What are you currently reading?

[3pidemiC]

Crazy...I had no idea that he posted here. I knew that it was a blog before though.

[MikePizzoff]

Crazy...I had no idea that he posted here. I knew that it was a blog before though. He doesn't really post much anymore; he stops in every few months or so and will make 1 or 2 posts then re-disappear. He used to post a bunch on the old forums, though.

[3pidemiC]

Ahh, I see. Just started: Didn't really want to put it down last night, but I had to sleep. It really wastes no time getting into it.

[ludovico]

roadshow by Neil Peart

[Chic Freak]

Just renewed The Bonfire of the Vanities at the library. Update: it still feels outdated and pretentious. My next pieces of C20th US literature I want to tackle are Another Country by James Baldwin and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos... i figure if I read them both at the same time I can alternate between comedy and seriousness and hopefully not get bored with either! Plus I like stuff written around the 1920s, it's like the 80s but without the yuppie-health craze, just long island ice tea and cocaine all the way

[krakenslayer]

After nearly a year of reading, I finally finished Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos. It's a fantastic, deep, intelligent and very exciting read, but all four books combined (into two volumes, essentially comprising one epic story) make Lord of the Rings look like... ...THIS book, which I finished in one evening, right after I got done with Hyperion. SOME SPOILERS TO COME. Now, I don't wanna bad mouth it too much, as the author is obviously just a horror geek like us, but it was a really flimsy, trashy read. That can be a good thing sometimes, but I was just coming down off Dan Simmons' masterpiece, and it really highlighted all the flaws in this book. The plot is interesting initially, an unending apocalyptic rainstorm causes large underground-dwelling beasts to rise to the surface and terrorise the residents of a small hilltop settlement (one of the only places still above the water). The first characters we are introduced to are great - two feisty old timers trying to survive as the world falls apart - the opening is melancholy and filled with foreboding, it really drew me in at first. But it's not long before things start to wear thin: Keene uses a lame Deus-Ex Machina device to drop in a couple of wafer-thin characters (and I'm not talking malnutrition) onto the hill/island, who proceed to tell their own tale of survival in a large city, complete with ultra-generic cultist bad guys, weak and improbable romance, and a poor man's Cthulhu. It's like for the first few chapters Keene has been engrossed in his work, crafting a chilling sense of isolation and loss, then got bored after an hour and decided to repopulate the island with a bunch of in-name-only characters and make the story about them instead. I mean, its like he stopped caring about what he was writing - the second half of the story is filled with unintentionally hilarious dialogue along the lines of: "The worms!! It's like they're REANIMATING HIM!". Well, at least I didn't waste more than a few hours on it.

[MikePizzoff]

I've read it before, but I received it in hardback format for x-mas so I figured I'd give it another read since I loved it so much. Also (very minimally) working on The Shining. It's a pain in the ass reading when I'm in school. I rarely have time to take in a book and if I do, I end up forgetting everything I read because I have so much scholastic material on the brain.

[ludovico]

Too fat to fish - Artie Lang I hate your guts - mr yimmy norton

[DawnGirl27]

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...7010&MICTID=37 Good one if you are interested in the Franklin expedition and the crew's fate.

[ProfessorChaos]

this one is another good book about the franklin expedition, detailing the findings of autopsies conducted on the three sailors who they exhumed after 138 years.

[Tricky]

Ive moved onto this now its one of the classics that ive never read & feel like i ought to have done seen as its so widely quoted & referenced,im getting into it too,interesting story & almost a social commentary these days

[Mike70]

i'm re-reading this gem, a scifi classic of moumental proportions that has, sadly, been forgotten by most folks today. it is about a huge, multi-generation colony ship that along the way to its destination, some sort of war/civil disturbance breaks out among the crew/passengers. the story picks up 23 generations later, the hydroponic labs and greenhouses have overrun most of the ship, the stock animals run wild and the people have reverted to various states of barbarism, some more so than others. the story revolves around a hunter from the "quarters" tribe who with a couple of other members of his tribe gradually uncovers the facts behind their old myths and legends.

[MikePizzoff]

this one is another good book about the franklin expedition, detailing the findings of autopsies conducted on the three sailors who they exhumed after 138 years. Please give me some details about the autopsies!

[ProfessorChaos]

Please give me some details about the autopsies! well, i've just completed the chapter describing the actual unearthing of the bodies, i've not made it to see what they tissue samples collected revealed. but i've read another book (one that i picked up at a book fair in elementary school) about this, and the findings of the autopsies showed significant levels of lead in the bodies of the three sailors. this is due to the processes used for preserving food stores in tins that were soldered with lead. this led to the theory that the ships became icebound (nothing unusual for arctic explorations at the time) for an extra winter, and with many of the crew sick, weak, feeling the effects of scurvy and lead poisoning, the ships were abandoned and the sailors headed south with life boats filled with supplies that they dragged with them. all sorts of bones and artifacts have been discovered over the years by arctic explorers, and even 130+ years later they were still finding soles from boots, tin cans, etc. after analyzing the bones and determining they came from caucasians, most of the remains were assumed to be those of the ship's crew...and several bones had knife marks on them, indicating that the men had to resort to cannibalism during their last days. as far as the bodies, they were in near perfect condition (or as best condition possile for a 138 year-old corpse). it took the men digging two days using pickaxes and shovels to even reach the first coffin, and then they had to use water to thaw the bodies out. rigor mortis wasn't an issue, and according to the doctor performing the autopsies and overseeing the excavation, the bodies, once lifted from their coffins, were very limp as if they were just passed out. a pretty good read if you dig history, mysteries, and the whole man vs. nature and exploring thing. here's more pics of the frozen sailors: oh, and apparently one of them has a myspace page now. http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm...ndID=397817453

[Chic Freak]

almost a social commentary these days Definitely... follow it up with Brave New World if you want to be spooked on that score (admittedly it's been about 7 years since I read either).