Had to find a library copy, on sale on Amazon, tho. Book appears to be out of print.

It's interesting you say that about Dracula JB, I'm a big fan of F.W. Murnau, Sunrise ranks as one of my favourites but Nosferatu beyond a couple of scenes does nothing for me.

I'll be very impressed if you finish, Ryan! Aside from the crawling-down-the-wall scene, which I found one of the creepiest I had ever read, I found DRACULA an enormous snooze-fest!

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That's come up several times here in the years I've been on the forum and it seems to be the one big exception to the fact that I usually seem to have the same taste in things as you, JB. I tend to agree with you on comics, definitely on everything Star Trek related, and on most books that we've both read (Fleming, Tolkein, Zelazny, to name a few), but with DRACULA, complete opposite opinions. It's one of my favorite novels. I always thought the pace of it was perfect for the atmosphere that Stoker was building.

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That's come up several times here in the years I've been on the forum and it seems to be the one big exception to the fact that I usually seem to have the same taste in things as you, JB. I tend to agree with you on comics, definitely on everything Star Trek related, and on most books that we've both read (Fleming, Tolkein, Zelazny, to name a few), but with DRACULA, complete opposite opinions. It's one of my favorite novels. I always thought the pace of it was perfect for the atmosphere that Stoker was building.

••

And that's what makes America great! :-)

I just read my very first book on iPhone -- well, the iBooks app, actually.  I'd loaned away my hard copy of this book and after recommending it to a friend, decided I wanted to read it again. 

Anyway, can't recommend Matt Ruff's BAD MONKEYS enough!  A great page-turner that tricks the reader into believing an unreliable narrator -- is she a fratricidal drug-addicted homeless woman, or does she really work for a secret governmental agency?  Good stuff.

This is a kind of "special" reading, tho. It was my father who introduced me to the book when I was around 13 years old, and a few years back I found for him an autographed copy. That copy has since come back to me.

It's fun to read the book, knowing that, at some point, Edmond Hamilton himself actually held it in his hands!

In other news - I just finished reading a book that blew my mind - could be my all-new favorite - it's called The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale - about a chimp who learns to talk - brilliant.

A must-read.

••

Reminding me immediately of a "bit" in Clifford Simak's CITY. Set in the distant future, when humans have long since left Earth and moved on to worlds around other stars, the principle characters are the robots and genetically altered dogs who were left behind.

The "bit" derives from the fact that long ago humans engineered dogs so they could stand on their hind legs and talk -- and one of the first things we learned when dogs became able to speak was that when a dog stares off into the distance and growls at what appears to be nothing, the dog is actually seeing something!

 ROLE MODELS by John Waters

This book is a laugh riot!! ...Its nice to laugh these days.....

A fascinating chapter is devoted to John Water's close friendship with LESILE VAN HOUTEN .... better know as one of the Manson's girls....it is creepy yet insightful.....

Just picked up Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America" from the library.

The best crime fiction publishing company on earth!

Sometimes it's a good idea to avoid reading any critique of a book before diving into it.

F'rinstance. The Lord of the Rings: I'd read somewhere that one of Tolkien's objectives was to write a long, rambling pseudo-history.

And I did indeed find the first and second books long and rambling, with payoffs far and few. Never got beyond the first third of the second book. Had I not read the critique, I probably would have figured that it was just my impression that the book was deliberately long (instead of the author simply letting the story find its own length) and I would have made the effort to finish all three.