What BOOK(s) are you reading?

www.amazon.com/Ratification-People-Debat...7-1788/dp/0684868555

I am reading Lovecraft Country, by Matt Ruff. The book caught my attention on the library shelf, in part, because it looked ancient. Not ancient like centuries old, but more like a hardcover library book that might have survived many decades of use. I picked it up, and the cover felt worn, and the color scheme art definitely seemed old-fashioned, like maybe from the '30s or '40s. But I had a suspicion and was not completely surprised to see a web address on the back cover, and a glance inside revealed that this book was published in 2016.

The other big surprise is the content. Although the collection of stories inside dabble with magic-using cultists and ghosts, the protagonists are very resourceful and plucky African-Americans struggling against the Midwestern racism of the 1950s. The first story starts out with the harrowing experience of a black Korean War vet simply driving a car from Florida to Illinois. The tension becomes almost unbearable as he encounters oppressive and threatening racism despite his use of the Safe Negro Travel Guide to the few motels and restaurants along his route that do business with black people. That brought back an old memory from junior high, when my 7th grade social studies teacher invited a black teacher from another department in the school to teach our class. He told us about his personal experiences of driving while black in the 1950s. And there really was something like the Safe Negro Travel Guide back then, only it was called the Green Book.

The stories in Lovecraft Country are loosely connected, and told in chronological order. Characters from the first story appear again and again, and takes turns as lead characters in their own stories. The scenes involving racism always struck me as more intense and scary then the supernatural scenes. I highly recommend Lovecraft Country, even if it isn't quite working with the Cthulhu Mythos.

I am also currently partway through the third book of the White Trash Zombie series, by Diana Rowland. Despite taking place in modern Louisiana, there is zero racism depicted, possibly because the only black character is big former college football player who now works for the local coroner's office. The main character is a plucky white trash girl turned zombie. As long as she is able to eat brains from time to time, she easily passes as a normal human. Despite the subject matter, the stories are fairly tame, with modest amounts of violence and fairly discrete descriptions of gore. It's light, pleasant fare compared to Lovecraft Country or conventional horror stories.

Shellhead wrote: I am reading Lovecraft Country, by Matt Ruff. The book caught my attention on the library shelf, in part, because it looked ancient. Not ancient like centuries old, but more like a hardcover library book that might have survived many decades of use. I picked it up, and the cover felt worn, and the color scheme art definitely seemed old-fashioned, like maybe from the '30s or '40s. But I had a suspicion and was not completely surprised to see a web address on the back cover, and a glance inside revealed that this book was published in 2016.

The other big surprise is the content. Although the collection of stories inside dabble with magic-using cultists and ghosts, the protagonists are very resourceful and plucky African-Americans struggling against the Midwestern racism of the 1950s. The first story starts out with the harrowing experience of a black Korean War vet simply driving a car from Florida to Illinois. The tension becomes almost unbearable as he encounters oppressive and threatening racism despite his use of the Safe Negro Travel Guide to the few motels and restaurants along his route that do business with black people. That brought back an old memory from junior high, when my 7th grade social studies teacher invited a black teacher from another department in the school to teach our class. He told us about his personal experiences of driving while black in the 1950s. And there really was something like the Safe Negro Travel Guide back then, only it was called the Green Book.

The stories in Lovecraft Country are loosely connected, and told in chronological order. Characters from the first story appear again and again, and takes turns as lead characters in their own stories. The scenes involving racism always struck me as more intense and scary then the supernatural scenes. I highly recommend Lovecraft Country, even if it isn't quite working with the Cthulhu Mythos.

I read this a few years ago, it was pretty good. It kind of bothered me that there were zero nice/decent white people in the whole book, but I think that was sort of the point. You make a good point about the racism being more horrible than the horror.

I started reading the 40k novel, Deathwatch. So far, so good. I believe the game Deathwatch Overkill is in my near future.

Recently finished Lost Stars. A Star Wars novel that follows two childhood friends through the original trilogy with one becoming an officer in the Empire and the other joining the Rebellion. It was a fun read which was all I was looking for.

Now I'm working my way through the Witcher stories. Pretty good so far.

I know some of y'all are music nerds too, so I wanna highly recommend They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib. It's a collection of essays about a wide range of pop music, from Carly Rae Jepsen to Springsteen to third-wave emo. Dude has plenty to say about it all, and consistently works in personal material about race, grief, loneliness, and joy that really elevates the writing to another level.

I'm not currently reading Cryptonomicon, but I just stumbled across this quote and feel like reading it again.

Bobby Shaftoe has become a connoisseur of nightmares.

Like a fighter pilot ejecting from a burning plane, he has just been catapulted out of an old nightmare, and into a brand-new, even better one. It is creepy and understated; no giant lizards here.

It begins with heat on his face. When you take enough fuel to push a fifty-thousand-ton ship across the Pacific Ocean at twenty-five knots, and put it all in one tank and the Nips fly over and torch it all in a few seconds, while you stand close enough to see the triumphant grins on the pilots’ faces, then you can feel the heat on your face in this way.

Bobby Shaftoe opens his eyes, expecting that, in so doing, he is raising the curtain on a corker of a nightmare, probably the final moments of Torpedo Bombers at Two O’Clock! (his all-time favorite) or the surprise beginning of Strafed by Yellow Men XVII.

But the sound track to this nightmare does not seem to be running. It is as quiet as an ambush. He is sitting up in a hospital bed surrounded by a firing squad of hot klieg lights that make it difficult to see anything else. Shaftoe blinks and focuses on an eddy of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, like spilled fuel oil in a tropical cove. It sure smells good.

A young man is sitting near his bed. All that Shaftoe can see of this man is an asymmetrical halo where the lights glance from the petroleum glaze on his pompadour. And the red coal of his cigarette. As he looks more carefully he can make out the silhouette of a military uniform. Not a Marine uniform. Lieutenant’s bars gleam on his shoulders, light shining through double doors.

"Would you like another cigarette?" the lieutenant says. His voice is hoarse but weirdly gentle.

Shaftoe looks down at his own hand and sees the terminal half-inch of a Lucky Strike wedged between his fingers.

"Ask me a tough one," he manages to say. His own voice is deep and skirted, like a gramophone winding down.

The butt is swapped for a new one. Shaftoe raises it to his lips. There are bandages on that arm, and underneath them, he can feel grievous wounds trying to inflict pain. But something is blocking the signals.

Ah, the morphine. It can’t be too bad of a nightmare if it comes with morphine, can it?

"You ready?" the voice says. God damn it, that voice is familiar.

"Sir, ask me a tough one, sir!" Shaftoe says.

"You already said that."

"Sir, if you ask a Marine if he wants another cigarette, or if he’s ready, the answer is always the same, sir!"

"That’s the spirit," the voice says. "Roll film."

A clicking noise starts up in the outer darkness beyond the klieg light firmament. "Rolling," says a voice.

Something big descends towards Shaftoe. He flattens himself into the bed, because it looks exactly like the sinister eggs laid in midair by Nip dive-bombers. But then it stops and just hovers there.

"Sound," says another voice.

Shaftoe looks harder and sees that it is not a bomb but a large bullet-shaped microphone on the end of a boom.

The lieutenant with the pompadour leans forward now, instinctively seeking the light, like a traveler on a cold winter’s night.

It is that guy from the movies. What’s-his-name. Oh, yeah!

Ronald Reagan has a stack of three-by-five cards in his lap. He skids up a new one: "What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young Marines on their way to Guadalcanal?"

Shaftoe doesn’t have to think very long. The memories are still as fresh as last night’s eleventh nightmare: ten plucky Nips in Suicide Charge!

"Just kill the one with the sword first."

"Ah," Reagan says, raising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking his pompadour in Shaftoe’s direction. "Smarrrt —you target them because they’re the officers, right?"

"No, fuckhead!" Shaftoe yells. "You kill ’em because they’ve got fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword?"

Reagan backs down. He’s scared now, sweating off some of his makeup, even though a cool breeze is coming in off the bay and through the window.

Reagan wants to turn tail and head back down to Hollywood and nail a starlet fast. But he’s stuck here in Oakland, interviewing the war hero. He flips through his stack of cards, rejects about twenty in a row. Shaftoe’s in no hurry, he’s going to be flat on his back in this hospital bed for approximately the rest of his life. He incinerates half of that cigarette with one long breath, holds it, blows out a smoke ring.

When they fought at night, the big guns on the warships made rings of incandescent gas. Not fat doughnuts but long skinny ones that twisted around like lariats. Shaftoe’s body is saturated with morphine. His eyelids avalanche down over his eyes, blessing those orbs that are burning and swollen from the film lights and the smoke of the cigarettes. He and his platoon are racing an incoming tide, trying to get around a headland. They are Marine Raiders and they have been chasing a particular unit of Nips across Guadalcanal for two weeks, whittling them down. As long as they’re in the neighborhood, they’ve been ordered to make their way to a certain point on the headland from which they ought to be able to lob mortar rounds against the incoming Tokyo Express. It is a somewhat harebrained and reckless tactic, but they don’t call this Operation Shoestring for nothing; it is all wacky improvisation from the get-go. They are behind schedule because this paltry handful of Nips has been really tenacious, setting ambushes behind every fallen log, taking potshots at them every time they come around one of these headlands. . .

Something clammy hits him on the forehead: it is the makeup artist taking a swipe at him. Shaftoe finds himself back in the nightmare within which the lizard nightmare was nested.

"Did I tell you about the lizard?" Shaftoe says.

"Several times," his interrogator says. "This’ll just take another minute." Ronald Reagan squeezes a fresh three-by-five card between thumb and forefinger, fastening onto something a little less emotional: "What did you and your buddies do in the evenings, when the day’s fighting was done?"

"Pile up dead Nips with a bulldozer," Shaftoe says, "and set fire to ’em. Then go down to the beach with a jar of hooch and watch our ships get torpedoed."

Reagan grimaces. "Cut!" he says, quietly but commanding. The clicking noise of the film camera stops.

"How’d I do?" Bobby Shaftoe says as they are squeegeeing the Maybelline off his face, and the men are packing up their equipment. The klieg lights have been turned off, clear northern California light streams in through the windows. The whole scene looks almost real, as if it weren’t a nightmare at all.

"You did great," Lieutenant Reagan says, without looking him in the eye. "A real morale booster." He lights a cigarette. "You can go back to sleep now."

"Haw!" Shaftoe says. "I been asleep the whole time. Haven’t I?"

He feels a lot better once he gets out of the hospital. They give him a couple of weeks of leave, and he goes straight to the Oakland station and hops the next train for Chicago. Fellow-passengers recognize him from his newspaper pictures, buy him drinks, pose with him for snap shots. He stares out the windows for hours, watching America go by, and sees that all of it is beautiful and clean. There might be wildness, there might be deep forest, there might even be grizzly bears and mountain lions, but it is cleanly sorted out, and the rules (don’t mess with bear cubs, hang your food from a tree limb at night) are well-known, and published in the Boy Scout Manual. In those Pacific islands there is too much that is alive, and all of it is in a continual process of eating and being eaten by something else, and once you set foot in the place, you’re buying into the deal. Just sitting in that train for a couple of days, his feet in clean white cotton socks, not being eaten alive by anything, goes a long way towards clearing his head up. Only once, or possibly two or three times, does he really feel the need to lock himself in the can and squirt morphine into his arm.

But when he closes his eyes, he finds himself on Guadalcanal, sloshing around that last headland, racing the incoming tide. The big waves are rolling in now, picking up the men and slamming them into rocks.

Bobby Shaftoe sections of that novel are the Tyrion sections of any GoT book.

Stephen King’s The Outsider has been quite a pleasant surprise so far. I hadn’t picked up a novel of his since The Stand and the first three books of the Dark Tower series... all read in a single insanely lonely summer sometime in my Sophomore or Junior year in HS.

My return to his work finds him a bit more pragmatic and procedural but he seems to have gained some damned good nuance in his shifting narrative perspectives between characters. He’s also intensified his proclivity toward sympathetic characters in the most unexpected, almost offensively cold moments, but he seems to know how to follow through on the repercussions .

I also love that after , I find myself really getting invested in the most impenetrable yet somehow sympathetic character in the novel so far: Holly.

I’m... almost afraid to root for her because she’s feeling a lot like Icarus with OCD at the moment. Getting too close to the truth waaay too quickly.

It’s been quite a ride, and I’m only halfway through. Good shit.

I’ve always been highly suspicious of Warhammer and 40k novels. I’m deeply concerned they are compromised by a commercial agenda in the hands of semi-skilled craftsmen. I mean, what do you take me for Games Workshop? The whole thing is like Christian rock. Hacks with questionable intentions committing atrocities that only rabid fanboys and delusional true believers could stomach. Hahaha seriously - no thanks. I don’t read 400-page commercials.

A month ago, however, it only took two complete strangers on Reddit liking the Night Lords Omnibus for me to buy it. “Great author,” they said. “The best.”

The Night Lords Omnibus follows the adventures of, well, the Night Lords, the terrorizing chapter of Astartes now fallen to chaos. Particularly the 8th legion, now more of a war band but still very deadly and wicked. Still able to terrorize, but in many respects a ghost of its former self.

I’ve now read the three novels comprised in the omnibus and I no longer scoff.

It’s not that the books don’t have a commercial feel - parts of them definitely do, such as Chapter Seven, in which the guys fight an Imperial Knight!

But there’s depth of narrative and supporting characters and complexity enough to make it a very enjoyable read.

Yes there are cliched cliff hangers but the canvas is rich and brings so much to life.

Color me a fanboy. Anybody else read these books? What should I read next?

I started listening to the first book in the Reckoners series (Steelheart), mostly because I wanted to get some background info to supplement my review of the board game which just arrived.

The writing is very much YA, but the setting is particularly interesting. I'm not a big super hero fan, but this twist of all of the people with super powers being bad is pretty gripping. It's grittier and the stakes seem higher. Enjoying it quite a bit honestly, including the Necromunda-esque locale of Newcago.

Hadik wrote: Color me a fanboy. Anybody else read these books? What should I read next?

I've haven't read any in years, but you're right that the Night Lords stuff was the most interesting of the Space Marine-oriented stories until they got into the Horus Heresy stuff and even that was spotty. If you like the setting, pretty much anything by Dan Abnett is worth a read. The Gaunt's Ghosts series is good. Titanicus (about the titan legions) was really good. The Eisenhorn/Ravenor stuff is decent.

Jackwraith wrote:

Hadik wrote: Color me a fanboy. Anybody else read these books? What should I read next?

I've haven't read any in years, but you're right that the Night Lords stuff was the most interesting of the Space Marine-oriented stories until they got into the Horus Heresy stuff and even that was spotty. If you like the setting, pretty much anything by Dan Abnett is worth a read. The Gaunt's Ghosts series is good. Titanicus (about the titan legions) was really good. The Eisenhorn/Ravenor stuff is decent.

Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Dan Abnett, most of Graham McNeill (starts as an enthusiastic non-writer and then improves, before losing interest during HH and starting to phone it in), and Sandy Mitchell are your best bets. They are better writers and also seem to grasp how absurd the setting is (particularly Mitchell, which plays much closer to a satire). My recommendation would be Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain stories.

Right. I forgot about the Ciaphas Cain stuff. I second barrowdown's recommendation on those. It's an interesting combination of the archly satirical and the high intensity conflict ("In the grim dark of the far future, there is only...") common to the setting. I think the later books got a little repetitive, but they're still not bad. OTOH, I can't really recommend McNeill at all with one exception: Priests of Mars. I'm a Mechanicus fanboy to begin with, but I thought that was well done. I haven't read either of the two sequels, though.

I'm not a fan of McNeil's writing, either. I've read the first 3-4 HH books but I've stuck primarily with Abnett's books. Gaunt's Ghosts is really good and a good stand alone is Double Eagle. Titanicus fell flat for me but Abnett handles the visceral element of 40K battles really well and Titanicus is no exception.

I think the Eisenhorn trilogy is great, Ravenor is average-to-good, and I thought the first Eisenhorn/Ravenor book from the new trilogy was plodding and underwhelming.