New! Reading Anything Thread 2.0

[lester1/2jr]

just finishing "90% of everything" a non fiction book about the shipping industry. Basically, the whole word depends on it but meanwhile it's crews of Philipinos with white captains who are overworked and constantly paranoid about pirates and hitting right whales and stuff.

[chainsaw midget]

I just finished reading Horseman by Christina Henry.  It's a sequel to the Legend of Sleepy Hollow that takes place 30 years after the incident with Ichabod and the Headless Horseman. 

The book is face paced and for the most part interesting, but it's got three major flaws. 

The main character is a 14 year old girl who's the grand daughter of Brom Bones and Katrina.  She tells us every single chapter that she's a boy and refuses to every be a girl and you can't make her!  Nobody really seems to have a problem with this. 

She also will absolutely not stop telling us how her grandpa Brom is the biggest, strongest, toughest, most hansom, most popular, greatest thing that every lived. 

But the biggest problem is the last few chapters of the book.  It absolutely blows the ending. 

Not one I'd recommend. 

[Rev. Powell]

Started reading "Vineland" by Thomas Pynchon. It's going to be loosely adapted as a movie with Leo DiCapprio releasing this fall (ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER). Some people think Pynchon is difficult but I think you just have to go in with the right attitude: the plot is going to be too complex to follow, and that's the point. Don't try, just enjoy without fully understanding.

[jimpickens]

Reading Doc Savage Mountain Terror The Pharaohs Ghost and Time Terror

[Rev. Powell]

My reading of Vineland was interrupted halfway through when the library wouldn't let me renew it because someone else reserved it. So I started a re-read of "Animal Farm."

[chainsaw midget]

I read a book of short stories.  What October Brings.  It's a series of Halloween Lovecraft themed stuff.  It's alright. 

[FatFreddysCat]

Currently reading:

Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, by Susan Morrison

[Sitting Duck]

Box Office Poison by Tim Roby (who is a film critic for the Daily Telegraph), which recounts the stories behind a variety of box office bombs. While many of the usual suspects are featured (Intolerance, Dr. Doolittle, Dune, etc.), some you may not be familiar with get included, like the Coen Brothers flop The Hudsucker Proxy. He also deliberately skips over certain titles which either technically broke even (Cleopatra, Waterworld) or regards as having been done to death (Heaven's Gate, Ishtar).

[indianasmith]

Just finished a remarkably entertaining true story called A KIM JONG IL PRODUCTION by Paul Fischer.

While North Korea's founding Communist god Kim Il Sung was still alive, his son and designated successor, Kim Jong Il, was placed in charge of North Korea's film industry.  His movies were klunky, predictable communist personality cult propaganda that people tired of quickly, so in 1978 he got the brilliant idea to kidnap one of South Korea's most popular movie stars, Choi Eun-hee and her estranged husband, Shin Sang-ok, South Korea's best-known movie producer.
For eight years the couple were captives in North Korea, kept in isolation at first and then gradually allowed more and more freedom - as long as they would make movies for the Dear Leader!  Finally, in 1986, they managed to escape while attending a film festival in Vienna. This bizarre true story was one of the most fascinating things I have read in a while, and reminded me one more time that every citizen of almost any country on earth should thank God every day that they were NOT born in North Korea!

[Rev. Powell]

[zombie no.one]

I studied English Literature at degree level, and this guy is still the only fiction author I've read more than one novel by. I've read approx 30 of his books (I last read this particular one when I was about 14). His writing is clunky, repetitive, and one dimensional, but there is something about it that draws me in every time. lol

[lester1/2jr]

I'm reading "A Marginal Jew: rethinking the historical Jesus". It starts off kind of clunky but settles down into some interesting, ridiculously OCD but in a good way stuff.

Could Jesus read? Every single thing in the New Testament, outside of the New Testament, and in historical sources about literacy, is poured through. In the end, the author sticks with an Occum's Razor sort of answer: someone in his position would tend to not be able to read, BUT the fact that he was a preacher by trade (after being a carpenter), and also the oldest son and likely responsible for reading to his brothers and sisters, means he probably had some sort of religious Hebrew education, though probably not beyond that. I don't think to many people would argue he was a book worm and had read "Livy's History of Rome" or something.

Catholics apparently believe that Jesus' "brother and sisters" as described repeatedly are in fact cousins because Mary is the perpetual virgin. He lays waste to this theory. Again, it's part Occum's Razor and part research. Jesus' brother James is mentioned in Josephus' "Antiquities of the Jews". He doesn't refer to him as Jesus' cousin. There are other things where Jesus' cousins AND his brothers and sisters are discussed by the same author, so not looking to good for the cousin argument but who knows?  He had an uncle named Cleopus which is sort of crazy to think about.

There are 4 other books in this series.