Amph What book are you reading right now?

PCCViking oh yeah, I read The Hunt for Red October in high school and quickly followed it up w/The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Patriot Games and Red Storm Rising. None quite as big as Executive Orders and The Bear and the Dragon, but before that I'd mostly read stuff on the scale of the Robotech series (all under 200 page or so) and movie novelizations, so it felt like a step up to the big leagues. I also attempted to read The Stand in high school (it was hip to read King amongst the kids in my honor lit class), but I just couldn't stick w/it. Been meaning to give it another go, but 25 or so years later (sheesh, has it been that long?), still haven't.

 

And let's not forget the Song of Ice and Fire Series (Game of Thrones) and Wheel of Time series (the last book has a chapter that's over 100 pages long).

 

PCCViking absolutely. I actually blazed through the entire GoT saga in a matter of months back in '12, but I made half a dozen or so aborted attempts at Jordan's first WoT book. I like Jordan from his Conan books and I respect the epic scope and scale of his saga, but I'd honestly rather read the Hong Kong white pages at this point.

 

Big Bosoms Square Jaws , the life of Russ Meyer .

very well written , the writer is clearly a fan of the work but not afraid to be critical of the man and his behaviour .
Also gives quite a bit of background on a lot of the ladies and crew as well .

.

 

Just finished; Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Third time's a charm, as spurred on by the recent movie trailer, I finally finished RPO. Cline does some impressive world building, and there are clever bits throughout, but there are also contrivances galore and dialog isn't one of Cline's strong suits. Still worth a read, particularly for fans of 80s pop culture. - 6.5/10

I will say that very, very little of what's in that trailer is in the book.

About to begin; Old Man's War by John Scalzi. Well regarded first entry in the long running military/sci-fi series. Definitely looking forward to this one.

 

That series was pretty good. I like Scalzi's books.

 

The Color of Law: a Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein

 

Appropriate, given what's currently going on in the US..

 

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro.

The potent mixture of fascinating detail and yet a simultaneous frustrating, inevitable lack thereof on display here is perhaps best illustrated by a choice anecdote from the introduction.

Shapiro pins down as much as can be pinned down, which I think is simultaneously laudable and depressing. Well worth a read for casual fans interested in a snapshot of a key year for the elusive literary figure without suffering a lot of nonsense about how he's actually Francis Bacon because if you take every 87th character in Act II of The Taming of the Shrew and then rearrange them based on months of the year (taking into account calendar changes between then and now, of course), you will notice they spell AYY 420 BLAZE IT LMAO which is, of course, a reference to Bacon's famous experiments on shoving snow up the hindquarters of poultry.*

*James Shapiro also wrote a book called Contested Will which outlines the various conspiracy theory arguments in some (much more fair) details before systematically destroying them at the end of the book. Worth checking out if you're into that sort of thing.

 

Young Jedi Knights: Return to Ord Mantell

 

Red Rising by Pierce Brown
Dystopian sci-fi drama, first book of three.

 

Listening to The Once and Future King. Very, very good listen.

 

I'm very interested in reading this book, but I'm debating whether I should read it or listen to it. Do you have a recommendation?

(I usually prefer to read things, but listening is a great way to save time or accompany a road trip.)

 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) – Raymond Carver

I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise . . .

This book has an incredibly troubled history. Raymond Carver turned in his manuscript for this book to his editor Gordon Lish and had no idea that anything was going to be any different than with his previous books. But it was. Lish absolutely took Carver’s manuscript apart to the degree that Carver begged Lish not to publish the list in its final form, but Carver had signed away the rights and Lish had a vision. The book was published and Carver was acclaimed as a new figure of the minimalist movement. One can only imagine how this must have rankled Carver; he and Lish never worked together again and Carver began to go in an ever more expansive direction, repudiating the minimalism he’d actually pioneered in Will You Please Be Quiet Please. Carver’s original manuscript would originally be published, but more on that in a later review.

Anyway, this is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Lish doesn’t just edit Carver’s prose down; there are passages here where there’s nothing of Carver’s words – Lish essentially just paraphrases long sections. And the cuts are not nominal. The final book is half as long as the original manuscript, almost exactly. Some of the stories are absolutely brutalized; there’s a story that’s nearly eighteen pages in Carver’s manuscript that Lish edits down to less than four pages and he changes the title as well to reference a line that he added, a line not in Carver’s original. This is, interestingly enough, both the most demolished story and the least successful in the collection. The rest of the time, this collection works and it works brilliantly. Somehow Lish was able to see through Carver’s prose to spot something diamond hard inside them and this is what he gives us. It’s an odd collaboration, but it works the best when it changes everything from the tone of a story to its arc. The Bath is a great example; Lish boils down the story of a boy hit by a car on his birthday and chooses to end the story on a Hitchcockian twist moment but this necessitates cutting the last ten pages or so from Carver’s story. Carver had a lot more ready to go after that twist. Tell the Women We’re Going is another good one. It revolves around a painfully young man, barely over twenty, who’s already married with a child who is deeply unhappy and adrift. The story ends with a painful gut punch and it’s up for debate whether the more detailed and excruciating ending from Carver is better or worse or just as good as Lish’s abbreviated sucker punch.

But to approach this book outside of Carver’s original manuscript is to approach something like genius. This is a masterful collection of short stories. They revolve around a cast of characters not unlike the ones in Carver’s debut: normal men & women facing deep crises under the surface. The stories here are darker, meaner, less forgiving and, lest we forget, the stories in Will You Please Be Quiet Please were already dark, mean and unforgiving. It’s a weird collaboration that created this book, but I’m glad it did. Lish takes Carver’s already grim stories and tightens them like a noose around the characters and around the readers. The book is a fast read and a gripping one. If you know the story, it’s a fascinating piece of literary history; if you don’t, it’s still a tense, brutal, haunting collection of stories. It’s a collaboration in everything but name and a decidedly strange one, but, in the best twist of all, it’s also a masterpiece. 4 stars.

tl;dr – a fascinating story is behind this book of short stories, but even without the story of the book itself, this book is an American masterpiece of dread, tension, cruelty and brutality. 4 stars.

 

Berserker's Star by Fred Saberhagen. Once again, the killer robots are plotting to wipe out all life everywhere. IMO, Saberhagen is better with short stories than novels; this one felt like it could have used one more pass at drafting/editing to trim out some of the excess. Not bad, but not great.

 

Half through YJK 14: Crisis at Crystal Reef

STOKED that I am FINALLY almost at the NJO reread

 

Garden of the Moon by Steven Erikson

Spoiler

Somebody write a fanfic and save Lorn!

 

Beginners (2009) – Raymond Carver

My reading plans typically go in chronological order, but I’m taking a big leap in my Carver plan to talk about Beginners. It’s the first official publication of Carver’s original manuscript for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. I read this book in tandem with What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and I think that’s the way these books should be read. Carver’s stories here are longer, sometimes extremely so, and it’s typically a toss-up which version of the story is better. A lot of times you’ll find that Carver’s versions of the stories are, while still quite bitter and sad, somewhat more compassionate. If It Please You, for instance, is the original version of After the Denim and they’re both really great. But If It Please You continues past the bitter ending of After the Denim to follow the main character into his room at night and lets us eavesdrop on his pained prayers in the darkness. It’s still brutally sad, but it has a kind of poetry that After the Denim doesn’t. The most obvious example is A Small Good Thing, Carver’s original version of The Bath. The Bath is a great story and it has a brilliant, Alfred Hitchcock Presents style ending, but A Small Good Thing is its own kind of intense masterpiece. It continues a good ten to fifteen pages past the ending of The Bath and it achieves a really transcendent beauty and empathy which is kind of shocking. It’s Carver’s best story to that point and easily his most redemptive. There’s still deep sorrow and longing, but the title says it all. Sometimes we find a measure of redemption in just a small good thing; the smallest acts of kindness or connection offer a tiny bit of hope and sometimes even the tiniest bits are worth a lot. Anyway, I think it’s best to read this book right in conjunction with Lish’s version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. I recommend reading each individual story first out of What We Talk About and then out of Beginners; then go back to What We Talk About for the next story and so on. Beginners is a raw, powerful masterpiece with an entirely different tone and style from the version of it that was originally published. Considered on its own, it’s a masterpiece; in tandem with the final version, it becomes both a masterpiece and a fascinating exploration of literature and creativity. 4 stars.

tl;dr – breathtaking collection of stories finds Carver allowing more empathy than in his prior works, though sadness and isolation still rule the day; a beautiful, deeply powerful work. 4 stars.

 

Finished Boba Fett: A Practical Man e-book yesterday so will start on NJO Vector Prime today.

 

This Present Darkness by Peretti. I was expecting comic book theology, and it had a lot of that. But it also had real people, characters I knew and cared about. There's a lot of truth mixed in with the fantasy adventure stuff. And the adventure stuff is very exciting and suspenseful.

 

I'm about two-thirds of the way through Anna Karenina. In many circles it is considered to be the 'greatest novel ever written.'

I like it so far, don't get me wrong, but best ever? No way. I just don't get it I guess.

 

Still reading It. I'm a quarter of the way through. The time jumps, of which I thought would be jarring, are actually very effective and easily transitioned.

 

Ship Of Magic by Robin Hobb

 

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
After having watched the last episode of Black Sails I decided to reread this, not having read it since first reading the kid's version when I was a child. So far I have to say it is very readable.

 

Going to start Richard Kadrey's The Kill Society this evening. It's #9 in his Sandman Slim series.