Book Thread

[Asherdan]

yesterday I found out Project Gutenberg has a bunch of Wodehouse up in epub format.

See you next month, maybe.

[Mr Trout]

What do you use to read ebooks? I can throw them on my phone or I can read them on my laptop but neither are comfortable enough for long-format reading. Maybe it's time to pick up a used Kindle or something, but I feel like I have enough electronic devices as it is.

[Asherdan]

Mostly laptop, depending on where I'm at and what I'm doing. I use Adobe digital editions just because it's simple and I don't need to fool around with it much to read something. Unlike currently in copyright works, the Project Gutenberg stuff can be printed off as well. That is handy as hell when traveling through airports and such where I don't want to pack/unpack turn on/off a device all the flipping time. The iPad works well as a reader, so I'm going to throw a few things on it (if I can pry it from Spouse's hands, that is) and give it a run.

Matter of fact, she's having a mental health day right now and I believe she is watching a movie on the thing while out on the cabana.

[theinevitable]

my dad has a kindle, and swears by it. he has to travel A TON for work, and says it has basically saved his life. Buy a few books before a trip, read them, delete them. If he finishes them he can always get another one using wifi.

[Asherdan]

The U of Chicago publishing arm is at it again!

Manual of Style

This could be either as cool or totally not as cool as it sounds.

[miles]

If you feel like paying for a book, I recommend picking up a copy of The Ask by Sam Lipsyte and then reading it. Hell of funny, and topical but timeless. I'm kidding, it's mostly just really funny.

[Carlos del Vaca]

You know, if Jesus did in fact appear periodically as an enormous, talking lion, and helped one defeat their enemies, I bet Christianity would be REALLY popular.

[Pedro Picasso]

Tolkien and Lewis disagreed about the usefulness of allegory in storytelling. Tolkien's writing was strongly influenced by the wars in Europe and was awesome. The Jesus, The Devil, and The Door to Metaphor was a straight allegory and was terrible.

There I said it.


The Screwtape Letters was pretty neat. Were pretty neat? What's the verb agreement rule here?

[Asherdan]

Loving Little Egypt is the University of Chicago Press free ebook you can scrip up for the rest of the week.

[CortJstr]

Is anybody else participating in the "get Machine of Death to #1 on Amazon today" initiative?

[Nabubrush]

Just catching up on old threads. I like Vonnegut just fine but I'm really surprised to hear anyone here say he's their favorite author. Fun reads, though.

I'm trying to make my way through Red Mars. It's great, but for some reason it's taking a long time to get through. I did recently read the graphic novel series 100 Bullets. That was striking - beautiful and horrifying and very well written, I thought (there's supposedly a game coming, but it's in development hell). I'm also continuing to stay up on Walking Dead, and I'm pretty much furious I won't be home to watch the premiere (taking place at the Bagdad, and presented by Cort and Fatboy, but probably not our Cort).

[miles]

I love 100 Bullets. I've taken a break about halfway through the series  because I didn't want to get through it too quickly. I've also been enjoying some Ed Brubaker. Right now I'm reading The Executioner's Song. It's fantastic, but I'm more than halfway through and have like 500 pages still. It's not slow, just long and I haven't had a lot of time to read lately.

[Doc]

I really liked 100 bullets, one of like 3 series I've actively collected, but I kind of lost my connection with it somewhere after Milo's story, which was probably the highpoint of the series for me. I feel like they either needed more room to flesh out the stories in the second half or needed to cut out a lot of the fat. Still has a hell of a lot of style though.

That said I got into it not knowing it even had an over-arching storyline so I would have been happy with one shots of agent Graves entering people's lives basically forever.

[greenkoolayd]

nothing special.  i just finished the first of stephen kings darktower series.

[Choop]

man i sure wish he'd finished off the series after the first three.