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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Sept 22, 2023 19:31:38 GMT
haven't read anything this year. Team of Rivals was really interesting but couldn't get through it in time before the loan expired because it's long af (Audible maybe), and then BPL shafted me by ending their out-of-state E-card program without telling me (sure did send me a lot of donation mailers though ). Tried briefly to get into Dark Tower book 3 before giving up, probably for good tbh - I liked book 1 because just Roland traveling through the wasteland made for tight and enjoyable vignettes with occasionally backstory to widen out the world and deepen the character, but Detta and especially Eddie were annoying additions in book 2. Not really interested in all the time-travelly stuff either. annnnnyways, gonna do some spooky reading in October. Listened to Blackstone Audio's Dreams of Terror and Death Lovecraft collection last year and enjoyed it, but this year we'll be diving into Necronomicon (!) which features some of his most well-known horror stuff and Cthulu mythos. "Dagon", "Herbert West Reanimator", "Color Out of Space", "Dunwich Horror", and of course "Call of Cthulu" among others. Can't wait I'm sure I'll get some King in there too, probably stuff from Night Shift.
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chris3
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Post by chris3 on Sept 23, 2023 5:21:22 GMT
Taking a break from my Stephen King binge (Billy Summers was fantastic btw) and finally reading Blood Meridian for the very first time. I'm thirty pages in... Holy mother of god.
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tep
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Post by tep on Sept 23, 2023 14:35:07 GMT
Taking a break from my Stephen King binge ( Billy Summers was fantastic btw) and finally reading Blood Meridian for the very first time. I'm thirty pages in... Holy mother of god. My reading habits have been eerily close to yours, lol. I agree Billy Summers was great, and I thought Blood Meridian was a masterpiece, probably in my top 10 of all time. Read it about a month ago, and there probably hasn’t been day since that I haven’t thought about it.
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Post by Mattsby on Sept 29, 2023 20:17:23 GMT
Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts (2013)"You can't ignore a giant." What an important book... From the last years and last days of Welles, these are recorded convos, cleverly formatted, btwn him and his longtime mentor/confidant. Their banter is bittersweet, intimate, funny ("there's no duck under my djellabas"), and by the end deeply devastating... Apparently the night before Welles died he had said: "For the first time in years I'm feeling hopeful that I'll be able to muster the money I need to complete many of my projects... The Other Side of the Wind, The Big Brass Ring, The Cradle Will Rock, The Dreamers, Don Quixote, Lear......."
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Post by stephen on Sept 29, 2023 20:25:05 GMT
Taking a break from my Stephen King binge ( Billy Summers was fantastic btw) and finally reading Blood Meridian for the very first time. I'm thirty pages in... Holy mother of god. The greatest literary work of the English language. Keep me updated on your progress. And let me know if you might be interested in reading a screenplay adaptation I did of it after.
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chris3
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I just ordered a slice of pumpkin pie...
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Post by chris3 on Sept 30, 2023 3:35:02 GMT
Taking a break from my Stephen King binge ( Billy Summers was fantastic btw) and finally reading Blood Meridian for the very first time. I'm thirty pages in... Holy mother of god. The greatest literary work of the English language. Keep me updated on your progress. And let me know if you might be interested in reading a screenplay adaptation I did of it after. I read about fifty pages on my laptop via PDF and had to stop and order a physical copy on eBay. That book is simply too good to read on a computer. Every single sentence feels like it could be an entire scene in a lesser novel; so terse yet so evocative. The first page alone basically screams, "You are about to read one of the greatest novels ever written." Recently I've been tearing through so many Stephen King tomes that McCarthy's polar-opposite style immediately socked me in the face with its masterfully concise elegance: instead of greedily consuming page-after-page I needed to read those first few chapters extremely slowly, considering and savoring every detail. My copy arrives in the mail on Aug 2nd and I should get through it in about a week. I'll let you know what I think when I finish (in the meantime I'm 1/3rd through Duma Key and it's pretty good so far). And I'd LOVE to read your script when I finish the book!
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SZilla
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Post by SZilla on Oct 2, 2023 3:20:54 GMT
Been on a bit of a tear this past month:
Read 5 plays - Ah, Wilderness! by Eugene O'Neill, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore by John Ford, and Sean O'Casey's trilogy of The Plough and the Stars, Shadow of a Gunman, and Juno and the Paycock.
Also read a graphic novel - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin and then followed that up with a historical trivia book called Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?: A Tour of Presidential Gravesites and a book of poetry by Billy Chapata called Flowers on the Moon.
Besides those, I read Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, and am now kicking off October with Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (and other stories).
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tep
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Post by tep on Oct 2, 2023 21:19:29 GMT
Just finished A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. I liked The Cabin at the End of the World, so I went in cautiously optimistic. But tbh, I thought it was absolute shit. Got almost no enjoyment out of it… obnoxious, nonsensical, contrived, not at all scary, no atmosphere, no immersion. Probably the worst book I ever read to completion, and I had to force myself to finish the goddam thing. 1/10.
I’m probably gonna read The Exorcist next, just to experience a (hopefully) good possession horror story
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chris3
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I just ordered a slice of pumpkin pie...
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Post by chris3 on Oct 11, 2023 9:57:29 GMT
Just finished Blood Meridian. McCarthy's writing style, while undeniably brilliant from the first page, was initially quite a challenge for me. I never realized how much I value and depend on the inner thoughts of characters expressed via prose until reading this novel comprised of nothing but relentless dispassionate accounting of incident and imagery at an utterly furious pace. It's been a long time since I've had to read a novel so slowly, really paying attention not due to overly florid and impenetrable language but simply to process the sheer amount of information whizzing by me at all times. Mere ten page chapters contain enough incident to fill a hundred pages of other authors' books. Every word carries deep meaning, and often key plot points are casually buried within paragraph-sized sentences of repetitive scene description. And through it all we're refused access to the inner lives of our cast. This is by no means a criticism; of course this is the correct method to tell this particular tale, but I must admit that it took me a while to acclimate despite loving the story/themes and deeply respecting the writing. I felt like I was reading a movie script written by the world's greatest poet, whereas all of my favorite novels often luxuriate within the tortured psyches of their respective characters. It's what I love most about literature as opposed to film, which is usually restricted to capturing action. It took me over a week to read the first hundred pages and I considered putting it aside for a later date. Mother of God, I'm glad I stuck with it. For the record, the turnaround happened as soon as the expriest Tobin recounts how the gang first came to meet the judge along their path. From that moment on I was fully enthralled (although I did love many earlier sections, especially the hilarious one about that moron Captain White and his band of ill-fated filibusters). I consumed the entire second half in a day. I feel like I've just returned to this plane of existence from some kind of unholy vision quest and I can comfortably state this is one of the greatest novels I've ever read, probably one of the best ever written, and the strongest candidate for "Great American Novel" I've encountered since discovering The Sound and the Fury as a teenager. This was... an experience, to say the least. I mean, where does one even begin? This was historical past reality rendered as apocalyptic future funeral dirge; this was yesterday, tomorrow, and worst of all today. The judge will never die. It felt so richly detailed to its specific setting while at the same time mythic and ancient and absolutely surreal. Soul-shatteringly brutal. Cold, matter-of-fact descriptions of the most profane evil imaginable, page after page after page, the nihilism so absurd yet never less than riveting and always so disturbingly, so cruelly real. The most disgracefully violent western novel ever written also feels the most truthful. The entire second act felt like one prolonged insane movie montage of wanton barbarism, like the village massacre in The Thin Red Line played on a year-long loop sans Zimmer score. The apocalyptic imagery conjured to mind everything from Dante's Inferno to Lynch's Part 8. There was so much greatness jam-packed within every single chapter that to include just a handful of examples of said genius would feel offensively inept. I shouldn't even try. I'll just say the most obvious thing: the judge has to be the greatest villain in fiction, right? My dumbass brain completely failed to notice all the children who went missing whenever the judge would cavort around naked and maniacal... that is until the VERY END of the book, when the girl crying over the bear was listed as missing right before the man enters the jakes. It made an already nightmarish finale land with even more nuclear of an impact. In regards to a movie adaptation, in my mind's eye I saw this resembling the cinematography/production design of There Will be Blood with the lack of score of No Country for Old Men and an absolutely furious editing pace a la Oppenheimer or modern Malick, only completely linear in chronology. This book feels like it MUST be made into a cinematic masterpiece despite its seemingly unfilmable level of disturbing content. PTA could've rocked this, but alas he never seemed to be too interested in violence as a major theme in his work. I'll keep low expectations for the John Hillcoat film, if it happens. It might be years before I read it (or any McCarthy) again... but I will most assuredly read it again. Everyone was right. This was astonishing. EDIT since I forgot this was the "currently reading" thread: Gonna read some Stephen King to detox from this beast ( Full Dark, No Stars).
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SZilla
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Post by SZilla on Oct 11, 2023 14:29:11 GMT
Loved Dorian Gray. Just started House of Leaves. It's a trip already.
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Oct 12, 2023 4:06:47 GMT
My dumbass brain completely failed to notice all the children who went missing whenever the judge would cavort around naked and maniacal... that is until the VERY END of the book, when the girl crying over the bear was listed as missing right before the man enters the jakes. It made an already nightmarish finale land with even more nuclear of an impact. Yeah, the same thing actually happened to me when I first read it...
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Post by Brother Fease on Oct 14, 2023 0:01:48 GMT
#4 Strike, JK Rowling.
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Post by TylerDeneuve on Oct 19, 2023 17:43:54 GMT
Completely intoxicating and transportive - if you enjoyed Madeline Miller's Circe and The Song of Achilles, then you will love Mary Renault. Tommen_Saperstein
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Post by pacinoyes on Oct 24, 2023 8:59:04 GMT
Ok, I haven't started this yet since Amazon just delivered it last nght but I'm prety much going to say this might be the best book ever written because his life is way more fascinating than anyone elses's yanno?
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Post by pacinoyes on Oct 25, 2023 11:44:36 GMT
Ok, I haven't started this yet since Amazon just delivered it last nght but I'm prety much going to say this might be the best book ever written because his life is way more fascinating than anyone elses's yanno? Some of this is quite funny - he's a really good writer - which isn't surprising because he's also a great storyteller - did he ever write fiction (outside of screenplays I mean)? There's several stories that seem like fiction and weirdly like he's holding back at the same time.........seems more autibiography than a memoir .......or maybe a cross between the 2.........some of this is Jerzy Kosinski-like in its "that's sounds like a tall tale" aspect but told very dryly and matter of factly........really good stuff so far
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Post by Brother Fease on Oct 30, 2023 22:03:14 GMT
#4 Strike, JK Rowling. It took me 18 days, but I finished it this morning. Excellent book. Probably the best one of the series, I read. Rowlings knows how to write crime fiction. In January, I will probably read Troubled Blood, which is apparently very controversial.
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Post by Brother Fease on Nov 18, 2023 4:10:21 GMT
Win by Harlan Coben. It is a spinoff from the Myron Bolitar series.
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dazed
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Post by dazed on Nov 18, 2023 13:13:49 GMT
the metamorphosis
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SZilla
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Post by SZilla on Nov 18, 2023 21:45:34 GMT
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. I'm only halfway through but I am blown away with how often it goes into detail about Gulliver taking a shit.
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Post by Mattsby on Nov 21, 2023 22:12:19 GMT
Spike Lee's Gotta Have It (1987) which is arguably better than She's Gotta Have It - like how Making Do the Right Thing is arguably better than Do the Right Thing (it wraps the themes better, at least). There's the script and an interview but mostly it's Spike's diary at the time and it's fascinating and sometimes funny to hear out his thinking process, fanning his confidence, pinballing around New York, and the research behind the film (interviewing lots about their sex lives...... might've inspired Spader in SL*V.... and Sod had a making-of book just like this one too.... I wonder if any of this fueled the fumes at Cannes btwn them). The Second Greatest Story Ever Told (1991) by Gorman Bechard. Satire about the daughter of God who happens to be an 18y/o obsessed with Tab, Chaplin, The Mets and The Mats. It's not about her as a religious figure as much as it's about her celebrity - the whole book is practically her press tour in 1989. ("That's what we're here for, three or four seconds of viewing pleasure," Letterman says as she throws a Big Mac and a Rambo VHS off the top of a building.) Sure she turns water into Rolling Rock, but the wit goes wider - the ways in which others consider her sacred and desperately want a piece of the fame. It's hilarious at times and I'm burying the lede....... Paul Westerberg is the romantic interest, a major character who becomes the most popular musician who ever lived, WHAT?? ("He cried when Stink was certified platinum" - you can't make this up!). pacinoyes What the hell ! Have you read this? The writer later made Color Me Obsessed. Apparently... Winona Ryder was desperate for the rights even before it was published (imagine getting Westy to costar...). Rooney Mara was lined up in the aughts to star too.
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Post by pacinoyes on Nov 21, 2023 22:34:06 GMT
Spike Lee's Gotta Have It (1987) which is arguably better than She's Gotta Have It - like how Making Do the Right Thing is arguably better than Do the Right Thing (it wraps the themes better, at least). There's the script and an interview but mostly it's Spike's diary at the time and it's fascinating and sometimes funny to hear out his thinking process, fanning his confidence, pinballing around New York, and the research behind the film (interviewing lots about their sex lives...... might've inspired Spader in SL*V.... and Sod had a making-of book just like this one too.... I wonder if any of this fueled the fumes at Cannes btwn them). The Second Greatest Story Ever Told (1991) by Gorman Bechard. Satire about the daughter of God who happens to be an 18y/o obsessed with Tab, Chaplin, The Mets and The Mats. It's not about her as a religious figure as much as it's about her celebrity - the whole book is practically her press tour in 1989. ("That's what we're here for, three or four seconds of viewing pleasure," Letterman says as she throws a Big Mac and a Rambo VHS off the top of a building.) Sure she turns water into Rolling Rock, but the wit goes wider - the ways in which others consider her sacred and desperately want a piece of the fame. It's hilarious at times and I'm burying the lede....... Paul Westerberg is the romantic interest, a major character who becomes the most popular musician who ever lived, WHAT?? ("He cried when Stink was certified platinum" - you can't make this up!). pacinoyes What the hell ! Have you read this? The writer later made Color Me Obsessed. Apparently... Winona Ryder was desperate for the rights even before it was published (imagine getting Westy to costar...). Rooney Mara was lined up in the aughts to star too. I never read this but I've heard him talk about it a lot and I have flipped through it .........he's a funny and interesting guy in a lot of ways ..........I really like his Every Everything doc (on TUBI now!) on Grant Hart where he just lets him talk and he deceptively gets him to reveal stuff he maybe is trying to conceal (about being a father etc).......Color Me Obsessed is a classic from the dark years when no one was remixing their albums (twice) and writing New York Times best sellers about their self-sabotage and what not
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dazed
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Post by dazed on Nov 25, 2023 14:59:13 GMT
manufacturing consent
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Post by Brother Fease on Nov 27, 2023 2:47:21 GMT
Troubled Blood, JK Rowlings, #5 Strike series
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Post by pacinoyes on Dec 10, 2023 0:14:24 GMT
Christmas and Other Horrors: An Anthology of Solstice Horror - Various Authors (2023)Picked this up today and started it at one of my local libraries - so far so good. This was recommended - and the librarians are pretty on target with recommending stuff in the past. This is new btw and came out like a month ago ......it's a great idea anyway ......
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Post by pacinoyes on Jan 2, 2024 18:16:52 GMT
Tiny Nightmares (2020) - Various AuthorsVery Short Horror Stories (1500 words or less) - I've read 2 so far: 1 by Meg Ellison (wtf) that's on some level about climate change and quite odd and pretty good and one PoS by Rion Amilcar Scott which basically is "cops are scary" - shoots its wad in the first few sentences and snarkily trivializess police brutality and makes you come down on the cops side tbh with its oppressive "footnotes" to prove you know "it really happened" My stylish librarian friend - who recommended it (sorta) said let me flag the stories you'll like pacinoyes ....... Well she flagged the Meg Ellison and not the Rion Amilcar Scott so I should have listened........and no she doesn't call me pacinoyes ffs........
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