What are you reading in 2023?

[Bedrockgames]

Reading the stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Started with A New England Nun and working my way through. Finding her prose surprisingly approachable for the time it was written

 

[trappedslider]

TV Land does a 7AM-11AM block of the M*A*s*H TV series, so Ive been watching it last few weeks. Its good. So I watched the 1970 movie with Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould. so different, yet so great, Scene when he drops the olives in the martini is classic. So I just cracked the book

boy are you in for a whiplash

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Just finished re-reading The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.

It's always striking to me how different the actual story is from the pop culture version of things and how much it prefigures a lot of later science fiction and even comics, down to the trope of "we can't duplicate the results because there was an unknown contaminant in the original batch," which Marvel Comics in particular loves to use.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I finished McCaffrey's Dragonsong. It struck me that the enemies of the world are generally Thread and tradition. Not a Dark Lord with a Horde of Others. But an extraterrestrial plant and people's own hidebound ideas. And that's pretty revolutionary for the time.

Now I'm reading Roger Zelazny's The Guns of Avalon.

 

[R_J_K75]

boy are you in for a whiplash

...And theres always the foot tall stack of Spider-Man comics I need to read still

 

[HawaiiSteveO]

In The Shadow of Lightning, Brian McClellan - finished in a few days, well done story and compelling characters, with a twist towards the end. Enjoyed his Powder Mage series quite a bit as well.
Now, moving on to Queen of Bedlam, Robert McCammon ... got a whole Mc thing going on here

 

[Richards]

I'm now on book 4 (of 4) of Mariah Stewart's "Dead ____" series, Dead End (an appropriate title for the last novel in the series). With the "three convicts switching kill victims" plot pretty much sewed up, this one takes a look at the death of the loved one (fiancée) of one of the FBI profilers in the previous novels, a death that happened before the events in the series but which has current-day repercussions for the FBI lady. There's a lot of romancing going on in these books - to the point I'm starting to get mixed up about who's with who - but the mystery/thriller portions of the novels have held my interest.

Johnathan

 

[Alzrius]

Having finished that, I'm also preparing to wrap up Benjamin Franklin's The Art of Virtue (which is a book that Franklin titled but never actually wrote; this book's editor, George L. Rogers, has instead taken selected writings of Franklin's – personal correspondence, newspaper articles, speeches, quotes from Poor Richard's Almanac, etc. – and put them together to demonstrate various virtues that Franklin both lived and championed).

Having finished this earlier this morning, I have to say that it was quite the interesting examination of Ben Franklin's life.

While I'm not sure how much of an outline Franklin ever made of the Art of Virtue that he wanted to (but never did) write, this book outlines twelve maxims that Franklin espoused in both his public and private life, sharing writings where he encouraged them, told personal anecdotes about them, relayed stories he'd heard from others about them, etc. Many were quite witty, and all of them were insightful (e.g. one in which he describes what we now call the Ben Franklin effect). It also provided some interesting facts about Ben Franklin beyond the typical nuggets that we know (e.g. the kite and key story); for instance, I had no idea that he was estranged from his son later in life, as his son was an ardent British loyalist who spied for the crown against the rebelling colonies!

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I finished reading Zelazny's The Guns of Avalon. Fun stuff...Amber kinda feels like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table on acid.

Now I'm continuing my idle Black Company re-read with Glen Cook's Shadows Linger.

 

[Nellisir]

Read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Lords of Creation, book 3 in his Final Architecture trilogy. As usual, it's...fine. Something about his writing leaves me cold. Interesting ideas, well written, but somehow not fully engaging.