I don't know what the heck to call this thread!

[a. non]

I reread Douglas Adams' Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency

[dupersuper]

I reread Douglas Adams' Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency

Certainly worth a reread.

[Slam_Bradley]

Finished up The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett. This was the only one of Hammett's novels I hadn't previously read.

While it certainly wasn't bad, it was easily the weakest of Hammett's novels. It was terribly episodic, a tribute to its having previously been at least three separate Black Mask stories. However, Red Harvest was cobbled together from Black Mask stories and the transition was pretty seamless.

The book seemed off-track from Hammett's work, which was generally a slap in the face at the "cozy mysteries" that had prevailed before his time. The mystery was unnecessarily convoluted, not the type of thing we're used to seeing the "Op" tackle. Hammett, as a former Pinkerton, knew full well what it took to find criminals and bust cases. And it's almost never Sherlockian detection.

We also see the Op come very close to breaking his code (largely the same code as that of Sam Spade). The break that Hammett makes with Ned Beaumont in The Glass Key works. Hammett had changed. Society had changed. But the Op doesn't work correctly as a character in much of The Dain Curse. And that's a problem.

[DeTroyes]

Finished up The Road to Serfdom (F.A. Hayak) last night; starting on Capitalism and Freedom (Milton Friedman) today.

[howyadoin]

Bogged down on The Yiddish Policeman's Union, but tearing through The Eyre Affair.

[x-23]

I am reading Under The Dome by Stephen King.

[clayholio]

"Juiced" - Jose Canseco

Man, that Jose sure loves steroids! I have a soft spot for athlete autobiographies, even though they often don't make a lot of sense and aren't often very good. This was by no means a good book, but it was still interesting.

[Donald M.]

Right now I'm reading Hardcase, the first in a series of three crime novels about ex-con and unlicensed PI Joe Kurtz by Dan Simmons. At turns funny, bleak and brutal, (the tale of how the Alabama Beagle Boys got their name manages to be all three at once) it's basically an homage to the hardboiled crime stories of guys like Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane and Donald E. Westlake, to whom the book is dedicated. (Actually it's dedicated to Richard Stark, the pseudonym under which he wrote his Parker novels.)

The book doesn't set the genre on its ear or anything, but its a damned entertaining read.

If The Terror hadn't gone and bored me to tears, I'd say there was no genre Dan Simmons couldn't master!

[berk]

Wow, this brings back memories.

<----- Was responsible for the Project Gutenberg e-text edition of Orlando Furioso. And a bunch of other classical, medieval, and renaissance texts, for that matter.

The best english translation of Orlando Innamorato I'm aware of was published by Oxford University Press. But sadly, it appears to now be out of print.

Ah, thanks for the info. The OUP edition doesn't seem too hard to find on some of the used sites, so i'll probably try one of those.

Reading Sir Walter Scott's Marmion right now. Good fun. Scott apparently made his name with narrative poems like this one and Lay of the Last Minstrel (also good) before doing his famous historical novels. Marmion is about a 1513 battle between the Scottish and the English, and Marmion's an English knight sent on a diplomatic mission to King James of Scotland. Slightly unusual for its era in that the title character is not 100% pure and heroic. I'll be getting into the novels later on, I hope. I'm trying to decide whether to skip straight to Ivanhoe, which is the one that attracts me most, or to start with the one that first brought him to an entirely new level of fame and literary celebrity, Waverly.

[Deathstroke]

I finished reading the David Baldacci novel First Family.

[Rabid Trekkie]

I finished The Black Company by Glen Cook. It was a great story, already moving on to the second book in the series.

[Slam_Bradley]

Finished reading Ralph S. Mouse by Beverly Cleary with Connor.

[Infra-Man]

This week I'm plowing through a stack of stories from One Story and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

[Karl O'Neill]

Finished reading:

Pygmalion (Play)--George Bernard Shaw. The Rain in spain stays mainly in the plain. Cute, Sure this is not mention in the play but who doesn't adore My Fair Lady.

Julius Caesar--Bill shakespeare. This was the noblest roman of them all.

The Time machine--HG Wells.--Beware the Morlocks. Now I see where those funny x-men characters came from. Nice.

The Naked Face--Sidney Sheldon.-- Yeah, a psychological thriller, sans any real psychological trivia or plot devices put in place. Decent read but not his greatness novel by any means. I believe they made a movie of this novel years ago with Roger Moore as the lead character.

Would love to write more comments on the above but am too tired.

[Karl O'Neill]

Finished reading:

The Turn of the Screw--Henry James. This short novel was terribly frustrating. It was an effort to finish it. I think if I was not interested in Pyscho-Analysis I would not have bothered to finish it at all. Furthermore the dialogue and overwrought wordiness of it is jarring and equally bothersome!

Are all Henry James Novels the same? I hope not, Because I know he wrote many popular novels.

I also find his sentence structure annoying as hell. Let's do a mock up.

Reading Henry James;I dare say, nothing to see, here is some flowers, so says him and her and them, and them and blah blah blah; long live the confusing impenetrable dribble drabble, gabage smarbige!.

The novel is not totally a waste. Some of the scenes are scary and unnerving. It's an early ghost story and I can see that Nicole Kidman Movie the others is ripped from this story. And the Skeleton Key with kate Hudson and tons of other TV show episodes and comic book references and even this book can be seen in the amazing TV SHOW LOST.

I also finished:

Two short Accounts of Psycho-Analysis--Sigmund Freud.

It's a short work of mostly reprinted lectures of Psycho-analysis from the first time he went to the US of A. It's very layman friendly and his writing style is a pleasure to read--both consise with plenty of cool anecdotes.