What are you reading in 2024?

[Bedrockgames]

My Halloween reading begins now. So going to start simple with the Penguin classics American Supernatural Tales. Read a number of the stories before but I enjoy re-reads for Halloween anyways. Thinking of reading Dracula and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde again as well.

Finished the first book in the destroyer series recently after it came up in a discussion about the monk and its influence on it.

Also I finally got a copy of The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land. Ordered it ages ago but it never arrived. So finally made a point of getting it delivered. I've been fascinated by the New Motive Power since I learned about it when I interned at the Lynn Museum. The supreme motive power is a bizarre mechanical messiah Spear tried to create, and the events around it are like Frankenstein with a bunch of spiritualists thrown in. This book looks like it doesn't just dwell on this one event but really gets into other things (he was an abolitionist for example and that was one of the reasons he may have created the new motive power----it is described as a kind of perpetual motion machine, but looks like an antique version of the robot from Lost in Space). I used to live right around the corner from the site where it all happened too so really looking forward to reading this and maybe going back there as well

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Tried to read Let Me In, and although I love the writing it is just too dark for me. You get inside the heads of very messed up, abused, disturbed people. Eegh.

I enjoyed the book, but it is definitely black as pitch.

 

[Richards]

I'm now reading Anne Perry's Slaves of Obsession, a William Monk mystery set in 1861 London. Monk is a detective and his wife Hester apparently occasionally aids him in his investigations; this one involves a British arms dealer selling weapons to the US Confederacy, much to the consternation of his own wife and daughter. It's the first William Monk novel I've ever read, but so far (a mere 24 pages in) I'm already hooked.

Johnathan

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I'm now reading Anne Perry's Slaves of Obsession, a William Monk mystery set in 1861 London. Monk is a detective and his wife Hester apparently occasionally aids him in his investigations; this one involves a British arms dealer selling weapons to the US Confederacy, much to the consternation of his own wife and daughter. It's the first William Monk novel I've ever read, but so far (a mere 24 pages in) I'm already hooked.

Johnathan

This is a different Monk from the Monk of the TV shows? Certainly the setting seems different

 

[Richards]

Oh, definitely. William Monk lives in Victorian England and solves mysteries, and Adrian Monk lives in modern-day San Francisco and...solves mysteries.

The novel was published in 2000 (and there were apparently a bunch of them published earlier than the one I'm reading now), and the TV show first aired in 2002, so William gets the first-use win for the last name.

Johnathan

 

[overgeeked]

Diving back into P. G. Wodehouse and Jeeves. Started with “Extricating Young Gussie,” the first story to feature Jeeves and Wooster. In an odd coincidence, September 1st featured prominently in the story. It’s a quick, fun read riddled with British period slang, has a nice twist, and ends with a good joke.

 

[Alzrius]

After six weeks, I've finished reading William Godwin's 1834 treatise The Lives of the Necromancers, being a catalogue of eminent individuals who either personally claimed, or were reputed, to have magical powers.

From the beginning, Godwin makes it clear that he not only doesn't believe in sorcery, witchcraft, or necromancy of any kind; rather, he regards it as a lamentable condition that people were so deluded for so long. It's in that spirit that the book is ordered chronologically (after some brief introductions to various magical practices and traditions, so that readers would know what's being discussed), going from Biblical figures to those from the late 17th century.

I mention that because Godwin evinces less sympathy as the volume progresses. For ancient figures, his attitude is "they didn't know any better," whereas for more recent ones his attitude is "they were deluded," and the final section of the book is presented as "they were liars." Of course, this is contextual to the individuals in question; Godwin has more sympathy for people who's magical claims never hurt anyone than he does for the overzealous prosecutors of later centuries who put (often times many) people to death based on spurious accusations and "evidence" that doesn't deserve the name.

Those condemnations aside, this work is quite notable for the various individuals and anecdotes that it discusses. While many of these figures are quite famous (e.g. Medea, Simon Magus, Merlin, etc.) there are quite a few others whom I'd never heard of before, such as Hermotimus, Attus Navius, and Žito. There's also quite a few references to other people and places (fictional, mythological, and real) to be found throughout, both as their own entries and mentioned in others, such as Erichtho, the Nine Worthies, and Blockula. And of course, Godwin makes sure to bring the receipts, citing numerous works from which he's getting his information; footnotes abound here!

I will say that finishing this took me longer than I expected, considering that my copy is only slightly more than a hundred pages long. That was because I thought this would be roughly the size of a trade paperback, only to find that it was 11.75" x 8.25" with dense text in a small font and nary an illustration to break things up. If this had come in the size I'd expected it to, the page count would easily have been twice as long, perhaps longer. (I'll also add that, while just shy of two hundred years isn't enough time for the language to change appreciably, Godwin uses plenty of words that are no longer part of the contemporary vernacular, and I frequently found myself pausing to look something up.)

Still, this was an impressive book overall, and one definitely worth reading. When no less a personage than Edgar Allen Poe gives it a glowing review, you know a book has to be good!

 

[John Lloyd1]

Just finished Charles & Ada: The Computer's Most Passionate Partnership by James Essinger. I learnt in the late eighties that Ada was the 'first programer' at uni. I had always been fascinated, but never dug deeper.

The story of Babbage and Lovelace is pretty amazing. The biographer was over the top on the speculation side of things, though, and focused a lot on the romance angle. (They had a deep friendship and maybe considered turning it into something more when they were younger.)

I really want to know more about how these machines were meant to work. The book skimped on that side of things.

 

[Alzrius]

I just polished off an old copy of Emily Hahn's 1959 book, Around the World with Nellie Bly, that I picked up a short while ago.

I'll admit that seeing this book for sale got a laugh out of me, as I'd just read an essay about an old Nelly Bly boardgame a few weeks ago. It wasn't the first time I'd heard about her (that was from the episode of The West Wing mentioned on her Wikipedia page), but the coincidence was too delightful for me not to purchase this title.

I mentioned that The Lives of the Necromancers took longer than expected because the book's pages were larger than I'd thought, and with a smaller font than expected. This book, by contrast, was exactly the opposite. While not quite what we'd think of as "mass market" size today, this is still a relatively modest book. More than that, the font was slight larger than I'd anticipated, and with a bit more space between each line as well. It almost reminded me of a children's book in its interior layout, with the illustrations (by B. Holmes, about whom I could find nothing) in particular reminding me of the old books I read as a kid.

As for the book itself, while it could be called a biography, covering the early parts of Nellie's life and career in some detail (and only a tiny bit of what she did afterward), the majority of its text is dedicated to her titular trip around the world, which was done in an attempt to beat Jules Verne's fictitious Phileas Fogg from Around the World in Eighty Days. As Hahn points out, what made this particularly notable (which was good for Nellie's newspaper, since the entire thing was a publicity stunt) was that it was being done by a young woman traveling completely alone, something which shocked people, but also delighted them, as she returned to parades, chorus songs, and lasting celebrity (on top of her previous journalistic exposés), not to mention a great deal of money.

That said, even if I hadn't known that this book was written in 1959, the writing would have given away that it was from different era. Leaving aside the use of the ocassional term that no one would use now (e.g. referring to American money as "greenbacks"), quite a few of the comparisons between Nellie's time and "today" felt amusingly dated (though a few felt timeless, such as when the author notes how today, if there isn't any news that's headline-worthy, the editors will just make something up).

On a minor note, there's a slight error in the numbering of the chapters, as Chapter 6 is mistakenly presented as being Chapter 9. The pagination is correct, and the narrative is unbroken; it's more like someone somehow turned the printing plate upside-down. I was also mildly surprised to find that, while there was no table of contents, the book had an index of all the topics mentioned over the course of Nellie's journey.

 

[DadtheGM]

I just started reading He Who Fights with Monsters series, an isekai, progression fantasy/cultivation that started as a serial.