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I read a bunch of John Christopher books when I was a teenager. Is the Tripods the one where television is stupid and hypnotic because aliens are using it to make humans docile?

Finished The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy. It's not so dreary as The Road, but it is a long way from the liveliness of Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men. I'm intimately familiar with depression. I'm not interested in reading books with a depressed worldview.

Finished book five of Travis McGee, A Deadly Shade of Gold. It has twice the pagecount of the previous books, and John MacDonald uses the space to write something with a larger cast and multiple layers of hidden motivations.

About halfway through The Dead Zone, by Stephen King.

Yes, the last book is a prequel which mentions "The Trippy Show" that hypnotizes viewers and the wearing of caps that put them under alien control. My introduction to the series were the comics in Boys' Life.

As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. Trying to get caught up on my Southern gothics. I've read most everything by McCarthy, but it only recently occurred to me that I should probably try getting into Faulkner as well since McCarthy has stated him as a profound influence.

I kind of cheated with The Sound and the Fury since I've already seen James Franco's (...) film adaptation. But I wanted to have a little extra perspective before jumping into the novel since it's structured in such a disjointed way.

Stuff Im reading as of right now for August

Star Wars Coruscant Nights IV Last Jedi. im not entirely sure but I think right now its the third time ive read the book. I know I read the first two Coruscant Nights books months ago anyway.

Star Wars Battlefront Twilight
Empire Strikes Back
Star Wars Shadows of the Empire

John Barnes's Directive 51
Wheel of Time book 2 The Great Horn/Hunt

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Finished:

While I can understand how this received rave reviews (and won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel), I just didn't enjoy reading this very much. There were certainly really good ideas here (like the AI ships and their zombified "ancillaries") and the author seems to have done a lot of world building (which this book seems to only touch the surface of). The writing style just didn't work for me. I get the intellectual exercise of muddying gender identifications, but for me it created non-stop barriers for imagining this world and its characters.

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Meh... It was pretty short, and IMHO not up to par with his past books.

Finished The Dark Tower book 6 Song of Susannah last week and finished Harry Potter Book 7 last night. I read the first couple of books in the series years ago and only got around to reading all 7 books this summer. Was surprisingly good and entertaining despite me being in my late 40s..

waiting on the library Onedrive app for book 7 of the Dark Tower...

I just finished this one also, and while I thought it was entertaining, I couldn't help but feel it was ghostwritten by another author and made to cash in on Harris' name.
It's barely longer than a novella, and just seems half-baked.

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And just started ...

That'll be it for me this month because this book's a monster (Kindle version lists length as 1500+ pages ).

Just finished:

Be warned that Stephen King interrupts book 7 to say that you won't like the ending. I didn't. But I like the book up until then.

Finished The Dead Zone. I liked the ending. The storyline of the radicalization of a political assassin has become dated. We don't get crazed loners anymore so much as members of a crazed online community.

Started The Green Mile. I need to get more books on my Kindle that aren't written by Stephen King. Still, I'm glad I waited until middle-age to read his books. Instead of reading them all as they came out, good and bad, I've been able to skim off the cream of his literary career.

Started book 6 of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, Bright Orange for the Shroud. I'm running down. The beginning is almost the same as the last book. I find that the advice for living life as an adult man (instead of as an eternal adolescent), which was great when I was a teenager, only gets a tired nod of recognition from me now. Fifty years later, it's obvious which of his cynical grumblings about the world were right and which were very wrong.

Just finished:

Finished The Green Mile. I liked it. I'd already seen the movie and I knew where it was going, but I liked the journey.

Started American Gods by Neil Gaiman, the long version. It's a paperback book, and it's another doorstopper.

This one's getting marketed like CRAZY. Is the hype justified?

I'm a fan of McKinty -- along with Don Winslow who essentially pulled some strings to get this published while McKinty was struggling to make ends meet in recent months.

I'm only 1/2 way through, but the book disappoints some. Aside from the provocative subject matter, the execution is coming across as a bit dumbed-down for the commercial, summer read masses. I like McKinty's earlier works and the Sean Duffy series, better. Will see how the second half fares.

I finished Heretics of Dune and started Chapterhouse: Dune

Interesting back story, thanks!