The "What Are You Reading Right Now" Thread

[1234-5678 0]

I wasn't too impressed with King and Straub's other collaboration, "The Talisman". I didn't even finish it.

[Youth N Asia 0]

I wasn't too impressed with King and Straub's other collaboration, "The Talisman". I didn't even finish it.

Same here...I got about 1/3 of the way in and realized that I just didn't care anymore.

 

If you like horror I suggest anything and everything by Bentley Little (Except The Return), the guy's a sicko.

[Special K 0]

Regarding horror, I read some Edward Lee and it was shit. The Girl Next Door by Ketchum is supposed to be THE shit, so I'm looking into it. Otherwise, Lovecraft is actually the only author to make me feel shifty, so take that for what you will.

[Gary Floyd 0]

Regarding horror, I read some Edward Lee and it was shit. The Girl Next Door by Ketchum is supposed to be THE shit, so I'm looking into it. Otherwise, Lovecraft is actually the only author to make me feel shifty, so take that for what you will.

Girl Next Door is great, though it's pretty disturbing, and sticks to ya for a few days, mainly because the events in it are more realistic. The thing that I love about most of Ketchums stuff, is that it mostly deals with human horrors, and the evil man can commit. That scares me more then ghost stories.

 

Of course, Lovecraft is my favorite, but that's a given.

 

By the way, what Edward Lee books did you read? If it's his more recent stuff, I still like that, but it lacks the excess of books like "The Bighead","Mother Bitchfight", and "Goon", which he co-wrote with John Pelan, another great author. If memory serves me right, "Goon" is set in the world of Indy Wrestling.

[Ravenbomb 0]

Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.

Just started reading it, and the way he wrote it is weird (the dialogue has no quotation marks and he doesn't start new paragraphs).

[chaosrage 0]

Salem's Lot by King. I'm taking a break from DT5 to find out what's the deal about Father Callahan. I'm glad I did it because it's a good book, although I'm 400 pages into it and Callahan has barely been mentioned.

[1234-5678 0]

"Strange Days" by Patricia Kenneally or "Have A Nice Day" by Mick Foley. I've read both before numerous times, but I recently bought them off Ebay cheap as hell. They both arrived today and I can't decide.

[Masked Man of Mystery 0]

I actually liked the Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I won't pay $8 for it, but it was an enjoyable little book

[1234-5678 0]

Man, I totally disagree. "Tom Gordon" had absolutely nothing enjoyable, and to now hear that their are making a movie out of it is a complete travesty to the name of King. Let's get that fucking "Bag Of Bones" movie back on track for God's sake.

[Crimson Platypus 0]

I finished "From a Buick 8" last night. I could have stopped 1/2 way through and had the same feeling. What a disappointment.

[1234-5678 0]

I finished it (Buick) and kind of had an "Eh" feeling about it. "Tom Gordon", however, I wanted the couple hours I put into reading it back.

[Guest Undertow]

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

 

Excellent novel so far.

[Vyce 0]

I finished "From a Buick 8" last night. I could have stopped 1/2 way through and had the same feeling. What a disappointment.

I gave a warning back on page one!

 

Better book than "Gordon", but ultimately, the book is just THERE. Not necessarily bad, but not really worth the effort either.

[1234-5678 0]

Has anyone read King's "On Writing"?

 

That's pretty good stuff right there, and that's post accident work.

[Vyce 0]

Has anyone read King's "On Writing"?

 

That's pretty good stuff right there, and that's post accident work.

Excellent book.

 

The man does have a lot of informative things to teach about the actual craft of writing. I just think his work as far as writing fiction goes suffered a hit. It's not as if his post accident work is rally BAD (with a few notable exceptions), some of it is just mediocre, or at least not up to the quality it was in years past. Some may disagree with me on this, but I think some of King's works (his earlier works for sure) will eventually go down in history as true classics of horror / suspense, much like Lovecraft or Poe before him.

 

I haven't read any of the later Dark Tower books, so I have to ask, are they any good? I know some who were disappointed with the final book in the series.

[Nighthawk 0]

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

 

Excellent novel so far.

I was surprised by the filthy sex in that. "Crawly flood of semen" is an actual quote.

 

Finished "No One Here Gets Out Alive". Interesting. I was disgusted by his wiccan wedding. Hopefully that was one of the bullshit parts. I'm going to take a break and just read some comics for a few days.

[Jingus 0]

I enjoyed Tom Gordon. The material was nothing new for King and it ended a bit abruptly, but I liked it enough to buy a copy off the clearance rack.

 

I was assigned Their Eyes Were Watching God for required in high school. I think I got about three pages into it before just giving up. The contrast between the prose (which was so wordy as to almost require having a dictionary on hand) and the dialogue (which was the most exaggerated phonetically-spelled dialect since Huckleberry Finn) really bugged me.

 

I like Bentley Little in general, but I kinda liked him more back when nobody had heard of him. His earlier stuff like The University and The Ignored puts his more recent offerings to shame.

 

I re-read most of the original Dune series, and like always I got lost in Herbert's vast imaginary universe, even if he does suffer a little from George Lucas Syndrome where everyone has to have a funny name. I couldn't find my copies of God Emperor or Chapterhouse, so I was sorta reading piecemeal. I wish Herbert had lived long enough to write that rumored "one last book" that supposedly would've ended the series. His son's stuff is fun to read, but ultimately gets boring; you can only write so many prequels before I want some NEW stories, dammit.

 

Dan Brown is a one-trick pony, but it's a pretty good trick. DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons are damn near the same book, just substituting different MacGuffins, but the guy knows his shit when it comes to obscure historical & religious trivia. However, one thing that did piss me off is when in DaVinci he completely forgets the woman that his hero Robert Langdon fell in love with in the previous book and just introduces a new one. That may work in James Bond movies, but 21st century literature should really be a bit more sensitive.

 

Have A Nice Day still rules, even though I've read it so damn many times that the enjoyment is starting to wear off. Foley Is Good is still Electric Boogaloo. If Mick wanted to write a followup to his autobiography, that's fine, but he should've waited a few more years and put in a few more old stories that got left out of the last one. The book's content is decent, but damn it's short. When you get right down to it, there's less than 200 pages of actual autobiographical material; the rest is comprised firstly of Mick just fucking around and padding the length, and secondly his bizarre, strident, and way too long rant on the PTC.

 

I still don't get what's so great about Peter Straub. I tried to read Ghost Story again, even though I didn't like it the first time, and I got so bored that I gave up about thirty pages in. The man simply cannot scare me or compell me to care enough about his characters to turn the page.

 

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls should be required reading for every film student, period. Some of the stories sound a little shaky, but it still perfectly captures the time & place of Hollywood in the 70s. It's funny seeing George Lucas basically admit that he made Star Wars for the money.

 

State of Fear is Michael Crichton's best book in a long, long time. My faith in the man is not exactly restored, but I have a lot more respect for him now than I did back in the days of The Lost World and Timeline. And his newest book is the most savage disassembling of the global warming theory that you'll ever read.

 

Bobby Heenan needs a better ghostwriter. The stories in his two books are great, but man they're presented in some really boring language. It's almost like the written equivalent of listening to Ben Stein talk.

 

Fuck useless moron Scott Keith's Death of WWE, the book every wrestling fan needs to read is The Death of WCW. Bryan Alvarez pretty much executed any tiny last gasp of hope that his wrestling career might go anywhere with all the shooting he does here on many of the industry's biggest names.

 

I'm currently giving The Stand another try. I remember it being too long and having too many characters, but it's been a few years and I'm willing to offer any book a second chance. I'm about 300 pages in, so far so good with Captain Trips decimating the population of the entire world.

[Youth N Asia 0]

I like Bentley Little in general, but I kinda liked him more back when nobody had heard of him. His earlier stuff like The University and The Ignored puts his more recent offerings to shame.

You bet your ass. The Ignored, The University, The Store, and The Association just seem to kill anything other horror writers are doing.

 

I got into him by picking up The University used at a bookstore, after that I picked up everything he had out (ironicaly enough I have everything BUT the University now).

 

Although his last few have been ehhh...The Return sucked. And The Policy and The Resort were just ok.

[Crimson Platypus 0]

I just ordered American Gods by Gaiman off of Amazon.com, that will be the next read for me.

 

Like people said above, Buick was just there. Nothing happened at all. Hell I would have accepted a shitty "hollywood happy" ending as opposed to the nothing resolved garbage that ended it.

[1234-5678 0]

Finished "No One Here Gets Out Alive". Interesting. I was disgusted by his wiccan wedding. Hopefully that was one of the bullshit parts. I'm going to take a break and just read some comics for a few days.

Nah, it's true. The book "Strange Days" I am currently rereading was written by the broad, Patricia Keneally who he did it with.

 

Do da funky chicken.

[Vyce 0]

I have to join the Bentley Little consensus as well. Even though some of his later books might not be as great as his earlier work, he's still one of the best writers of modern horror fiction.

 

I'd also recommend Douglas Clegg; another good, solid writer of contemporary horror.

 

I just ordered American Gods by Gaiman off of Amazon.com, that will be the next read for me.

 

Very good book. If you like it, I'd also recommend picking up the "Legends II" anthology (edited by Robert Silverberg) as it contains the novella "The Monarch of the Glen", which is something of sequel to Gods.

[1234-5678 0]

"The 25th Hour" by David Benioff

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

"The Plague" by Albert Camus &

"Drawing for Dummies"

 

Just finished Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" not too long ago.

 

Could anybody recommend some other good sci-fi/fantasy series in this vein? I like LOTR and the Dark Tower but I haven't read anything else in this genre.

[starvenger 0]

I needed to reread "Be Cool" to get rid of the bad taste the movie left.

[Guest Fire and Knives]

Gregory Corso, Mindfield.

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

I was assigned Their Eyes Were Watching God for required in high school. I think I got about three pages into it before just giving up. The contrast between the prose (which was so wordy as to almost require having a dictionary on hand) and the dialogue (which was the most exaggerated phonetically-spelled dialect since Huckleberry Finn) really bugged me.

Now that you're not a stupid high schooler, you should really give it another shot. I was bored to tears by the same aspects of it in 10th grade, but I re-read it earlier this year for the last part of my lit survey and it's really quite fantastic. Hurston's prose is far from need-a-dictionary levels, and the dialogue is much easier to read (and more charming) than a dopey 15 year-old like myself was willing to give credit. It's a really fast read too, and a remarkably well-arranged character study. And it's got a hurricane with 200 mile per hour winds!

 

Here's the best books I've read in recent memory that I guarantee very few people on here will want to read but really should. Each of these is a really quick read, very approachable, and entirely enchanting.

 

-Junot Diaz's collection of short stories,Drown, largely about people living in shitty neighborhoods in New Jersey and the crises of abridged adolescence. Darkly hilarious and weird.

 

-Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, again, because it really is one of the most heartbreaking and subtle books ever written. Great bullfighting scenes for anyone who needs a little action with their pathos.

 

-Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, another seminal and subtle work by a dead white guy that remains a fantastic exercise in shifting narrators. The mother of a poor-as-dirt southern family dies, and her surviving family members trek across the county with her body in tow. Assorted tribulations ensue.

 

-Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange, which is the best piece of magical realism I've read since Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Tropic of Cancer starts to migrate north, bringing social revolution and monstrous fucking oranges along with it. Insane and great and non-linear, and hey, there's some wrestling for all you people who like that.

[Guest Joshua A. Norton]

Just finished Pygmalion. Working on The Sirens of Titan.

[1234-5678 0]

"The Death Of WCW"

[Nighthawk 0]

I'm now reading a book called Gumbo Ya-Ya, a collection of Louisiana history and folklore. Utterly fascinating.

[B. Brian Brunzell 0]

I'm about 1/3 of the way through Holy Blood, Holy Grail. It's a fucking incredible book, that as a Catholic, has me aleady questioning everything I've ever been taught in school.