January Reading Thread

[Ian Fortytwo]

I'm currently reading The Treasure Hunters, by Enid Blyton.

 

[Dave Vicks]

I WANT TO BELIEVE, by Max Allen Collins,
1998, X-Files book.

 

[Elentarri]

H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction.

Compelling, but a mixed bag. Lovecraft is good at writing atmospheric, and sometimes almost Poe-esque, stories, where the terror of the narrator is palpable. He also describes scenery and atmosphere in a beautifully evocative manner. On the other hand, Lovecraft's characters are fairly unmemorable. I especially liked the stories that reveal strange and weird creatures and/or civilizations, or have interesting and unexpected endings [e.g. the Moon-Bog and the Outsider], or inadvertently end up being amusing. Lovecraft tends to recycle concepts/ideas a lot, which can get a bit tedious if reading a compilation like this one. Since the stories in this book are organised chronologically, the reader can see how Lovecraft's writing skills and ideas developed. I was, however, expecting more Cthulhu!

The stories I particularly enjoyed (for a variety of reasons) include: The Tree; The Cats of Ulthar; The Temple; Sweet Ermengarde; The Nameless City; Herbert West - Reanimator; The Hound; The Lurking Fear; In the Vault; Cool Air; The Call of Cthulhu; Pickman's Model; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; The Colour Out of Space; The Dunwich Horror; The Thing on the Doorstep; The Shadow Out of Time; and At the Mountains of Madness.

 

[Vince W]

Reading Harlan Ellison's The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World. Haven't read Ellison in some time. You forget just how great his writing is.

 

[Randy M.]

Finished The Beetle: A Mystery by Richard Marsh (grandfather of "strange story" writer, Robert Aickman). It's part mystery, part comedy, part supernatural horror story, contains passages that will offend feminists and/or anyone sensitive to racial stereotypes (though towards the end, after the damage is done, there's a line that seems to try to mitigate the latter) and has an Orientalist plot that in many ways is b*tsh*t crazy. At GoodReads I describe it as, "quite possibly the font from which flowed a thousand pulp adventure stories." And I'd stand by that.

The Beetle having put me in a Victorian mood, just started a reread of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Tales of Terror and Mystery; I'd forgotten how engaging "The Horror of the Heights" was.

 

[Dave Vicks]

NO PLAN B,by Lee Child and Andrew Child.2022.
Jack Reacher novel.

 

[Danny McG]

Alistair Reynolds - Machine Vendetta

 

[Dave Vicks]

PRYOR CONVICTIONS: by Richard Pryor, 1995.Autobiography.

 

[Chris von shannow]

Berserker by Adrian Edmondson is very good

 

[Chris von shannow]

I also picked up Robert E Howard complete works

 

[JunkMonkey]

Currently listening, via Spotify, to Les Mystères de Paris by Eugene Sue - a stone gone classic of 19th century French, page-turning absurdity.

In the baser quarters of Paris a disguised nobleman dispences justice and redeems the fallen and rights wrongs. Paris in the book is so denuded of characters that just about everyone is turning out to be the long-lost real or adopted father/son/daughter/murderer of everyone else. Lots of skulking in doorways in lashing rain, overhearing vital conversations while unseen then leaping into action, and improbable cliffhangers. (I still can't get my head round the physics that would allow our hero to be nigh on drowning in a cellar filled with ceiling high water flooding in from the Seine - and rats - that has a door to a perfectly unflooded room that can be easily opened (Just in the Nick of Time!) by a secondary character...

Paper editions of this thing run to over a thousand pages.

Current real paper read: Cette lueur qui venait des tenebres by Richard-Bessiere. Which is turning out to be a lot more interesting than the only previous book of his which was, quite frankly, bloody awful.

 

[Dave Vicks]

THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY, by
Bertrand Russell, 1912.

 

[dask]

Started this the other day:

 

[Hugh]

Terry Pratchett "Guards! Guards!"
Year three of my one-book-a-year Pratchett read. I can see why he's so popular.

 

[Rodders]

I’ve started cycling again, so the Audiobook of Iain M. Banks’s Hydrogen Sonata is next.

 

[Chris von shannow]

I’ve started cycling again, so the Audiobook of Iain M. Banks’s Hydrogen Sonata is next.

View attachment 114249

I have tried so many times with this book can never get into it

 

[Rodders]

I've read it before and I rather enjoyed it.

 

[Vertigo]

I've read it before and I rather enjoyed it.

Me too (twice)!

 

[Orcadian]

My current listen is (the full-length reading of) The Jewel in the Crown. This is book 1 of the Raj Quartet and I had previously planned to listen to the full set. That was before I discovered that; 1. this first book is 22 hours long - and I typically manage 30-45 min at a time; 2. the author frequently goes into a mind-numbing level of detail about characters, their relatives and their back-stories - and then hours later refers back to these details, which now merely tug at my memory! I'm guessing that all this is needed to conjure for the reader the atmosphere, mores and cultural nuances of the British Raj. Which is, after all, why one is reading it...

 

[hitmouse]

My current listen is (the full-length reading of) The Jewel in the Crown. This is book 1 of the Raj Quartet and I had previously planned to listen to the full set. That was before I discovered that; 1. this first book is 22 hours long - and I typically manage 30-45 min at a time; 2. the author frequently goes into a mind-numbing level of detail about characters, their relatives and their back-stories - and then hours later refers back to these details, which now merely tug at my memory! I'm guessing that all this is needed to conjure for the reader the atmosphere, mores and cultural nuances of the British Raj. Which is, after all, why one is reading it...

good books. If you find reading them tokuch, watch the excellent 1980s TV serialisation.