BOOKS: What are you reading?

[Matt89]

Cobain: Montage Of Heck - Companion to the recent Kurt Cobain documentary. Very interesting!

 

[Irish Queer]

The Strain. Book1.

 

[miaedu]

Douglas Crimp - Before Pictures

from the publisher:

"Before Pictures tells the story of Crimp’s life as a young gay man and art critic in New York City during the late 1960s through the turbulent 1970s. Crimp participated in all of what made the city so stimulating in that vibrant decade. The details of his professional and personal life are interwoven with this the particularly rich history of New York City at that time, producing a vivid portrait of both the critic and his adopted city. The book begins with his escape from his hometown in Idaho, and we quickly find Crimp writing criticism for ArtNews while working at the Guggenheim—where, as a young curatorial assistant, he was one of the few to see Daniel Buren’s Peinture-Sculpture before it was removed amid cries of institutional censorship. We also travel to the Chelsea Hotel (where Crimp helped the down-on-his-luck couturier Charles James organize his papers) through to his days as a cinephile and balletomane to the founding of the art journal October, where he remained a central figure for many years. As he was developing his reputation as a critic, he was also partaking of the New York night life, from drugs and late nights alongside the Warhol crowd at the Max’s Kansas City to discos, roller-skating, and casual sex with famous (and not-so-famous) men. As AIDS began to ravage the closely linked art and gay communities, Crimp eventually turned his attention to activism dedicated to rethinking AIDS.

Part biography and part cultural history, Before Pictures is a courageous account of an exceptional period in both Crimp’s life and the life of New York City. At the same time, it offers a deeply personal and engaging point of entry into important issues in contemporary art."

 

[Matt89]

Starman - David Bowie The Definative Biography By Paul Trynka

 

[theworldwithout]

Science Fiction Showcase by Marry Kornbluth

 

[zoltanspawn]

Karl Ove Knausgaard's Proustian reminiscence My Struggle, Vol. 1 seems to bear all the life of a person in its pages.

 

[purina]

The Diary of Mary Chestnut

 

[flyingfree]

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

 

[theworldwithout]

Just started, only read a small part of the first chapter, The Sorcerer of Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson.
Can anyone recommend any other Fantasy/SciFi books that have gay main characters? (Hopefully a book you've read yourself and that's good or decent.)

 

[Matt89]

Children Of Eden By Joey Graceffa and Laura L. Sullivan

 

[Kulindahr]

Just started, only read a small part of the first chapter, The Sorcerer of Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson.
Can anyone recommend any other Fantasy/SciFi books that have gay main characters? (Hopefully a book you've read yourself and that's good or decent.)

Actually I can't think of any with gay main characters, just ones with secondary ones. Even my own Fit for Life doesn't have a gay main character.

 

[Kulindahr]

Green Earth by Kim Stanley Robinson


It was written as science fiction about climate change but reads like today's newspaper.

 

[zoltanspawn]

Just started, only read a small part of the first chapter, The Sorcerer of Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson.
Can anyone recommend any other Fantasy/SciFi books that have gay main characters? (Hopefully a book you've read yourself and that's good or decent.)

You might consider Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains. It's only decent, but Morgan is playing with genre in a very interesting way. As a barbarian story walking in the footsteps of Edgar Rice Burroughs and others, it's a thoroughly masculine novel. While so much gay literature seems to adopt a more romantic nature, I found the brute approach refreshing. (Morgan's Altered Carbon is an excellent entertainment, but no gay characters.)

 

[theworldwithout]

You might consider Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains. It's only decent, but Morgan is playing with genre in a very interesting way. As a barbarian story walking in the footsteps of Edgar Rice Burroughs and others, it's a thoroughly masculine novel. While so much gay literature seems to adopt a more romantic nature, I found the brute approach refreshing. (Morgan's Altered Carbon is an excellent entertainment, but no gay characters.)

View attachment 1185995

Thankyou! I'll give it a try.

 

[REACTION]

I'm reading BLOODLANDS
EUROPE BETWEEN HITLER AND STALIN by Timothy Snyder.

A few years ago I visited what I think was the first holocaust museum in the US in Farmington Hills, Michigan. While there was a very small amount of information on the other victims of the Nazis it wasn't enough to inform me at all. My step-grandmother was in the camps plus my neighbor. Neither one would watch anything on WW2 on the television. My neighbor would rarely come to her door and talk except to us kids. I have never heard my Polish Catholic Grandmother talk about the war. I only heard about her time in the concentration camps much later. She would change the channel here in the US if anything came on about the war. On television it was only reported as far as the Jewish perspective. Of course I was curious to know more.

Bloodlands covers the experience of the lands between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. The Polish were the only nation that faced death if convicted of helping the Jews yet they are first among the helpful nations during that time. The book covers Stalin's starving of the Ukranians plus all the lands alliances and switching alliances during that time. While all the Poles don't come out sparkly clean they have been treated ungratefully by the media Jews that have shit on them for risking life and freedom for human decency. The American media disgusts me. If you think I am wrong in my conclusions feel free to tell me how. I am not concrete headed on this and hope I won't be. I'm willing to listen to your media facts.

 

[Matt89]

The Four Legendary Kingdoms By Matthew Reilly

 

[Kulindahr]

Just finished The Heart of Islam.

 

[zoltanspawn]

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

 

[Kulindahr]

Just finished Cryptonomicon.

If you like code and code-breaking, all I can say is "WOW".

 

[star-warrior]

Short Egyptian Grammar by Gunther Roeder, translated by Samuel Mercer.

There's a copy of it in the Internet Archive Text initiative. I downloaded it, printed it out then sewed it together just to read it as a physical copy.