Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine So what are you READING?

The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly.

By the way, I know this is a mere cookbook, but if you like trying out tasty food that's not dead flesh, this is a winner:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/881348.Fresh_from_the_Vegetarian_Slow_Cooker

I've tried about 1/4th to 1/3rd of the recipes here so far, and there haven't been too many clunkers. Most of them just need a little tinkering here and there. Like, I usually prefer less salt and sweetener in my food, and more garlic.

Also...

One thing about veggies in a slow cooker versus meat: they tend to overcook a lot more easily, and they're harder to salvage afterwards. So I rarely use the cooker unless I'm home to check up on the food occasionally. Unfortunately, when I'm going to a job, "Cook eight hours" ends up being "Cook ten hours. (Travel time, don'cha' know.)

Well, no technology's perfect, right?

But I appreciate that these recipes appear to have been tested before publication, at least. Too often, when I've tried stuff from online, it's obvious that someone pulled the whole thing from the, uh... part they sit on.

Finished my re-read of American Gods in anticipation of the TV series. It's still a good read, relatively straight-forward and seems ready made for adaptation (as the book progresses though, I see the effects budget going up and up).

First I've heard of that. Some big names behind it. The trailer wasn't much help but anything Gaimen is worth a read and anything with Al Swearengen is worth at least one watch. Look forward to it.


Re-reading Fables. SO many subtle little nods to later events, that meant nothing at the time, it's fun again.

This post goes out to all the other Ladies of Legion World:

READ THIS BOOK:

https://www.amazon.com/Youll-Grow-Out-Jessi-Klein/dp/1455531189/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481849419&sr=1-1&keywords=jessi+klein+you%27ll+grow+out+of+it

I did, and I'm glad I did.

(And do please tell me after you've read it whether you were glad you did, or not glad. Either way, it's getting publicity, and there's no such thing as...et cetera.)

Maybe a good book for the book exchange at school?

I've also just learned that raw, straight-from-the-bulk-bin split peas WILL NOT slow-cook properly, no matter how long you wait. In the future, I'll treat them like pintos, et al. and do a soak + pre-cook first.

I did salvage the soup, though. But it cost me a lot of precious time.

I'm about halfway through Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway. Doomsday, funny, British, clockworks, mechanical bees, espionage, mobsters...

Gil's All Fright Diner by A. Lee Martinez.


Again.

I just realized that I never plugged The Stockholm Octavo here. Let me rectify that. In 1791 Sweden, Emil Larsson is trying to find a wife. His boss at his Customs job insists that it's not proper for a bureaucrat his age to remain a bachelor. His good friend, the card-reader and tavern-owner, Mrs. Sparrow, helps him in his search. Soon they're both caught up in the intrigue linked to the Revolution in neighboring France, and the spillover conflict between two opposing factions in their own country.

Karen Englemann did a great job of juggling her large cast in this tale. The only criticism I really have is that a couple of the denouements at the end got a little far-fetched, as she was running out of time to wrap up the story. But if you love meaty historical fiction, this one's a winner.

Reading Chekhov again. Also a book of poetry from 18th Century Vietnam:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/807765.Spring_Essence

Just finished Norm MacDonald's book "Based on a True Story", which is presented as an autobiography, but is really a surrealist comedy send-up of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas mixed with a lot of "meta" scenarios that play like a distorted version of Norm's real life churned through B-movie cliches. It's incredibly funny, but not traditionally so, much like MacDonald himself, so your mileage may vary. I really dug it.

I'm reading Ross Macdonald hard boiled detective books on the train to work.

I always enjoy books, essays, & documentaries about how evil McDonald's is.

Finished the "Dream-Quest of Unknown Kaddath" by H.P. Lovecraft, which is essentially the story of one of Lovecraft's go-to characters, Randolph Carter, exploring the entire dream realm in search of the fabled city of the Old Gods so he can have them grant him access to the beautiful "Sunset city" of his dreams. Along the way he encounters locations and people from a lot of the previous stories in the "Dream Cycle". It's a bit of a tough read, with no chapter breaks, dialogue and very long paragraphs, so you are looking at block after block of monolithic text. The payoff is interesting, as it is highly sentimental about Boston and New England, and (like passages in his Charles Dexter Ward novel) is much more emotive than you'd expect given Lovecraft's reputation.

Got out John Lanchester's The Debt To Pleasure for a re-read this week. For all of its rambling tone (and lots of run-ons... not the book for you if run-ons make you scream) it's super-fast to get through. That is, if you've ever been a fan of trendy food writing and/or travel memoirs. Those are really just the lure to get you into it, though. All kinds of other stuff is, uh... cooking just below the fancy-pants surface.

The narrator of the book, Tarquin Winot, is so damn unreliable that Lanchester pulls off the neat trick of forcing the reader to develop a parallel story in his/her head where Winot's view of the people around him is corrected to be more in line with what "reality" probably was. Winot, for all his intelligence, is (to say the least) one messed-up guy. You know if you met him in real life, you'd be frustrated as hell with his b.s. If you were lucky, that's all you'd end up feeling.

More details here, for the curious: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8050-4388-4

Funnily enough, on our bookshelf this one's right next to Mark Kurlansky's Edible Stories, which I can't get into at all. There's nothing wrong with it per se. But the writing style is a huge stumbling block for me. I just can't get past it to enjoy the various characters and settings. Maybe I should try again...?

"Coming Out to Play" by Robbie Rogers... autobiography of the first openly gay professional soccer player in the United States... heartbreaking (to a degree) account of how internalized homophobia can be fostered by otherwise loving parents... and while the author certainly made good strides in overcoming said internalized homophobia, there is still quite a bit present when themes of masculinity are interwoven... nonetheless, so far a compelling story...

Found a digest-sized collection of Hans Erni's paintings for a dollar at someone's yard sale over the weekend. Been enjoying it, though technically I'm not really reading it, since the text is all in French.

Starting Alan Moore's "Jerusalem", which is pretty daunting as the book is enormous and I'm a notoriously slow reader. I suspect I'll just repost "Still reading 'Jerusalem'" here every few months for the rest of my life.

One of the 10 longest novels in English at time of publication according to wiki. I look forward to reading the review in my next incarnation

I just finished reading this list I apparently wrote on my phone and forgot about.

McCord
Macgruder
Liddy
Hunt
Dean
Mitchell
Ehrlichman
Colson
Haldeman
Baldwin
Macgregor
Larue
Krogh
Strachan
Stans
Sturgis
Sirica

For those who don't recognize, that's a list of Watergate conspirators, plus the judge who tried the burglars. Why did I write this? It's a mystery. I was less than 14 months old at the time of the break-in, so I'm pretty sure I wasn't involved. I have to admit that I can't account for my whereabouts on those dates, though.

Just finished Sue Grafton's Q Is For Quarry a few days ago. (I found a used copy on the way to the doc's office. I'd had a premonition that I'd be stuck there for hours.) It was interesting. Millhone scours small desert towns with two retired cops in pursuit of a cold case where a teenage drifter was killed. Grafton works in some background on the detective and her own family life, or lack of it. (Resisting the urge to make the whole family into villains.) The ending was a little abrupt for my taste, though.

mr_cleome had A Bullet For Your Thoughts lying around, so I picked that up next. I'm almost all the way through, but honestly: I'm just in it at this point to count the typos and plethora of misplaced commas. Dude, I know it's likely a vanity press, but for 's sake PROOFREAD! This is a mystery-thriller which mostly seems to exist so the author (Lawrence W. Erickson) can name-drop locales in my town of residence which wouldn't mean zip to anyone from anywhere else. The story itself has no elements which would make it distinctively part of this region (as opposed to, say, New York or LA)-- unless you count heroic amounts of rain, techies in suits, and coffee. The plot is standard industrial skullduggery boilerplate, with lots of explosions.

Same applies to his characters. Even the most interesting of the villains (sort of a redneck Ninja with a thing for singing cowboy tunes) sounds like he was probably lifted (or rejected) from a Tarrantino flick. Also, the dehumanized femme fatale (aka "The Serpent"-- how original) is bi and purportedly runs around seducing everything in sight. (Off-camera.) I kept looking at the publishing date again to confirm I wasn't reading a "for men only" pulp novel from 1958. I wasn't.

The most believable thing that happens here is the P.I.'s painter girlfriend abandoning him for being a suicidal goon without the common sense to leave town when the bodies start to pile up. She could forgive him by story's end, I suppose.

Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-year Battle Between Marvel and DC
By Reed Tucker

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/reed-tucker/slugfest-tucker/

Interesting book, well-researched, with plenty of actual quotations from the subjects. Focusing more on the corporate side of the two comics giants, it reveals why both companies make some of the dumb decisions they do. (Hint: Management sees their core industry as marketing and distribution, rather than, oh, say, art and storytelling.)

Also profiling many of the stable and properties of DC and Marvel, the book discusses many major turning points in the industry. A few examples: the defection of Jack Kirby, and later John Byrne, “Secret Wars” and “Crisis”, and the era of “event” comics, the creation of comic book shops and direct marketing, the cross-overs and Amalgam Comics of the 90’s, the “Cinematic Universes”.

DC Comics (which, the author points out, stands for Detective Comics Comics) was initially nonplussed by Marvel’s success. The creation of the black-and-yellow taxicab “checkerboard” covers was an attempt to more obviously brand their books, as some executives thought that those dumb kids were buying Marvel accidentally when all they really wanted was DC. It turns out DC was half-right: after the taxi-cab issues began appearing, DC’s sales plummeted.

Interestingly, Jim Shooter is mentioned as the 13-year-old ‘genius’ who began his career in comics at a very early age… but there is no mention anywhere in the book of the Legion of Super-Heroes. I guess the Legion is unnecessary in telling the story of DC. (Although Supersnipe and Brother Power the Geek do get references.)

Incidentally, both Marvel and DC are acutely aware that like cigarettes, their core business involves getting children hooked early, while still providing a products strong enough for teens and adults. They just haven’t figured out how to do it very well yet.

Uncle Fester: There must be SOME way to pick up that kind of money.
Gomez: I've got it! We'll invent something that costs a dime to make, sells for a dollar, and is habit-forming.

Investigator 1: Who could possibly have bugged this office? You'd have to be tiny to be able to get that wiretap in there!
Investigator 2: >gasp< You don't mean...
Investigator 1: But Baby Faced BFOB is supposed to be on our side!



Gah! It's been over a month now and Cleome still hasn't told us if she gets back with him at the end!

If only all the residents of murder prone English TV towns would move at the next death.




That sounds interesting. I have to admit I get a little frustrated reading some of the historical commentaries as they often leave out lots of details. There's only so much you can fit in and make it coherent and life and industry isn't like that. Besides, leaving out the Legion... tsk...


Oh, I'm reading Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.