What are you reading right now?

[Silver Kamen]

[lhb412]

Continuing my classic horror reading: The Haunted Looking Glass, a collection of classic horror short stories selected and illustrated by famed illustrator Edward Gorey.

[Silver Kamen]

[StevenScrivello]

[Silver Kamen]

[StevenScrivello]

[Silver Kamen]

[Reaper G]

The Reach of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman (2000)

A look a chefs' striving for quality and success. The book is divided into three sections -- the grueling Certified Master Chef exam at the Culinary Institute of America; Michael Symon making his Cleveland restaurant, Lola, one of the best in the country (a decade before "Iron Chef America" and "The Chew"); and Thomas Keller's French Laundry, often called the best restaurant in the country (when Grant Achatz, now running Alinea in Chicago, was his sous chef).

[Silver Kamen]

[sentaison]

Just finished Eric Flint and David Carrico's 1636:The Devils Opera. If you haven't read any of the books based on Eric Flints collaborative Ring of Fire universe there is a lot here that you won't get. But if you have, this is a nice little Renaissance Noir story with some political overtones.

For those not familiar with the Ring of Fire series, it starts out with a West Virginia mining town transported through time and space to Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War. The first novel is 1632 and is certainly the best starting point if you're interested in good alt history. There are currently around 14 novels and 9 short story collections set in the universe with more to come.

[MekaGojira3k]

Just finished Dracula for the first time. It's...alright. Not as good as my experience with Frankenstein last year. Dracula is sort of derpy. LIke....it's pretty obvious this dude is probably evil and/or a monster. Whatevs.

[lhb412]

^The first part of Dracula, with Harker in Transylvania, is awesome, and there's great stuff throughout, only it gets to be a slough once you get halfway. I think this is largely a problem of how it's aged. We're used to supernatural fiction now, but back then an extended narrative of rational, modern (for the time) folks investigating and unraveling a supernatural threat was a real novelty. Now we're so used to it. To put it simply: we all know what a vampire is these days and something of 'the rules,' so a lot of that is superfluous to us.

[MekaGojira3k]

The Witching Hour by Anne Rice
pretty solid until the last 200 pages or so.
I still liked it, but the ending didn't live up to the promise of the rest of the book.
I need to read the sequel though.

[MekaGojira3k]

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. This is the first time I've ever read it. I liked it, the ghosts tend to come off a LOT creepier here than in most adaptations. Usually The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is the only mildly creepy thing.

[lhb412]

[XvGojira]

Just finished "Ready Player One". That was a blast of a book! Total geek book. I encourage anyone to read it.

[lhb412]

Reading Don Quixote Part 1 by Cervantes - it's a long book, and since it was originally two books published a decade apart I'm splitting it up accordingly.

[DannyBeane]

Just finished Fight Club, now I'm working on Chushingura.

[lhb412]

The Wisdom of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton

[MekaGojira3k]

Finished Neuromancer. I don't necessarily like Gibson's style, but like 3/4 of the way through the novel I found myself really drawn in. It's like a really long Ghost in the Shell episode, I may try to check out more of his stuff, but it wasn't anything earth shattering.

[planetxleader]

[klen7]

typically i'm not one to judge a book by its cover... but i pretty much decided to buy this one without even finding out anything about it.

[ILL GREEN]

Indulging the photos in these books.

[MekaGojira3k]

Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin (My mom got me the set for my Birthday and replaced my copy of Game of Thrones that she destroyed last summer ) and Godzilla Returns by Marc Cerasini.

[eabaker]

Just finished JB Priestley's Benighted, the novel on which James Whale's The Old Dark House is based. Being so, so familiar with the movie, I couldn't help comparing and contrasting the two most of the way. The book is damned good, and the movie is an extremely faithful adaptation. There's some very, very good character material which the book is, of course, able to explore in a lot of depth, whereas the movie (quite successfully, for the most part) has to rely more on visual and performative implications. The actually complement each other quite brilliantly - almost like with 2001, I think I'd say they're a richer experience combined than either one is alone. After loving the whole book, I was disappointed to find that almost the entire climactic sequence of the movie - one of my favorite scenes of all time - was almost entirely invented by the screenwriters. The boo ends up feeling anti-climactic by comparison.

Anyway, it's a great book, and I'd eagerly recommend it to fans of the movie, and those who have never seen it.