What Was the Last Book You Read?

[VertOlive]

For fun: The Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. It's a witty rollicking fantasy that seems like a practice run for his well known American Gods. What does a modern nation of immigrants do when all the folk gods they left behind in the old country follow them to their new lives? Loads of cheeky, sometimes creepy fun.

[southpaw52]

I recently finished The Bear and The Nightingale by Katherine Arden. I would highly recommend this book. The story line is a Russian fairytale with a young girl coming of age. How she battles good and evil.

Just started the Ink and Bone, it is book one in an ongoing series.

[younricw]

Finished The Talisman and almost done with Black House. Both by Stephen King. This is the 2nd time around.


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[Bisquitlips]

On a Hemingway biography kick of recent days. Hemingway's Boat is a good read and also Walks in Hemingway's Paris.

[Lady Onogaro]

I recently finished The Bear and The Nightingale by Katherine Arden. I would highly recommend this book. The story line is a Russian fairytale with a young girl coming of age. How she battles good and evil.

Just started the Ink and Bone, it is book one in an ongoing series.

I read the Arden book, too. I recommend it, too.

[Lady Onogaro]

I read Lyndsay Faye's Sherlock Holmes novel Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson. Loved it. Faye does a very good Sherlock Holmes pastiche.

I also finished C. S. Harris's latest book in the Sebastian St. Cyr series: Where the Dead Lie.

And then there were the graphic novels: Ms. Marvel: Generation Y; Captain Marvel: Higher, Further, Faster; Rivers of London: Night Witch.

[Morgaine]

Last book finished was Letters from Boy - the letters Roald Dahl wrote to his mother (often with a fountain pen). Thoroughly enjoyable read.

[ethernautrix]

I'm finally getting around to reading Murakami's 1Q84. I was skeptical at the beginning (or first third), but I am completely drawn into this TWO WORLDS idea and the Receiver and the Perceiver concepts--and other factors. I'm in it now. Immersed. Enjoying the ride.

[Lady Onogaro]

Just finished Elsa Hart's The White Mirror.

[VertOlive]

H. Beam Piper's The Lone Star Planet (for obvious reasons). The usual HB Piper fun, vintage sci-fi.

[writingrav]

Tje Great Passage
by Shion Miura
Great if your interested in words and dictionaries and such.

[inklord]

Margaret George: The confessions of Young Nero
Great, insightful historical writing and an interesting glimpse into the (assumed) psychology of autocrats.

[sgtstretch]

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman.

[inklord]

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman.

...nice one - good, dry humor, too!

[Lady Onogaro]

The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch. It was more a novella, actually.

Before that it was Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz. A mystery within a mystery, and both mysteries are boring.

[ethernautrix]

Now reading Michael Lewis's The Big Short (apparently also a movie; did not know; still don't know the particulars of the movie).

[TSherbs]

Just finished The Road,by Cormac McCarthy. Bleak! Kind of frustrating, too, but explaining that would entail spoilers.

[Kaputnik]

I'm going to ramble on too long. Sorry.

I have at last finished a book which I first heard of a bit more than two years ago, bought not long after that, started reading in due course, and then put aside for quite some time. The book is Letters from Russia, by Astolphe de Custine, the Marquis de Custine, who in the summer of 1839 spent three months traveling in Russia, and returned to write a book about it.

The book and its perceived significance is apparently (despite my having found out about it rather late) quite well known, and there has been so much written about it, both positive and negative, that I have nothing original to add on its principal themes. But there is an aspect which provides food for thought on the topics covered by this forum.

The Marquis wrote these “letters” mostly at night during his trip, after the main activities of the day. If he did happen to write during the day, he might have been fortunate enough to have strong sunlight to write by, otherwise it would have been candles or oil lamps; he doesn’t really say, as it’s something he would have taken for granted. Metal dip pens were being made then, but perhaps he preferred quills, at any rate, he would have needed to pause and dip regularly. Granted, a practiced writer would develop a rhythm which could make this go more quickly. When staying in inns, the rooms could be quite unpleasant; he frequently comments on the infestations of “vermin”, fleas and other insects.

Despite this, the “letters” are quite long, the edition that I have runs to 654 pages. Writing a typical one of them in a single sitting would have taken quite some time, although he sometimes comments that he is putting one aside to complete later. And these were not true letters, but documents which he was doing his best to keep secret during his trip, with a view to publication once he left the country. He was quite worried about arousing the suspicions of the Czar’s secret police, and he wrote other letters, to be sent by post, with innocuous subject matter which concealed his caustic opinions of his host country. Those other letters, in order to seem natural, must have cost him quite a bit of additional work.

It was a world in which a man of his background would find it perfectly natural to write in this manner, and perhaps at this length. Whatever one thinks of the book (in the end I rather like it), it’s hard to imagine anyone today getting the same effect with tweeting and blogging.

[Lady Onogaro]

Just finished The Road,by Cormac McCarthy. Bleak! Kind of frustrating, too, but explaining that would entail spoilers.

I think everything by Cormac McCarthy is bleak. He pretty much believes we'll blow ourselves up , poison ourselves, or induce some other catastrophe. Even in his western books, most humans are pretty much animals.

[SIR]

Not exactly the last thing I read, but rather something I am dipping into occasionally;
"That glorious future! or, Key to the Revelation" by the Rev. J L Thompson

A commentary and companion for readers of the last book of the new testament (written from the perspective of one who is encouraging others to believe, of course), and originally written in the late 1880s, it is interesting when considering the impact of later international events on the world and religious adherence.

Anyone know anything about the author?