Favorite Books and Current Reads

[Akarshi]

For some reason I've been on a big Fitzgerald kick. It came completely from nowhere. I read This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby and I am like whoah. That prose. Is like. WHOAH.

Other than that, I've been looking into South Korean/Chinese lit, but there's not much translated into English, as opposed to Japanese lit for some reason...oh well.

[noodles]

The Great Gatsby taught me a lot about prose. a thing I wrote in high school that had to do with that.

[Trifkin]

And this is why I love noobles.

So, the book I'm reading right now is the funniest thing I think I've ever read in my entire life (which I know sounds like a gross exaggeration but I really can't remember a single book that has made me laugh this much). I cannot find anything wrong with this book at all, which is weird because I can always find at least one little nit-picky thing somewhere... The closest I can get to any criticism of this book is that it may or may not have too many run-on sentences but I happen to enjoy them anyway so that probably doesn't even count. Anywho, I strongly suggest anyone who likes memoirs (I usually don't!) and needs a good laugh-until-you-cry-or-pee-or-both kind of book, pick up Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson.

Also, I just started reading a comic called Runaways, and so far I am majorly impressed. This is the kind of comic that is super clever and filled with characters you wish were your friends. Oh, and I LOVE Jo Chen's paintings for the cover art! OMG, the woman is my hero and I want her art on my walls!

This is turning out to be one hell of a lazy Sunday. :3

[zamisk]

C:

[Kinokokao]

I finished Strange Fortune. I forced myself to keep reading until things got interesting, which was around the 60-70 page mark, so the rest was fairly easy to get through.

On the way to Oklahoma I read Zero Hour by Jordan Castaway Price. I got fucking hardcore addicted to her Psycop series, so I'm working my way through the rest of her books. She's a pretty damn solid writer. Zero Hour was really good, better than Hemavore, the other stand-alone novel of hers I read. Futuristic dystopian-utopia setting with excellent world building. Her influences were clear but not overwhelming, which I appreciated. It was in 3rd person, and everything else I've ever read by her was in 1st, so that was a nice change of pace. It proved she doesn't just rely on the crutch of witty internal dialog.

Characters felt fairly fleshed out, but the romance was a little lacking -- still better than most, but I dunno... I guess I didn't see their courtship as really being all that development. The plot moved along at a good pace and definitely kept me hooked. Total thumbs up on it.

On the way back from Oklahoma I read Channeling Morpheus for Scary Mary, which is also by Jordan Caramel Price. The structure of the book was that it was divided into 5 parts and each part read like a short story, albeit ones with the same main characters and continuing story line. I reeeeally liked this one, even though I felt a tad disappointed with it as compared to Zero Hour. I think Zero Hero just felt solid and complete, whereas Channeling Morpheus zapped with amazing characters and an incredibly relationship dynamic, but suffered in some of the storytelling aspects.

It's also incredibly smutty. Each of the 5 parts has a sex scene, and by "has a sex scene" I mean they're like .. mostly sex. I'm not complaining too much, Price writes some incredibly good sex scenes. Sometimes she whips out some phrases that take me out of the moment, but mostly I enjoy them. Eventually I reach the point where the sex feels gratuitous -- where's my plot? It's the same problem I had with a lot of the Psycop stuff, where it's just like "HANG ON EVERYONE! Fucking is going to happen! Okay, fucking's done, back to your regularly scheduled plot." I'm just saying.

Channeling Morpheus is about a wanna-be vampire slayer who ends up falling for a vampire. It's a nice dynamic when you think about it because Bill, the vampire, shows a lot of vulnerability that's buried beneath a thick layer of sarcasm and cynicism. He also vacillates between gruff/tough and clingy/sweet, which is awesome. Michael, the slayer, is a young runaway who is mourning the loss of his BFF Scary Mary to a pack of vampires, hence his vendetta. Michael's all squishy and cute and hesitant, and then he goes and cuts the head off a vampire, and you're like "fuck yeah."

There's a second book, which I'm hoping might be a straight-up novel rather than something that feels more like a collection of story snippets. Then again, the snippets all mesh up into a plot, but I got the feeling that the structure meant that each had to have a sex scene, for whatever reason. Oh well. I super liked it.

Next on the agenda is Dance with the Devil by Megan Derr, who is a woefully inferior writer. Going from back to back Price books to Derr ... it's cringe-worthily awful. But, whatever, I liked Midnight enough that I keep trying her books. So far Dance isn't that bad. It is also structured like interconnected short stories centered around cases that are investigated by Chris, a demon consort with magic powers and shit. Apparently there's all kind of paranormal goodness in this world -- imps, demons, vampires, werewolves, faeries, etc. I'm not sure how I like that. Oh well. It's entertaining. Also I've only been reading it over the last 24 hours or whatever in which I've been tripping mad balls of exhaustion.

[zamisk]

Parents are out of town, read the first HP book in one evening. Loved it.

[noodles]

I don't give a shit about Twilight, or Eragon, or the Hunger Games, or Maximum Ride, or almost any young adult fiction

But Harry Potter. That is good stuff.

[zamisk]

I loved Maximum Ride a while back but now can't stand to read it. Eragon is good if you can get into it, and the writing by the end is incredibly solid. Twilight... is young adult fiction, alright. Harry Potter is the devil for normalizing magic and corrupting my soul, obviously.

But yeah I read books 2 and 3 on tuesday, but couldn't find four until today so I started reading it. Loving it.

[Trifkin]

So I actually want to read this:



Also, I mean, uh, hey Zamisk check this out--y'know Cory Doctorow an' how he's rad and stuff? Turns out I own a short story collection with one of his stories in it. Look at the title listed for page 117:

It's from which I picked up because I am an apocalypse junkie. When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth was one of my favorites. : 3 Imagine that.

[zamisk]

I've heard those were interesting, and there were two episodes in the same story, one at the end of each season. They are set 10 years after the show, and they will BLOW YOUR MINDHOLE. But yeah, neat on the Cory Doctorow stuff, I've only read one of his other books and didn't like it at all. Still, very cool!

[Trifkin]

Yeah, those episodes of Dollhouse were like @_@;?! OMG NO IT'S OVER?!?!

And PSH. "Didn't like it at all," he says. I have photographic evidence proving otherwise... but I'll save it for a rainy (read: blackmail-y) day.

>:3

[zamisk]

The book I read was called "For the Win" and it was filled with leet speak and he crammed in every gamer abbreviation he or anyone knows. It was super annoying to read.

[Curry-Kohai]

Annoying?

I'd have gone catatonic if I had to read a full book in leet and gamer abbreviations.

[Trifkin]

[Skele Von Mann]