What Are You Reading

[Diamondback]

A welcome surprise seeing you back, Sunny--you've been missed! I'm actually building Abomination... which reminds me, I gotta get a check mailed off for my autographed copy of Monster Hunter Vendetta.

RE-EDIT: [deleted]

 

[Wally_Hood]

Just finished Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire.

 

[VitaminG]

Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde


Lost in a Good Book

 

[Harp]

Celine's Entretiens avec le Professeur Y; shadows cast across his provocative art and not alltogether admirable nature.

And another visit with Samuel Beckett, master of classical precision of language-
like Celine, there is a void with this man. Nothing like Celine's darkness, but more a distant cloud
that hides the sun of Beckett's genuinely gracious nature.
A cipher, elusive as mercury, Beckett is yet a most admirable fellow.
Michael Robinson"s The Long Sonata of the Dead captures the mystery within this poet scribe.

 

[Widebrim]

Oh do share how you got with the Bobby Darin bio, as i have been thinking of buying that. I have all the Marlowe novels at home and are one of my favourites for re-reading, never get bored of them. I read little excerpts to my son which elicits much rolling round on the floor laughing at the 'funny language', but i figure you have to start them young and at least he's not goggling in front of the tube for ten minutes, so it's all good stuff.

Miss sofia, the Walden Robert "Bobby Darin" Cassotto bio is pretty darn good, and I would recommend it. What I didn't know at the time it was happening, was how Darrin's career really took a bit of a nosedive in the year before his death. Very intense, complicated man.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

A True Crime Story from the Golden Era

Swift Justice: Murder and Vengeance in a California Town
by Harry Farrell
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992)

Swift Justice re-creates the events surrounding the November 1933 kidnapping and murder of Brooke Hart, the 22-year-old son of a wealthy San Jose, California department store owner. The Hart family received two phone calls from the kidnappers demanding $40,000 ransom. In the days that followed, police and FBI were on the case attempting to track down the kidnappers. Ultimately two men were arrested for the crime, 27-year-old Harold Thurmond, a former gas-station attendant, and 29-year-old Jack Holmes, a salesman for Union Oil Company and mastermind of the plot. Thurmond was caught at a pay phone in a garage across the street from police headquarters making a another ransom demand.

In police custody Holmes and Thurmond confessed to the kidnapping, attempting to incriminate each other as the mastermind. An already ugly mood became uglier with the discovery by duck hunters of Brooke Hart's decomposed body in San Francisco Bay on November 25, 1933. He had been thrown off the San Mateo Bridge by his abductors. The next evening a mob* incensed by the atrocity and bent on avenging the murder of Brooke Hart, a popular and well-liked figure in the community, laid siege to the county jail where Holmes and Thurmond were being held, battling sheriff's deputies and highway patrolmen brought in as reinforcements. Braving tear gas fired by police the mob succeded in storming the jail where they seized the kidnappers and lynched them at St. James Park across the street from the jail. In the aftermath of the lynching then-California Governor Jim Rolph stepped into the controversy expressing his approval of the actions of the lynch mob and offering to pardon the perpetrators.

*among the angry mob was nineteen-year-old Jackie Coogan. The former child star was a classmate of Brooke Hart at Santa Clara University.

 

[davidraphael]

I just read (and loved) Paul Auster's Invisible. I'm a big fan of his earlier novels, but felt that the last few have been weaker. Invisible really is a return to form.

I'm also just finishing up Haruki Murukami's What I Talk about When I Talk about Running. Without hyperbole, he's one of the greatest living writers. His book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is absolutely incredible.

 

[Mr Badger]

I've got a terrible reading habit and really have to watch my consumption! I worked in public libraries for years and could order anything I wanted. Reckon I read about a quarter century's-worth of books in seven years!

Been off work with flu for the past three days so, when not sleeping fitfully, have already got thru both of my new purchases, which turned up in the mail on Monday: Mick Farren's "Speed Speed Speedfreak: A Fast History Of Amphetamine" and Eric Davidson's "We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut 1998-2001".

Both were pretty good, the Farren book (like his "The Black Leather Jacket" and Gene Vincent tribute) is pretty comprehensive and should be of interest to FL members, as there's a lot of military and hepcat speed usage covered. The Davidson tome is OK, but very much from his POV - there was a lot of underground rock'n'roll activity round the world during those years, and he should have given non-US countries more props, as well as spreading his net wider than the 'faster and louder', macho punk bands...

Apart from that, I've been greatly enjoying a 'spiv' novel, Alexander Baron's "The Lowlife", and re-reading Glenn David Gold's "Carter Beats The Devil", which is a fine romp. Next up is the estimable Rick Bragg's "Ava's Man" - if it's even half as good as "Redbirds", it'll be excellent...

 

[JimWagner]

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest.

Will read the sequel, Dreadnought, when it's released next week.

Boneshaker

 

[AmateisGal]

Just finished Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson. Loved it.

 

[skyvue]

I'm reading James Mauro's Twilight at the World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World's Fair on the Brink of War, which, it seems likely to me, was inspired by the success of Eric Larson's The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. My initial impression is that Mauro's tome doesn't match the quality of Larson's book, but I'm enjoying it well enough on its own terms.

 

[Harp]

...the quality of Larson's book

Well researched/written.
A bit too de Sade, though, for my taste. *yucky*

Have meant to revisit Simone de Beauvoir's defense of the Marquis' canon.
A difficult excursion inside the darkness of the human heart.

 

[RetroPat]

"Mary Tudor: Princess, ba***rd, Queen" by Anna Whitelock

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Edison: Inventing the Century
by Neil Baldwin
(New York: Hyperion, 1995)

The Rise and Fall of an American Army: U.S. Ground Forces in Vietnam, 1965-1973) (1985)
by Shelby L. Stanton
(New York: Dell, 1988)

 

[CopperNY]

"Four Color Fear:Forgotten Comics of the 1950's"

a collection of horror/suspense comics from before the enactment of the 1954 codes. some great, some just lurid. but when put in context of the market created by GI's returning home, dealing with the horrors of war and "lost childhoods" it is interesting to see what became popular fare and "a threat to our youth".

 

[Harp]

The Rise and Fall of an American Army: U.S. Ground Forces in Vietnam, 1965-1973) (1985)
by Shelby L. Stanton
(New York: Dell, 1988)

--------------------------------
1974-75?
Saigon fell in 1975.

 

[Kaonashi]

"Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the west"

For third time!... but the first one in english, so much can get lost in translation...:eusa_doh:

 

[Black Dahlia]

I'm reading a few books right now:

Ghosts: True Encounters with the World Beyond, by Hanz Holzer.

And the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe (ah, again.)

And still getting through the collected works of Rudyard Kipling!

X
BD

 

[randooch]

Jose Saramago

Anyone here like his writings? I'm rereading "The History of the Siege of Lisbon" right now. He up and died last July, and there's a posthumous work out there, too, but I can't find a copy to buy yet.

He's a great chronicler of human frailty and strength, and his style either aggravates or pleases, reader depending: very little use of punctuation.

 

[randersonabq]

Dorothy Sayers

Dorothy Sayers's Nine Tailors. I think it is the best of the Lord Peter Whimsey series.