1. This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Learn More.
  2. We've had very few donations over the year. I'm going to be short soon as some personal things are keeping me from putting up the money. If you have something small to contribute it's greatly appreciated. Please put your screen name as well so that I can give you credit. Click here: Donations
    Dismiss Notice

What books are you reading right now?

Discussion in 'Tilted Art, Photography, Music & Literature' started by sapiens, Aug 12, 2011.

  1. snowy

    snowy so kawaii Staff Member

    Just plowed through Sekai-ichi Hatsukoi . Yaoi manga are usually not my thing, but this one has a great story. It's about a group of guys who all work at a publishing company editing a shoujo monthly; a new editor joins their group at the beginning of the series, and it turns out that his new boss is his first love from middle school. Hilarity ensues, and it's a refreshing twist on the "notice me, sempai," love confession trope, as it deals with what happens after when reality hits. Because of the link to shoujo, they poke a lot of fun at the different tropes in those manga, i.e. one of the guys tells his boyfriend that he's too "sparkly."

    There's an anime, so I suppose I'll move on to watching that while waiting for another volume.
     
  2. redravin

    redravin Cynical Optimist Donor

    Location:
    North



    When I worked at the bookstore I was doing backup on register and this girl came up to the register with her mom.
    She couldn't have been more than 12 or 13 and she had a stack of yaoi manga a foot high that mom was paying for.
    I knew it was some of the more graphic stuff only because some of my coworkers were huge fans and there was a part of me that wanted to ask the mom if she knew what her kiddo was reading.
    But really it was none of my business and who knows, maybe the mom was a fan too.
     
  3. snowy

    snowy so kawaii Staff Member

    I had a student a couple years ago who kept wanting to hide her manga from me. It made me really curious, so I stealthily walked behind her during reading time to peer over her shoulder, and I could see it was a yaoi. She freaked when she realized I was right behind her, since she's a preacher's kid. I was like, "Oh. Is the story any good?"

    She stared at me a long moment and asked I knew what kind of manga it was.

    Well, duh.

    "You're not going to tell my mom, are you?" was the first thing out of her mouth.

    I told her that was an awkward conversation I did not want to have, plus I was happy she was reading, regardless.

    "And OH MY GOD, Ms. SNOWY! YOU KNOW WHAT YAOI IS!?! YOU'RE THE COOLEST!!!"
     
    • Like Like x 1
  4. Chris Noyb

    Chris Noyb Get in, buckle up, hang on, & be quiet.

    Location:
    Large City, TX
    I recently finished Amagansett by Mark Mills, and am about half way through his second novel The Savage Garden. I'm usually leary of reading books by the same author back-to-back, but so far so good.
     
  5. Chris Noyb

    Chris Noyb Get in, buckle up, hang on, & be quiet.

    Location:
    Large City, TX
    I'm not familiar with manga, I'm guessing that some of it is sexually explicit.

    I always read books way above my age. When I learned to read I pretty much skipped over "children's books," and I was reading Young Adult novels years before I was a young adult.

    My mother was open about sex in the sense that she would joke about it generally, but was also very prudish about the specifics of sex (talk about mixed messages). If she had known what kind of books I read when I went to the library on my own she'd would've blown a gasket.
    --- merged: Nov 22, 2014 3:40 PM ---
    The ending of The Savage Garden was little to convenient & tidy for my taste. And I had figured the answer to one of the main questions/mysteries fairly early in the novel. I haven't checked any reviews of TSG, but I'm pretty sure that many other readers did as well. Seriously, if I managed to figure it out, so could your dog.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Nov 29, 2014
  6. snowy

    snowy so kawaii Staff Member


    A little primer on manga: they are divided up by their target audiences: children, shōnen (adolescent boys), shōjo (adolescent girls), seinen (adult men), and josei (adult women). From there, they are further divided up by genre. Typical shōnen are major titles like Dragon Ball, Naruto, Bleach, One Piece--the major focus is on adventure and action. Shōjo stories cover a wide variety of settings, but almost always focus on love, romance, and feelings; the "love confession" is a key trope. Neither of those divisions are typically sexually explicit. Seinen and josei, by contrast, can be sexual in nature. There is a wide, wide range of "explicit," but it tends more towards the softcore side of things. Yaoi (also known as BL or boys' love) tends to fall into the josei and shōjo categories, depending, but it really is its own thing; interestingly, its audience is largely women. There's another, smaller division of manga for gay comics.

    My parents never restricted my reading. I had read my way through all of my mother's romance novels by the time I was 13. Some of those were pretty graphic. My dad likes to read Westerns. Those are pretty damn graphic. It was interesting to compare the linguistic differences between the two when it came to writing about sex. I also find it interesting to note the way writing about sex in romance novels has changed in general in the last 20 years. Oral sex would be alluded to by something like "he kissed her inner thigh." Uh-huh, just her thigh, eh? Now it's much more explicit--and some stories even include anal!
     
  7. redux

    redux Very Tilted

    Location:
    Foggy Bottom
    Jack and the Giants by Piers Anthony and J.R. Rain - a light and humorous retelling of the classic tale.
     
  8. Chris Noyb

    Chris Noyb Get in, buckle up, hang on, & be quiet.

    Location:
    Large City, TX
    I took a break from 'long' books, and read a couple of collections of short stories.

    The Greatest Boxing Stories Ever Told Thirty-six Incredible Tales from the Ring, edited by Jeff Silverman. Not a bad collection, but not as good as In The Ring.

    The Brushlanders, by Robert Winship. This collection focuses on stories specifically about "...the land west of Austin (Texas)..." Unfortunately that makes the pool of available stories a bit small and it shows. Quite a few of the stories left me with the feeling that the author got off to a good start and then left the story unfinished.

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------

    And now a couple of books that I stopped reading, which I rarely do.

    Picture This by Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22. The book jacket does not describe it a work based on Greek history and philosophy. Which is what it turned out to be, which is not something that appeals to me, esp. philosophical discussions. I would label the dust jacket blurb description as extremely misleading.

    The Fault Does Not Lie With Your Set, by Jack Harris, Paul Huhndorff, & Jack McGrew. Another misleading dust
    jacket description. This book is supposed to be about the first 40 years of television in Houston, which it is but with a limted focus mostly on just one TV station. I was hoping for a much broader history.

    I might try these books again sometime in the future.........................or I might not.
     
  9. Chris Noyb

    Chris Noyb Get in, buckle up, hang on, & be quiet.

    Location:
    Large City, TX
    I'm currently reading & enjoying Mutiny on the Bounty. The book itself is the Bounty Trilogy, so if I really like MOTB I don't have to track down the other two books, Men Against the Sea & Pictairn's Island.

    Today's buys at the charity thrift store sale:
    Born Standing Up by Steve Martin. Hopefully this will be much better than most celeb ABs.
    Death of a Salesman by Author Miller. For some reason I never had to read it in HS or college.
    Billy Bathgate, E.L. Doctorow.
    The Robots of Dawn, Isaac Asimov. SF isn't my genre, but this book sounds interesting (I'm a Blade Runner fan).
    The Story of O, Pauline Reage.
    The Sunlight and the Shadows, Mark Helprin.
     
  10. rogue49

    rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

    Location:
    Baltimore/DC
    The Magician King
    and The Magicians by Lev Grossman

    These two are the sequels for first book, "The Magician"
    It's like a series like Harry Potter...but for adults, with adult consequences and style...and with darker tone.

    It's starts off with terms and dynamics like HP...then gets real. Realistic thoughts, real actions...and not everything comes out "right" (kinda European-que when it comes to stories)

    Very good, just started...looking forward to tearing into the meat of the books.
    Highly recommend at least the first...if not the others.
     
  11. Levite

    Levite Levitical Yet Funky

    Location:
    The Windy City
    Just finished a couple of collections of classic sci-fi by Arthur C. Clarke. On the whole, I have to say I found them disappointing. I like some of Clarke's novels, though I never loved any of them. But I figured maybe since so many of the sci-fi writers of his time did their best work in short stories, his would catch me more than the novels. They didn't.

    There wasn't anything wrong with them, I guess. They sounded stultifyingly dated, but then again, so do a lot of Asimov's stories, or Heinlein's, or Silverberg's, and I like their short stories very much. It's not that Clarke didn't have some interesting ideas. He did. But...I don't know. His stories just seemed...lightweight to me. The characters were absolutely uncompelling, and that's even in comparison to some of Asimov's stories, where the characters sort of seemed to come of out of a mechanical generator of 1950s stereotypes, complete with attendant dialogue. Clarke's style just seemed...disengaged. It was like he wrote without any particular investment in the stories; whereas I always got the sense with Asimov and Heinlein and their ilk that they got down and got their hands dirty and their brows sweaty writing.

    But you know, Clarke is one of the greats. So I feel disappointed in how much he didn't move me.
     
  12. Lindy

    Lindy Moderator Staff Member

    Location:
    Nebraska
    A lot of sci-fi is pure dreck, and Sturgeon's Law is definitely understated. While I enjoyed Clarke's Childhood's End, I couldn't even finish 2001, though I liked the movie.

    The best sci-fi novel ever written, in my never to be humble opinion, which I came across by accident, is A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter Miller. I've read it at least three times, and I'm sure I'll read it again. I keep wondering if the Wandering Jew figure in Liebowitz is actually St. Liebowitz himself.
     
    • Like Like x 1
  13. Levite

    Levite Levitical Yet Funky

    Location:
    The Windy City
    There is a lot of bad sci-fi, no question. But there's also a lot of good sci-fi, including a lot of underrated stuff. But unfortunately, I think I have to conclude that Clarke was a mediocre writer who had very good ideas.

    I have read Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz. I read it in high school, didn't care for it, and then picked it up again about a decade later, presuming that I had just been too young to appreciate it properly. Unfortunately, I still didn't care for it.

    So far, I think the best "hard science fiction" I've ever read is either Asimov's Robot series (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire) or Niven's Ringworld. The best "soft" science fiction I've ever read is definitely Frank Herbert's Dune, with first runner-up being probably Old Man's War by John Scalzi.
     
  14. redux

    redux Very Tilted

    Location:
    Foggy Bottom
  15. Chris Noyb

    Chris Noyb Get in, buckle up, hang on, & be quiet.

    Location:
    Large City, TX

    Do any of you avid readers ever have the experience where you look at your stash of unread books, and know that you won't be happy with whatever selection you make,, despite a strong craving to read? It's much like being at a better grocery store with ample selection of deli meats, breads, teas, whatever, and nothing appeals to you.
     
    • Like Like x 1
  16. redravin

    redravin Cynical Optimist Donor

    Location:
    North


    I usually go for one of my huge collection of graphic novels in that case.
    There are usually 3 or 4 I haven't got to yet.
    They work as sort of a palette cleanser and then I can move on to another book.
    I recommend Incorruptible about a super villain who does his best to become a hero after the most powerful hero on Earth (basically Superman) goes nuts, kills most of the other heroes and destroys the worlds infrastructure.
    The only problem is he really has no idea how to go about it.
    With a sidekick named Jail Bait (because she's an underage girl who he now refuses to sleep with because he's a good guy which pisses her off to no end) and an alcoholic cop as his only guide to what a hero should do, it's really well done.
     
    • Like Like x 1
  17. snowy

    snowy so kawaii Staff Member

    I usually go for "comfort reading" in that case--books I've read before and love.
     
  18. RedSneaker

    RedSneaker Very Tilted

    I have been reading some John C. Maxwell books. I find them informative and inspiring. 2015 is going to be my year to get my life in order.
     
    • Like Like x 1
  19. Chris Noyb

    Chris Noyb Get in, buckle up, hang on, & be quiet.

    Location:
    Large City, TX
    I reach for a genre that I normally don't read, such as SciFi. As strange as that sounds.

    I rarely re-read books. I responded to a thread here. My list of re-reads was pretty short, although longer than I thought before I actually listed the books.
     
  20. Baraka_Guru

    Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

    Location:
    Toronto
    I'm still trying to finish Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson, and I'm about to start Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic + the Domestic by Esther Perel, but the trick for me these days is being able to read more than 100 words for pleasure without falling asleep. I'm gradually getting there.
     
    • Like Like x 1