What are you reading at the moment?

[Erlikkhan]

Anyone ever read "The Overstory"? Weird but well written. Do trees really rule the world? Reminds me a little of "The Vegetarian" where the protagonist turns into a tree at the end. Pulitzer Prize and Man Booker? Maybe I should write some tree porn. Is that allowed?

 

[beachbum1958]

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
And I'm not sure I like it..

See if you can find the BBC dramatisation 'Wolf Hall' on BBC Lionheart or the BBC iPlayer online. It's based on 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring up the bodies', with Mark Rylance as Cromwell, and Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn, both of whom capture the intrigue and treachery of the time perfectly, and Damian Lewis as the fickle, amoral, spoiled, treacherous and self-indulgent Henry VIII is a treasure to watch; it's superbly done, and the Elizabethan settings are wonderfully atmospheric, Lori was absolutely captivated.

I'm reading E. Nesbit's Edwardian children's novel 'Five Children and It' as an antidote to the updated Jacqueline Wilson '4 children and it' doing the rounds on the UK satellite TV rounds.

 

[SimonDoom]

I'm usually working through several books at a time but the main one of interest right now is Rick Atkinson's The British Are Coming, part 1 of his trilogy on the American Revolutionary War. It's good. He's a terrific writer.

 

[vanmyers86]

Madeleine L'Engle. I need something affirming right now.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

See if you can find the BBC dramatisation 'Wolf Hall' on BBC Lionheart or the BBC iPlayer online. It's based on 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring up the bodies', with Mark Rylance as Cromwell, and Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn, both of whom capture the intrigue and treachery of the time perfectly, and Damian Lewis as the fickle, amoral, spoiled, treacherous and self-indulgent Henry VIII is a treasure to watch; it's superbly done, and the Elizabethan settings are wonderfully atmospheric, Lori was absolutely captivated.

I'm reading E. Nesbit's Edwardian children's novel 'Five Children and It' as an antidote to the updated Jacqueline Wilson '4 children and it' doing the rounds on the UK satellite TV rounds.

I'm only reading the book because I liked the series so much. It's something about her style of writing. It's present tense, mostly. She does dialogue strangely, and some of it is almost like stream of consciousness from Cromwell. It's compelling enough that I'll at least finish this book. I think it helps that I already have Mark Rylance's performance in my head to guide me.

I've been a huge fan of Damien Lewis since Band of Brothers, and he's why I started watching the series (it was on PBS a couple of years ago ), but Rylance captivated me. Don't get me wrong, Lewis was fantastic, but I hadn't seen Rylance in anything before. Now he's on my list of "if so-and-so is in something, I automatically give it a chance. "

 

[beachbum1958]

I'm only reading the book because I liked the series so much. It's something about her style of writing. It's present tense, mostly. She does dialogue strangely, and some of it is almost like stream of consciousness from Cromwell. It's compelling enough that I'll at least finish this book. I think it helps that I already have Mark Rylance's performance in my head to guide me.

I've been a huge fan of Damien Lewis since Band of Brothers, and he's why I started watching the series (it was on PBS a couple of years ago ), but Rylance captivated me. Don't get me wrong, Lewis was fantastic, but I hadn't seen Rylance in anything before. Now he's on my list of "if so-and-so is in something, I automatically give it a chance. "

I first saw Claire Foy in the darkly comic 'Being Human', the original UK production, not the US TV remake, and her performance as the scheming, but ultimately wronged Anne Boleyn was truly outstanding. She's luminously beautiful, for me eyes are the thing, I don't really care how pretty or not-pretty a girl is, if she has beautiful eyes then I'm hooked, and Claire Foy has expressive, gorgeous, porcelain doll eyes. Her performance as an increasingly desperate Anne, forced to watch as her rival, Jane Seymour, begins to more and more fascinate Damien Lewis's increasingly sleazy Henry, and Cromwell's plotting to discredit her and force her departure one way or another is the cornerstone of the series. I hated this period in school, I memorised the old 'divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived' 6-wives rhyme as all I needed to know about Henry VIII and the period, but this production brought it to life without all the cod, affected 'thees and thou's so many period programme producers default to. One to watch again.

 

[KeithD]

Maeve Binchy's Firefly Summer. Binchy shouldn't be anyone I should like reading, but, for some reason, she always knew how to pull me in as a reader and play the heartstrings. I don't go lookin for her books like I do with some authors, reading everything they write--and in chronological order, if I can--but my wife reads them and they appear on my nightstand. Not something I'll indulge in much longer, though, as Binchy has died.

I'm also reading my first M.C. Beaton book, Death of a Ghost, which was sent to me as a gift (so I suppose I have to read it). The book is terrible, though, and the writing almost impossible to follow. Last of those I'll let in the house.

 

[Salacious_Scribe]

Right now I'm proofreading this post.

 

[litfan10]

On my tablet a mindless but sweet Lesbian romance, Educating Eve by Anna Archer (one of my many guilty pleasures) and physically a great book from the Indiana University Press, Don Glass' How the World Looks to a Bee.

 

[MetaBob]

The Gunslinger - Stephen King

The original novelet from 1978.

This is the first part of what later became his first "The Dark Tower" novel. I also have "The Way Station" from 1980, which later became part 2 of that first Dark Tower novel. I'll continue to that if the first part is better than I remember.

 

[UsuallyPresent]

The Dungeon Robotics series from Michael Peed. GameLit/LitRPG series following a robotics genius whose creations led to the world coming to the edge of disaster before he was killed & brought... elsewhere. For... reasons.

His grammar ain't goodish, man truly needs an editor IMO, but the world and character building is IMO pretty damn good.

Before that I'd just done a re-read of John Conroe's Demon Accords series up to the present. A kid hides as his family is horrifically murdered, later coming to find he is able to exorcise demons. And it gets even more interesting from there, over a series of (currently) 16 books. Semi-typical hidden-magic world - think Harry Dresden or Anita Blake type setup, great mystical powers cautious of the huge numbers of nonmagical, excitable humans after multiple applications of torches and pitchforks. Some fun twists, and great thematic consistency - some early revelations become very, very important later in the series.

 

[Misshotndeep]

I am reading three books:

Jibaku-shounen-Hanako-kun - Iro Aida

Beware the Hunter - Martha Carr, Michael Anderle

I woman like her - Marc Levy, Kate Deimling

 

[Blind_Justice]

When I'm not punching words into my keyboard, I have a stack of hardware manuals for my synthesizers to go through again and again until I might understand all the fine points of LFO modulation, filter types, oscillator settings and sequencer parameters. Tough, but fun.

 

[flytime]

The happy hooker: my own story Hollander & Moore - ReganBooks - 2002
From: Internet Archive, Audio, https://archive.org

 

[flytime]

Xaviera Goes Wild Mass Market Paperback – January 1, 1974. by Xaviera Hollander (Author) 3.6 out of 5 stars 5 ratings.

looking for it in pdf

 

[ChloeTzang]

City of Devils - the two men who ruled the underworld of Old Shanghai by Paul French

 

[KeithD]

Cara Black, Murder in Bel-Air
[A woman detective in Paris caught up in international espionage. Someone sent it to me to read and there are a bunch of them in the series before this. I think I came in too late for the continuing part of the story to maintain interest in it.]

Donna Leon, A Noble Radiance
[I've now read all of hers. I hope she keeps going for a while. I read them chronologically by publishing date when I can. This one's an early one that I didn't catch the first time around.]

Larry Phillips, ed., Ernest Hemingway on Writing
[This one was left on my nightstand where I spent this last week. A lot of pithy Hemingway quotes on writing and the writer's life. An interesting one that I've experienced as true without having given it much thought was that he recommended stopping writing for the day while your current action is still open and you have someplace to go with it when you sit down to writing again, rather than stopping at the end of something and have to rev up with something new when you come back to it.]

 

[SimonDoom]

Neal Stephenson's Anathem. I'll probably be reading it for a while because it's not exactly a fast read and I don't give myself big chunks of time per day to read it.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

Plagues and Peoples by William O'Neill

An interesting prolegemenon to a yet-to-be-realized detailed analysis of the role of parasitism in human history.

 

[Lori_the_Hoosier]

'Once' by James Herbert - An horrific fable of magic, faeries, pixies, succubi, demons, and dark enchantments in the woods and forests of Shropshire, in the heart of rural England. Read it and you'll never look at stories of the faerifolkis quite the same way again.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore

 

[Misshotndeep]

Book 8, Dresden Files

 

[vanmyers86]

Rereading Stephen King's memoir and guide, "On Writing." I had forgotten how good it is!

 

[BelleCanzuto]

Reading "Devoted" by Dean Koontz, cuz I was in the mood for a thriller-ish yarn that I didn't need to think too hard about.

Just finished "Snowbound" by Blake Crouch, another suspense kind of tale. Not as good as "Dark Matter" or "Recursion", but much better than "Abandon"

 

[ElectricBlue]

1Q84 by Murakami. It was the first of his work I'd read, and it's got a magical fascination that keeps pulling me back.