What are you reading?

[TMS]

I just finished reading Stephen King's recent novel Joyland, which I picked up at a campus bookstore this morning in preparation for a college football game I was attending because my brother is in the marching band. It was good, naturally. It was sort of a coming-of-age story rather than a horror novel, though a ghost, a murder mystery, and a couple of psychics gave it some preternatural flavor. Looking forward to reading Dr. Sleep...

 

[TMS]

...which is what I'm now reading. It's good so far, though maybe a little odd in the way that a sequel always is, especially so far removed from the original. It was one of the many books that I got for Christmas. I've been reading through them alphabetically by author, so before I got to Doctor Sleep I read a trio of short novels that H. P. Lovecraft admired. There was H. B. Drake's The Shadowy Thing (about mind control), Herbert S. Gorman's The Place Called Dagon (which was rather Lovecraftian, though maybe not as interesting as Lovecraft's own stuff), and Leland Hall's Sinister House (a ghost story). They were all pretty good reads, and with a kind of thematic unity, since they each feature a man trying to protect the person he loves from vague supernatural forces.

 

[FranGP]

I just picked up Porno, by Irving Welsh. It is the sequel to Trainspotting. Both of them are a 'must read', since they tell a deep story about a group of friends whose lives have gone down because of their addiction to heroin. Porno is supposed to take place a few years after, when the main character of the famous film is out of his habit. I'm just in the first chapter, so I can't really tell.

 

[Py687]

Got assigned Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone in my Victorian detection English class. Starts off slowly but invitingly, and things do get rather mysterious. Hadn't read a mystery novel in the longest time so it was a nice change of pace as well.

 

[TMS]

I've heard of Wilkie Collins's stuff, though I've never really made up my mind to read any of it.

 

[Py687]

I've heard of Wilkie Collins's stuff, though I've never really made up my mind to read any of it.

Well, I'd been behind on my assigned readings for a week, and I had every intention of catching up over the weekend. Turns out, I'm likely to just finish the whole damn thing today.

Probably most compelling is that the chapters are written by multiple narrators, the first one being a butler/servant with incredibly charming personality.

I haven't heard of anything else by Collins but The Moonstone is a rather good read.

 

[TMS]

I actually first heard about him when I saw him mentioned in this Call of Cthulhu card's flavor text. There's an older card called Pulp Writer which uses the same flavor text but with the authors' names switched around. After seeing the cards I had to look him up, but wasn't intrigued enough to read his work.

 

[TMS]

Recently I've been reading through a collection of M. P. Shiel's stories titled The House of Sounds and Others, another Lovecraft's Library book. I had read "Vaila," the original version of the title story, before I got the book, as well as a couple others which I had only the most hazy memories of, so it's been fun getting reacquainted with Shiel's work. "The House of Sounds" / "Vaila" especially is a classic work of horror. Last night I began reading The Purple Cloud, a novel included in the collection, and am enjoying it so far. Featuring an expedition to the North Pole and a disaster which apparently kills off all human and animal life on the planet except for the narrator, it made appropriate reading today, since I was home alone with a blizzard outside.

 

[TMS]

I keep forgetting about this thread (it's not that I haven't read anything for two months). I have quite a number of books at my house I'd like to get around to reading, but recently I happened to go to the library, which started a cycle of borrowing that has yet to be broken (I tend to pick up something new every time I go, and focus on finishing the books before I need to return them).

I don't think anyone here has followed my Twitter account, but it's a pretty good record of what I've been reading recently. I read another Thomas Ligotti collection, which was good, though his relentlessly bleak outlook can get stale after a while. I also read my first Ramsey Campbell novel, The Parasite, though I'd read a number of his short stories before then. The novel was pretty good, though I think I'd like some of his later ones better. I also read a few odds and ends, like a trio of ghost stories by Gertrude Atherton, who idolizes Henry James just a bit too much.

I was just starting to read Algernon Blackwood's Incredible Adventures, a landmark weird fiction collection, when on another library trip I stumbled across a collection of ghost stories by Edith Wharton. I wasn't aware that she wrote horror stories; anything I've previously read of hers was a school assignment. I've only read two of the stories so far, and I'm reserving final judgment. I also recently bought a collection of Edward Lucas White stories based on his nightmares, which I'm greatly looking forward to.

When it comes to reading fiction - especially horror/fantasy - I prefer to have as few distractions as possible, so my opportunities to read are limited. Recently I've taken to reading non-fiction instead if things are too loud. My mom lent me a book written by a Christian minister (rather too liberal for many of his colleagues) that addresses questions about how to view the Bible in a historical perspective and how much of it to take literally. I haven't finished reading it yet. Today on a whim I picked up a book called The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung [Carl Jung] at the library, and may try and get through that first.

Anyone else read anything recently?

 

[Monox D. I-Fly]

I am reading the second book of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Just got several early chapters. Maybe it's just me, but honestly I think that The Hunger Games' world is darker than Harry Potter's.

 

[TMS]

I haven't read them, but given that they're about a dystopia, you're probably right.

 

[Exiled]

"Memorias de Idhún", the first book.

 

[Py687]

Relatively The Hunger Gamers are darker than HP, yeah.

I'm reading TMS's short story collection, two chapters in so far.

 

[Monox D. I-Fly]

Relatively The Hunger Gamers are darker than HP, yeah.

Glad that I'm not the only one. Even in Harry Potter's world where a single spell can kill a human instantly, there are never any people killed just because trying to show their gratitude like in Catching Fire.

 

[DigiTamer Rikun]

Ugh I don't read NEARLY as much as I did when I was younger anymore... it's right tragic is what it is.
I did get a few of the Hunger Games Game of Thrones (gah WTF reading the topic got the wrong series into my head) novels for my birthday a week or so back so I'll certainly be getting into those whenever I have time.

Other than that, (relatively) recently I've finished the Age of Fire series by E.E. Knight, and was off-and-on reading a novelization fic of Fire Emblem Awakening that was okay, except for some failed understandings of the canon and continuity (not that the game itself goes into much detail on that anyway).

 

[Monox D. I-Fly]

Just finished the very first volume of Sherlock Holmes complete novel. The two last chapters were great: The Adventure of "something" Bachelor which was so tense of emotion about a misunderstanding of a father and his son; and The Adventure of Copper "something" which was full of mystery about a hidden chamber which contained a Doppelganger. Sorry I can't remember both titles, though. I also enjoy the adventure in The Adventure of The Blue Carbuncle and The Adventure of an Engineer's Thumb.

 

[TMS]

"The Noble Bachelor" and "The Copper Beeches" are the stories you mean. The latter is one of my particular favorites in the collection, along with "A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Red-Headed League," "The Five Orange Pips," "The Engineer's Thumb," and, in particular, "The Speckled Band." Have you read A Study in Scarlet yet?

For my part, I recently read through that Edward Lucas White collection. I was a little disappointed to find out that a number of stories were historical fiction rather than horror/fantasy, but they were pretty good regardless. I'm now reading The Undying Thing and Others, a Lovecraft's Library book containing the (almost) complete weird fiction of Barry Pain. He was best known for humor, but a number of the stories are interesting. "The Undying Thing" was a favorite of Lovecraft's, and "The Moon-Slave" was well known to M. R. James, the master of the classic ghost story.

 

[KaenKazui]

After finishing "Witcher 2", I decided to read the books again.
I have right now finished The Blood of Elves. I really have to say, that I love those books. They are not only very funny at times (due to the characters tending to be such idiots) and also very dramatic. But most of all I love the worldbuilding and how the characters are really... Believable. And act in a comprehensible way.
Also I really love how the general world makes sense. There are small wars for everything, the races hate each other, the witchers are outsiders and everything is dirty and everything. I mean, it is a freaking high fantasy world with a realistic middle age, where people are dying of pox. <3

 

[Monox D. I-Fly]

"The Noble Bachelor" and "The Copper Beeches" are the stories you mean. The latter is one of my particular favorites in the collection, along with "A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Red-Headed League," "The Five Orange Pips," "The Engineer's Thumb," and, in particular, "The Speckled Band." Have you read A Study in Scarlet yet?

Ah, yes. Thank you for that. Isn't "A Scandal in Bohemia" the one which tells about Irene Adler? That's also my favorite one. The main character got beaten just as early as the third chapter. "The Speckled Band" is undoubtedly interesting, however it has so many flaws concerning the snake (like that a snake can be guided through its way by a sound) that I won't consider it my favorite. Of course I've read "A Study in Scarlet", it's the second chapter in the volume if not the first. The story is too long for me, though, that I hardly recall anything happened there.

 

[TMS]

I've been doing a lot of reading over the past few months, and I can't really remember all of it. I know that I read through some Sax Rohmer stories (non-Fu Manchu) that I've had on hand for a while. A decent writer, but very pulpy. I've been sticking primarily to short stories by various authors, though just tonight I've finally started on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.