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?

[Luke Blanchard]

Desmond Bagley Running Blind

Alistair MacLean-ish Cold War pursuit/double-cross thriller. A former British agent is forced to do a courier job in Iceland. His Icelander girlfriend gets caught up in the affair.

Edgar Wallace The Crimson Circle

Librivox audio. Interwar British thriller. A gang called the Crimson Circle shakes down the rich and seems able to murder at will. The police can't break it as even the gang-members don't know who the leader is. One of the murders is committed with poison gas soap bubbles.

Paul Leicester Ford The Great K. & A. Train-Robbery

Librivox audio. Enjoyable 1890s light adventure. The superintendent of an interstate railway line is drawn by his attraction to a railway magnate's daughter into a struggle between two companies for control of the railway.

Bradford Scott Dead Man's Trail

Western. Texas Ranger Walt Slade pursues a tough criminal who has become involved with a Mexican gang that has a mysterious means of smuggling goods past the Rio Grande.

Brett Halliday Murder is My Business

1945 Mike Shayne mystery. Shayne investigates an apparent traffic fatality in El Paso which was actually a murder. Shayne was initially based in Miami, but by this book he had moved to New Orleans.

This post displaced the thread 'Amazing Spider-Man' #800 from the homepage.

[Doctor Hmmm?]

You had me at "poison gas soap bubbles."

[The Baron]

The Saga of Tanya the Evil, vol 1.: Deus lo Vult, by Carlo Zen.

[Luke Blanchard]

Sapper Ronald Standish

This is a collection of Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Sapper imitates Doyle's writing style as well as his type of mystery. Standish is a Holmesian detective, but lacks Holmes's eccentricities. He has an independent income and takes only cases that interest him, and his other interests are sports (golf and cricket).

Barry Perowne Raffles' Crime in Gibraltar

Sexton Blake adventure set in Gibraltar during the Spanish Civil War. My copy is a reprint from the late 60s packaged as a juvenile novel ("as featured on TV"), but the net tells me the story originally appeared in The Sexton Blake Library in 1937. It's a standard adventure story, but its descriptions of Gibraltar sound authentic. Perowne wrote a number of Raffles novels and stories, including other Sexton Blake/Raffles ones.

Edgar Wallace The Feathered Serpent

Three people who share a guilty secret receive cards with images of a feathered serpent and the legend "Lest You Forget". A murder follows. The hero of the novel is a crime reporter.

I also read two of Wallace's collections of short stories, The Lady of Little Hell and Other Stories and The Lady Called Nita.

This post displaced the thread Steve Niles' Winnebago Graveyard from the homepage.

[The Baron]

So I'm a Spider, So What?. vol. 2, by Okina Baba (Translation by Jenny McKeon)

[The Baron]

All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault, by James Alan Gardner

[Rob Staeger (Grodd Mod)]

I started reading March Violets by Phillip Kerr -- the first in a series of noir novels about a private eye in Nazi Germany. Excellent so far. 

[The Baron]

All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault, by James Alan Gardner

Finished this. A pretty good super-hero story about a quartet of college roommates who get super-powers.

Next up is Reborn as a Vending Machine, Now I Wander the Dungeon, vol. 1, by Hirukuma, about a guy who is reborn into an MMORPG world (a common genre these days) as a vending machine. (Not so common.)

[JD DeLuzio]

I finished Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, a good if excessively-detailed account of a notorious Victorian-era crime that influenced the detective fiction genre, and Fifteen Dogs, a short novel by André Alexis which has developed a kind of cult following. It's a fabulous (in the literal sense of "fable-like") account of fifteen dogs in Toronto granted sentience by the gods. Hilarity Social commentary ensues.

[The Baron]

Dubliners, by James Joyce - STATUS: COMPLETED

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce - STATUS: COMPLETED

Ulysses, by James Joyce -  STATUS:  75.86206896% COMPLETED

Finnegan's Wake, by James Joyce - STATUS: ON DECK

[The Baron]

Finished Finnegan's Wake, by James Joyce . Every word of it.

Next up:  The Saga of Tanya the Evil 3: The Finest Hour, by Carlo Zen

[Doctor Hmmm?]

The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton.