November 2015: What Are You Reading?

Toby, I read Salem's Lot this summer for the first time and loved it.

I put down The Heir to the North only because Aftermath came in for me at the library. I am only about 60 pages in and am not sure what to think.
 
I just came across a short story online called "All Summer in a Day" which I remember reading in 7th grade as an assignment. It's about a little girl from Earth who loved the sun, but went to live on a rainy planet where the sun shone for only two hours every seven years.

I also discovered that this story is by Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite authors. I thought I discovered him in college, not realizing until now that I had actually found one of his works years earlier. :)
 
Just finished Silverlock (1949) by John Myers Myers. Terrific. Light, funny, learned, and very clever. Pretty obscure these days. It should get more love.
A cynical and depressed MBA from Wisconsin is shipwrecked on "The Commonwealth" and has a series of picaresque adventures in the company of Golias, who is alternately Taliesin/Orpheus. This is an allegorical journey analogous to Pilgrim's Progress, but a lot more fun. During the trip he comes across a number of literary/mythical figures including Beowulf, Robin Hood, Faust, The Green Knight, Prometheus, Don Quixote, The mob from the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, Job, and Moby Dick and the Ancient Mariner.
 
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hitmouse said:
Just finished Silverlock (1949) by John Myers Myers. Terrific. Light, funny, learned, and very clever. Pretty obscure these days. It should get more love.
A cynical and depressed MBA from Wisconsin is shipwrecked on "The Commonwealth" and has a series of picaresque adventures in the company of Golias, who is alternately Taliesin/Orpheus. This is an allegorical journey analogous to Pilgrim's Progress, but a lot more fun. During the trip he comes across a number of literary/mythical figures including Beowulf, Robin Hood, Faust, The Green Knight, Prometheus, Don Quixote, The mob from the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, Job, and Moby Dick and the Ancient Mariner.
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I agree Silverlock is a great read. It's too bad so few people nowadays read it. (y)
 
It's been a long time since I read Silverlock (probably more than forty years) but I remember it fondly. I've often thought about rereading it, but somehow never have.
 
Finished Michael Flynn's Eifelheim, which I liked quite a lot. I mean to read more by this author.

Rereading Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, a pretty great novel.

Intend to begin Eugene Vodolazkin's Laurus soon, but have one or two other things I've never read in the queue ahead of it.
 
Toby Frost said:
I've finished 'Salem's Lot, which was excellent even on a third reading, and am now onto Insomnia, also by Stephen King. This feels like "lesser work" but is still pretty interesting. It's about an old man who, lacking sleep, begins to have visions that I'm sure will open up some greater, sinister, truth. What strikes me is how slow the book is compared to the tightness of 'Salem's Lot: conversations involve digressions that, while realistic, add nothing, descriptions of local events go on and on. It makes me wonder if world-building is necessary when the world you're building is actually a fairly mundane town. But it's engrossing, even if it could be more tightly edited.
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I've never been into modern horror fiction, but I did read King's Dumas Key and loved it. Considered by many to be his worst book, I thought he did a great job. It made me want to visit the Florida Keys, and the phantom limb syndrome theme was fascinating. Although the end was a bit bog-standard, it didn't ruin my enjoyment of the rest of it.
 
Onto the fourth and final volume of Three Kingdoms. It'll be weird when I finally finish it [when I finished Outlaws of the Marsh for the first time it felt a bit odd, because I'd been reading it for months].
 
I have just started K-PAX (1995) by Gene Brewer, source of the 2001 movie of the same name, which I did not like. We'll see if the book is better. So far it seems to be science fiction for people who haven't read science fiction before.
 
Various Sherlock Holmes short stories - reading the unread and rereading the read. What a joy!
 
Finished Night of the Jabberwock by Fredric Brown, which I suspect any fan of the Alice books would find fun. Not a great mystery, but an entertaining one. There is a lot of drinking in this book, and some of what the main character does might not be what unclouded judgement would have dictated, but I think Brown knew that, in spite of his enjoyment of booze.

Started Thorne Smith's Topper, but wasn't in quite the right mood so switched to Chester Himes' Cotton Comes to Harlem. Only about 3 chapters in.


Randy M.
 
Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler. Only just started, but loving it so far - grabs you from the very beginning. I've not read any Butler before, and have been meaning to set that straight.
 
Having raced through the first 4,000 pages of Steven Erikson's Malazan series, I've ground to a halt in the first few pages of book five, Midnight Tides. I might come back to it later.

In the meantime, I'm very much enjoying Toby Frost's God Emperor of Didcot. "Her dreadlocks looked like the offspring of an octopus and a rat, but in a good way."
 
HareBrain, I think that's my favourite of the Space Captain Smith books (still got one or two more to read, though).
 
thaddeus6th said:
HareBrain, I think that's my favourite of the Space Captain Smith books (still got one or two more to read, though).
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This is the only one of the current five I haven't already read, and it's shaping up to be one of the best. I had an idea from somewhere that it might be partly a spoof of Dune, and that (not having read Dune) I would miss a lot of the humour, but if I have, there's more than enough other funny stuff not to notice it. (I loved the subtle throwaway reference to the long-running Gold Blend coffee ads, as one tiny example.) And it's backed up by a plot that would pass muster in serious form, and characters that come to life and that you care about.
 
I just finished The Return (book 4 of The Voyagers) by Ben Bova. Am re-reading Notes from a Small Island (Bill Bryson) and his new book, The Road to Little Dribbling. Also reading Angel's Flight by Michael Connolly and Nocturnes 2 by John Connolly.
 
HareBrain said:
Having raced through the first 4,000 pages of Steven Erikson's Malazan series, I've ground to a halt in the first few pages of book five, Midnight Tides. I might come back to it later.
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Probably not a bad idea to take a breather before starting on Midnight Tides as it kicks off the third major plot branch so there's kind of a natural break at that point. It's my favourite book from the series. I thought the Sengar brothers' storyline was fabulous, and then there's Tehol and Bugg, of course :D


I'm currently 300 pages into Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I actually thought I was grinding to a halt on this one, but decided to stick with it and have got through about a hundred pages so far today :)
 
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