64, constantly typing pages and pages of DATA commands from that, which would move a badly shaped blob around the screen after approximately 3 years worth of effort.

Rusty chains and armoured pillows stuffed with silver pins

Oh yes, type-in listings. I can't be bothered to type them in myself, but there are websites where people take old type-in listings and make them available as ready-to-use files for emulators. One surprisingly good type-in I came across is "Crasher" for the Sinclair ZX81.




New Du Mont high-resolution picture tube and high picture power give a fuller tone range

City of Ember by Jeanna DuPrau. About half way in and so far I really like it. Going to have to pick up the rest of the series.

Also plan to read Lockwood and Co.: The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud.

After the brilliant but harrowing 'Call Me By Your Name' I'm having a light interlude with Jack London's 'Call of the Wild'.

Right now I'm reading Dr. No by Ian Fleming and The Cardinal of the Kremlin by Tom Clancy.

Fall into Darkness by Christopher Pike
Inside Daisy Clover by Gavin Lambert

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. Just started it but it certainly has one of the most shocking/thrilling first chapters I have ever come across.

Really enjoyed that.

The Marinus character is important in other Mitchell novels.

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker

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The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker

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All grammar Nazis should be forced to read it.

One of the bestest books what I have ever readed!






"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations" Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

City On Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg

Read that last year and ended up really disliking it.

First 300 pages - this is good isn't it?
Second 300 pages - I'm not sure this is good
Last 300 - oh no this is bad! What have I done!!

Finally finished The Godless by Ben Peek. A fantasy novel about people living in a world with dead and dying gods in it. It's alright. I found much of it frustrating. Too many characters, too many names of places, people. Could have used a Dramatis Personae at the beginning. Also the chapters are usually 3-4 pages long which means the action is just starting when the chapter ends and moves on to a different scene.

Now I'll try to get into Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke.

I guess these few posts left should ween me off this site for the Winter :(

Finished 'The Bonfire Of The Vanities' by Tom Wolfe.

A little conflicted here, the first 200 pages are some of the most brilliant satire that I have read in quite awhile, then we have about 200 pages of filler, wherein Mister Wolf, takes all the steam out of his black rocketing humor to bog us down by mixing in some extraneous characters that just babble word count (my editor said at least 600 pages to justify the $40 Hardcover edition-LOL) and then about page 500 he finally gets back to his main characters whose momentum had been lost at about page 250 to finally wrap it up(unsatisfactorily) page 639. Stop at page 200- go to page 500 and you've really missed nothing.

I am now on book three of 'The Dark Elf' trilogy by R.A. Slavatore, who is probably the best writer of the 'Forgotten Realms' series/ in which there are 1 zillion books or something. Like his first 'Icewind Dale Trilogy' this had the potential as a great work of fantasy but by the third book he phoned in a bunch of monster chasing for his main plot. Both series involve his Drow Elf Drizzt, who is actually one of the more unique characters in Fantasy literature, kinda like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. They are both very good sword-and-sorcery/d&d series and worth the time if you are just hankering for something decent to read in this vein.

Ummmdecided to put down Will and Ariel Durant's 'The Age of Voltaire' Book 9 of his 'Story of Civilization' series. Unlike the earlier works, this book does not have the same focused narrative and insights, I am now reading 'The Age of Faith' from A.D 325-1300 /book 4 and you can tell right away that the 'The Age of Voltaire' has been written by a completely different person, (Durant was quite up there in age by this time and felt compelled to finish the series- so I am guessing 'ghost written' as he published way too many (Huge)books at this advanced age to really write them all.

So if interested- think about just sticking with the earlier books in the series first, pre-1960 or so, they are far better and more focused as you go back to book one.

I have noticed that the old Amazon forums are still going. (Why are they still viable and this site is not?)

https://www.amazon.com/forum/book
-seems like it might be one of the sensible places for a home for this thread.

1) Bee Season by Myla Goldberg - About 60 pages in; it's entertaining but a little slight so far.
2) The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes - Majestic and wonderful. The physics stretches are confusing, but not too dense.
3) The Clown by Heinrich Boll - Only about 30 pages into it. Interesting so far.
4) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens - It is what it is.

About two thirds of the way through Dragonfly: An epic Adventure of Survival in Outer Space by Bryan Burrough. Very interesting look at the ill-fated US missions to MIR in the 1990's.














"Hogs have futures, I don't."
Dr. Johnny Fever

ArianeDevere Sherlock transcripts.
Kind of Er A bit obsessive, if truly someone is using one's life to do that without being connected to the actual show, imho.



Manelle
"to tax and to please, no more to love and to be wise, is not given to men"

I'm now reading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. The characterization is superb, and the plot is so far a page-turner. I've got a long way to go as it's quite lengthy, so I may not finish before the message boards are murdered.

Jack Grimwood - Moskva

Sad to think that this might be my last post on this thread ever. Especially as I haven't got a view on the book yet, I've not had chance to sit down and properly commit to it yet. Shockingly, I rather enjoyed Murakami's Kafka on the Shore much more than expected, despite it having all his usual tropes.

Rusty chains and armoured pillows stuffed with silver pins

I'm reading Wanting to Believe: a critical guide to The X-Files, Millennium and The Lone Gunmen by Robert Shearman. I've had this book for almost a year, finally getting around to it.

Planning on reading Being There by Jerzy Kosinski and beginning Life After Life by Kate Atkinson this month, too.

1) To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (finished) - 5 of 5 stars - Like Woolf's other stuff that I've read, it took me a day or so to get myself attuned to her stream of consciousness style; but, once I got there, I ended up liking this one better that either Mrs. Dalloway or Orlando. Sad and close to perfect.

2) Ubik by Philip K. Dick - I should have this one done before the board shuts down. I am a bit over halfway done and still trying to figure out exactly what is happening; but that is about par for the course with Dick. I've like his other stuff and trust that this one will come together for me as well.

3) The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco - I will probably finish this before the shutdown as well. Eco is one of my favorite writers but this is really just middle of the pack for me so far. It's an interesting take on language and memory and is keeping me engaged, but it's really wordy (even for Eco) and slow going in stops.

A Delicate Truth (2013) by John le Carré

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations" Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac, which I bought some weeks ago because I decided I wanted to read this book right after reading The Robbers by Schiller (my previous reading).

I am liking the way Balzac writes, I am finding it very straightforward and not so boring as other writers from the same time periods of the 18th and 19th centuries. I think I'll like this one much better than I liked The Robbers (which was almost stupidly comical of how melodramatical it was) and The Red and the Black by Stendhal (which I read some years ago and found a little boring, I suspect I am going to like Eugène de Rastignac better than Julien Sorel, who was a bore).

"I know one thing: that I know nothing" - Socrates

Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, Diderot.
Le barbier de Séville, le mariage de figaro, Beaumarchais.
Please,

Read. Enjoy. Have it your way.
Have a nice life.

Very best regards,

Manelle
"to tax and to please, no more to love and to be wise, is not given to men"

Starting Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (And Everything In Between) by Lauren Graham.

Don't eva let nobody tell you you ain't strong enough

Why does reading that title lead me into thinking about someone who can deliver the reading of a story at sublight's speed ?

Manelle
"to tax and to please, no more to love and to be wise, is not given to men"

"Why does reading that title lead me into thinking about someone who can deliver the reading of a story at sublight's speed ? "

Because if anyone could do that, it'd be Lauren Graham.

Don't eva let nobody tell you you ain't strong enough

I am pages from the end of Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders. As soon as I put it down, I'll pick up the audio book which I'd heard promises of being wonderful (http://ew.com/books/2017/02/08/george-saunders-lincoln-in-the-bardo-the-greatest-audiobook/). After reading the book, I'm even more determined to hear it! What a production.