Currently Reading

Just started the wheel of time series by Robert Jordan. Can't stop reading, everyday, every moment.

Got a bit bored after 4 or 5... :(
Currently re-reading The Farseer trilogy by Robin Hobb untill I can find something else :)

Gangster's League: Inside the Albanian Mob by Arjan Mustafa


Can't stop reading - was recommended to me by a friend... very good book if you like gritty, action packed, keeps you wanting more.

Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne.

good books so far.

Dean Koontz's Frankenstein trilogy (yeah i know there are an extra 2)

i read a most of koontz's earlier works and a friend gave me these books ...

the fast pace and simple plot makes them an easy read of you're going to read them 20/30 minutes at a time mainly because they're easy to put down and pick up again without loosing track of what is going on ... other than that i don't think they're anywhere near his better works and when i finish the 3rd book (i'm nearly there) i won't be picking up the other two

I remember reading the first 2-3 when they released. They weren't the best books but were decent mashup supernatural detective quick-reads. I do know that it got a little disjointed there at the end as the setting was New Orleans and Katrina hit in between books. I remember him trying to write the hurricane into the plot somehow and not doing a very good job of it. Still, I have fond memories of the first two books at least.

Like you said, not the best Koontz has to offer by a long shot but still enjoyable enough reads.

Cheers!

Just finished reading "Blame me on History" by Bloke Modisane

Now reading "The Traitor" by Andy McNab

Less than Zero is one of my favorite books, the movie not so much

Currently on Catch-22 by Heller, but after that I'm on either to Sheperd's Buried Child or La Nausée de Sartre.

Nice! I've always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with Catch-22. I've read it a few times, the first time I didn't really care for it but as I've gotten older and been in the world longer I've come to appreciate it a lot more. I guess I couldn't really fathom as a teenager how much of adult living really is a paradox.

Never read Buried Children but my gf and I have a big shelf full of secondhand playbooks and there's a Shepard anthology there somewhere that I know has Buried Children in it. You should let me know how you like it, if I get it recommended highly enough I might dig up my copy and finally give it a read lol

I have read Nausea though! I'm a big Sartre fan, I love how he turned down the Nobel Prize for this book because he said the award was too boushie. I've got Nausea in my copy of "The Wall". I've always like JPS more for his plays than his novels. The Flies, The Respectful Prostitute, & the Devil and Good Lord have a special case on my bookcase.

If I have to be honest though, Cumas still has to be my fave existentialist author.

All great reads though, congrats!!

I'm not terribly far in to Catch-22 (started the night I posted - I'd just finished Call of the Wild before it), but I find Yossarian sees the world much as I do, which might be troubling as he seems to be a misanthrope with severe problems, but it's connecting with me like a book hasn't in some time.

I've seen Buried Child performed before, and though I haven't yet read it I assure you it is worthy of your attention. There's an absolutely beautiful monologue in it I'm looking to use as an audition piece. Deals a lot with the inevitability of our blood.

I've read very little Sartre. Les Mouches (Flies) and Huis Clos (probably Closed Door in English, though I started reading Sartre to give me something to improve my French so I only know the French names and they're sometimes different) are all I've read previously. Huis Clos was wonderful, but the cheap, ugly, minimalist eternity he designs really gets to the same part of me that likes greasy diners and the @nihilist_arbys twitter account. Looking forward to La Nausée.

The Antagonists: Book One by Burgandi Rakoska.

Quite the interesting read.

I just finished reading Carrie by Stephen King. I hear he actually doesn't like it because it was his first book but I really liked it because you come to love and care for all the characters, save for two of them. And it's just like the movie where you really just want them to be happy but you know what's going to happen and you know it's going to hurt and it does. Brutal book. Reading Salem's Lot now but I might skip it and read The Shining instead because it isn't really catching my interest.

Carrie was a good read although it never stood out as one of his better books or one of my favorites- probably, like you said, because it was his first.

I've always really loved Salem's Lot though, it's one of my favorites of his and I've read it several times. I remember it was the first and maybe the only book I've ever felt "creeped out" while reading. Maybe it was just my age at the time, but I remember being in middle school and reading the book in bed at night in my room and being convinced that if I looked out my window I'd see a vampire floating there on the other side of the glass lol

I will say that imo, SL is worth the read, especially if you plan on reading a lot more Stephen King or his Dark Tower series in particular as there are re-occurring characters from one in the other.

And the Shining is awesome, one of his seminal works.

Hope you enjoy them both :-)

I've actually read Gunslinger and I thought it was great but I never followed up on the series after and I know I should. I think that what it and Carrie have in common might be what appealed to me and that is that they're relatively short. Compared to Salem's Lot especially, which is a door-stopper of a book. I'll probably come back to Salem's lot at some point though, especially if I continue the Dark Tower series. What I thought was neat about Carrie though was that you could really see the potential King's writing style had even way back when. I mean he tells you very early on that a massacre happens at prom, Carrie is the perpetrator, and he let's you know which characters are going to die. What this does is that instead of dealing with horror or fear for the character's safety, you instead have a consistent sense of dread, knowing that as you read the people you empathize with are going to die and that the survivors won't be that much better off for it. In that way it is also essentially a spoiler-proof book lol. Also he's very good at writing people. I like that after Tommy dies, Sue eventually notes that even though she loved him then, he was a very small part of her life overall and that it's silly to think she'd be holding on to him after all these years. It's a lot more realistic than her becoming an old maid because her high school boyfriend died, tragic though it was.

Ya, his character writing is awesome, it's one of the things that really sets him apart from other authors. He writes so insightfully, and for lack of a better word "real-ly", that you find yourself relating to characters you probably wouldn't have otherwise. I read most of his books for the first time in my early teens and, as a kid with relatively little life experience, it's a testament to his skill that I was able to relate to so many diverse protagonists.

In so many of the other books that I was reading at the time(scifi & fantasy mostly) I was without realizing it being pigeonholed into preferring a certain typecast of character; the heroic, hearty/dashing/roguish, almost-exclusively male characters that they market to boys that age. So it was a pleasant surprise and a big eye-opener to be able to enjoy a book about a battered middle-age woman like in Rose Madder, a geriatric widower like in my VERY favorite SK novel Insomnia, or a preteen girl in the aptly named a Girl Who Loves Tom Gordon.

King is in every way a Master of the personal story. I would strongly recommend reading the Dark Tower series at some point. But there's no rush, trust me, you'll be a sad when it's over so enjoy the suspense beforehand. And honestly, the more of his other works you read beforehand the more the eventual experience of Roland and the the Ka-Tet of the Gun's quest will be enhanced :-)


I'd recommend at least having read Salems Lot, IT, The Stand, Insomia, and maybe a story about low men like Regulators. Although none of that is necessary to enjoy TDT series!

Till we have faces by C.S. Lewis ... the theme seemed interesting (retelling of the Psyche and Cupid myth) and i found it new at "nice price" in a book fair ... good books are even more attractive when the price is right :)

Re-reading Hamlet by Shakespeare, reading Brown by Kamal al-Solaylee and the Iliad by Homer.

Just started "Britain Begins" by Sir Barry Cunliffe. I borrowed from the local library and it's an interesting read so far. Didn't realise the word Britannia came from Pretannia, which was what the ancient Greeks called the Island, and the people they named Pretani / Priteni - meaning the painted or tattooed ones / folk.

Currently reading "Bounce" by - Matthew Syed