The 'Currently Reading' Thread.

[Richie Freebird]

All I've read since I was in my teens are autobiographies and history books: never a novel.

 

Can someone recommend me some sort of horror novel? Is there like a benchmark book that sets the standard for the genre? Is there anything like a novel equivalent to a slasher film?

[HarmonicGenerator]

All I've read since I was in my teens are autobiographies and history books: never a novel.

 

Can someone recommend me some sort of horror novel? Is there like a benchmark book that sets the standard for the genre? Is there anything like a novel equivalent to a slasher film?

 

I'd send you straight to Stephen King. In terms of masters of the horror novels he's the only one I've read (Dean Koontz is another big name but I don't know anything of his stuff). There are so many to choose from with King, even if you didn't like one there's bound to be others that you do. I'd try Carrie, The Shining or Misery to start - the latter is more of a psychological horror though. My favourite King is The Stand but at 1000 odd pages it may be a bit hefty to start things with!

 

Vampire novels are more in my knowledge base, and obviously there is nothing out there better than Dracula. It may be a bit dated for you to kick off with, so instead I'd maybe have a go at I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (trust me, it's nothing like the Will Smith film. Matheson has loads of great scary sci-fi, actually - The Shrinking Man is another classic by him). If you want a modern novel, Guillermo del Toro co-wrote a vampire trilogy recently, which starts with The Strain, continues with The Fall and ends with The Night Eternal. The first one gripped me, and the second two didn't quite live up to it, but you may like them nonetheless. One of the characters is a retired luchador. There's also The Passage by Justin Cronin (and its sequel The Twelve) which flips between present day and the unleashing of a virus that produces, essentially, vampires, and the world 100 years later. The latter is a fantastically built world, and a lovely way to deal with the subject - the immediate aftermath of apocalypses has been done to death, but by flashing forward a century Cronin has a lot more to play with. However, the present day sections, while necessary, are a bit slow going.

 

If you like ghosts, Susan Hill's The Woman In Black is the modern standard, but it's written as a pastiche of nineteenth century ghost stories like The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, so may not be your cup of tea.

 

I know how much you like films, too, so you might enjoy the series I'm currently working through, by Kim Newman, who, as well as being a great writer and exemplary horror movie critic, knows so many books and films throughout history and loves them, which shines through in his work. Anno Dracula is set in a Victorian London if Dracula had won. He's Prince Consort, Victoria is his wife, and vampires and 'warm' live alongside each other. He uses characters from Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and history (Jack the Ripper is reimagined as a vigilante vampire killer). The sequel, The Bloody Red Baron, is set in World War I, and has the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Winston Churchill and Orlok from Nosferatu gracing its pages (Orlok's Dracula's mate). There's two more books after that too. I absolutely love them - you might too.

 

Hope that helps!

Edited March 16, 2013 by HarmonicGenerator

[Richie Freebird]

I finished reading The Aquariums of Pyongyang by Kang Chol-Hwan last night. Basically, Kang Chol-Hwan was the grandson of a couple of Korean descent, who had subsequently emigrated to Japan, but returned to North Korea following the establishment of the communist state after the Korean War. As a rich and reasonably powerful family with a grandmother that was an active believer in the North

Edited September 3, 2013 by Richie Freebird

[Richie Freebird]

I finished off No other Choice by George Blake at the weekend. This was a fascinating story, and one of the most intriguing and exiting autobiographies I

[HarmonicGenerator]

After powering through The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne (a ripping yarn about being jolly well shipwrecked on a tropical island, chaps), I've started on Dante's Divine Comedy. Currently four cantos into the Inferno. Decided to pick it up mainly because I've never read it!

[Richie Freebird]

Currently reading Lysergic, by this dizzy little bint, Krystle Cole...

 

Why on earth did I think a book by a little girl would be any good?

 

Her story sounded interesting: She was a stripper, and (without knowing who he was) started going out with one of the largest LSD manufacturer / distributors in the world. They lived for a while in a modified missile silo and took crazy amounts of all different psychedelic drugs. Eventually the operation began to unravel and former friends and business partners started to grass each other up in attempts to either gain immunity for themselves or from shear fear for their own safety.

 

She has a youtube channel where she sits there spitting out stories of trips and experiences, and for some reason I thought her story would make an interesting read. However, I'm only about a quarter of the way through it and I'm just about ready to give up. I'm pretty sure she was still in her early 20's when she wrote this, and it really is in the tone of a sulky, immature young American woman. The language used is really basic, and reminiscent of how some young women speak

[Chest Rockwell]

Bit of resurrection here!

 

Let's hope the thread gets more interesting use than when it was last around (I haven't read back to be honest, but I just saw a bunch of Richie Freebird posts and probably correctly assumed they were boring).

 

I had fallen out of reading for a bit, much to my shame but thanks to a recent holiday I have got right back in to it.

 

Before I had my little hiatus I was in the habit of reading some fairly heavy stuff or Classics and trying to think of myself as some kind of clever sort. So this tim around in an effor not to put myself off I've been reading some fairly light and contemporary stuff.

 

So the one I've just finished was School for Scumbags . It was really funny and although completely fantastical still well grounded.

 

Really fun ideas going on and an exciting story. It would have been really easy to make the main character a complete dickhead and render the book shitty as a result but thankfully that's not the case here.

 

It's nice when you grab something like this up from a Clearance bin on a whim and it pays off!

 

I will have to re-attack the massive pile of unread books in my room when I get home to decide what to read next as I'm not allowing myself to buy anything new until I get through some of the backlog.

[Undefeated Steak]

I just saw a bunch of Richie Freebird posts and probably correctly assumed they were boring

 

 

 

 Does he still post on here?

 

 

Glad you've bumped this thread as I'm looking for some good books to read too.

[HarmonicGenerator]

It's sat on my shelf for around four years, but this summer I finally started Gormenghast. Currently near the end of the first book in the trilogy. Mervyn Peake had a fantastic vocabulary, beautiful use of language throughout, brilliant character names, and the descriptions of Gormenghast itself are just superb.

 

I also read a graphic novel called Line Of Fire: Diary of an Unknown Soldier by the French artist Barroux. He was walking through Paris one day and saw some books in a skip, had a dig through them and found the diary of a soldier from the First World War. In the book, he's taken the diary word for word and done illustrations accompanying it, and it's one of the most moving things I've read in ages. A lot of the soldier's diary entries are quite trivial and everyday - we marched this far, we stayed at this village - but every so often there's a detail of war that comes out of nowhere just floors you, especially because it's all the soldier's words. It covers August and September 1914, and then ... stops. Nobody knows what happened to the soldier, or who he was. Even knowing that at the beginning, that gave me a bit of a chill. Michael Morpurgo does the foreword, and basically says 'read it, and weep', and he's not far off the truth.

Edited September 25, 2014 by HarmonicGenerator

[Sergio Mendacious]

Bit of resurrection here!

 

Let's hope the thread gets more interesting use than when it was last around (I haven't read back to be honest, but I just saw a bunch of Richie Freebird posts and probably correctly assumed they were boring).

 

I had fallen out of reading for a bit, much to my shame but thanks to a recent holiday I have got right back in to it.

 

Before I had my little hiatus I was in the habit of reading some fairly heavy stuff or Classics and trying to think of myself as some kind of clever sort. So this tim around in an effor not to put myself off I've been reading some fairly light and contemporary stuff.

 

So the one I've just finished was School for Scumbags . It was really funny and although completely fantastical still well grounded.

 

Really fun ideas going on and an exciting story. It would have been really easy to make the main character a complete dickhead and render the book shitty as a result but thankfully that's not the case here.

 

It's nice when you grab something like this up from a Clearance bin on a whim and it pays off!

 

I will have to re-attack the massive pile of unread books in my room when I get home to decide what to read next as I'm not allowing myself to buy anything new until I get through some of the backlog.

School for Scumbags brings back a lot of memories of when I was a somebody — I used to work for Serpent's Tail, and that was (I think) Danny King's first move away from his "Diaries" books, which had done really well for us. I remember my boss having no real idea what either that book, or The Harry Potter series, were about, as he insisted that it be aimed at the market as a heel version of Rowling's books — he even had me use this font for the bound proofs, which was a right joke.

 

Danny was a good fella, though — bit of a lad, but I think he was settling down when I got turfed out the door. Was very surreal to sit chatting with Dexter Fletcher, coaching him through his TV/film pitch for the Burglar Diaries series. Fucking hell, I'm proper shite, now.

 

I've just finished book three of the Game of Thrones books, and I have to stall there to not spoil the TV series. Also, just finished rereading "Man Enough to Be a Woman" by Jayne County and Rupert Smith — it's on Prime Library (in the US, at least), I can recommend it to anyone who likes to know about the underground from the 60s to the 90s.

 

At a loose end, bookswise, at the moment, so I'm going to check out a new Prime book, and browse our review copies for owt that doesn't look too awful.

 

EDIT — picked up a copy of Feed, by Mira Grant — sounds pretty generically like all of the other "virus spread to people through tech" works (ala "Cell", by Stephen King), but it gets a recommendation from the sci-fi editor, so I'll give it a crack.

Edited September 25, 2014 by Bill Diarrhea

[Scott Malbranque]

Went through the John Twelve Hawks ‘Fourth Realm Trilogy’ again which started wonderfully, but quickly turned to shite.

I’m reading Palahniuk’s ‘Rant’ and Leslie Nielsen’s ‘Naked Truth’ at the moment. I don’t know for the balls of me, how Franco is going to translate that narrative to screen.

[ColinBollocks]

Can anybody recommend any good books on Ed Gein, or something related? I've spent the summer reading baseball-related books and can do with a change of pace.

 

Of the baseball books, Fantasyland by Sam Walker is a fun tale of his daft first year in a top level rotisserie league. The charm of the book is it's less about the churn of a Fantasy baseball league (and all the multiple stats), instead focusing on all the strange characters he encounters, including baseball players, Tout War players and his growing addiction to all things fantasy baseball.

 

Also, The Numbers Game is a good read for people looking for tales behind the games evolving statistics. Definitely not for the casual, but if you're a fan I recommend it.

Edited September 25, 2014 by ColinBollocks

[Sergio Mendacious]

Can anybody recommend any good books on Ed Gein, or something related? I've spent the summer reading baseball-related books and can do with a change of pace.

"Deviant!" sounded pretty decent. I can recommend Meat is Murder!, by Mikita Brottman — lots of crossover with serial killers.

 

As an aside, I was watching House of 1000 Corpses last night, and knocked together a few gifs, including an Ed Gein one.

[ColinBollocks]

Thanks, Bill. Will check them out.

 

I've got The Only Living Witness on the way, which I've been meaning to read for over 5 years now.

[Bellenda Carlisle]

I've had some free time over the summer so I've been reading a fair bit in my garden.

 

I read Vagos, Mongols and Outlaws by Charles Falco. I can't imagine any guy not enjoying this book, it's a true story written by the man that lived it about him going undercover to infiltrate three of the most brutal Hell's Angels style motorcycle gangs on the West Coast of the States at the beginning of the 2000s. Three gangs separately, one after the other! It's mental and the real kicker for me is that he's not even a cop, FBI agent or anything, just a nutter with a borderline death wish who has his own reasons for doing it (which I won't spoil). Because he's a civilian he has little access to backup or other outside help and only a couple of people know or care who he really is (he makes sure to frequently remind us that it's harder/worse for him for various reasons than a cop or FBI agent doing the same thing).

The book is absolutely gripping, it's written in a straightforward action packed style which works perfectly for movie like source material. The bulk of the focus is detailed recreations of the violent and crazy biker meets which is great but there's the right amount time dedicated to how much it's affecting him on the inside too. If you think a book about a guy going undercover with bikers sounds interesting at all then you should check it out because it lives up to the promise of how exciting a book about that subject could be.

 

 

I'm also about 2/3rds of the way through Scar Tissue the autobiography of Anthony Kiedis, the front man of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

I used to love the Chili Peppers in 1991 when I was ten and I still enjoy some of their stuff (Blood Sugar Sex Magik is a really great album) but that's the extent of it. Someone left the book at my house though so I started reading it and it's impossible to put down. I've read loads of autobiographies of rock stars, wrestlers, actors and people like that but this is up there with the absolute best for me. Anthony Kiedis' life has been absolutely insane, and the Chilis organic rise to the top despite everything that happens is a great read, the tales of excess are as detailed and sleazy as anything in the Mötley Crüe book but the narration comes from a much cooler and more positive place. Kiedis doesn't revel in telling dirty stories, it's simply an open account of a fascinating guy going through different crazy things he sees (even at the time) as learning experiences. His dad used to give him drugs and take him to hollywood parties and even fix him up with women when he was still literally a child but he never says he was a shit dad, there are other biographies that relish in talking about how badly the subject was were raised. Despite the condition he was in while most of it was happening everything is remembered in great detail and told with a lot of personality.