What Are You Reading?

[smfrazier]

I'm rereading Dracula for about the 4th or 5th time.

[Pixilated]

I'm on a massive Star Trek (TOS) binge-fest at the moment. There's a local second-hand bookstore at which I made a HUGE haul several months ago. Went back today as it's my birthday and ... went to the usual corner and ... NO STAR TREK BOOKS.


I finally asked a staff member (or possibly a volunteer; this place operates on both) who led me to the new area and there I struck gold. I'd set a maximum of $50 and my bill came to $47 and change.

I did cheat a bit, though ... I left about half a dozen books behind, promising to pick them up by the end of the month (when my pensions come in) at the latest. I've done this before with them so there was no problem.

I live in a truly tiny apartment and have no idea where I'm going to put these books but ... that is irrelevant.

Stopped for a coffee on the way home and got started on "The Vulcan Academy Murders" by Jean Lorrah.

[Pixilated]

I'm rereading Dracula for about the 4th or 5th time.

I've got a paperback copy of that which is so old it's being held together by a rubber band!

I got started on classics like Dracula, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and others thanks to an extremely cheesy 1960s gothic soap opera titled "Dark Shadows" -- and a critique of that same show by the TV Guide critic Cleveland Amory. It was scathing but also so hilarious that even though I was a rabid fan of the show, I couldn't take offence ... because it was all also very accurate. His critique included the fact that the show was shamelessly ripping off classics like Dracula, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and others ... and I remember thinking "Hey, maybe I should read some of those."

I wish somebody would put either all or at least a hefty selection of his TV Guide articles together into a book. I know I'd buy it, and I suspect a lot of other people would too, if only for the nostalgia of reading about shows from years gone by.

[Ceir]

I'm on a massive Star Trek (TOS) binge-fest at the moment. There's a local second-hand bookstore at which I made a HUGE haul several months ago. Went back today as it's my birthday and ... went to the usual corner and ... NO STAR TREK BOOKS.


I finally asked a staff member (or possibly a volunteer; this place operates on both) who led me to the new area and there I struck gold. I'd set a maximum of $50 and my bill came to $47 and change.

I did cheat a bit, though ... I left about half a dozen books behind, promising to pick them up by the end of the month (when my pensions come in) at the latest. I've done this before with them so there was no problem.

I live in a truly tiny apartment and have no idea where I'm going to put these books but ... that is irrelevant.

Stopped for a coffee on the way home and got started on "The Vulcan Academy Murders" by Jean Lorrah.

Nice score! (And the answer is to rebuild your furniture out of books.)

[Pixilated]

Nice score! (And the answer is to rebuild your furniture out of books.)

Thank you! I was extremely pleased. There's a ton of TNG and DS9 and who-knows-what-else there as well but right now I'm focusing almost entirely on TOS books.

The guy manning the register says they have a regular who comes in often looking for Star Trek books ... he grinned and said "You might have beat him to it this time." That does depend on what he's looking for; if it's TNG and/or DS9 there's still plenty there.

So now I have roughly 2 dozen Star Trek books -- some non-fiction -- and am more than happy to keep adding to that.

As for making furniture out of books ... That might turn out to be my only solution!

[Nunavut Pants]

.. an extremely cheesy 1960s gothic soap opera titled "Dark Shadows" ...

My wife was a huge fan of that show. I guess she watched a fair amount of it when she was a little girl? She bought the entire set on DVD a few years ago, and binged it.

[Seanette]

My wife was a huge fan of that show. I guess she watched a fair amount of it when she was a little girl? She bought the entire set on DVD a few years ago, and binged it.

I'm a little young for the original serial, did find the early 1990s revival reasonably enjoyable, rather liked the movie that came out in 2012 (I do have that in my collection).

[Pixilated]

My wife was a huge fan of that show. I guess she watched a fair amount of it when she was a little girl? She bought the entire set on DVD a few years ago, and binged it.

I came in quite late to that party. The most famous character (the vampire) wasn't in the show for the first year or so, and the show was just having "meh" response from the public. By the time I found it he was a longstanding character.
I read somewhere that it was one of the first (if not THE first) TV show to play around with things like time travel and alternate universes. Don't know if that's true.

[Pixilated]

I'm a little young for the original serial, did find the early 1990s revival reasonably enjoyable, rather liked the movie that came out in 2012 (I do have that in my collection).

I intended to go see the movie but ... never got around to it.

[Deserted]

Today's reading: "A Course In Error-Correcting Codes, Second Edition" by Jørn Justesen and Tom Høholdt. Now that I'm once again a hacker professional programmer I find that I have a need for ECC in my day-to-day work life. I understand Hamming codes, and in fact use Hamming(11,4) in one of my personal projects, but I'm working on an embedded 386 and need something... better.

[Ironclad Alibi]

I am reading "The Ark Before Noah" by Irving Finkel. It is another book giving insight to the ancient Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian cultures 2000 years B.C.E. as well discussing all the flood stories that predate the Noah's Ark story.

[Pixilated]

My wife was a huge fan of that show. I guess she watched a fair amount of it when she was a little girl? She bought the entire set on DVD a few years ago, and binged it.

For a while it was being rerun at midnight on a channel that we got at the time (pre-cable!) and I remember watching a few episodes and thinking "OMG DID I REALLY GO BONKERS OVER THIS?!?"

Somewhere in my collection of "stuff" I still have Josette's music box! And last time I tried it ... it still worked! (Well, it's a wind-up item, no batteries needed, so maybe that's why.)

[Nunavut Pants]

Recently finished Martha Wells' "The Witch King". Pretty decent read, with parallel past-and-present timelines that switch back and forth in the narrative, chapter by chapter. Not as good (IMHO) as her well-loved "Murderbot" books, but still pretty good.

Picked up David Brin's "Sundiver" for a re-read. Been quite a while since I have read it, so while I know at least partly "who dun it", I don't remember a lot of the details. Though there are quotes from it that have lingered in my memory and had gotten them attached to other books somehow, so a couple of times I have read something and thought, "Oh, that's where this is from instead of that other book!" Anyway, there's a reason that Brin is a highly-regarded author, and this book is one example. It's part of his "Uplift" series, where basically all of the oxygen-breathing civilizations in the galaxy participate in the "uplift" of sentient creatures into sapience, making client races out of them for a long time. Except for humans, we seem to have evolved on our own (probably?) and the only reason the Galactics grudgingly accept us is because we had already bred and modified chimps and dolphins to full sapience by the time we were discovered.

[Eireann]

I'm reading The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton. I recently read The Appeal, a pretty good mystery told in epistolary style.

[Ceir]

Haven't started it yet, but I finally got my copy of Jim Butcher's The Olympian Affair in! Been looking forward to it for a long time.