What're you reading?

[wris]

What are you reading at the moment, and would you recommend it?

I'm currently reading a zombie horror story, Pontypool Changes Everything. It's written in a very stylised way, which some people apparently find quite jarring, but I've enjoyed so far. I haven't read much horror other than a bunch of Stephen King novels and the excellent House of Leaves, so this is a nice change of pace.

[MamboGator]

I haven't been reading much of anything for a long time. I have quite a few books on my list, but either don't have the time to read or can't commit mentally to doing just one thing in my spare time.

But since my phone has two screens, I spend most of my evenings sitting in bed barely paying attention to a youtube video on one screen and mindlessly scrolling through/refreshing a few websites on the other. So I decided to replace the doomscrolling on the second screen and give e-books a try instead. I downloaded the kindle app and purchased digital copies of a couple of the anthology books I've been wanting to read. So now I'm slowly working my way through the Conan the Barbarian and John Carter of Mars collections.

I'm actually regretting picking up John Carter. I really liked the Disney movie, but Edgar Rice Burroughs leans a lot heavier into the fact that he was a confederate soldier. So ... like ... fighting on the side of slavery (where's the puking emoji when you need it?). That made getting through even the first chapter of the first book a challenge. Maybe he changes his views later on, but so far it isn't written like his racism is a problem. Given that the series Burroughs is best known for is Tarzan, it's probably safe to assume that he himself had right-wing views. I might have to give up on John Carter because I definitely can't slog through a dozen books of confederate sympathy.

Not only that, but it's also written really ... not poorly, but I guess you could say "simply." What I mean is that it reads like a YA novel, which I have never enjoyed. I honestly expected a lot more sophistication from such a revered author. I don't mean to sound pompous, but books written for young adult readers like Harry Potter, Hunger Games, etc. never appealed to me. When I was done with kids books, I moved straight into the adult fiction section of the library.

Conan the Barbarian, on the other hand, is a treasure. I absolutely love it. The stories are brilliant and the world that Robert E. Howard crafted is so fleshed out that it feels real. I would honestly put it up there with the detail Tolkien put into defining Middle Earth. And even though there is definitely a degree of titillation, I heard a story a while back (I think it was on an episode of Extra Sci Fi) that Howard only included that in his stories because the magazine he submitted them to for publication was more likely to feature your story on the cover if there were sexy scenes they could illustrate and attract more sales. Cover stories thus earned a lot more money and Howard needed the money to support his mother.

So I definitely recommend Conan the Barbarian, but wouldn't recommend John Carter at all unless you can overlook the confederate sympathies.

[NullCertifier]

My roommate just got a new library card and brought back a good little haul. Right now I'm casually reading through "Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography" by Laurie Woolever. Fittingly enough I've mostly been flipping my way through it while working in the kitchen. The format - a biography of Anthony Bourdain via interviews with people who knew him - makes it a good read for multitasking, as most of the snippets are well less than a page in length. I'm unfamiliar with the author, but as per the notes on the jacket she's apparently been an assistant and coauthor for him for many years. Still a little bummed out since his passing.

Besides that, I've been reading Frank Herbert's Dune. I suppose there's probably been a good bit of interest since the movie last year. Stopped at book II: Muad'dib, need to puick that back up soon

[debleb]

Not reading anything at the moment but the last thing I read was Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin (and all the earlier Earthsea books before that). Would reccomend the series! I love the characters and setting.

[SilkSkull]

Dean Koontz - The Key to Midnight. It's gotten me back into reading and reminds me a lot of Perfect Blue, for a summary check out this https://www.deankoontz.com/book/the-key-to-midnight/

[t0lo]

I was reading stephen king's fairy tale recently, but when the twist happened a third of the way through the story became pretty uninteresting to me. Before that I read Frankenstein which is really good! Shelley writes in such a beautifully articulate way

[Melooon]

~Moved to the Writers Corner!

Iv been reading a few short stories by Franz Kafka recently; Iv never read any before and they really are sparkly; I though Id share a very short one here!

PASSERS-BY - Kafka
When you go walking by night up a street and a man, visible a long way off--for the street mounts uphill and there is a full moon--comes running towards you, well, you don't catch hold of him, not even if he is a feeble and ragged creature, not even if someone chases yelling at his heels, but you let him run on.

For it is night, and you can't help it if the street goes uphill before you in the moonlight, and besides, these two have maybe started that chase to amuse themselves, or perhaps they are both chasing a third, perhaps the first is an innocent man and the second wants to murder him and you would become an accessory, perhaps they don't know anything about each other and are merely running separately home to bed, perhaps they are night birds, perhaps the first man is armed.

And anyhow, haven't you a right to be tired, haven't you been drinking a lot of wine? You're thankful that the second man is now long out of sight.

EDIT: Theres a bunch of them online here: https://zork.net/~patty/oldkafka/

[pleb-hates-the-modern-web]

i've been reading compendiums of the works of poe and flannery o'connor; for the former, i wanted to revisit old favorites like "the masque of the red death" and "fall of the house of usher", and for the latter, i wanted to finally get around to reading works like "a good man is hard to find" and "yonder stands your orphan".

[Wobblegong]

'In the Penal Colony' was my favorite Kafka short story. I guess I like the gruesome stuff

Just finished Emperor of All Maladies which is about cancer - very interesting stuff it's weird how little they knew about it when chemotherapy started as a practice