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What 📔book are you reading right now?

Wolfshead said:
I couldn't say how good Closing Time is, I'm only a few chapters in. Some people say it's rubbish, while others so it's as good as the original. We shall see.
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Closing Time I found to be very disappointing, as well as Something Happened. Heller just wrote one great book.
 
Hey guys! I'm sure it's been asked several times prior, but I am new and I'd like to ask myself

Over the past couple years I've worked on reading quite a bit of the works of Tolkien & Lewis. These books have been very influential to me and I think a big reason is due to their philosophy and faith being subtly (tolkien) or plainly (lewis) intertwined through their works. I still have several books I want to read from both authors, but I am already starting to look ahead at what I may be interested in reading after these.

Can you guys recommend any other authors or series which bring a similar conviction into their stories? If there is a singular place where this has already been discussed, please link me there.
 
Re-reading Verlyn Flieger's 2015 edition of JRRT's version of "The Story of Kullervo" - another "Unfinished Tale" in contrast to "Sigurd & Gudrun".
 
You could try the series of books about King Arthur by Steven R. Lawhead. I enjoyed Taliesen.
 
I've been listening to the audiobooks of Fritz Leiber's 'Fafhrd and the gray mouser' series at work and enjoying them a lot. Huge fan of sword and sorcery type stories or classic weird tales (Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft, Moorcock, etc.)
 
Just finished Crichton's Dragon Teeth. Not a bad story...a rather simplistic, contrived ending in my opinion, but it 'works.' A bit of good news, there's a "brief" he included at the end, sharing the high level of what's generally true, what's not, and such. Saved me some research and let me know I need spend no more time on it.

Have now started J.R.R. Tolkien: Christian Maker of Middle-Earth by Jeremy W. Johnston. Published late in 2023. It's clear early on he takes entirely the opposite view regarding what informed Tolkien's writing than I have come to see.

I will devour it with relish to see if he changes my mind. Fortunately he provides ample footnotes, and so far I have every reference he makes so I can validate its veracity on some of the key statements leading him to his conclusions. It looks like some of them may be statements made by other authors, rather than by Tolkien himself... so I'll be doing a good deal of digging to accept or dismiss the conclusions he draws.

If Tolkien said it, fine. If another author said it, then I need to run down that author's source information.

Fun, fun, fun.
 
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I'm currently re-reading Jurassic Park for the zillionth time. I just love it. (While I do also love the movie my real love belongs to the novel. Probably because I read it before I got to see the movie because my mother bought 10-year-old me the novel but did not allow me to see the movie without realizing that the novel is about a zillion times more gory than the movie, lol.)
 
Vorondil said:
Not to mention that the swearing in the book is like something off a naval ship.
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She wasn't really worried about swearing (it's not really much of a thing German parents worry about, at least they didn't when I was young), but violence was an absolute no-no for her. (She wouldn't even let me have Ninja Turtles action figures "because they're carrying weapons".) When she realized her 'mistake' in giving me the book she took it away again but I complained so much that she allowed me to read a chapter each day. I still do this today - I always read one chapter. 😄
 
I read it and I don't recall anything about the swearing. But then,
1) I read it years ago, and
2) I was in the Navy for 6 years and likely didn't notice the swearing because, well, it's about as consciously noticeable as breathing 🙄😆
 
That book is excellent. I personally read the book before watching the film however.
 
A 2023 German biography of Prague-born European reporter legend Egon Erwin Kisch (1885-1948). One of Germany's most prestigious journalism awards was named after him beginning in 1977. As of 2005, it became a sub-category for on-the-spot journalism, called "Reprtage", meaning the reporters had personally witnessed what they were reporting (say in contrast to TV anchors).
 
Gave up on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy less than 3/4 of the way through. I was determined to slog through and finish the book (the modest page count of 365 on my Nook edition felt like 1,000 pages) but could not follow the thread of the narrative and didn't have the interest to try. Life is too short.

I have started reading The Corridors of Time by Poul Anderson after I read his short story "The Valor of Cappen" (both also Nook downloads).
 
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