New! Reading Anything Thread 2.0

[chainsaw midget]

Just finished "My Best Friend's Exorcism".

It's a story about two young teenage girls in the 80s who are bets friends.  One of them from a poor lower class family, the other from a upper class family that pretty much places image above everything and doesn't believe in fun.  The upper class girl ends up getting possessed and starts doing various evil stuff while he friends does everything she can to try to save her.  However nobody believes her and the possessed girl keeps setting her up to take the fall for everything. 

it's actually a mostly fun book with some good character work.  Not as much horror as you'd expect though, and the ending just falls flat.  Rather than have some big climax and celebration, the story just slowly deflates. 

This is actually the THIRD books I've read from the author and everytime, I've enjoyed the book right up until the last few chapters were it just all seems to fall apart.The guy just can't stick the endings. 

[Alex]

Tigers in the Mud by Otto Carius: The Experiences of a German Tank Commander during the Second World War. Most of the book takes place on the Eastern Front, although after recovering from a serious injury, he does end up spending the last few weeks of the European war fighting against US forces. I've read a few books written by tankers from the war, and it is interesting to see their different opinions on the different enemies they faced. This one is one of Germany's top tank aces with over 150 kills credited to his name (although, as he refused to count any kills that were achieved when he was the tank commander rather than the gunner and quite often gave credit away for shared kills his actual total would have been much higher). I found his meeting with Himmler particularly interesting. He doesn't seem to be a nazi, but consider himself a German patriot and an anti-communist (at one point he muses that people in Eastern Europe would have been much happier and better off had the Soviets not won the war. I am not sure I agree with that as they'd have been mostly dead).