What Are You Reading?

[Fievel]

The Rocketeer!? Grisham is writing sci-fi now??

[Spandau Belly]

Child 44
by Tom Rob Smith

I read this novel last week, and apparently they are turning this into a movie starring Tom Hardy as the lead character and my girlfriend as his wife. The whole cast sounds ideal for their roles, my main doubt is that the director of SAFE HOUSE is the man helming this and I found SAFE HOUSE to be your standard wannabe Tony Scott shakeycam excercise. I think this story demands a more steady hand with attention to character and tension like what Paul Verhoeven achieved in BLACK BOOK.

This is a thriller novel about a Moscow cop in Stalin era USSR who is trying to hunt down a serial killer. Despite being a cop, he is not empowered by the state with resources or even permission to do so because the state would find it politically disgraceful to admit such a crime was even occurring in their self-proclaimed eutopia. It is not a mystery novel in the Agatha Christie sense. You are not presented with a selection of suspects and evidence. It is more of a procedural about closing in on the target; the tension comes from the hero guy trying to solve this case in secret in a society where everybody is watching.

Smith does a good job at getting inside the mentality of the culture of this time and place. The various twists and turns are generally exciting and the novel keeps its pace up. I would say the one major twist in the middle of the novel when it is revealed that the cop and the killer are brothers seperated in childhood took it down a couple notches. I think I probably would've like it if the story had just kept going straight without having to give the story this element of personal destiny that feels like a far-fetched coincidence.

I still liked the novel, despite mixed feelings about the major twist, and I intend to read the sequel.

[Wolfpack]

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. It won the Nebula. It's first in a trilogy about the efforts of scientists to colonize Mars and turn it into an Earthlike planet.

[caruso_stalker217]

So I've been reading Clockers by Richard Price, since I knew Spike Lee did the movie version back in the '90s so I thought I'd check it out. I thought John Turturro would be perfect for one of the cops in the book. Turns out that's exactly who Spike cast for the role. I know my shit.

[TheBaxter]

i'm about halfway through reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, soon to be a film by David Fincher starring Ben Affleck (perfect casting) and Rosamund Pike (Brittany Murphy would have been perfect casting, but she's dead, so i guess she's not really available). anyway, the book is told in a he-said, she-said fashion that's full of twists and turns and very engaging. just got to the BIG twist (i think) and now i have no idea how Fincher is going to film this book.

[Ribbons]

just got to the BIG twist (i think) and now i have no idea how Fincher is going to film this book.

Yeah, that was my first thought as well. This does not seem like a book that lends itself to adaptation seeing as both husband and wife are what you would call "unreliable narrators". They could just do a linear version of the story but, if they ditch the he-said/she-said angle, it would probably lose something important. Maybe like Cloud Atlas, it'll be completely different and yet seemingly perfect at the same time. It's a good book, and there are still more twists in store (they basically continue right up to the end).

[TheBaxter]

just got to the BIG twist (i think) and now i have no idea how Fincher is going to film this book.

Yeah, that was my first thought as well. This does not seem like a book that lends itself to adaptation seeing as both husband and wife are what you would call "unreliable narrators". They could just do a linear version of the story but, if they ditch the he-said/she-said angle, it would probably lose something important. Maybe like Cloud Atlas, it'll be completely different and yet seemingly perfect at the same time. It's a good book, and there are still more twists in store (they basically continue right up to the end).

one idea i had was they could possibly [BIG SPOILERS, like, FOR REALZZZ]cast two different actresses to play Diary Amy and real Amy, so when the perspective shifts on that character, it's clear which parts actually happened and which ones were made up.... you can think back to any scenes and tell the difference based on which actress played the role, and the way the book is structured (real amy shows up right when Diary Amy disappears) the shift would reinforce the twist without being too confusing[/BIG SPOILERS]... but it doesn't sound like they're going to do it that way.

[caruso_stalker217]

Finished Clockers, which I thought was great. Have moved on to Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich "Sam Elliot's mustache? I fucked it" Nietzsche.

[Al Shut]

Rereading 'The Alchemaster’s Apprentice ' by Waler Moers, wishing he would hurry the fuck up and finish his next book. As I remembered the book is delightful sinister in part.

[caruso_stalker217]

Currently reading Lisey's Story by Stephen King. Waiting to see if this will dethrone Insomnia as the worst King book I've read.

[Spandau Belly]

The Bonfire of The Vanities
by Tom Wolfe

I finally got around to reading what has been called one of the great modern American novels, and I found it to be pretty good. I read this book on my tablet computer, and the way the e-reader software that I use works is that it tells you how far you are within a given chapter, but the progress bar at the bottom doesn't tell you how far you are in the overall novel. If I had been reading this as an old-fashioned paper book, the ending probably wouldn't have seemed so abrupt because I would've felt that I was getting closer to the end. As it was, I felt like I was at the halfway point of this story when it ended. What was intended as a climax, I took as a turning point. And the way it ended was also pretty jarring, almost like the end of that UNBREAKABLE movie when that text just pops up on screen telling you what happens next.

Anyway, I generally liked the novel and its examination of the various socio-economic tensions at play in New York City in the 1980s. The characterization is all very good. Wolfe achieves that difficult task of making unlikeable characters engaging. He really feels like he has insight into these various mindsets. He also handles prickly racial issues in a way that accepts their complexity and doesn't provide some easy solution. I am aware that Brian DePalma made a film adaption of this novel, which I have not seen. I think the racism aspect of this novel would probably be the easiest to fuck up in a film adaption, but from what I read, DePalma's movie also fucked up everything else as well. I still might rent it out of morbid curiosity.

But this novel definately had teeth. It got into me and I found it very engrossing.

[Ribbons]

I'm a big big fan of Bonfire of the Vanities. I also have not seen the film, but am against the casting of Tom Hanks out of principle

[Spandau Belly]

I can't even imagine Tom Hanks trying to play this character. The only thing worse would be casting a black actor and losing all the racial context. So yeah, second worst choice to play Sherman McCoy: Tom Hanks, worst choice: Bill Cosby.

[caruso_stalker217]

Last night I finished The Searchers by Alan Le May. This is a wonderful book. Funny and poignant and so much better than the John Ford film. This is a new favorite. Just a beautiful piece of work, in my opinion, on the level of Portis's True Grit, though I'm not sure many people would agree with me.

[minstrel]

Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard.

An account of Matthiessen's journey into the deepest part of the Tibetan plateau, looking for, among other things, the rare snow leopard. This journey also allowed Matthiessen an opportunity to ruminate on Zen Buddhism. Matthiessen is a wonderful writer - one of the founders of the Paris Review - and this book won the National Book Award in 1978. It's turning out to be worth the read.

[SilentBobX]

I just recently purchased a Kindle, and am soon to purchase my first ever paperless book. I think I'll get Kerouac's On The Road(since I've never read it), JLA Earth 2(deluxe ed. coming October),a Bloom County book, and maybe something by Hunter Thompson that I've not read yet. Let's see what's out there.........

Mahalo

[Al Shut]

George R R Martin's Dunk & Egg stories.

Choosing characters that we know from history in the Song of Ice and Fire books may not have been the best idea. (Maybe it wasn't that bad when the stories came out and I'm too lazy to check the publishing history). Nevertheless any nugget of story from Westeros is worth solid gold for me.

[Fievel]

Kenobi.

Set between Episodes III & IV.
Very much a "western" feel (Sandpeople -vs- isolated small community type-of-deal). They're apparently trying to set up how Obi-Wan becomes Ben, becomes "that crazy old wizard", etc. etc. etc.

So far it's very entertaining. With all this talk of standalone films, this is one era (Obi-Wan between 3 & 4) I'd love to see.. and this is just the type of story that would fit the bill. I'm not entirely sure this is THE story to work on-screen, but it's entertaining enough for a Star Wars book......... so far (halfway through).

[minstrel]

Well, I figured I'd pick up Cloud Atlas. Just started that, but I'm reading it along with a couple of other books, so the going will be slow.

[Spandau Belly]

While sitting in airports, I read

Agent 6
by Tom Rob Smith

just as I promised I would earlier in this thread! I would definately say this sequel is a huge step up. I liked the first one, but this one is just epic. There's like three novels in one here. This one spans multiple decades in Russian history, and I particularily liked the buddy cop portion in Afghanistan. Smith puts his characters through the ringer ten times worse than the first novel.

I know the first novel is being turned into a film, but I doubt that film will do well (I just don't see Americans flocking to see a movie where the hero is a Stalin era KGB agent), so they probably won't go for a sequel. I would actually recommend that people could just read this novel as a standalone. You don't need to have read the first novel, nor does reading this one first really spoil anything if you then wanted to go back and read the first.

[Spandau Belly]

Seven Years in Tibet
by Heinrich Harrer

This book is the memoirs of Heinrich Harrer, a famous Austrian adventurer known for climbing mountains. During World War 2 he was caught abroad in India with no way of returning to Austria. He was put in a British prisoner of war camp because he was Austrian and this was the policy of the day. He generally found the standard of living in the camp to be quite good, but was philisophically opposed to living in anything he considered "a cage" and so he, along with friend Peter Aufschnaiter, escaped and fled to Tibet, where the living standard was much lower but he felt happier with the idea that he was a free man.

Tibet at the time was an isolationist country, not interested in letting outsiders in other than pilgrims from India wishing to pay tribute to the Dalai Lama. Harrer and Aufschnaiter had to be very persuasive and find ways to make themselves useful in order to avoid deportation. They were granted permission to stay and Harrer even managed to become a tutor to the 14th Dalai Lama himself who was a boy at the time. Harrer and Aufschnaiter are among the few Europeans to really integrate with Tibetan culture and witness the fall of independent Tibet when China ultimately invaded and the Dalai Lama fled to India.

His tales of escape from POW camps and survival on the way to Tibet are entertaining survivalist stuff. Once he makes it to Lhasa, Harrer has a lot of insights in Tibetan culture and his observations were very interesting to me. Although he felt at home there, he never adopted the religious beliefs that truly defined their culture, but still had a respect for their way life and for the Dalai Lama as a leader.

I have just been in Tibet back in the autumn, so I could really picture a lot of the scenary and people as I read Harrer's memoir. I could also appreciate how much the country had changed since Harrer's time there in the 1940s. I have seen the film they made out of this memoir starring Sir Bradley Pitt as Heinrich Harrer, but honestly, I don't really remember it at all. I do plan to revisit the film to see how they adapted it.

This is a very good read for anybody interested in history and Asian cultures. Harrer is very blunt and plainspoken. I could relate to a lot of aspects of his character and enjoyed learning about this time and place through his perspective.

[caruso_stalker217]

Here is what I read in the month of January

Up in Honey's Room, Elmore Leonard (started in December)
52 Pickup, Elmore Leonard (started in December)
Nobody Runs Forever, Richard Stark
When The Women Come Out To Dance, Elmore Leonard
Mr. Paradise, Elmore Leonard
Pronto, Elmore Leonard
Riding the Rap, Elmore Leonard
Raylan, Elmore Leonard
Tishomingo Blues, Elmore Leonard
Pagan Babies, Elmore Leonard

Quite a diverse list, you'll notice.

[minstrel]

Here is what I read in the month of January

Up in Honey's Room, Elmore Leonard (started in December)
52 Pickup, Elmore Leonard (started in December)
Nobody Runs Forever, Richard Stark
When The Women Come Out To Dance, Elmore Leonard
Mr. Paradise, Elmore Leonard
Pronto, Elmore Leonard
Riding the Rap, Elmore Leonard
Raylan, Elmore Leonard
Tishomingo Blues, Elmore Leonard
Pagan Babies, Elmore Leonard

Quite a diverse list, you'll notice.

You're not Elmore Leonard's mom, by any chance, are you?

[caruso_stalker217]

I wish!

Really what happened though is I got a library card.

[Fievel]

Here is what I read in the month of January

Up in Honey's Room, Elmore Leonard (started in December)

Had you read The Hot Kid yet?

I really dug his Carl Webster stories.

[caruso_stalker217]

Yeah, I finished The Hot Kid back in December. Up In Honey's Room wasn't as good, but I really like the characters in those stories. They love to hear themselves talk.

[caruso_stalker217]

For the month of February I read:

The Gunslinger, Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three, Stephen King
The Pleasure of My Company, Steve Martin
The Waste Lands, Stephen King

And I'm two-thirds done with Wizard and Glass. My goal to read the entire Dark Tower series last month was an abysmal failure.

[caruso_stalker217]

The month of March went something like this:


Wizard and Glass, Stephen King
The Wind Through The Keyhole, Stephen King
Wolves of the Calla, Stephen King
Song of Susannah, Stephen King
Getting Mother's Body, Suzan-Lori Parks


Getting Mother's Body was pretty good. Kinda like Faulkner meets the Coen brothers.

This month I will wrap up The Dark Tower and jump right into Under The Dome which a buddy gave me for my birthday. I don't think I've ever read two 1000 page books back-to-back. I expect it to break my mind.

I also just got everyone's favorite outlaw internet film critic Vern's debut novel Niketown.

[caruso_stalker217]

Took a bit longer than usual, but I finally finished the last Dark Tower book. I'm jumping balls-first into Under The Dome tonight.

[minstrel]

I'm going to dig into Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country tonight. I've wanted to read it for awhile, but every time I've picked it up, something else got in the way.

[caruso_stalker217]

April:

Niketown, Vern
The Dark Tower, Stephen King
Under the Dome, Stephen King
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian was pretty legit.

[Wolfpack]

I am reading Trigger Finger by Jackson Spencer Bell. It's only available on Kindle right now. Full disclosure: the author is my brother, writing under a pseudonym. I'll just quote the book description:

When two intruders break into his house one night bent on attacking his family, Kevin Swanson fights back, shooting and killing both assailants. In the aftermath, he rockets from obscure lawyer to local hero overnight--a hero to everyone, that is, except for a strange man who calls in to a local talk radio show when Kevin appears as a guest. The caller, who won't reveal his name, has a message: Kevin is no hero. And his story about what happened isn't even close to accurate.
Shortly thereafter, Kevin finds himself thrust into the center of one violent crime after another, rising to the occasion and exceeding his wildest expectations each time. Strangely, though, none of his attackers carry any identification. And as his doubts drive him through his own investigation of what really happened that night, his crumbling reality sends him hurtling towards a face-to-face confrontation with the nameless caller—and the horrifying truth that won't let him hide.

[Al Shut]

Rereading At the Mountains of Madness after picking up the Nemo: Heart of Ice comic yesterday.

Let's see if I can find that Gordon Pym copy that must be somewhere in the house next.

[Wolfpack]

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. It won the 1969 Hugo Award.

It's a very strange novel. It is set in the near future...of 2010...IN A WORLD(!) plagued by overpopulation and eugenics laws. Some chapters consist solely of scatological, disjointed paragraphs and sentences designed not to move the narrative forward, but to better firm the setting in the reader's mind. Brunner also uses his own made-up slang terms the definitions of which one has to figure out on their own.

There's also an African president named Obomi. Not of the USA, but of Benin. Still eerie, though.

[caruso_stalker217]

This is what I read last month:

Twelve Years A Slave, Solomon Northup
From a Buick 8, Stephen King
The Dragon and the George, Gordon R. Dickson
All The Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy

I'm currently reading Cities of the Plain, the third book in McCarthy's "Border Trilogy", which brings the protagonists from All The Pretty Horses and The Crossing together in one delightful horse-filled romp.

I've also started Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King.

[so sorry]

Cripes that's a lot of reading!

I'm happy if I can manage to read 2 chapters of a book a night....

What's the Stephen King book about?

[so sorry]

Kardashian sisters YA dystopian novel getting panned

[Wolfpack]

After all the Kardashians have done to Deep Space 9 and the Bajorans, I will not buy anything of theirs!

[TheBaxter]

Kardashian sisters YA dystopian novel getting panned

where do all these kardashians keep coming from? i swear they breed like roaches.
so, a book "written" by these people turns out to not be very good?
I AM SO SHOCKED.
seriously. look.

see, that is how shocked i am.

[so sorry]

Kardashian sisters YA dystopian novel getting panned

where do all these kardashians keep coming from? i swear they breed like roaches.
so, a book "written" by these people turns out to not be very good?
I AM SO SHOCKED.
seriously. look.

see, that is how shocked i am.

I'm actually shocked that they didn't get sued by anybody since the "plot" is an obvious mashup of existing book and movie properties. Maybe after the sequel comes out, which is titled: Rebels: A New Hope: Grabbing Fire.

[TheBaxter]

Kardashian sisters YA dystopian novel getting panned

where do all these kardashians keep coming from? i swear they breed like roaches.
so, a book "written" by these people turns out to not be very good?
I AM SO SHOCKED.
seriously. look.

see, that is how shocked i am.

I'm actually shocked that they didn't get sued by anybody since the "plot" is an obvious mashup of existing book and movie properties. Maybe after the sequel comes out, which is titled: Rebels: A New Hope: Grabbing Fire.

there will be a class-action suit by the people who actually buy and read it.

[caruso_stalker217]

This review was quite good:

Just finished the book and went to get some egg rolls. The fortune cookie they gave me said "The book you just read was terrible" and now my egg rolls taste like regret.

The short bit that I read from the prologue was bad, but not overrun with adverbs so there's that at least.

[caruso_stalker217]

What's the Stephen King book about?

A retired detective trying to catch a deranged whacko killer guy. Unfortunately a lot of the action so far involves modern technology, like the Internets, and the protagonist is an out-of-touch old guy so King pairs him with a tech-savvy teen sidekick who luckily isn't quite as fucking terribly written as the kids in Under the Dome (yet). There have been several scenes so far of people explaining technology to the old detective, who doesn't even know that people can photocopy stuff with their home printers. These scenes feel like leftovers from Doctor Sleep when the bad guys were going on about 4G or some shit.

[TheBaxter]

oh god i think you just singlehandedly ruined any chance of me reading this book. those were the worst parts of doctor sleep, and a whole book of that would drive me insane. king needs to go teach a computer class at a community college or write his "iPhone for Dummies" book and get it the fuck out of his system already.

[caruso_stalker217]

I'm not even at the halfway point yet, so maybe shit turns around. It's not terrible so far, but it's certainly not his best. Like Doctor Sleep it almost doesn't seem like it was written by him.

[SilentBobX]

Just about over half done on Feast Of Crows. Pretty good stuff, easing me into the next book(which I bought first mistakenly, oh well)

Mahalo

[caruso_stalker217]

I just finished reading As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.

This is the first book of his that I have read. I have to admit that I was not familiar with his work outside of his acting. In fact I didn't even know that he had ever written a book, let alone several.

The book tells the story of the Bundren family and is told from different characters' points of view, much like RASHOMON, with people having different views of events that occur. Also like RASHOMON this is a murder mystery. The victim in question is the mother of the Bundren family, Addie.

Unlike most murder mysteries, though, the killer is outed quite early on. I think Mr. Faulkner was giving a nod to the television series "Columbo" which he starred in. In many episodes the murder happened at the beginning and the audience knew who the killer was and the fun was watching Columbo catch them.

This is not so fun, though.

The family's youngest member, Vardaman, seems to be filling the Columbo role. Despite his youth and lack of education, he cleverly deduces early on that his mother's murderer is Dr. Peabody, who happened to walk in the room and make eye contact with the victim and she died from it or something (many things in this book were not made very clear). Vardaman immediately embarks on a mission of revenge, but doesn't get very far because he's like seven years old or something. He soon becomes obsessed with the case and begins to spin wild theories about his mother being a fish. Darl, his brother and partner in the investigation, proposes that she may in fact be a horse.

The father has no teeth and is bad with money.

Faulkner starts to lose the thread after a while and doesn't seem to know how to tell an engaging and satisfying crime story. Too much of the story focused on the burial arrangements and weather (nothing stops a book cold like endless blather about the weather). The subplot about the girl who needed period medicine went nowhere. Dr. Peabody is never caught or brought to justice. He is not even pursued for the crime. He gets away with everything and no one cares.

Ten dollars is not enough money for an abortion.

Overall, a disappointing read. But there was some interesting stuff here and I may look into Mr. Faulkner's other works, which apparently includes a novelization of the film POPEYE.

Maybe you should stick to acting, Mr. Faulkner. I loved you in HUSBANDS.

[Fievel]

I just finished reading As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.

This is the first book of his that I have read. I have to admit that I was not familiar with his work outside of his acting. In fact I didn't even know that he had ever written a book, let alone several.

Who on Earth are you mistaking Faulkner with?

William Cuthbert Faulkner (/ˈfɔːknər/, September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi where he spent most of his life.
Faulkner is one of the most important writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is often included on similar lists.

[Wolfpack]

I just finished reading As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.

This is the first book of his that I have read. I have to admit that I was not familiar with his work outside of his acting. In fact I didn't even know that he had ever written a book, let alone several.

Who on Earth are you mistaking Faulkner with?

William Cuthbert Faulkner (/ˈfɔːknər/, September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi where he spent most of his life.
Faulkner is one of the most important writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is often included on similar lists.

He got his inspiration to write from being the narrator in The Princess Bride.

[Fievel]

Peter Falk... William Faulkner....

...and I thought caruso was being serious.

Now everyone laugh at the silly mouse! Laugh at the silly little mouse-man!!