What Are You Reading Now?

[Beowulf]

Well, I just started reading, (at night when I get home from work)The Lodger.

This book is great! I guess everyone has read it here? If not, I highly recommend to do so, because it does let you feel as if you are back in the day of the Whitechapel murderer, though a fictional take on it. Fog and made up persons and all, but with a very nice fact thrown in here and there and really absorbing, light reading.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could talk to some of the policmen's wives back then, to hear just what their husbands had to say after some of those ripper hunts?

[DVV]

Hi Beowulf, agreed, The Lodger is great. I can't think of a better novel inspired by JtR.

[Henry Flower]

Last night I re-read Herman Melville's great little novella Bartleby the Scrivener. Can't recommend it highly enough, a wonderfully comic but ultimately disturbing study of alienation and the strange world beyond normalcy.

[Robert]

Henry, there was a very good film with Paul Scofield :

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065452/

[007]

Just read The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton this past weekend. Very good. Saw John Carter at the late show last night, so I'm thinking of rereading A Princess of Mars again.

[Henry Flower]

Bartleby

Robert - thank you so much, I had no idea! Scofield is one of my very favourite actors, so I have to find a copy!

I'm indebted to you.

HF

[Cogidubnus]

PS was an old boy of my school and always held up as something of an example to us...may have unfairly prejudiced me against him!
Dave

[Cogidubnus]

Rereading some of Edward Marston's Railway Detective series at the moment (helps to pass the time on buses) ... set in the 1850s with a Scotland Yard detective specialising in railway crime... not a bad read at all...

Dave

[Robert]

You're welcome, Henry.

Dave, about 30 years ago I read some of Whitechurch's stories. I don't remember anything brilliant about them, but they were reasonable. You can hear a few here :

http://www.archive.org/details/BbcThrillingStoriesOfTheRailway05Eps

[curious4]

What are you reading now?

Potemkin and Katherine the Great, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett and Great Tales of the Sea edited by William McFee (published sometime in the 1940s).

Personally I love ALL of Terry Pratchett´s books, but I suppose it depends on what kind of sense of humour you have - and you have to read a good deal between the lines.

Glad to see someone else has discovered The Uncommercial Traveller - hoping the chapter on Merchantile Jack etc will give me some support for my idea that "Jack" was a sailor.

Great thread this!

Best wishes
C4

[The Good Michael]

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies- 50 pages is enough to read. It was fine, but the gag wore thin.

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter- Once again, the gag wore thin, but it was worth reading for the photoshopped pictures and some fun.


The Reapers are the Angels - Started out to be a good and unusual zombie book, but got a bit weird with a mutant human section. Still, at maybe 180 pages, why not?


Mike

[The Good Michael]

Now I'm reading The Terror by Dan Simmons. It is everything I want in a book so far at about 200 pages. Have 500 or so to go. Absolutely a joy to read, and I'm not a big Simmons fan.


Mike

[Tom_Wescott]

Dan Simmons! I read a horror book by him years ago. Very good. What's the Terror about? I recently read (devoured is more like it) Stephen King's new book 11/22/63. Suitably, I'm now reading Mark Fuhrman's book on the JFK assassination, and it may just be the perfect JFK book. At only 226 pages, it's all meat and no fat.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Beowulf]

I did get a copy of In the Fog, by Richard Harding Davis, an old one from 1902 with lovely plates. Very nice book and good story. Really takes you back to those times.

This author intrigues me as he did go to Mary Kelly's place after her tragedy sometime later. Wish he wrote more about that.

[The Good Michael]

Dan Simmons! I read a horror book by him years ago. Very good. What's the Terror about? I recently read (devoured is more like it) Stephen King's new book 11/22/63. Suitably, I'm now reading Mark Fuhrman's book on the JFK assassination, and it may just be the perfect JFK book. At only 226 pages, it's all meat and no fat.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

Tom,

i don't want to give anything away. The book is about the Franklin expedition to the Northwest Passage in the 1840s. It is true to history and wonderfully detailed, but there is an element of terror and some mystery that makes this book absolutely wonderful. The details and description of weather conditions and simple things like the use of coal and rum rations, just make it all feel real. Keep in mind that I'm in Kazakhstan where it has hit -40 several times this winter with godawful wind that I still take a daily walk in, so I feel connected to these hapless sailors.

Mike