What Book Are You Currently Reading ?

[Batman]

In 1897, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered in the rural area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat. His outraged friends -- —mostly poor cotton farmers -- form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe responsible. The hooded members wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty. Caught in the maelstrom of the Mitcham war are four people: the aging sheriff sympathetic to both sides; the widowed midwife who delivered nearly every member of Hell-at-the-Breech; a ruthless detective who wages his own war against the gang; and a young store clerk who harbors a terrible secret.

Based on incidents that occurred a few miles from the author's childhood home, Hell at the Breech chronicles the events of dark days that led the people involved to discover their capacity for good, evil, or for both.

I'm currently reading this at the moment, I only started it the other day and whilst its good I'm struggling to get into it, I like the writing style but I'm just waiting for it to kick off a little bit and get going.

I read one of Tom Franklins other books (Smonk) and that was just a crazy clusterfuck of violence and crazy characters that wasn't very good, that was why I thought I'd give this book a go because he seems like he could be a real good author, I'll let you all know what I think of it in the end

[El Kabong]

In 1897, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered in the rural area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat. His outraged friends -- —mostly poor cotton farmers -- form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe responsible. The hooded members wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty. Caught in the maelstrom of the Mitcham war are four people: the aging sheriff sympathetic to both sides; the widowed midwife who delivered nearly every member of Hell-at-the-Breech; a ruthless detective who wages his own war against the gang; and a young store clerk who harbors a terrible secret.

Based on incidents that occurred a few miles from the author's childhood home, Hell at the Breech chronicles the events of dark days that led the people involved to discover their capacity for good, evil, or for both.

I'm currently reading this at the moment, I only started it the other day and whilst its good I'm struggling to get into it, I like the writing style but I'm just waiting for it to kick off a little bit and get going.

I read one of Tom Franklins other books (Smonk) and that was just a crazy clusterfuck of violence and crazy characters that wasn't very good, that was why I thought I'd give this book a go because he seems like he could be a real good author, I'll let you all know what I think of it in the end

Wow, looks like you stumbled on a bit of American history that I didn't even know about. I may have to take a look at that one myself.

[Batman]

In 1897, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered in the rural area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat. His outraged friends -- —mostly poor cotton farmers -- form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe responsible. The hooded members wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty. Caught in the maelstrom of the Mitcham war are four people: the aging sheriff sympathetic to both sides; the widowed midwife who delivered nearly every member of Hell-at-the-Breech; a ruthless detective who wages his own war against the gang; and a young store clerk who harbors a terrible secret.

Based on incidents that occurred a few miles from the author's childhood home, Hell at the Breech chronicles the events of dark days that led the people involved to discover their capacity for good, evil, or for both.

I'm currently reading this at the moment, I only started it the other day and whilst its good I'm struggling to get into it, I like the writing style but I'm just waiting for it to kick off a little bit and get going.

I read one of Tom Franklins other books (Smonk) and that was just a crazy clusterfuck of violence and crazy characters that wasn't very good, that was why I thought I'd give this book a go because he seems like he could be a real good author, I'll let you all know what I think of it in the end

Wow, looks like you stumbled on a bit of American history that I didn't even know about. I may have to take a look at that one myself.

To be honest I love westerns and anything set in the deep south, I've read a few books like this one, I find that I end up burning myself out after a while if I stick with them for too long

for example whilst this book was fucking brilliant it was a proper slog to get through

The lore and the legends, the lawmen and the bad men, the rise of the cattle barons and the tragic demise of the Plains Indians, the pioneers and the forty-niners, Little Big Horn and the Alamo, Calamity Jane and Crazy Horse -- from the Alleghenies to the Rockies the events that shaped the West and the people who tamed it are featured in this vivid anecdotal history, which draws upon firsthand testimony and contemporary documents to provide a compelling and comprehensive account of a land as it became a nation.

[El Kabong]

To be honest I love westerns and anything set in the deep south, I've read a few books like this one, I find that I end up burning myself out after a while if I stick with them for too long

for example whilst this book was fucking brilliant it was a proper slog to get through

The lore and the legends, the lawmen and the bad men, the rise of the cattle barons and the tragic demise of the Plains Indians, the pioneers and the forty-niners, Little Big Horn and the Alamo, Calamity Jane and Crazy Horse -- from the Alleghenies to the Rockies the events that shaped the West and the people who tamed it are featured in this vivid anecdotal history, which draws upon firsthand testimony and contemporary documents to provide a compelling and comprehensive account of a land as it became a nation.

If that is what you enjoy then you would absolutely love 'Scouting on Two Continents'....just got through a part where Major Burnham (then a young adult perhaps in his 20's) and friends help dissuade a lynch mob who are in a frenzy of blood lust. That was but a small chapter, his smuggler friend taught Major Burnham how to throw other scouts off his trail which was quite interesting as well as Major Burnham's surprisingly clear view of the issues with the Indians. He indeed called them along with native tribes in Africa "savages" as was the parlance of their time, but he admitted to the wrongdoings of those in power in the Indian Affairs Bureau and the like, their repeated nixing of treaties, the going back on their word, the breach of trust which left many a bridge burned and doubtless cost the lives of thousands of people both settlers and Indians.

He's one interesting and smart dude, if you like those books you'd like his.

[Batman]

added it to my 'to read' shelf on goodreads, cheers

[Gandalf]

I read the Iggy Pop biography 'Open up and bleed' last month and it was one of the best rock biographies I have read. It is an amazing life story with some of the most grueling experiences imaginable. Blood, vomit, and fights aplenty. When I was younger I looked upon those kinds of antics and the musicians who carried them out as deities, but now I just wince and say 'My, oh my!' He is an interesting chap, old James Osterberg.

I think I will read something by Richard Dawkins next, but haven't decided what. I had no idea he had a stroke earlier this year. I also didn't realise he was 75 years old. He always seemed so vigorous with that boyish, but knowledge imbued enthusiastic voice. Hopefully he will recover and live well.

[Batman]

I'm going to be finishing Hell at the Breech in the few days so I took a stroll to waterstones and purchased these today

The classic novel about a daring experiment in human intelligence

Charlie Gordon, IQ 68, is a floor sweeper and the gentle butt of everyone's jokes - until an experiment in the enhancement of human intelligence turns him into a genius.

But then Algernon, the mouse whose triumphal experimental tranformation preceded his, fades and dies, and Charlie has to face the possibility that his salvation was only temporary.

Oakley Hall's legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era, Warlock is not only one of the most original and entertaining of modern American novels but a lasting contribution to American fiction.

"Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who . . . is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him, but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the image to exist. . . . Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with—the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the personal crises of those in power—the collective awareness that is Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall's to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall." —Thomas Pynchon

[denilson200]

Just some of the books in my store

[Batman]

I would put money on you never actually having read any of the above books you mentioned