What Are You Reading

[Touchofevil]

I am a huge Georges Simenon fan. He is a master of creating atmosphere and quite addictive. Fortunately, he was quite prolific so there is much of his to read.

 

[Touchofevil]

I started with Raymond Chandler which led me to Dashiell Hammett, followed by Ross MacDonald and on it went. If it wasn't for Vintage Crime/ Black Lizard back in the early 90's, I don't know if I would have stumbled on to so many great hard-boiled/noir/pulp authors of yesteryear.

 

[martinsantos]

Simenon is great, specially with Maigret's stories. Interessing that the newer stories are so much less conplex than the first ones. Homicides ussually are simple stories, and so are Maigret's.

Liked too Ross McDonald, but sometimes he try so much to copy Chandler's style. He is a huge influence, of course - but McDonald had enough talent to not do this.

 

[Touchofevil]

Unfortunately since Chandler was not that prolific as a writer, we are fortunate to have MacDonald. Another author I might suggest if you haven't already discovered him, is David Goodis.

 

[martinsantos]

And Chandler used to "canibalize" his short stories into the novels. It's really a low production. Hammett too, just a hundred stories and a few novels.

I know Goodis, very good! "Shoot the pianist", and a few others (don't remember the titles in English!).

Can I suggest one too? Cornell Woolrich. A lot of his stories became classic noir films.

 

[Touchofevil]

A good suggestion. I have read a few of his and although they were bleak, nonetheless, they were entertaining.

 

[Rayson]

I have insomnia tonight (I'm the UK) so I'll finish Suttree, which finishes a Cormac McCarthy season I began months ago. I read The Road, the border trilogy and kept putting aside Suttree to read other books. Next, a Jim Thompson season. I read his biography, The Getaway and another one or two years ago. The biography is easily one of the most harrowing lives of a writer I've read. I'm aching to delve back into his dark little world. My avatar is a photo I just found of him ("early years") on Google.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Today at the monthly meeting of the Southern California Military Insignia Collectors Society(aka "The Patch Club") I picked up this classic of military history...

The Foxes of the Desert: The Story of the Afrika Korps
by Paul Carell
(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1961)

 

[Miss Golightly]

Dusty by Lucy O'Brien - I've been meaning to get my hands on a bio on the great Dusty Springfield for years - this is apparently the best one....

 

[Derek Cavin]

Not quite classic, but Superman in the Seventies.

 

[Harp]

Another turn with Mariani's study, Gerard Manley Hopkins:

...the hard thing but to pray,
But bid for, patience is! Patience who asks
Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks;
To do without, take losses, and obey.
Rare patience roots in these, and, these away,
Nowhere.

Hopkins pursued the Divine through Poetry; an Impressionist captive to beauty's moment
and the heart's despair, with a soul seemingly twinned by love and melancholia.
A most endearing gentleman philosopher to spend time with.

 

[WH1]

Why Marines Fight by James Brady

Interesting series of interviews with Marine combat veterans including James Webb & his son (an infantryman in both Iraq and Afghanistan), and Senators John Chaffee adn John Warner.

 

[martinsantos]

"I was Vermeer - the legend of the forger who swindled the nazis", by Frank Wynne.

The very intersting life of Han van Meegeren. An artist out of his own time, in love with the old masters, Meegeren started to forger paintings by his beloved Vermeer. And became rich with this. His only trouble? He sold some of his forgered paintings to Goering.

 

[scotrace]

Colonel Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Thrift Store Find of the Day!

Fight for the Sky: The Story of the Spitfire and Hurricane
by Douglas Bader
(New York: Doubleday & Company, 1973)

..and arrived in the mail today

Flight Manual, B-24D Airplane
(San Diego, CA: Flight and Service Department, Consolidated Aircraft Corp., December 1942)

 

[Harp]

"I was Vermeer - the legend of the forger who swindled the nazis", by Frank Wynne.

The very intersting life of Han van Meegeren. An artist out of his own time, in love with the old masters....

Martin-
Criminal research? I would enjoy this tale.
Patricia Hampl's Blue Arabesque leads a search for the sublime
through the Odalisques; Matisse, Delacroix, Ingres.
Not quite a dovetail to van Meegeren's exploits but exceptional art reading.

 

[Irish4]

The Alchemist.

 

[martinsantos]

Not exactly a criminal research, but a fine portrait of a forger. Forgers usually have a strange and strong sense of humour, and so was van Meegeren. I highly recommend this book! The ending becames suprisingly, as Meegeren turned a kind of national hero, fooling art critics, marchands and, specially, Goering.

(Unhappilly I never met in person an art forger. But once a money forger, who highly appreciated his own work, and calling himself as a genius. But maybe he wasn't that good - he was in jail, "living" together with a client).

Martin-
Criminal research? I would enjoy this tale.
Patricia Hampl's Blue Arabesque leads a search for the sublime
through the Odalisques; Matisse, Delacroix, Ingres.
Not quite a dovetail to van Meegeren's exploits but exceptional art reading.

 

[JennyLou]

"Comfort Women"

It is about women who were forced to work in "comfort" stations for the Japanese army during WWII.

 

[Engrishman]

"The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden" by Catherynne Valente.

Essentially a story about a storyteller telling stories about storytellers, in the fashion of Scheherazade from A Thousand and One Nights.