What are you reading at the moment?

[Lori_the_Hoosier]

Orlando Furioso - Ludovico Ariosto

 

[ManitowocMike]

"What are you reading at the moment?​

• Thread starter EesomeBeastie
• Start date Mar 13, 2009"

 

[KeithD]

I'm reading this thread. (Was this a trick question?)

 

[stickygirl]

Chocolat - Joanna Harris
Seven Pillars of Wisdom - T E Lawrence
The Rainbow - The other Lawrence bloke
Gender Identity, Sexuality and Autism - Mendes & Maroney
and just finished
Carol - Patricia Highsmith

 

[Lori_the_Hoosier]

Edith Holden - The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady
F. Tennyson Jesse - The Lacquer Lady
Adrian Levy & Cathy Scott Clark - The Stone of Heaven; Unearthing The Secret History of Imperial Green Jade

 

[Wifetheif]

E.C. Comics "EC Adult suspense Stories Crime Illustrated." "Picto-fiction" was E.C.s last gasp after shutting down all their horror, crime, and detective comics because of Doctor Wertham and Congress's misguided campaign that linked comic books to juvenile delinquency. Quite entertaining and adult, killings with twist endings, crimes gone wrong, and general human nastiness. The artwork is first-class, as is the writing. They are basically illustrated short stories by all of the great MAD magazine artists, Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Joe Orland, Al Feldstein. Really great reading. Unfortunately, newsdealers, terrified of EC's "sordid" reputation, refused to carry ECs new line. Bill Gaines pulled the plug after only three issues and put all his eggs in the MAD Magazine basket, and creating perhaps the single most important magazine of post-war America.

 

[Lady2020]

FBI thriller series.

 

[HeyAll]

"We Can See You," by Simon Kernick, my favorite thriller writer.

I'm 1/5th into it, chilling read, highly recommended if you like twisty crime thrillers.

 

[TadOverdon]

September 1, 1939

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

 

[NC_Coastal]

The online owner's manual for the M3 I recently bought.

 

[MillieDynamite]

A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O'Connor. She's a woman, she wrote between about 1945 and her death in 1965. This is a collection of short stories.

 

[PapaDe]

Rereading The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz

 

[Lori_the_Hoosier]

'Once', by James Herbert. Set in the English county of Shropshire, it's a tale of witchcraft and magic and faerie folkis but not the elves, fairies, gnomes, and pixies you read about in those tinkly-wee fairy story books when you were a child; these elementals are a whole lot darker than that, sometimes helpful, usually malicious, dangerous, and often downright evil. There's some truly scary passages, the descriptions of the witches and their worship of the Sathanus is particularly gooseflesh-inducing, and the story itself gallops along with hardly a pause for a breath; even the couple of seduction scenes, rather than providing a sexy interlude, instead made my blood run cold. Herbert has elected to use his catalog of book titles in reverse as the names of the various gnomes and goblins, and pixies; once I worked that out it was quite fun reading them the right way round to get the book titles; names like 'ekulf', 'Niamod', 'Rial', 'Erhclupes' and so on.

 

[Blind_Justice]

Bored of the Rings

One, if not the first LOTR parody. Reminds kme a lot of Discworld, only with a lot more low-brow gags tossed in. Still, very fun read even if the Nazi jokes feel rather painful.

 

[MKvDeepSea]

Just finished: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.

 

[Bound_Vixen]

I love a good book, and I'd like to know what the rest of you are reading. So please tell me, what are you reading at the moment?

To kick off, I'm reading:

• Shots from the Front, the British Soldier 1914 - 1918 by Richard Holmes
• Darkling by Yasmine Galenorn (supernatural fantasy / romance)
• The Student's Guide to VHDL by Peter Ashenden (a programming language for programmable logic chips rather than computers)

Strange Weather by Joe Hill.

 

[shivadancer]

I'm 600 pages in to the first volume of Proust's _Rememberance_of_Things_Past_. I'm worried however it will affect my writing. I wrote a story once after reading Thomas Mann (my fav), and one reader accused me of swallowing a dictionary.

I'm sometimes taking small forays out of that. I consumed _Slaughter_House_Five_ in an evening, and am now plodding along with _Cats_Cradle_. _Nix_ is on deck, as is Twains _Innocents_Abroad_.

 

[SimonDoom]

Bored of the Rings

One, if not the first LOTR parody. Reminds kme a lot of Discworld, only with a lot more low-brow gags tossed in. Still, very fun read even if the Nazi jokes feel rather painful.

I read that decades ago, not too long after finishing the trilogy. I'm a sucker for sophomoric humor, so I enjoyed it thoroughly. Dildo Bugger. Goddam. Arrowroot son of Arrowshirt. Legolam. I think I lost my copy of it years ago, but I still remember it pretty well.

The best part of the whole damn thing is the short teaser passage inside the cover, with the elf trying to get the ring from Frodo by seducing him. It inspired my Tolkien fanfic hobbit sex story.

 

[Blind_Justice]

I read that decades ago, not too long after finishing the trilogy. I'm a sucker for sophomoric humor, so I enjoyed it thoroughly. Dildo Bugger. Goddam. Arrowroot son of Arrowshirt. Legolam. I think I lost my copy of it years ago, but I still remember it pretty well.

The best part of the whole damn thing is the short teaser passage inside the cover, with the elf trying to get the ring from Frodo by seducing him. It inspired my Tolkien fanfic hobbit sex story.

That was pretty neat, true. My lady love and I nearly died laughing when the Vee-Ates flattened Isinglass though. Oh the veggie puns!

I lost my German copy in one of our past two moves and got it as an e-book off amazon for about four Euros.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I'm 600 pages in to the first volume of Proust's _Rememberance_of_Things_Past_. I'm worried however it will affect my writing. I wrote a story once after reading Thomas Mann (my fav), and one reader accused me of swallowing a dictionary.

I'm sometimes taking small forays out of that. I consumed _Slaughter_House_Five_ in an evening, and am now plodding along with _Cats_Cradle_. _Nix_ is on deck, as is Twains _Innocents_Abroad_.

Tell us if you manage to finish Proust. I've started, twice, and been defeated at around a hundred pages. I feel I should try again, but my God he can drivel on!

 

[KeithD]

Anne Perry, Angels in the Gloom
and
Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

 

[Michael682]

Isaac Azimov Robot Trilogy, The Naked Sun. I'm not really feeling it this time around, so I'll probably pick up John Steakley's Armor.

Armor looks like it could be good. *adds to list*

 

[KeithD]

Sadly, I am currently reading:

Riccardino by Andrea Camilleri

and

Sliverview by John LeCarre

I say sadly, because these are two authors that I track down everything they have written and read it. They both recently died. Both of these books are advertised to be their last books. These are the only listed books of theirs I haven't already read. So, this is a double-whammy final read of them both for me.

 

[KeithD]

Sadness.

I have just finished reading the last John LeCarre book that I haven't already read. It is the last (presumably) of his to be published, not the last he wrote, but the one he had held back to be published after his death (in December 2020). Silverview.

It's been a long haul in getting all of his books read since the first one I read, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, read in 1964 as I was embarking on a 30-year career in intelligence myself (yes, I keep a list of everything read and when).

Only when I finished reading it just now out on the porch in a rocking chair in 84-degree weather and with a glass of Yellowtail Shiraz in hand did I realize that the story I also finished writing today has the same plot point as Silverview: The bringing to account of a double agent. (It's a Sam Winterberry espionage story titled "Distracted," which eventually will be published to Literotica.)

More sadness, as tomorrow I will probably finish Andrea Camilleri's posthumous Montalbano-series detective novella, Riccardino, as well. I have read all of his books I can find too, starting late, with Shape of the Water, in 2010. He died in July, 2019, and unlike some other authors who wrote a book to be published after they died, he made sure Riccardino would be the very last Montalbano book published that was written by him--he even pursued this in discussions with himself, as the author, within the book.

 

[WerdNerd]

A very good Lit story.