Books: What have you been reading?

[Enigma]

I decided to try a bit of romance. I can't like, it was bloody awful. Of course, it might have just been a bad romance book

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[Dante Milton]

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig, a novel about the end of the world that felt oddly prescient. Content warnings for spoilers:

rape, captivity, and torture

end of spoilers

[Deathstroke]

I finished reading James R. Benn's Billy Boyle: A World War II Mystery tonight.

[Starter Set]

Back on Albert Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus".

Always gives me a great deal of motivation.

[Jack Dracula]

The Unexpected Universe by Loren Eisley.
It's ok. The flowery prose isn't to my taste. Eisley comes off like a frustrated poet.
The philosophical ideas about the natural world and origins of life and human conciousness are interesting tho.

[The Darknight Detective]

After numerous adaptions of the story I have seen over the years (going all the way back to the Hanna-Barbera version from the '70s), I'm finally going to read, on my Kindle, The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) by Alexandre Dumas.

[Malvolio]

Howard Stern Comes Again by Howard Stern. It is interesting how so many people now know what long time listeners like myself have known for so long: what a good, insightful interviewer Stern is.

[Chubistian]

My rythm really declined with Women, so it took me longer to finish it that what I expected. It hasn't got anything to do with the book, which I really liked, but with some other things I kept myself occupied with.

Now I'm starting War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, which is reallly long, so I will be reading it for quite a while

Quite a while indeed. Yesterday I finished War and Peace, so soon I will start Faust by Goethe

[babyblob]

I decided to put Goblet Of Fie down for a bit and broke out my old copy of The Stand. I enjoy end of the world society breaking down stuff and living it makes me want to read it more.

[The Darknight Detective]

Latest book I'm reading: The Civilization of Rome (1960) by Donald R. Dudley.

[Dante Milton]

Infinity Son by Adam Silvera, YA urban fantasy. I've enjoyed a lot of Silvera's other books, but this one was not great. It really could have used another round of edits, the pacing and transitions between scenes were off, the shifting POV doesn't help. There are some characters that are really unlikable that I think readers are meant to be at least somewhat empathetic for, but I just found myself hoping they would die. There were also a couple of reveals that felt a little too like a telenovela. The book is supposed to be the first of a series, but I don't think I want another one.

[TriggerWarning]

Worm by John "Wildbow" McCrae.

Not sure how I'd never heard of this given its pretty much everything a comic book lover could want in prose. Only available online but its free.

It also is massively long but so far that is awesome because its been amazing so far.

Premise is a world of people with powers. The protagonist is a high school aged girl, she seems to be about 15 or 16, who is bullied by everyone at school. However she recently figured out she has powers but its not a conventionally nice power - she can control bugs. This is actually a fairly useful power as it turns out and very offensive - imagine dozens of brown recluses, black widows, and other biting bugs all going to town on an opponents genital area. She wants to be a hero but in her first solo mission inadvertantly ends up falling in with a low level villain team who not only accept her but treat her as a friend and valued teammate. Which is leading to the obvious internal conflict in her where she originally joined with the idea she would gather intel and then turn it over to the heroes but now actually likes her new friends as they are the first to actually accept her and treat her well.

So far I'm loving it because the bad guys are not necessarily evil people all the time and the good guys aren't necessarily saints all the time.

[The Darknight Detective]

Newest read: The Glory of Their Times (1966) by Lawrence S. Ritter. Though I have taken it out quite a few times from the library since the early '80s, I finally have included it as part of my own collection.

[Jim Kelly]

Well, I just heard about a book that I have to read now: Soap and Water & Common Sense: The Definitive Guide to Viruses, Bacteria, Parasites, and Disease by Dr. Bonnie Henry. She is our chief health officer in British Columbia, leading the fight against COVID-19 in our province, holding press briefings daily. A women of enormous intelligence and compassion. I doubt I could get a physical copy of this book, given how popular Dr. Henry has become--but maybe I can download it on my iPad or Macbook.

Meanwhile I'm still reading a chapter of WAR AND PEACE a day. And reading a Sherlock Holmes story each week. I'll probably finish both before we're out of the woods.

[Dante Milton]

Children of Virtue and Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi, the sequel to Children of Blood and Bone, I enjoyed it better than the first, looking forward to the next one.