Books: What are you reading tonight?

Anyone else get the new Broken Binding Malazan set? Books 1-3 just arrived and they are pretty spectacular!

Love the idea of a continuing series. But ... but after Game of Thrones I will never ever start one unless it is completed. Is this over? Or is ther more to come? I have no interest is being hung out to dry waiting for the next book.

This is a fancy custom reprinting, all ten books have been out for years and he delivered them all on time.

There is nothing in fantasy on the scale of this series.

Thanks! Will definitely check it out.

I picked Cicely Tyson's autobiography off the library shelf to check out the Miles Davis stories, and now I'm reading the whole thing. Better celebrity memoir than most, but nowhere close to being as good as Waiting on the Moon by Peter Wolf. He even wrote it himself, imagine that.

Seeing GoT & Miles Davis brought back memories of this joyous rant.

https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospect...

Yes, but the sequel series and one of the two prequel series are not complete! 🤣

I’m sure they’re great but the main series alone looks to be at least 8000 pages; just not happening at my age.

How does it compare to A Song of Ice and Fire?

Infinitely more magical. One of the most powerful extinct races were essentially space wizard velociraptors with swords for arms.

Try Gardens of the Moon. A lot of people find that a tough read (because he shows you everything instead of explaining) and are therefore in no danger of getting anywhere near the other nine books.

How many pages are you planning to read before you die? We can plan around that. I guess Proust is out as well.

I started Proust, such beautiful writing but could not finish it.

Re-reading Norwegian Wood, it's been about 12 years.

New Slow Horses novel comes out next week!

Is there something like The Hobbit that gives you a real taste of it without requiring any heavy lifting, or memorizing family trees?

I might be the most poorly read person who’s read as much as I have. Ive read almost none of the classics.

No.

They are hit and miss. Don't bother with Dumas despite what everyone says. He was hiring out the actual writing like James Michener. People calling him great is like calling Stan Lee great. Like ok but it was this other guy who did all the work?

So what? Count of Monte Cristo remains one of the greatest adventure stories written, regardless of whether Dumas or Maquet is more responsible for it.

I'm reading Pete Hamill's 1999 biography of Diego Rivera, it's excellent.

Diego Rivera >>> Frida btw

I like to say Diego was the Mexican version of Thomas Hart Benton.

I just finished the novella A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck.

I won't give anything away other than to say that the author imagines hell as a version of Borges's Library of Babel. The best way I can describe the novella is as an attempt to make the notion of eternity (or near eternity) tangible. That description probably makes the novella sound difficult or boring. But it isn't. It's an unsettling page turner that you can read in a couple of hours.

Read the noir Driver in one sitting, it's excellent.

The basis for the film, yes. Different.

Brilliant Blunders by Mario Livio.

In this, Livio examines some "blunders" from the world of science (turns out, his research shows that Einstein never said the quote attributed to him about the cosmological constant).

IDK, it was pretty good, and a good read, but I don't feel as if I got anything out of it, either. Kinda meh on it right now.

Also I have Dumas' cookbook(?) for some reason. Here is an illustration of a perfectly reasonable home fruit-drying setup.

interesting will check it out

New Slow Horses novel dropped yesterday, halfway done. Slightly different thus far.

Yeah it’s taking me a while to get into it. Plus way too cognizant of the show in the writing and even a direct reference.

Yeah, he's always been slightly meta about the whole thing though, James Bond jokes, etc.