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Thread: What are you reading?

  1. #931
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    great interview was a fan of chucks until i think "snuff" which i felt was shock for shocks sake , kind of clarifies some of that. kind of makes me reassess how i feel and think about all "shock" artists
    -louie

  2. #932
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    Yeah I just finished Adjustment Day and I feel the same way. His last few books have been misses and it seems like he writes shock for shocks sake. The book was okay, but the ending was disappointing and the story itself could be frustrating at times. And Snuff was pretty forgettable.

    I'm getting ready to start The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

  3. #933
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    Yeah, there were quite a few parts in the book where I was thinking that he was just putting on airs and not writing believably. For example, the brown recluse bit. Jesus Christ that made me gag. And the idea that...you know what, not getting into it. That part was just beyond the pale.

  4. #934
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    So I read The Circle. Not sure but I think I'm just outside the group who uses the Internet in such a way that this made sense. The gradual escalation of everything made it sound like a farce for most of the book. But then I saw this tweet and it lines up with where the book ended up saying social media would go. Sorta. Maybe minus the whole take over the gov't part.



    This subtweet for example:



    is full-on Mae and her "These people didn't vote for me. Why do they want me dead?" line of thinking.

    And I totally get that the thread is mostly sarcasm but there's truth in the sarcasm and that's what sucks about twitter. Really more than twitter at this point, with so many people saying you're the worst ever if you x instead of y. This is almost fascinating and I'd love to read some articles about it but I also want to not waste the time reading something that would probably make me upset anyway. huh.

  5. #935
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    Just finished reading Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.



    If anyone's in the mood for a book that'll go well with the upcoming autumn/Halloween season, this might be what you're looking for. It's not a horror novel and there's nothing supernatural in it, unlike some of Jackson's other stuff, but it has a very spooky, gothic atmosphere and a lot of black humor.

    I think this is essentially a book about agoraphobia. It does an amazing job of putting you in that mindset, that feeling like the whole outside world is this hostile, scary place, and the only way to survive is to build your private, beautiful sanctuary and try to keep everything out. When I compare this with her famous short story, "The Lottery," it seems like Shirley Jackson must have had a strong sense of distrust towards society and the masses. When reading about her life and her personal struggles, I can't help wondering if this book was actually a bit of a fantasy and escape for her, as opposed to some heartbreaking look at mental illness. Obviously, this level of extreme agoraphobia is a terrible thing, and the book doesn't at all try to misrepresent that. But still, there's something fun about all the creepy sadness. It almost seem like an old fairy tale. I feel like Jackson was trying to do more than simply gaze down upon these characters with pity and horror. I think she really wants the reader to feel it deeply within themselves, to understand the immense appeal of hiding from the world and just wallowing in your own strangeness.

    ...Or something like that...idk. It's a short but incredibly fascinating book with a lot going on, and I haven't fully sorted out all my thoughts on it just yet. But I can't stop thinking about it ever since I finished it. Definitely Shirley Jackson's very best book from what I've read.

  6. #936
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    Woah I just finished the Three Body Problem trilogy and it's pretty amazing

  7. #937
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    https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....4,203,200_.jpg

    Let's just say the parallels between the late Weimar Republic and what we're going through now are frighteningly similar.

  8. #938
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    I'm currently finishing Uzumaki for Halloween.

  9. #939
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    Law, law, law is all I read anymore. Finishing up my first year of law school and so needed a break. That brought me here.

  10. #940
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    Moby - Porcelain, because the description of its follow-up "Then It Fell Apart" like "What do you do when you realise you have everything you think you've ever wanted but still feel completely empty? What do you do when it all starts to fall apart?" really intrigued me and I'm looking forward to that one too.

  11. #941
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    So far I've learned that in 1987 MCA paid for the gender reassignment surgery of one of their friends. Pretty interesting stuff.

  12. #942
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    i really do like this book, not sure the movie did it justice tho




    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

  13. #943
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    Momo (in Slovak "Little girl Momo and lost time", or "stolen time") by Michael Ende, author of Neverending story. One-night book, similar to the Little Prince in that you can see many important themes to think about behind "fairytale" story, touching and double so it being christmas gift from one very close lovely person who knows how much I love Neverending story the movie, I confess sometimes I had to wipe a few tears. Also interesting that it was written in 1973 and already describing how parents don't have the time for children and everyone is just in such hurry all the time, even before all the internets and such. "But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart."

    Update: Had to boy also Neverending story finally, and even though I still consider the movie (1984) as one of the most beautiful ever, I must say that sometimes it felt, forgive me, too long. :-) Momo book 5/5, Neverending Story film 5/5, book 4/5.
    Last edited by Substance242; 01-07-2019 at 03:50 PM.

  14. #944
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    recently finished Grady Hendrix's third novel, We Sold Our Souls, and it was amazing. i love all three of his novels and while this didn't overtake My Best Friend's Exorcism, it was fucking great.

    today i finished Red Dragon, which is the first Thomas Harris book i've read. i saw silence of the lambs once, i (regrettably) saw hannibal rising in the theater, and i'm obsessed with the TV show Hannibal. the book was good but i missed the tone & unreality of the show. don't know if i'll read silence of the lambs.

    started This Body's Not Big Enough For Both Of Us this afternoon, which is Edgar Cantero's third novel (in English, can't remember if he wrote any in Spanish previously). i loved his other two books so i'm really looking forward to this one. i'm only about 20 pages in and i'm already really enjoying it.

    it's nice to have the focus and drive to read so much. before i started my meds i had to be in such a particular mood to be able to read, and it was hard for me to read quickly. i have a giant collection of books that i started and never finished and i'm pretty hopeful that i won't be adding any more to that pile.

  15. #945
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    OMG, you mentioned Grady and Edgar in the same post. Love both of them, can't wait to start reading their newest books.

    Edgar has mentioned he's working on a sequel of a sort to Meddling Kids and I'm stoked.

  16. #946
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    Quote Originally Posted by allegate View Post
    OMG, you mentioned Grady and Edgar in the same post. Love both of them, can't wait to start reading their newest books.

    Edgar has mentioned he's working on a sequel of a sort to Meddling Kids and I'm stoked.
    duuuude i'm more than halfway through "this body's..." (as of friday, didn't read over the weekend) and it is fantastic.

  17. #947
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    So i just read Shaun Attwood's English Shaun Trilogy, which he fucking gave me for free, because i asked him to FRONT me a DIGITAL copy of ONE of them, and told him about my RA diagnosis and that literally all of my money was going for RA treatment and such. Instead, he mailed me PHYSICAL copies of MULTIPLE books, asking only that i review them on Amazon. I'm gonna tell you fuckers a bit about them, too.

    The books are fucking great. THey are very easy to read; he's got a good "voice."
    The first one is all about dude's rise to prominence as a millionaire stock broker by the age of 25, and the fact that he gets bored, becomes a fucking lunatic club drug user and raver, then an ecstasy kingpin in the southwest who ALSO threw massives in Arizona. What's crazy is, a lot of my friends went to raves he threw, and i'm pretty fucking sure i ate some of his E. This was all around the year 2000. He was a purveyor of pure MDMA tabs at a time when such things PRETTY much didn't exist. It was a fascinating read: i always wondered if the people THROWING the parties were in on the drug supplying, and the answer is, apparently, sometimes. My old high school buddy Jeremy Word, aka Kid Icarus, who started the Prototype Gold and Platinum record labels and threw massives in the dallas area was VIOLENTLY against drugs. Now i get it, his rage regarding the subject- for other promoters, selling drugs was part of the reason for throwing the raves.

    The second book is an INSANELY scathing indictment of Joe Arpaio's Maricopa County Jail, and dear GOD it is/was fucked up. I'm talking INSANELY fucked up. all told, i've spent about a year in Dallas County, which was always in danger of being taken over by the feds, and it sucked, but JESUS, not like Maricopa. i'm talking fucking rats in the food, actual green bologna, rotten vegetables, Arpaio bragging that they spend more on feeding the police dogs than people in jail, brown recluse bites being common, the fucking jail having a policy of "not treating spider bites," people losing fingers and hands and such due to said policy, cockroaches crawling all over people at night and actually eating ear wax out of their ears, one man cells being turned into FOUR man cells (by adding two racks on the wall and having one person sleep on the floor,) brown water with rust in it, people falling out from heatstroke and dehydration, bedsores being common due to heat and sweat and rashes...i could go on and on. It's fucking HORRIBLE. It's INSANE. And keep in mind, county jail is for people who HAVEN'T BEEN SENTENCED, or are serving short sentences. So, a lot of people in this hellhole are INNOCENT and haven't had a chance to prove it, and a lot of them are serving time for TICKETS and shit. :/
    FUCK donald trump for pardoning that piece of shit.

    The third book is all about the state prison experience- friendships, sexuality, and the spiritual changes Attwood went through in the 7.5 years he was in actual prison (vs county.)

    The whole trilogy was fucking awesome. One thing that made it extra cool is that i was already a huge fan of this dude on youtube, so i know his face, voice, mannerisms: this made it easier to picture everything he described.

    So i love this dude to death now because he sent me those books, and we've emailed a bit. I didn't expect to hear SHIT back from a best selling author with 150k subs on youtube, much less to have him get my back and send me more books than i asked for, and tell me i DON'T have to pay him back.

    If you guys were ever into raves or mdma, or are interested in jail and prison and how fucked up the american prison system is, check out this dude's books, or at LEAST check out some of his youtube vids. THis one is long, but it summarizes the story of the trilogy of books in under two hours, and it's quite entertaining. He is banned from the US for life- he regularly gives talks in the UK, (he is from Widnes,) and i'm jealous of you guys that live there, because i would love to attend.

    So yeah, that's what i read last.

  18. #948
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    Nature Girl- Carl Hiaasen I'm sure I've mentioned him here before but this man is fucking hilarious.

    Full Moon (Dresden series)- Jim Butcher

    Were the last two books I fairly burned through the last couple weeks.

    At the moment I am at the library as I'm back to having slow spotty internets at my apt again. As such I have a small stack of books next to me which I will be checking out here shortly.

    Post Office- Bukowksi I've read collections of his column and various poetry books of his but I don't think I've yet read an actual novel by him.

    and yet... - Hitchens Collection of essays

    Fear Nothing - Koontz

    Poems that make grown men cry (100 men on the words that move them) Edited by Anthony and Ben Holden

    I'm not going to get it this time around but here soon I also plan on checking out the Hannibal Cook Book. I contains the recipes and some antidotes from the show. From looking through it it seems pretty legit.

  19. #949
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    Quote Originally Posted by eversonpoe View Post
    today i finished Red Dragon, which is the first Thomas Harris book i've read. i saw silence of the lambs once, i (regrettably) saw hannibal rising in the theater, and i'm obsessed with the TV show Hannibal. the book was good but i missed the tone & unreality of the show. don't know if i'll read silence of the lambs.
    Red Dragon is meh... he's written a bunch of crap, but Silence of the Lambs and Black Sunday are great.

    Thriller authors are hit and miss, but when they do it right it's often something magical. Silence and Black Sunday, fuck yeah. Nothing else I've read by him is worth a second glance in my opinion.

    And check out Silence of the Lambs the movie again... it's tarnished by the sequels and prequels and stuff. It's one of the best movies ever made, full stop.

  20. #950
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    Quote Originally Posted by allegate View Post
    OMG, you mentioned Grady and Edgar in the same post. Love both of them, can't wait to start reading their newest books.

    Edgar has mentioned he's working on a sequel of a sort to Meddling Kids and I'm stoked.
    finished "this body's not big enough for both of us" and loved it. so ridiculous and so fun.

    read the first two volumes of neil gaiman's sandman series, in one sitting each. can't wait to get volume three!

    finished naomi alderman's "the power" yesterday. so intriguing, so upsetting. the last line of the book was brilliant. this excerpt from a review really gets the point across:

    When a male friend found out I was reading a book in which all women simultaneously develop the power to electrocute people and subsequently seize control of society, he responded "Tch, if that were the other way around, you'd go mad"... NO SHIT SHERLOCK! Damn right, the idea of a society in which one sex is systematically oppressed through the threat (or use) of physical and sexual violence infuriates me. The concept of one sex being disproportionately raped, killed and restricted sickens me. But I don't need to go and buy a book about the situation being the other way around because THAT'S THE WORLD THAT WE LIVE IN. And yes, I am mad. Just as a stopped clock is correct twice a day, he'd managed to hit the nail on the head while also completely missing the point.

  21. #951
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    This book is REALLY GOOD, it’s RIVETING!


  22. #952
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    Finally finished "New York" by Edward Rutherfurd (decent book... a chronological fictional history of the geography of Manhattan from pre-contact to the mid-2000s) yesterday ... and today I started "Germania" by Simon Winder.
    Last edited by MrLobster; 07-13-2019 at 11:06 AM.

  23. #953
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    Finished "Germania" by Simon Winder (and learned the word fissiparousness; good book and easy to digest, want to know why Germany wasn't really Germany until after WW1, then read this). Tomorrow I'll start "Poems & Pahlevans" by Marcello Di Cintio.

    Kinda surprised I kept up my 50 pgs. per day reading... I wonder if I can do it whole summer.
    Last edited by MrLobster; 07-13-2019 at 11:03 AM.

  24. #954
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    Well, finished "Poems & Pahlevans" by Marcello Di Cintio ... good it you're into travel and want to learn a bit about Iran, Iranian poetry and wrestling as culture. Made me laugh more than a few times.

    Next up; "Millennium" by Tom Holland.

  25. #955
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    Finished "Millennium" by Tom Holland ... do you want to know about Roman Christian anxieties regarding the year 1000 (or 1033)? Annnnnd all of the gore and madness and pressure that that encompasses? Covers 900 - 1100 CE.

    Next up; "John Dee and the Empire of Angels -- Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World" by Jason Louv (there's a vague theme developing here)

  26. #956
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    Quote Originally Posted by MrLobster View Post
    Finished "Millennium" by Tom Holland ... do you want to know about Roman Christian anxieties regarding the year 1000 (or 1033)? Annnnnd all of the gore and madness and pressure that that encompasses? Covers 900 - 1100 CE.

    Next up; "John Dee and the Empire of Angels -- Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World" by Jason Louv (there's a vague theme developing here)
    both sound very interesting to me, and, I'm impressed with your reading schedule. Now ima attempt to emulate you.

  27. #957
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    Quote Originally Posted by elevenism View Post
    both sound very interesting to me, and, I'm impressed with your reading schedule. Now ima attempt to emulate you.
    I'm just trying to get through 50pages a day, and while not all book are equal, it seems to be working out alright. If, for some reason you need a list of suggested titles... here you go

  28. #958
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    Well, finished up "John Dee and the Empire of Angels - Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World" by Jason Louv (could have used [an or another] editor, but it was alright) ... and coupled with "Millennium", it affirms my stance that Revelations/apocalyptic Christians are weird and scary.

    Next up; "Pandæmonium 1660 - 1886 - the Coming of the Machine as seen by contemporary observers" by Humphrey Jennings.
    Last edited by MrLobster; 07-30-2019 at 01:45 AM.

  29. #959
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    Picked up the first Strain Book and Steppenwolf from a local media store the other day. The latter I have read though I don't remember much, hoping The Strain comes off better than the show did. I liked what I saw of the first season overall but some of the acting drove me nuts. Just yesterday I picked up Can't Hurt Me -Goggins and The Merciless Book Of Heavy Metal Lists, for $3 dollars of the bargain rack I had too. Next up is a new book shelf so I can unpack my boxes of books since I left the last one I had behind when I moved. If I was into vinyl I'd really be fucked.

  30. #960
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    On a road trip with my fiancé and we’re listening to the audiobook for IT as she’s never read the whole thing but we’re both excited for the new movie... it’s 45 hours long and we’re at about the middle point now. I’ve never done the audiobook thing, but the way the guy reads it is at times great and then terrrrrible...I can’t stand the way he does the “shrill woman” type voice, or how when the story gets intense he starts reading it in a voice that’s exaggeratingly professing terror

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