Geek Culture: Books, Tomes, Scrolls, Grimoires, etc

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

"There are many ways to judge someone you like, but one I like is the size of their... bookshelf."

 

My current read is the biography of the Ghostess With The Mostest, the woman who made the Hollywood Hills green... with envy, one of my personal style and sass icons - Cassandra Peterson.

 

Yours Cruelly, Elvira starts with a bang - no, not that kind, though there's plenty enough action later on if that's what you're looking for - as a down-on-her-luck standup comedienne takes her first vacation in years. And is considering quitting and getting that regular job. Settling down. Settling for... normal.

 

Naturally, at this point she gets a frantic call back to LA to audition as, of all things, a late-night horror host. Despite things going somewhat tits up at the tryout, she gets the gig through sheer force of personality, great lines and snappy comebacks - and the rest is herstory.

 

We then rewind and walk through a rural childhood (with one early near-death experience), time as a Vegas showgirl, joining the legendary Groundlings comedy squad along with the likes of Paul Reubens and Phil Hartman, and then getting that role-of-a-lifetime. 

 

It is funny as hell, yes. There's a few naughty bits. And of course, things haven't been easy. You may need tissues.

For tears, sweetheart. Genuinely.

 

Not least for the descriptions of when she runs into Teresa "T" Wierson, her life partner of the last 20-odd years (and who has iron self-control: resisting running around screaming "I'm Elvira's girlfriend" must have required superhuman effort.) It's... yeah. Right in the feels. 

 

 

On a similar icon note: I've also recently finished Keith Richards' autobiography, Life (and as he says, he remembers everything.)

To give you a bit of a flavour: you again start at a midpoint with a typically Keef story - the Stones being hauled into a scary damn rural Southern courtroom on a drug charge. But for some reason, the judge seems to be missing. And things start to go the way you'd imagine a life seemingly that charmed and/or ridiculous is (still) going.  Is Keef a nerd? In the sense that he is absolutely passionate about music over anything and everything else... hell yeah.

 

 

Final recommendation isn't an autobiography, but oddly works like one. Jerry Seinfeld's Is This Anything? is a complete collection of every gag he wrote for gig use from being a mop-headed wannabe in the 70s through to the COVID era when, well, laughs got a bit muffled for a while.

Open any random page and... [flips] I got death, gambling, and sandwich bags. 

(Those are not part of the same bit, btw, but I think there's something in that.)

As well as reading and watching his craft grow, you get to see how his life and public and private obsessions change over the years - though I'm trying not to analyse (as Barry Cryer said: dissecting comedy is like dissecting frogs: only weirdos get laughs out of it and the frog dies). But I am learning. 

 

So what have you got on your reading pile right now?

 

Em

x

Edited February 5, 2022 by ThaOGDreamWeaver
Edited to remove one of my own tribute gags. Mayyyybe too much for a family audience...

[Frostbiter]

I love Elvira, I bet her memoir is a hoot. I need to give that one a read sometime.

[Luminara]

11 hours ago, ThaOGDreamWeaver said:

So what have you got on your reading pile right now?

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_technology

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest

[merrypessimist]

I read more in a week than most people do in a year.  My current reading project is the four book fantasy series Ancient Dreams, which I started earlier today (2/19) and am a quarter of the way through the third book.  As I went through them I also realized that I'd read the series when it was originally published a couple years ago, so more like an inadvertent re-reading. 

 

I'm not sure what's next on the list, I often see what's new in Kindle Unlimited and try things that catch my fancy there.  If it's something that suggests being "book X of a series" I go back to find the first book and start from there.    

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

2 hours ago, merrypessimist said:

If it's something that suggests being "book X of a series" I go back to find the first book and start from there.    

I'm happy dipping in wherever if I can pick up what's going on, which I can more or less anywhere in Pratchett and in the earlier Dresden Files.

Reminds me, I still need to pick up the most recent one. And if Jim winds up reading this, my new toon and possible script idea Wizard Of The West has been accused of aping Harry...

Spoiler

While Marshal Vincent Ray Brown is aware of Harry's work and respects a fellow master of the mystic arts: he's not from Chi-Town, he's visiting from Glendive MT... 1850. And a bit stuck.

 

And while he might be puzzled about some modern things - the price of fancy coffee, the Kardashians, and why people use a device that has access to all the world's knowledge to send cat pictures - he has email, can use a cellphone without it exploding, thinks Harry's aversion to washing machines and showers is 100% personal preference, and the only "aura" he should worry about can be sorted out with a good darn scrub and deodorant. He also likes hanging out with Mouse, both for a quiet drink and while in coyote form. 

 

[merrypessimist]

13 hours ago, ThaOGDreamWeaver said:

I'm happy dipping in wherever if I can pick up what's going on, which I can more or less anywhere in Pratchett and in the earlier Dresden Files.

 

 

Some series let you do that, but for me I prefer to see the situations and relationships develop themselves so that I have context.  Plus with how fast I read it's less challenging than it might be for others to start at the beginning. :)  

 

As for Battle Ground (the most recent Dresden book) treat it as the second half of Peace Talks and prepare yourself for Big Things(tm).

[Glacier Peak]

I read this at the beginning of the pandemic, it's an really impressive read:

https://www.amazon.com/They-Called-Enemy-George-Takei/dp/1603094504

 

And I've been going back through my Comixology collection of Batman classics (Long Halloween, What Ever Happened to the Caped Crusader, Batman: The Dark Knight trilogy, Killing Joke, Batman: Year One, etc..).

 

And I can't get enough Sherlock Holmes. I loved the original novels and short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle so I pick up one of those every so often and read through them again. 

Edited February 21, 2022 by Glacier Peak

[DougGraves]

I just finished The Vampire Academy first book.  It's vampires at school, but more action and intrigue than society although there is that.

 

I am also reading The Twenty Sided Sorceress series - urban fantasy.  Similar feel to Kate Daniels series.

 

I am having a hard time finding good sci-fi since I finished The Academy series - nearish future space exploration and pretty hard sci-fi (Priscilla Hutchins) and the Murderbot Diaries (about a security cyborg who goes rogue).

 

If you like magic and mystery, I also just finished the Esther Diamond series.  Which is about a stage actress in NYC who discovers that magic and monsters are real.  Each book is a mystery with her investigating a different type of monster.  They are very funny.

 

for autobiography I just finished The Boys by Ron Howard and his brother.  A very entertaining book.  It has no big story, just tons of little stories about their lives as child actors through their adult careers.

[Frostbiter]

I'm currently reading The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson. I'm on book two of four. I'm liking it as much as The Mistborn Series, though The Way of Kings was a little slow and didn't really pay-off until towards the end. Still a good read if you like Sanderson's work and this series has some great characters and a unique world setting. Note that these books are monsters with each being over 1200 pages long.

 

 

Edited February 23, 2022 by Frostbiter
Linkage

[InvaderStych]

Most recently completed:

 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/276694.Eeeee_Eee_Eeee

 

My review:

 

Snowcrash is now my 2nd favorite novel starring a pizza delivery guy as a protagonist.

 

It's that good, but only if you're into the sort of thing that it is.

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

Random thought: I often judge a book by how fast - or if I replace it, how often - it gets stolen. Multiple Pratchetts and two copies of Cyrano have gone missing over the years.

 

As has this one - clearly the work of a miscreant fiend of some kind...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Soon-I-Will-be-Invincible/dp/0718152913

 

...which tells the interwoven story of newly-minted bionic hero Fatale, recruited to join a famous and famously dysfunctional group of supers, and the rather more entertaining Dr. Impossible, an evil g... sorry, Malign Hypercognition Disorder sufferer. Who is as much puzzled and fascinated by his own self-destructive compulsion to take over the world as he is a slave to it. (Oddly, I wrote a similar psychological paper at college referencing Pinky And The Brain, amongst other things.)

 

The flipping of perspectives isn't a new device by any means, but works well in this context, and there are clear moves in tone and style that set our two narrators apart. And clearly, it's a lot more fun being bad, even if you wind up trying to do the same thing every night...

[DougGraves]

I will have to check it out.  The only superhero novel I have read is the Reckoners series - which is people hunting down supervillains, not actually superheroes.

 

Are there other good ones in the genre?

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

It's kind of an underused sandbox for writers, since, well, comic books kinda do the job pretty well.

 

However, being a Squirrel Girl nut, would recommend picking up her "origin story" novel Squirrel Meets World - which I would very, very much like to see filmed. It's a "new girl in new high school" YA-ish thing, but heavy on the comedy, Pratchettesque footnotes and asides and multiple perspectives. People might actually be put off by it being a Marvel tie-in, but very much not a knock-off for the money.

 

In the Serious Novelist category, you don't get much more serious than Salman Rushdie. Or do you? I'd never read the guy's stuff, only the news about him - and still haven't read any of his more contro stuff: not really the kind of thing I like relaxing with. But a friend recommended that Haroun And The Sea Of Stories would be up my street... and it is. Think Neil Gaiman rewriting Yellow Submarine for a bhangra crowd and you're close. From there, I went right back to Midnight's Children - only his second book. Without saying much - more than a bit X-Men, but I suspect Sens8 owes a lot to it. 

 

Something that may be somewhat familiar to users of this board right now... Bob Rodi's What They Did To Princess Paragon is about writers and their fandom. PP is a fairly obvious WW knock-off, and sales of her books are falling. So, as per usual, she gets re-imagined with a new style, new plotlines, and a new girlfriend. (The book's from 1994, btw, so it's before Straczynski's take on the series, New 52, etc etc). While the reboot reinvigorates the series and grabs headlines, one "traditional" fan - the wonderfully named Jerome T Kornacker - is more than a little upset. You can guess what happens next, but it's a fun once-and-done, and confirms a few of the things you darkly thought about writers and editors. It's also not aged that well: given what's happened with Reddit, Twitter, and armchair culture warriors generally, it'd need a reboot of its own.

 

Finally, if you're a WW fan, you might well have run across Jodi Picoult's Love And Murder arc. If you'd like to move across to her less capey stuff, Leaving Time might be a good place to start. 

Edited February 28, 2022 by ThaOGDreamWeaver