The Reader’s Nook - The N&G Book Thread

So I read the Secret Commonwealth (vol 2 of The Book Of Dust) last weekend and it was fantastic. I’d definitely recommend the first two volumes to anyone who enjoyed the His Dark Materials trilogy.

I'm a big HDM fan and loved La Belle Sauvage so I'm super keen for this. Waiting until my wife and I finish our read through of The Amber Spyglass though. Glad to hear you liked it.
 
I finished Daisy Jones and The Six in about 3 hours. I didn't know a ton about it. When I started, I was so confused. It's written as an oral history of a band. And I thought it was a real band for about a chapter. Lol. Anyway, very enjoyable, very easy, not a lot of thinking. I also found out that Amazon is making it into a series and I'm intrigued with who they will choose as Daisy.
 
I finished Daisy Jones and The Six in about 3 hours. I didn't know a ton about it. When I started, I was so confused. It's written as an oral history of a band. And I thought it was a real band for about a chapter. Lol. Anyway, very enjoyable, very easy, not a lot of thinking. I also found out that Amazon is making it into a series and I'm intrigued with who they will choose as Daisy.
I just read that book a couple weeks ago! I didn’t know it was going to be a series.
 
I finished Daisy Jones and The Six in about 3 hours. I didn't know a ton about it. When I started, I was so confused. It's written as an oral history of a band. And I thought it was a real band for about a chapter. Lol. Anyway, very enjoyable, very easy, not a lot of thinking. I also found out that Amazon is making it into a series and I'm intrigued with who they will choose as Daisy.
I loved that book. One of my favorites of the year (although I haven't read much this year).
 
The Liz Phair book just got checked out to me and I'm tetering on whether to read it all now or actually work or study or something productive.
 
There's 3 books that I will re-read each year. I started the on Monday and finished them yesterday, so 1 per day. I just love them. They are:
Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
The Rum Diary - Hunter S Thompson
The Old Man And The Sea - Ernest Hemingway

Now I have moved on to a book I picked up on a holiday to Spain a few years ago. I bought the book but only ever read the first couple of chapters, so far its pretty good. Temple - Matthew Reilly
 
Just finished my first Faulkner, Sanctuary. I can't say that I liked or disliked it, just that it was unlike any other writing style I have read before. I'm intrigued enough by him that I will try another. Absalom! Or The Fable. Anybody have thoughts on him?
He is one of my favourites but I haven't read Absalom or the Fable yet. Of the five or so that I have read, Sanctuary probably rates near the middle. I've read both As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury several times, and they're both very different from each other and especially from Sanctuary, in that they're a lot more stream of consciousness and imagery-based than plot-based. My favourite, though, and the one I would recommend most to anyone, is Light in August. Longer than the other two but very character-driven and beautiful.
 
Not sure how people feel about e-books, but there’s a great site called BookBub that has customized daily emails alerting you to steeply discounted prices on e-books in genres of your choosing from your favorite e-book stores. I definitely prefer not to read on a screen but if you can get a nice ebook of East of Eden for $1.99 on the Apple store, I’m willing to buy it just because (and I just did haha).
 
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Not sure how people feel about e-books, but there’s a great site called BookBub that has customized daily emails alerting you to steeply discounted prices on e-books in genres of your choosing from your favorite e-book stores. I definitely prefer not to read on a screen but if you can get a nice ebook of East of Eden for $1.99 on the Apple store, I’m will buy it just because (and I just did haha).
Checking out e-books from the library onto my kindle has saved me so much money! I'm a big fan. So thank you for this!

I also very much like having books in my hand.

I'm an equal opportunity reader.
 
Anybody else still on this Zelazny trip? Over halfway through the month, barely a third of the way through the book, and it finally feels like the story is actually about to begin.
 
Not sure how people feel about e-books, but there’s a great site called BookBub that has customized daily emails alerting you to steeply discounted prices on e-books in genres of your choosing from your favorite e-book stores. I definitely prefer not to read on a screen but if you can get a nice ebook of East of Eden for $1.99 on the Apple store, I’m will buy it just because (and I just did haha).
Oh hey I use that, get those emails every day. I've bought a good chunk of ebooks for $1.99 over the past few months. Mostly I still stick to physical books, but sometimes I just dig into an e-book and rip through it so quickly cause I end up reading way more frequently while I just have my phone on me.
 
Anybody else still on this Zelazny trip? Over halfway through the month, barely a third of the way through the book, and it finally feels like the story is actually about to begin.
Yep, my wife and I are reading it out loud. We are a couple days behind though. I suppose it is telling that we are less than halfway through by now. I think for that reason alone, you're right about it not really making sense to do it this way unless you have read it before. We're still interested in it though.
 
Anybody else still on this Zelazny trip? Over halfway through the month, barely a third of the way through the book, and it finally feels like the story is actually about to begin.

Struggled because of the daily intake, don't feel like I'm getting enough out of it. I stopped after day 3 or 4 I think with the aim of picking it back up towards the end of the month and reading in a few longer sittings.
 
Struggled because of the daily intake, don't feel like I'm getting enough out of it. I stopped after day 3 or 4 I think with the aim of picking it back up towards the end of the month and reading in a few longer sittings.
I think now may be the time, if you want to maintain the feel of progressing through the month. It looks like the first 100 pages took 19 days, but the next hundred or so will get covered in the next week, with the last 60-ish in the last 5 or 6 days. So it looks like the meat of the story will be in this week.

Hopefully one of the plot points will be, you know, something happening.
 
Oh hey I use that, get those emails every day. I've bought a good chunk of ebooks for $1.99 over the past few months. Mostly I still stick to physical books, but sometimes I just dig into an e-book and rip through it so quickly cause I end up reading way more frequently while I just have my phone on me.
Thanks for the tip Eric. I'm equal opportunity. I love the paperwhite for reading in bed when 'er indoors is sleeping. Can't read on a phone or tablet though. Eyeburn!
 
Finished Ling Ma's Severance the other night. I thought it was fairly good, though I'm surprised by the effusive praise; people seem to find it to be rather deep and emotional, while I found it removed and numb. I think that was the point, as the author's depicting a numb apocalypse; society fizzles out rather than dies violently. I just found the protagonist to be very disaffected and unmotivated, both before the fever and after. I think people walk through bad decisions (or avoid making any decisions) every day, but it's very hard to depict in fiction without being infuriating. I'm very curious about how literature from today will fare in the long run, as disaffected protagonists who eschew their agency are rather common these days.

I also found it odd that the nature of the apocalypse is being noted in reviews as novel or interesting; when people become "zombies" in this book, they just become fixed in their routines and lose all autonomy. It's a comment on habitual consumerism, but that's been an aspect of zombie fiction since Dawn of the Dead. Again, it's commentary, but also kind of removed and sad. The logistics of this zombie-ism are rather vague as well, as it's never quite explained whether the fevered are undead or on their way to death (at one point it's implied you'd just naturally starve and die when fevered, at another it seems more like zombie-ism, with people actively decaying while remaining at their day jobs).

All in all, it was a fine book, though I'd say that if you're looking for the story of an early-20s woman living off her dead parents' inheritance and smothering her feelings as an apocalyptic event shakes our greater status quo, Otessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a lot more incisive, satirical, and emotional.
 
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