Rate the last Book you read

Whaaaattttt? Dracula is a great read.

I really disliked Dracula, but it has been some years now.

Until they get to England? Yeah.


After that, the only thing I liked was Lucy's conversation with the old man by the cliffs (I think that's who and where it was). And maybe a few moments regarding Renfield.


I hated how the rest of it played....the characters....the dialogue...the writing...the endless transfusions...the terrible Van Helsing dialect....the romance....the labourer logic....hated!


It took me a year to get through the last 200 pages.

Madness!

I found it to be a pretty breezy read.

I really like the Demeter sequence, and also appreciated that the guys deciding to exclude Mina by sort of shutting her out of the investigation was obviously really stupid instead of being written as some noble act of chivalry.

I probably should read it again, as it's a classic obviously, but I just could not get past how dumb and/or helpless some of the characters were! And I like horror in general too!

I mean, that's fair. I'm a sucker for an epistolary novel.

Have you read Arthur Machen's The White People and Other Weird Stories? That's some late 1890s goodness with some genuinely creepy moments. (Plus short stories, so good for before-bed reading!)

No I have not, but looking it up now it sounds like some exciting proto-folk horror!

Ah! And here we have located what I maybe hated. I'm not very good with breezy.


Now, in fairness, I started reading it maybe looking for something easy to flip through. A classic I could finish and probably forget I ever read it at all. After all, during the pandemic, all I did was start one ponderous monster after another, thinking I now had the time to finish them all. Ulysses. Mason/Dixon. Master and Margarita. Some other stuff I never made it past a hundred pages of.


But then I found a copy of Dracula. Hey, that's horror stuff! Let's do it!


But I think I forgot, that for me, books are predominantly language based. Or at least idea based. Or at the very, very least, some kind of emotional valve for the writer. And what I quickly realized with Dracula (after the opening with Jonathan captive in Dracula's castle and the Demeter, which are both great), is that this was just a story, and this was just going to be me reading about how they try and kill Dracula for 400 pages, plus lots of blood transfusions. And nothing could have possibly interested me less than that.

Ooh, Master and Margarita is also really good.

I didn't so much find that one ponderous, as put it down after ten minutes, and forgot I ever started it.


I plan on going back to it though.


Also the other two, which I know I will definitely give up on again.

I picked up a used, beaten up copy of The Hobbit a couple of weeks ago while I was staying in Toh Tao, Thailand, and I finished reading it today. Admittedly although I have seen the first Hobbit film, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I have never fully paid attention to them and therefore, I still feel like I haven't experienced them properly. I enjoyed the book very much and I plan to eventually read the Lord of the Rings series and give the films a proper viewing too.



5/5

I just finished a belated re-reading of The Hobbit myself a month or two ago. I'm now wading through The Lord of the Rings (also a re-read from decades ago). Enjoying it more than I would have expected, having now seen the movies many times in the interim since my first reading.

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L.A. Requiem by Robert Crais - an Elvis Cole and Joe Pike novel (reread)

85/100

Dark Matters - Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering
by Mara Van Der Lugt

My first dive back into philosophy in awhile with this, a counter to my natural optimism. Heavy reading where some material certainly went over my head, but it did change a lot of my perspectives on how to look at the evil in life.

Right now I'm getting through American Gods. I have another $50 Barnes and Noble card via my brother's birthday gift, and I want to pick up another Neil Gaiman book, as well as Murtagh so I can complete the Inheritance collection and maybe sell it once I'm done with Murtagh.


Also, it's the one-year anniversary of my debut novel. But Reddit's given me slack with some weird-ass bug designating my post on my profile as NSFW. And since the book has two bird alien teenagers on the cover, I can't have people thinking it's underage furry porn. Honestly, I'm just kinda pissed right now.

I'm going to be reading some of this in a few weeks for a seminar that I am in---it sounds like it's worth checking out?

It depends on your previous knowledge of the subject, I would say. If you are going to a seminar, I imagine you have pretty good depth then haha

It took a bit for me to recognize the style of the book, which doesn't present as many original ideas as much as it analyzes pessimism through history. It starts with Pierre Bayle (what is evil, how does evil compare to good, can God explain evil), and eventually moves through time with how philosophers responded to Bayle's claims (we see familiar names like Hume and Kant eventually).

It definitely hit some unfamiliar notes in me mentally, which caused me to strike up some unusual conversations with friends. As a result, I recommend (I'll warn that it does take a deep look into justifying suicide which can eat away at some people, as it ate away at some of the philosophers here when analyzing it).

That sounds very interesting---especially in the context of the seminar (which is pretty much about tracing the development of the concept of "pain" through the Enlightenment so as to see how it laid the groundwork for conversations like the one in that book to be possible.

I have read some Benatar in the past, so I think I will go in prepared!

The Secret by Lee Child and Andrew Grant

65/100

I haven't posted on this thread in ages, but the last book I read was The Uriel Ventris Chronicles: Volume One, a collection of three novels and three short stories set in the Warhammer 40k universe. It is most definitely not high literature, but rather entertaining nonetheless. I've always liked the Warhammer worlds (meaning the fantasy and 40k variants), and even though they've changed slightly for the worse with the years, they still retain much of their magic.

Maybe something like 6, or even 7, out of 10. At least it made me walk to a local gaming store and buy a bagful of other 40k books

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