October Reading Thread

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The Judge

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I'm hoping this month to (finally!) finish off Tad William's Shadowmarch which has been hanging around since the spring.

As a break from novels, I might also start to make inroads into my non-fiction reading pile. One I read back in August was The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women's Lives 1660-1900 by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, which was -- surprise, surprise -- a book about women's pockets, ie the type which were separate from garments and affixed on long ties around a woman's waist and accessed through splits in her skirt seams. The socio-political academic jargon was incredibly wearing but it was compensated by some interesting facts and the most glorious images of hand-made embroidered pockets in museums and private collections.

Just as wonderfully illustrated, but with a better prose style is another non-fiction which arrived only yesterday and I've already started A Guide to Medieval Gardens: Gardens in the Age of Chivalry by Michael Brown -- gorgeous and informative.

What are you reading this month?
 
I'm about 13% through The Count of Monte Cristo, by Dumas. Actually once you take away the introduction, I've probably only read 10% of the story, but I'm already at what I would have thought to be about the one-third point in the plot (from my vague memory of the film). So I'm guessing the revenge is going to be really long and complicated.
 
I'm starting a post apocalypse survival thriller by someone called Viktor Csak "Welcome to the silent zone"

Feral mutants hunting in packs to eat the last true humans!
 
I’m reading The Power And The Glory by David Sedgwick. It’s an account of the intense rivalry between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost in the 1980s. I’m finding it a riveting read but there’s no point in reading this unless you have an interest in Formula One history.
 
I'm not sure if books about games - manuals, essentially - count, but I've been trying to make sense of Johnathan Rowe's roleplaying game Through the Hedgerow, which is very much focused on rural England and draws from sources like The Dark is Rising, Elidor, The Children of the Stones and Mythago Wood (and, it seems, Just William!). While the idea is terrific, working out the rules is really quite difficult. It's interesting to see what someone has created, relying on a lot of influences that are familiar to me. The pictures are great.
 
Toby Frost said:
I'm not sure if books about games - manuals, essentially - count, but I've been trying to make sense of Johnathan Rowe's roleplaying game Through the Hedgerow, which is very much focused on rural England and draws from sources like The Dark is Rising, Elidor, The Children of the Stones and Mythago Wood (and, it seems, Just William!). While the idea is terrific, working out the rules is really quite difficult. It's interesting to see what someone has created, relying on a lot of influences that are familiar to me. The pictures are great.
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Sounds just up my street! Let us know how you get on.
 
HareBrain said:
I'm about 13% through The Count of Monte Cristo, by Dumas. Actually once you take away the introduction, I've probably only read 10% of the story, but I'm already at what I would have thought to be about the one-third point in the plot (from my vague memory of the film). So I'm guessing the revenge is going to be really long and complicated.
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Um... well... the revenge is long, but the novel is bulked out with a load of other stuff. If it's of interest -- and by way of warning! -- this is what I said in my book-blog 10 years ago:

After the gripping start to The Count of Monte Cristo things rather slowed down, and I began to see why it comes in at 875 pages (and would top well over 1,000 if all the dialogue was split into separate lines as is now standard), with tedious chapters devoted to the only marginally interesting antics of two men-about-town in Rome, the dumped-on-the-page backstories of peripheral characters, and, worst of all, the billing and cooing from the drippiest pair of lovers I've ever had the misfortune to read (the Introduction's judgement on the couple is "vapid and verbose"). As for the submissive, brainless, ever-tearful Victorian ideal of perfect womanhood, I was ready to gag. Page-turning, nonetheless, thanks to the revenge-driven scheming of the Count himself, but though I'm glad I've read it, I'm far more glad its sexism and sentimental, sanctimonious, hypocritical God-bothering is largely a thing of the past.​

So, be ready to skim-read a lot of unnecessary stuff to get back to the Count!
 
Vince W said:
Wasp by Eric Frank Russell.
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I keep telling myself I'll pull that out and read it, then I pick up something else.

Anyway, finished Japanese Tales of Mystery and the Imagination by Edogawa Rampo. Rampo was influenced by Western mystery/detective writers, and especially Edgar Allan Poe, drawing his title from the title from Poe's first book of stories. This contains Gothic, macabre tales that seem on the verge of spilling over into the supernatural while displaying their psychological underpinnings, with one exception and I'm not saying which. There is much of doubling/twins/doppelgangers here, and an interesting use of vision and perceived reality. A good read with the added interest of seeing a popular Western genre through Eastern eyes.

Just pulled out A Maze for the Minotaur by Reggie Oliver.
 
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