Pointyskull

Just started:

Tom Banjo

Starting this one now. I thought Horrorstör was just ok, but really enjoyed My Best Friend’s Exorcism. I haven’t read his third book We Sold Our Souls yet, but will probably backtrack to it once I finish this.

Why So Blu?

Fist of Doom Jr

Funny, I just watched the movie last night.

Following up on The Shining, which I read earlier this year:

Bronkster

Just finished:

PAG

Just finished:

Pointyskull

Just started:

Fist of Doom Jr

Just the first book, or the whole series? i read the series a couple of months ago.

Bronkster

Just the first book. How does the rest of the series hold up?

wishbone

^ If you liked the first book you probably would enjoy the others too. I have The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but it does not include And Another Thing... written by another author.

Bronkster

^ Guess I'll start huntin' those down.

Nick Danger

Short story author Zenna Henderson - The Anything Box

Such an optimistic writer. Even her horror stories are kind of cheerful.

Fist of Doom Jr

Yeah, and I think it gets better with the second book. I read them all in a row, but I'd recommend taking a break between each, and maybe read something else in between.

Bronkster

I guess I'll return to the Hitchhiker series later - after I purchase them! In the meantime, I started this today:



This is like the third or fourth Chinese-translated book I've read this year and I still have a heck of a time getting used to the names. But it pulled me right in, so I think I'm going to enjoy it.

brainee

I've loved everything I've read of Cixin Liu: this book, it's 2 follow-ups (The Dark Forest and Death's End) and a big short story collection (that contains The Wandering Earth). I see a couple of his earlier novels were recently translated into English so I'll have to give them a read at some point. I love the grand scope, big idea hard sci-fi of these books. And while I agree Chinese names can be a struggle to keep straight, I like being exposed to Chinese culture and history.

If you finish and end up like this book, you have to read the follow-ups. It goes to some epic and mind-blowing places!

asianxcore

Bronkster

Thanks for the input/feedback on these! I'm already looking around for the 2nd book since I seem to be totally sucked into Three-Body Problem already. I gotta say - it's good I caught an article in the paper on this because I probably would never notice it just based on the title alone. The article was about the guys that did Games of Thrones for HBO are working on this series for Netflix - and I wanted to get a jump on it.

brainee

They finished shooting a Chinese film adaptation of Three Body Problem several years ago but it's in post-production hell. It must've turned out horribly for the Chinese studio to not even try to recoup the reported $30 million (US dollar equivalent) investment. Maybe their hopes are now for the tv series to be good, and they can finally dump their movie getting views/buys by accident from people looking for the other adaptation.

I wouldn't expect an American version of Three Body Problem to be particularly faithful to the source, given the China-centric nature of the characters/setting and the epic time scale of the book series. But the GoT producers were extremely faithful to those books, and a Netflix series probably has more leeway to be unconventional.

asianxcore

Finished

Tom Banjo

I want to try Three Body Problem again soon, but before I do I plan on reading up on the actual history of that place and era. I think I put that book down after somewhere btwn 50-100 pages because there was just a lot of background stuff I was very rusty on. My frikkin’ ADD doesn’t help matters.

PAG

Just finished:

Bronkster

I was thinking the same, although I doubt I'll actually follow up unless I hear about a great book covering it. The Chinese Cultural Revolution does seem to hit into the SF stuff I've read from China. I guess it was kind of a big deal.

brainee

Finished since last post:

The first "adult" book by a popular YA fantasy author (who I had never read anything by). There's something to be said for reimagining Yale University (and its secret societies) as a giant mystical organization, with New Haven as a dangerous fulcrum of supernatural forces. It was a bit hard for me to get into. There were a lot of detailed descriptions of Yale campus architecture and many unlikable characters (Yale seemed like Hogwarts if every student was the worst of Slytherin). Though I liked it by the last third, when we finally caught up with the time jumps (before that it alternated between "past", "present", and "future" chapters making it a bit hard to follow). And ultimately the plot solidified into a solid fantasy/horror mystery story.



Yes, these are the paperbacks I have When I was a student in New England, I would regularly hit all kinds of used bookstores within driving distance (and there were a ton of cool ones in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts) picking up all kinds of rare and interesting looking things. I bought way more than I could read, and still have many books I haven't gotten to yet. This spring I moved from an apartment into a house with nearly double the space, including a room that could be a dedicated "library". And as I organize and display all my books, it makes me want to get back to some of these older things I bought (but just lost track of).

Anyway, I can see how those covers drew me in. I didn't know anything of the author (and reading up on him, he seems like he was much more well-known as a political author). Old House of Fear wasn't quite what I was expecting. It clearly sells itself as gothic horror, but it was actually a crime thriller. It did have a spooky setting (a crumbling Scottish castle on a foggy isolated island) but it took half the book to get there, and any hint of the supernatural was explained away by the end.

Lost Lake was a short-story collection, and more like what I thought I'd get ... spooky low-key little atmospheric stories of ghosts, murder, witches, and revenge. Many of the stories are set in rural Michigan (where the author grew up) ... a setting you wouldn't think lends itself to gothic horror, but he makes it work.

Tom Banjo

I never actually started this. It’s on hold, as I’ve had several bursts of inspiration for stories I’d like to try to write myself. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, and I’ve started stories a couple of different time over the years and quit, mostly out of lack of confidence. My mother was a published fiction writer, so it’s in my genes to an extent. I’ve had several good ideas lately, and am currently outlining one of them. As an aside, I’ve decided to give this another read, since I found it to be very inspirational when I first read it years ago.

story

I read On Writing every August. It really gets me amped up for the fall.