Reading anything?

[lester1/2jr]

The Pink Triangle. It's about how homosexuals were put in concentration camps along with jews, gypsies and other non aryans.

[InformationGeek]

Picked up my issues of Swamp Thing and Animal Man #3:

Swamp Thing: The story continues its slow pace towards the eventual the confrontation between Alec Holland and Sethe, the creature of The Rot (the force that brings death where it goes, like all major plagues throughout the ages).  We are also introduced to more of the history of Arcane family.  Also, we get some more messed up images as we see another force of The Rot decide to its powers against a hospital.

Animal Man: Buddy (Animal Man) and Maxine, his daughter, finally meet the Totems, the caretakers of The Red (the source and connection between all animal life in the world), who want to make Maxine their new Avatar.  The reason is that they'll use be needing her is because The Rot (There will be a crossover between these two titles) has declared war on them.  Speaking, the horrific monsters known as The Hunter 3 have targeted the family and want to wipe them, attacking Buddy's wife and son.

Both of these titles are extremely good and utterly scary.  You must be reading them if you are a fan of comics.  You won't be disappointed.

[ER]

The Ramayana. The most genuinely entertaining religious epic I've ever come across!

[Rev. Powell]

The Ramayana. The most genuinely entertaining religious epic I've ever come across!

Even more than "Battlefield Earth?" 

[Mofo Rising]

Toussaint Louverture: A Biography by Madison Smart Bell.

Fascinating stuff. During a point when America was a new nation and the French Revolution was wreaking havoc across the civilized world, here is a man who was leading a slave/black uprising to gain control of a nation. Imagine slaveholder's worst fears made real, just miles away from their stronghold. Their worst possible fears realized.

Toussaint Louverture is a truly mysterious man, pathologically averse to recognition while he creates a secret empire that eventually controls the whole island. That empire goes on to create the sole slave uprising that actually succeeds in creating a new nation.

Don't get me wrong, it's a bloody, bloody business.

Well, we all know how Haiti ended up, but it's a great story. Toussaint Louverture is either a great man or an evil genius. Either way, he is a force of history.

I'm really enjoying this book.

[indianasmith]

That does sound very interesting.  Shame Haiti is what it is today.

[The Burgomaster]

Dorian Gray is a very uneven book. Just when it starts to get good, Wilde launches into some kind of imagery that goes on for pages before I realize none of it is even making sense to me. My mind actually wandered while reading it. Then a few chapters of tapestries, jewels and such - descriptions mostly. Then, just as it's getting intolerably tedious, the plot starts moving again, in a big way, and it draws me back in. I wonder if this is intentional, or whether Wilde just had trouble writing a tight, well-paced story.

I find the same to be true of LES MISERABLES.  When Victor Hugo actually spends time on the story, it is captivating.  But he keeps veering off into historical interludes and/or descriptions of convents and things that really slow down the pace.  He did the same thing on a much smaller scale in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (one of my favorite books).  There's a fairly long chapter in that book where Hugo describes Paris . . . up and down various streets, describing the architecture and stuff.  It's as dull as all hell.  I've seen some abridged versions that cut out this entire chapter.

[ER]

My Life in France, by Julia Child

[ER]

Re-reading American Gods.

[Psycho Circus]

Re-reading American Gods.

Oh, that's next on my "to read" list! 

[InformationGeek]

iZombie Vol. 1: A story about a young gravedigger who is sort of a zombie, but still alive and normal looking in some sense.  She has to eat the brains of someone (in this case, someone dead and recently buried) in order to avoid turning into a shambling corpse.  However, whose ever brain she eats, she gains that person's memories.  She's also friends with a young woman ghost from the 60's and her boyfriend is a wereterrier.  The first story arc is set up and her deciding to solve a murder of a recent deceased person after she ate his brains.

I like this story, but I especially like the dialogue between the characters.  It's some of the best I've seen, with good charactizeration and plenty of witty humor.  I bought the first volume on a spur of the moment and I'm glad I did.  Just recently got volume 2 in the mail so I'll be digging into that later.

[ChaosTheory]

About 2/3 through Infinite Jest.  It's....hard to describe.  There's a storyline (several, actually, all interconnected), but it doesn't feel like a novel so much as a manifesto on the nature of addiction.  And Wallace's addiction was words.  Brilliant but also exhausting.
Alternating between that and The Memory Keeper's Daughter (something a little more "bestsellerish" to counter D.F. Wallace).  In 1964 a woman delivers twins, and the girl has Down's Syndrome.  The dad shuffles her away with the nurse, under the assumption she'll put the baby in a home, and tells the mother that she died in childbirth.  The nurse instead leaves town and raises the girl on her own, and everyone spends the next couple decades dealing with the aftermath.  It's soapy, but not bad.

[Vik]

Just read Shrine by James Herbert which was a great horror book. Now reading The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brook, which is really entertaining and clever.

[Newt]

Just read Shrine by James Herbert which was a great horror book.

[indianasmith]

Hey Newt!  Nice to see ya!

I'm over halfway through THE OCTOBER HORSE by Colleen McCullough.  Julius Caesar has just been murdered, and Mark Antony, a complete boor, is looting the Roman treasury as Consul while young Gaius Octavius Caesar is positioning himself to claim his Great-uncle's legacy as First Man in Rome.

What an incredible series!  If Caesar was even half the incredible person that McCullough paints him to be, he was truly one of the most remarkable men in history, and those who slew him were a crowd of losers and wannabes. If I could step back in time with an AK-47, I'd waste the lot of them and then join Caesar on his campaign to crush the Parthians!