What Book Are You Currently Reading ?

[Gandalf]

I like to read my Kindle in the bath and dropped it in the water yesterday. It was totally submerged, but the power came back on and it seemed to be okay. Today though I tried turning it on and the screen went blank. It wouldn't turn on! I tried to reset it and still nothing. I was panicking. I read online that you can put it in a sealed bag with some rice and I did that while I went out. I came back and it was trying to update, but stalled. Then right before it came back! I am so relieved! Amazon is one evil bullshit corporation, but I need to read and thank god it came back. I would happily pay 15% extra for all my books if it would go directly to the staff in Amazon sweatshops. Form more unions you buggers, take them down!

[Batman]

I like to read my Kindle in the bath and dropped it in the water yesterday. It was totally submerged, but the power came back on and it seemed to be okay. Today though I tried turning it on and the screen went blank. It wouldn't turn on! I tried to reset it and still nothing. I was panicking. I read online that you can put it in a sealed bag with some rice and I did that while I went out. I came back and it was trying to update, but stalled. Then right before it came back! I am so relieved! Amazon is one evil bullshit corporation, but I need to read and thank god it came back. I would happily pay 15% extra for all my books if it would go directly to the staff in Amazon sweatshops. Form more unions you buggers, take them down!

Best thing when something like that happens is to put it in a box with rice before switching it back on, let it dry out completely first

Or leave it in a box of rice overnight and an Asian will sneak into your house and repair it for you

[Beanz]

I like to read my Kindle in the bath and dropped it in the water yesterday. It was totally submerged, but the power came back on and it seemed to be okay. Today though I tried turning it on and the screen went blank. It wouldn't turn on! I tried to reset it and still nothing. I was panicking. I read online that you can put it in a sealed bag with some rice and I did that while I went out. I came back and it was trying to update, but stalled. Then right before it came back! I am so relieved! Amazon is one evil bullshit corporation, but I need to read and thank god it came back. I would happily pay 15% extra for all my books if it would go directly to the staff in Amazon sweatshops. Form more unions you buggers, take them down!

Best thing when something like that happens is to put it in a box with rice before switching it back on, let it dry out completely first

Or leave it in a box of rice overnight and an Asian will sneak into your house and repair it for you

Where is Miles going to find an Asian?

I can't imagine reading stuff on a kindle but with hundreds of books lining the walls could do with the space. No smell, no touch, no pate turning sound....ewww

[Batman]

I've got a Kindle but it doesn't get used all that often at all, its more for if there is a book that I am only semi interested in then I'll download it.

It's also good for my Lovecraft and Poe stuff I mean they the books are not exactly practical for reading on the bus



I'm hoping to get The Crossing finished today or tomorrow, I've got about 200 pages left in it, its actually been a lot better than I was expecting, I thought it would just be in the same vein as James Patterson or Jeffrey Deaver but its actually a lot better than that, it isn't all car chases and shootouts (so far) and its very much about the investigation side of things which sits well with me.

I'm enjoying it so far anyways.

After that I think I'm going to get started on 1984, I was going to read Sinister Bend by Nabakov but it hasn't been delivered yet...I don't think, it may have and I've just forgotten about it, I've had a fuck load of books delivered over the past few weeks.

[Batman]

finished The Crossing, really good book it was.

I'm not sure what I'm going to read next, its out of

1984 - George Orwell (1949)
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (1939)
Zofloya or the Moor - Charlotte Dacre (1806)
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde (1890)

and I'm currently waiting of delivery of

Bend Sinister - Vladomir Nabokov (1947)
The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall (2007)

I also had this delivered the other day, I can't wait to get started on this but I'm going to wait until I've completed my 2017 challenge on Goodreads before starting it

One book. Two readers. A world of mystery, menace, and desire.

A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown.

THE BOOK: Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a prolific but enigmatic writer named V. M. Straka, in which a man with no past is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a monstrous crew and launched onto a disorienting and perilous journey.

THE WRITER: Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the world’s greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world knows nothing apart from the words he wrote and the rumours that swirl around him.

THE READERS: Jennifer and Eric, a college senior and a disgraced grad student, both facing crucial decisions about who they are, who they might become, and how much they’re willing to trust another person with their passions, hurts, and fears.

S. , conceived by filmmaker J. J. Abrams and written by award-winning novelist Doug Dorst, is the chronicle of two readers finding each other in the margins of a book and enmeshing themselves in a deadly struggle between forces they don’t understand. It is also Abrams and Dorst’s love letter to the written word.

Its absolutely crammed full of little odds and sods that help tell the story, newspaper cuttings, postcards, diaries, even a fucking napkin (yes an actual napkin) with a map drew on it, I'm going to have to get some post it notes and stick them to all the detachable pieces because they will no doubt fall out at some point, its definitely a book to be read at home and not on the bus.

[Batman]

`Few venture as thou hast in the alarming paths of sin.' This is the final judgement of Satan on Victoria di Loredani, the heroine of Zofloya, or The Moor (1806), a tale of lust, betrayal, and multiple murder set in Venice in the last days of the fifteenth century. The novel follows Victoria's progress from spoilt daughter of indulgent aristocrats, through a period of abuse and captivity, to a career of deepening criminality conducted under Satan's watchful eye. Charlotte Dacre's narrative deftly displays her heroine's movement from the vitalized position of Ann Radcliffe's heroines to a fully conscious commitment to vice that goes beyond that of `Monk' Lewis's deluded Ambrosio. The novel's most daring aspect is its anatomy of Victoria's intense sexual attraction to her Moorish servant Zofloya that transgresses taboos both of class and race. A minor scandal on its first publication, and a significant influence on Byron and Shelley, Zofloya has been unduly neglected. Contradicting idealized stereotypes of women's writing, the novel's portrait of indulged desire, gratuitous cruelty, and monumental self-absorption retains considerable power to disturb. The introduction to this edition, the first for nearly 200 years, examines why Zofloya deserves to be read alongside established Gothic classics as the highly original work of an intriguing and unconventional writer.

Well that was tough going, decent book but far too similar to The Monk by Matthew Lewis, the author actually uses the pseudonym of Rosa Matilda so she didn't even try to hide the influence.

The ending was a complete rip off of The Monk but nowhere near as good.

The characters were pretty standard and the story didn't excite me, I'm glad that I read it and I would recommend it to fans of this genre but I can think of many books that I would put above it.

I'm just about to start this now (at last, Amazon lost the first copy that I ordered so they had to resend it)

The state has been recently taken over and is being run by the tyrannical and philistine ‘Average Man’ party. Under the slogans of equality and happiness for all, it has done away with individualism and freedom of thought. Only John Krug, a brilliant philosopher, stands up to the regime. His antagonist, the leader of the new party, is his old school enemy, Paduk – known as the ‘Toad’. Grieving over his wife’s recent death, Krug is at first dismissive of Paduk’s activities and sees no threat in them. But the sinister machine which Paduk has set in motion may prove stronger than the individual, stronger even than the grotesque ‘Toad’ himself.

The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man. In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, the government attempts to co-opt Krug's support in order to validate the new regime.

Don't worry El Kabong, I'll be getting started right on 1984 once I have finished this one.

[Batman]

Finished this, cracking book, not as good as Lolita but still well worth a read.

Nabokov has a strange way of making really dark subject matters quite light hearted, his characters kind of remind me of Kafka's in their blase approach to serious situations.

Krug is a celebrity philosopher and when a new government comes into power called the Ekwilists who enforce equality upon everyone and believes that if no one is individual then everyone must be happy, Krug opposes this and the head of this new political party try to force him to publicly support them, they arrest his friends and everyone close to him and he still refuses to back down, eventually they take things up a level and its only right at the end of the book when you realize how far they are willing to go to get the support that they want. Oh and the head of this party is nicknamed The Toad, an name bestowed upon him when he was at school with Krug, yeah it turns out that Krug used to bully The Toad rather severely whilst they were at school.

one thing I would say is if you are going to read this then take a look at Hamlet first and familiarize yourself with the general story because there is a 20 page chapter devoted to it.

anyways, I'm finally going to be getting started on

Winston Smith is a low-rung member of the Party, the ruling government of Oceania. He works in the Ministry of Truth, the Party's propoganda arm, where he is in charge of revising history. He is but a small brick in the pyramid that is the Party, at the head of which stands Big Brother. Big Brother the infallible. Big Brother the all-powerful. In a totalitarian society, where individuality is suppressed and freedom of thought has its antithesis in the Thought Police, Winston finds respite in the company of Julia. Originality of thought awakens, love bloosoms and hope is rekindled. But what they don't know is that Big Brother is always watching...

lets see how this stacks up to Bend Sinister then