Amph What book are you reading right now?

Alexander’s Bridge (1912) – Willa Cather

After a mediocre book of poetry and a pretty good book of short stories, Cather didn’t publish any other books for seven years, but she spent those years, apparently, really honing her craft. This is a novella, not a full novel; in the collection I read, it took up right around a hundred pages, and it’s a really satisfying read. It’s the story of Bartley Alexander, a wealthy engineer who’s become well known for the bridges he’s designed. He’s become bored by his life, his marriage and his friends, but when he takes a business trip to London, he reconnects with a woman he had a relationship with years before and the story becomes a pretty typical mid-life crisis narrative. But Cather’s prose is extremely refined here and she really puts us inside Alexander’s head or, rather, inside his heart because we really feel everything that he’s feeling in this story. Romanticizing the past, longing for lost youth, questions about how different a life might have been with different choices made when younger . . . these are common themes in art, but Cather imbues them with real feeling. It’s not particularly unique and it isn’t instantly recognizable as a Cather, as some of her later works are, but it’s a time-worn story told effectively and graciously and at a slim hundred pages, it’s a quick, diverting read. 3 ½ stars.

tl;dr – fairly standard mid-life crisis story is wonderfully executed with real empathy and feeling; at a brief hundred pages, it’s a fast, emotionally satisfying read. 3 ½ stars.

 

Half way through reading Star Wars: From A Certain Point Of View

This is a great book, highly recommended, especially for fans of Star Wars: A New Hope.
Pretty amazing stuff here.

 

War Cross by Marie Lu

For the millions who log in every day, Warcross isn’t just a game—it’s a way of life. The obsession started ten years ago and its fan base now spans the globe, some eager to escape from reality and others hoping to make a profit. Struggling to make ends meet, teenage hacker Emika Chen works as a bounty hunter, tracking down Warcross players who bet on the game illegally. But the bounty-hunting world is a competitive one, and survival has not been easy. To make some quick cash, Emika takes a risk and hacks into the opening game of the international Warcross Championships—only to accidentally glitch herself into the action and become an overnight sensation.

Convinced she’s going to be arrested, Emika is shocked when instead she gets a call from the game’s creator, the elusive young billionaire Hideo Tanaka, with an irresistible offer. He needs a spy on the inside of this year’s tournament in order to uncover a security problem . . . and he wants Emika for the job. With no time to lose, Emika’s whisked off to Tokyo and thrust into a world of fame and fortune that she’s only dreamed of. But soon her investigation uncovers a sinister plot, with major consequences for the entire Warcross empire.

 

Going to start Warhammer 40K - The Horus Heresy Primarchs - Lorgar tonight. It came in an Amazon UK delivery earlier today.

 

Put Caliban's War on hold (for now). Gonna pick back up w/my re-read of Frank Herbert's Dune saga w/Children of Dune. Dune and Dune Messiah more than held up for me, remaining #1 and #2 on my all-time favorites list. It's been a decade or so, but my memories of Children of Dune are that the first half to two thirds or so is very much in the court intrigue style of Messiah, and then the final act is... strange.

 

So you're saying you have pinpointed the movement where the series went awry.

 

Give or take a hundred pages

 

Alex Rider series...again...for about the 5th time! It is quite a young book, but I just love it so much. I will take a short break after the one I am reading to read Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View

 

Across the Rolling River by Celia Wilkins

 

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

 

Reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy

 

dp

 

Finished Dresden 3 reread. Onto 4

 

Star Wars "Traitor" by Matthew Stover

 

Long Mile Home. Two reporters from the Boston Globe wrote a book about the bombing of the 2013 Boston Marathon and the people affected. It's a very powerful, moving story of hope and strength.

The race has always been a special one for my family. My dad ran it several times, including the 100th running in 1996. And I had a cousin who was in it, about a mile from the finish when the bombs went off. He had run it several times as well, and had already decided that would be the last time he ran it. But since he didn't get to finish, he decided to come back next year and do just one more.

 

Star Wars: Destiny's Way

 

The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

 

I finally finished It.

I'm now on The Rooster Bar by John Grisham.

 

Rereading Only Death is Real Documenting Hellhammer and the early days of Celtic Frost by Tom G. Warrior and Martin Eric Ain (Bazillion Points.) This brought me right back to 1983-1984 and the ridiculously brutal hardships Tom and Martin went through to escape their abusive homes in order to create the most extreme metal band at that time (Hellhammer.) HH and CF were crucial to my survival in so many ways and I really looked up to them as being kids who carved out their musical futures from absolutely nothing. Going through some rough patches of my own then, their music was the only thing that pulled me through unscathed.

I'd be lying if I didn't say Hellhammer remain pretty awful in the best kind of way. Outside of Sean Yseult's I'm With The Band, I've never read another Heavy Metal biography like this, that puts you at ground zero of not only the creation of a band, but an entire genre. As someone who loves graphic design there's plenty of Tom and Martin's home made art and symbolism. This is the second book Tom has written about his time in Celtic Frost with a third volume to be released eventually. I honestly do not know how he's going to get through that now that Martin passed away, but I am looking forward to it despite how sad it will be.

 

This is Where it Ends by Marieke Nijkamp

I just started, but shoving all four points-of-view in one chapter makes it very choppy. I hope that each chapter focuses solely on one character after the shooting (it's about a school shooting at a high school). I'm intrigued but would be "enjoying" (if one can enjoy such a book) it more - more into it - if there was a better flow.

 

O Pioneers! (1913) – Willa Cather

This short novel is, I think, Cather’s first pure masterpiece. It’s under 200 pages in the edition that I read, but it’s as close to perfect as novels get, I think; there’s not a single word that’s out of place or wasted. It’s the story of Alexandra Bergson, an immigrant farmer in Nebraska. It revolves specifically around her relationship to two men, her younger brother and a friend from childhood and the relation of her younger brother to a young married woman of the community. Alexandra is Cather’s first full-blooded character; she just comes to life and leaps off the page. She’s representative of an ideal for Cather, the strong, self-sufficient woman making her way in a world controlled by men by being more persistent than those men. The secondary characters are also really great. Her friend Carl is a man torn between the desire for security and the desire for adventure; it’s not a particularly unique character type, but Cather makes him really work. Her younger brother Emil, the object of Emil’s affection Marie and Marie’s husband Frank are also quite complicated. It would be easy to create a kind of a cardboard villain in Frank as the vile husband who is cruel to his young wife, but Cather makes him more complicated and gets inside his head more. One of the best scenes in the book is a late scene between Alexandra & Frank, a scene that really digs into their heads into deep & challenging ways. This book is shot through with vivid scenes that I still remembered in a very detailed way from my first read-through of this book, well over ten years ago now. The character conversations and characters ring absolutely true and with her beautiful prose, Cather really places us in the landscape of the story. Her eye for detail and her mastery of descriptive prose create a real, evocative atmosphere that just really shoots through the book in a really powerful way. The book is a fast, easy read, but it has stayed with me for years and reading it again, I found it to be even better than I remembered. It’s a near-perfect novel. It has nothing superfluous and every word is perfectly in its place; as a crafted piece of fiction, it’s absolutely superlative. 4 stars.

tl;dr – short novel explores prairie farming life in Nebraska via a host of complex characters, an emotionally powerful story and a near-perfect mastery of prose. 4 stars.

 

Harry Potter & The Sorcerer's Stone

 

PCCViking first time or re-read? I've been considering a re-read of the series, but that's a bit of a task.

 

Re-read.

 

Cool. Is this a one-off or do you plan to do the entire series?