Great book. Not for everyone. Les Miserables looks longer if I stick them side by side on my shelf, which I wouldn't do because H and T are nowhere near each other alphabetically.
What are you reading?
- Thread starter Bone2pick
- Start date
Another Jacqueline Winspear book, A Sunlit Weapon.
Almost at the end of my reread of At the Mountains of Madness.
Speaking of Mountains, I picked up Cold Mountain the other day. Haven't read it since I was about 20 and it blew my mind then. Now it reads like a very vanilla Cormac McCarthy or Faulkner knock-off, so we'll be see how far that goes.
With all the War and Peace talk I dusted that off, too. Probably read it four times before, so I'll noodle on it or not, depending on how I feel.
With all the War and Peace talk I dusted that off, too. Probably read it four times before, so I'll noodle on it or not, depending on how I feel.
Finished it last night.
I forgot to mention this yesterday, but I think it’s hilarious Lovecraft repeatedly describes penguins as grotesque. Not the weird, blind, oversized penguins who show up near the end of the story. No, just…totally normal penguins
Although I'm really liking Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout), I watched the 5-part Mildred Pierce over the weekend, and it was so amazingly, phenomenally good (with incidentally and incongruously by far the best classical singing I've ever heard in a TV program, by an evil character with elements of histrionic, narcissistic, and borderline personality disorders, though in real life sung by Chinese and South Korean contraltos Dilber Yunus and Sumi Jo, whom I mistook for Renee Fleming) that I've put Olive on hold to read Mildred Pierce (1941), by James M(allahan) Cain, an author familiar to aficionados of noir, possibly best known for The Postman Always Rings Twice — who was also an accomplished pianist and operatic singer who tried to make a professional go of the singing. This is not crime writing, it's family drama in plain style for mainstream publication in an era when noir was pulp press.
Last edited:
Over the weekend, I tore through The Shadow Over Innsmouth and made it about a third of the way through the latest issue of Lovecraftiana.
The latter has been a mixed bag so far, with the poetry better than most of the stories, but I loved “House of the Holy” by PN Harrison. It feels a lot like the work of the classic Lovecraft Circle, but it creates a sense of vulnerability more through the vast isolation of its West Texas setting than through the mysterious antiquity of Lovecraft’s favored New England. There are also some cool ties to Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Stone”, one of the best Cthulhu Mythos stories not written by Lovecraft.
The latter has been a mixed bag so far, with the poetry better than most of the stories, but I loved “House of the Holy” by PN Harrison. It feels a lot like the work of the classic Lovecraft Circle, but it creates a sense of vulnerability more through the vast isolation of its West Texas setting than through the mysterious antiquity of Lovecraft’s favored New England. There are also some cool ties to Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Stone”, one of the best Cthulhu Mythos stories not written by Lovecraft.
Finished A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon, and now I'm on to The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers, and Orbital by Samantha Harvey.