So, What Are You Reading These Days? (besides comics)

[Alan M.]

Just bringing this discussion over to ning...

What books are you reading right now that don't have a narrative driven by images as well as words?

[Jeff of Earth-J]

As soon as I finished those two books I realized I had enough time to read...

MIRACLE MONDAY before the day itself. (Today!) I posted about it here.

OUT OF MY MIND: Twice this week I have had occasion to reference Illusions by Richard Bach. I have read Illusions dozens of time, but the sequel (Illusions II) only once. Illusions II was a print-to-order sequel first published in 2013. (Man, has it been a decade already!?) As soon as I read the introduction, I realized why I haven't read it a second time. (Not that it's bad; I'll probably read it next.) Instead I read this earlier (1999) sequel I have likewise read only once before. It's very short (eight chapters, 101 pages) and was very easy to finish in a single day (a single sitting, actually). The reason I haven't read this one a second time in the past 24 years is that it's pleasant enough, but kind of lightweight. 

[Travis Herrick (Modular Mod)]

I recently finished Iron Spy: The True Story of the Greatest Double Agent in World War II by Ethan Quinn. The true story of Eddie Chapman who was a criminal before the war broke out, became a spy for the Germans with intent of becoming a double agent from the beginning, and then being a very good double agent. I blew through this during my breaks in the office, and then I see today its only 90 pages long. Still a good read, with a lot of interesting characters.

Chapman is also one of those people believed to have at least partly inspired Ian Fleming's James Bond.

[Travis Herrick (Modular Mod)]

I was on vacation for a bit last week, and got a decent amount of reading in. First, I finished Time Shards, and it was good. It had a few surprises as well, can wait for the next 2 books.

One that probably doesn't count since it was an art book, but I also read Black Velvet: The Art We Love to Hate, it had about a 2 1/2 page intro and the rest was pictures of velvet art. Pretty interesting.

Next up, was Southtown by Rick Riordan. Tres Navarre is a PI in San Antonio, TX (points scored for not being NYC or LA). A group of convicts have escaped jail, and their leader is looking to get revenge on Tres' boss and her arch rival at another PI firm. This was a good if a bit predictable book. It didn't have any interesting element in that one of the main characters is suffering from dementia (maybe Alzheimer's never said for certain)

Also, The City & The City by China Miéville. If you know China's other works you know he has some pretty out there ideas. Which I like, but I like taking breaks from him. This one I enjoyed because this is a police procedural that happens to be a science fiction. There are two cities and they happen to coexist over each other in different dimensions you would say. Some places are wholly one city, and some the other. There are places called crosshatches in which they truly coexist. The cities have had quite a long conflict (ie there are illegal colors to wear in each city), but things have been cooling off.

There is one place in which you can legally cross between the two. If you interact with one city while in another you are in breach. If the breach is really serious then The Breach will take you away and no one knows what happens to them. So, people have to learn to "unsee" and "unhear". International visitors have to go through months schooling to learn how to live there.

Anyways, a body is found in one city, and surprise surprise the murder took place in the other. This was really good, and I loved Miéville's world building. And showing us the differences between the two cities cultures.

Finally, I've begun The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter. A reporter/novelist was killed by a hit and run driver, and his wife doesn't believe its an accident. She persuades Bob Lee Swagger (I love that name) to investigate. This leads him into the JFK assassination. It is almost the 50th anniversary and our hero is now 67 years old. This is a an interesting read, and i can totally see conspiracy theorists buying into it. I was surprised that this takes place in the "present", as I've read a Swagger novel or two in the past and they take place when he is younger. Hell if I can see an 80 year old Indiana Jones, I can see a mid-60s military sniper still kicking ass.

[JD DeLuzio]

I really loved The City and The City, though I did not see the cities as existing in different dimensions. I read them as physically co-existing, with citizens trained to see and interact only with their culture and city, and Breach maintaining the order. When you enter Copula Hall, you're retrained to see the other city, and then you leave and visit it, in the same geographical location as your city.

We do this more often than we realize.

[Rob Staeger (Grodd Mod)]

I'm reading Peter Straub's 1990 novel Mystery now, and I could swear I'd read it before, but it's really unfamiliar to me. Maybe I'd bought it before, and never read it?

Anyway, it's set in the late 50s, early 60s, beginning on a Carribean island called Mill Walk, and eventually changing location to an area called Eagle Lake up in Wisconsin, where all the rich Americans who live on Mill Walk spend their summers. The hero's a high school kid named Tom Pasmore, who becomes interested in murders and crime in Mill Walk, and was run over by a car on his first investigation. He nearly dies, then spends about a year under hospital care as he gets better. He also is befriended by a neighbor, an elderly amateur detective nicknamed The Shadow whom the book suggests was the inspiration for pulp character. This one slowly worked its magic on me, but once I got to around the halfway point I was fully invested. Now it's full speed ahead on my kindle!

[Richard Willis]

It's possible to read all three novels out of order or only as single books, but Straub wrote the three as a trilogy with the same characters interacting in them, some more than others. Mystery is the second book. I think I read the first and third books before I read Mystery.

The Blue Rose Trilogy in Order by Peter Straub - FictionDB

I first got hooked on Peter Straub with Ghost Story, which is actually about a long-lived unforgiving shape shifter, not a ghost. I highly recommend this one in addition to the trilogy.

[JD DeLuzio]

Adam Diment's The Dolly Dolly Spy, the cult spy novel from 1967. I find it better-written than Fleming's stuff, though even more dated. If you haven't read any of Diment's few novels, imagine a period spy novel starring a young self-medicating hipster pilot in a morally ambiguous world.

[Rob Staeger (Grodd Mod)]

I loved Ghost Story. I think I saw the movie first, as it was on heavy rotation on PRISM* when my family first got cable.  and I think my favorite when I was younger was Shadowlands. I remember being VERY disappointed when a movie called Shadowlands was released -- starring Anthony Hopkins! -- and it was a biopic about C.S. Lewis instead of an adaptation of the Straub book. 

*PRISM was a Philly-area premium cable channel, that showed uncut, commercial-free movies like HBO, but also Phillies, Flyers, and Sixers home games that otherwise were only on radio. We didn't have HBO, but PRISM was a no-brainer for my dad.

Thanks for the link, Richard! I just finished Mystery last night... I'd been zooming through the last half, and a train ride into and out of NYC last night brought me to the end! One advantage to reading on a Kindle is that whenever a person or area of town becomes relevant to the mystery, you can do a search for the word or phrase to see how Straub sets it up. (And in my case, to remind me of who people are, since I'd begun the book two months ago and only read it sporadically for a while.) And Straub is really good about planting clues and just letting them sit on the page, waiting to bear fruit a hundred pages later.

Before I get to The Throat -- which I definitely have read! -- I'll be reading The Last Chairlift by John Updike, his new doorstop of a novel. It's a ghost story, but also, I suspect, quite a bit more. It'll be the first Updike I've ever read.

Richard Willis said:

It's possible to read all three novels out of order or only as single books, but Straub wrote the three as a trilogy with the same characters interacting in them, some more than others. Mystery is the second book. I think I read the first and third books before I read Mystery.

The Blue Rose Trilogy in Order by Peter Straub - FictionDB

I first got hooked on Peter Straub with Ghost Story, which is actually about a long-lived unforgiving shape shifter, not a ghost. I highly recommend this one in addition to the trilogy.

[Richard Willis]

I've never read any of John Updike's books but looking it up I see that The Last Chairlift is by John Irving. I have read a few of his.

[Rob Staeger (Grodd Mod)]

Ah, I've read neither, and got them confused. Bought the book a couple months ago, and it's been sitting unopened on my kindle since then.

Richard Willis said:

I've never read any of John Updike's books but looking it up I see that The Last Chairlift is by John Irving. I have read a few of his.

[Richard Willis]

If you've seen the movie The World According to Garp, it's based on Irving's book of the same name.

[JD DeLuzio]

I enjoyed Cider House Rules, but that was some decades ago. Aspects of it are timely again, unfortunately.