What Book Are You Reading XV - The Pile Keeps Growing!

[Bonyduck Campersang]

I'm actually reading books on religion sort of. I've been reading the Koran and the book of Mormon sometimes one or the other I cant make up my mind. Other than that I don't usually read books because I start thinking a lot and hearing voices However it is a good habit to read I just don't know what to read yet.

A biography of the Prophet would most probably be better as an introduction to Islam than reading a translation of the Quran.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Finished The Fellowship of the Ring. I enjoyed it much more than I did the first time, mostly because I read it more leisurely now than I did the last time. Some people don't like Tolkien's writing style, but I love it.

I'm terrible at visualising stuff – which cost me dearly in a drawing exam – and I couldn't for the life of me visualise any of the places they visit. Other than that it was swell.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

They're dead, yay! Everyone's dead who should be, and Octavian has become Augustus.

End of story.

Not sure what I'm going to read next, other than a few dozen Merlin fanfics in various stages of being read, and doing research for the ones I plan to write.

Can anyone recommend some good sources for the Glencoe Massacre of 1692?

 

[Arakhor]

I  went to Glencoe as a teenager, and both the landscape and the subject matter are pretty bleak, but I have no idea about any sources. Have you checked Wikipedia's list of sources for the massacre?

 

[Josu]

I continue with Collapse: how societies choose to fail ir succed. By Jared Diamond. But not finding too much time

Started with my fostered daughter The mystery of the sleeping referees by Roberto Santiago. A story about a kids in football (soccer) team adventures.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I  went to Glencoe as a teenager, and both the landscape and the subject matter are pretty bleak, but I have no idea about any sources. Have you checked Wikipedia's list of sources for the massacre?

The first I ever heard of this was in an Irish Rovers song, when they filmed some episodes in Scotland. The song starts around 3:30 in:

Spoiler Glencoe :

Lately I've been booting around a Highlander/Merlin crossover idea, with some of the historical flashback material based on music I've heard over the years. Glencoe isn't one of the historical events ever done on the original Highlander TV show (that I recall), so I wouldn't be stepping on that show in that respect. But when plotlines and dialogue suddenly start coming and next thing I've got 3 looseleaf pages of notes, it's something that's pushing to be written.

While Merlin played fast and loose with history, Highlander made more of an effort to get the historical era flashbacks reasonably accurate (allowing for the inclusion of Duncan Macleod or another of his Immortal friends/acquaintances being there and part of the event).

Yes, it's an extremely grim historical event. But there are a lot of things I write about that are grim. This idea won't leave me alone, so I'd like to try it. I tossed RL history out the window for my King's Heir project. I'm not doing that with this project. That means research.

Since I really don't know much beyond what the song says, plus a podcast I found (and slept partway through since podcasts put me to sleep; I really need printed words to read to learn stuff), this is going to require explaining it to someone who really doesn't know much at all of this period of history.

I've read the Wikipedia article, and it's a lot of information. It's going to take time to digest it before deciding which links to follow.

(speaking of reading stuff that's grim... if I could make it through a book about the Spanish Inquisition and do research on various torture/execution methods in ancient Rome and in medieval times, this is probably not that much worse, except that children were involved)

 

[EnglishEdward]

On Thursday I finished reading:

Psyckosis

by

Wilhemina Baird

It is the third of a trilogy.


I have now started to read a book called

*******s A Theory

by Aaron James

although I am uncertain whether I will complete it.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Started Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand. I had read one book of hers before, so I knew this one would be hot stuff, and I wasn't wrong

 

[Smellincoffee]

As far as nonfiction goes, trying to finish The Jewish Annotated New Testament, which has been a project of mine for this year. For leisure reading, I just picked up Storm Front, the first novel in the Dresden Files series.

 

[Kyriakos]

As far as nonfiction goes, trying to finish The Jewish Annotated New Testament, which has been a project of mine for this year. For leisure reading, I just picked up Storm Front, the first novel in the Dresden Files series.

What's the point of a jewish translation of something written in a different language while supposedly being the word of god?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I weighed my choices last night among The Count of Monte Cristo, an anthology of alt history war stories, and a Highlander fanzine focusing on the character of Methos.

I picked the fanzine. If I'm going to try a Highlander crossover, I want to get back to reading some of the other stories people have written.

 

[Kyriakos]

I plan to read a few books by Stephen Fry. And not just the ancient Greece non-fiction.

Fry is great

 

[Smellincoffee]

What's the point of a jewish translation of something written in a different language while supposedly being the word of god?

The JANT isn't a translation, it's a commentary. Given that almost all of the NT was written by Jews, set in a Jewish context, and illustrative of the variety of Jewish religious expression and thinking at the time, it makes sense to me to consider Jewish analysis of the same. It's part of a series -- The Jewish Study Bible and The Jewish Annotated Apocrypha. The latter may be next year's big read.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I finished Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro the other day. It was good. I was left feeling like I didn't really 'get it', though. I was thinking that people were talking about it and recommending it, years ago, and it was nominated for the Booker Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I liked the writing and the characters, which goes a long way with me, but even as someone who's not focused on plot, I could've used a little more plot. I've added the 2010 film to my watchlist, but it's not streaming on any of the services I currently subscribe to. I like Carey Mulligan, Kiera Knightly and Andrew Garfield, but I have to admit, not one of them fits the characters in my head. Mulligan's probably the closest. Anyway, if you're looking for science fiction, don't read this. I see it called sci fi - Wikipedia and Goodreads, for instance, maybe Amazon too - but it's not. Not really. I mean, I see what they're referring to when they call it that, but I still think it's misleading. It's a character drama. But if that's your thing, I guess I'd say give it a shot. I felt a little unfulfilled at the end, and there were at least a couple of plot points that I was interested in that went nowhere*, but ymmv.

* Specifically,

Spoiler :

the "possible", the woman that Ruth may - or may not - have come from, and Madame taking the art pieces for some kind of exhibition. Ishiguro seemed much more interested in the thing with the deferment for couples that were in love, but frankly, he didn't sell me on that. I feel like he set me up to be intrigued by Ruth's possible and about Madame's art exhibit, and then pulled the proverbial football away. Part of my interest in the film is to see whether they explore either of those more satisfactorily.

EDIT: To clarify, the reason I wasn't sold on the deferment thing was because I never believed that Kathy and Tommy were in love. I assumed that they were looking at the deferment as a way to escape the system, but escaping the system was never really something they talked about (or even thought about, in Kathy's case). I understood that they weren't dissidents, as the typical dystopian sci-fi story with this premise would have them be, but still, I didn't know why else they'd be so interested in the deferment. They so obviously were not a couple. I kind of liked their "friends with benefits" relationship over the years, but I never once thought they were desperate to spend a life together.

 

[Takhisis]

Oh, that's a brilliant book. The tragedy in it is

Spoiler :

that they accept it as the way things are to begin with, and none of them fight it anymore -that fight has been lost, by an earlier generation. They aren't dissidents, or, at least, they're resigned to their fate.

It's funny; I happened to watch a video essay on blocking and directing for I, Claudius last night, and one of the clips is of Augustus ranting at Tiberius that Antony was "twice the man you are" and Augustus still defeated him.

You wouldn't know it by the novel. Mind you, at the time of the novel, Tiberius was still a child (though Livia had already decided he was to marry Marcus Agrippa's daughter, Vipsania).

I don't think I've ever laid my hands on I, Claudius.

They're dead, yay! Everyone's dead who should be, and Octavian has become Augustus.

End of story.

Yes, it doesn't diverge from history in that except the order of some of the killings.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I don't think I've ever laid my hands on I, Claudius.

And here I'm on my second copy because the first one fell apart from too much re-reading...

It's actually the first of two books; the sequel is Claudius the God. The miniseries is based on both of them.

One interesting thing about it is that the dates used are AUC, as in reckoned from the founding of Rome. That's something to have to get used to. Since these are Claudius' memoirs, naturally he reckons in the Roman way, rather than in our modern way.

 

[Spidernova]

I finished a couple Alistair Reynolds novels recently. I really do like him, great hard sci-fi. Eversion is a great little mystery story, and Elysium Fire was a police investigation with some interesting twists.

I'm starting the second Apocalypse series currently. I've heard mixed things about it and it's levels of grimdark, but I think that kind of thing might be a good change of pace. I got through the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, how bad can it be.

 

[Blake00]

A while back I think I was venting on social media somewhere about frustrations with the Disney Star Wars sequel trilogy when someone recommended to me that I check out Timothy Zahn's Star Wars Thrawn Trilogy books believing they were a far superior sequel series picking up only a few years after Return of the Jedi and following our favourite heroes on their next adventure fighting against Grand Admiral Thrawn who was written so good he ended up appearing in official shows as a cannon character in the decades since.

So I thought why not.. I purchased a nice boxset version of the 3 trilogy books off Amazon and while I'm only a handful of chapters into the first book Heir to the Empire I'm loving it so far!

 

[Arakhor]

I think that was the series that first named the Imperial Capital as Coruscant. Initially intended to be pronounced as "-skant", just like coruscate, but of course the Prequels did what English does best and reduced the last syllable to a soft schwa or unvoiced "uh" (i.e. "-sənt").

 

[Blake00]

I think that was the series that first named the Imperial Capital as Coruscant. Initially intended to be pronounced as "-skant", just like coruscate, but of course the Prequels did what English does best and reduced the last syllable to a soft schwa or unvoiced "uh" (i.e. "-sənt").

Yeah that was a shock.. it's talking about them being on a capital world and I'm thinking "uh oh, what made up place is this gonna be as Coruscant doesn't appear until like 7 or 8 years after the book came out" and then they actually said Coruscant and I was like WAT!! Although they mention Luke looking at mountains in the distance past the city which doesn't quite fit lol, but hey that's still very cool. Story immersion leveled up!