What Books Are You Reading?

[tickle gamer]

Hi All! I have talked a lot lately about video games, I thought it was time I mixed it up a little.

So, I was wondering. What book/s [or internet stories] are you reading right now?

As for me, I have been reading “The Blue Mage” series by Eden Redd for the past 2 or 3 months.

“Blue Mage” is an erotic series, but it has a ton of story too, with sex scenes only very lightly sprinkled in. going a few chapters at a time without a sex scene.

I would defiantly recommend it to any mature reader that likes a good, and, sometimes, sexy, fantasy [fantasy, as in magic, mermaids, ETC] .

I am on the second to last side quest [it goes book 1,2,3,4, 4 [or 5] sides quests, book 5]

I would give it a 4.7 out of 5.

 

[milagros317]

I am now rereading Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.

 

[IrvingKrebb]

I'm reading Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation.

 

[The Internet]

"Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Age of Rhythm & Blues" by Arnold Shaw. A fantastic, obscure book from 1978 by a little-known veteran of the early music industry.

It's hard to describe this book, the title doesn't really do it justice. It's as much about the label owners and song pluggers and disc jockeys and distributors and how few record pressing plants there were in the world and all kinds of arcane information that you won't find anywhere else. Tons of great profiles and interviews with many great - and under-interviewed - artists. Like T-Bone Walker, off the top of my head. It was written in 1978 so a lot of these guys were still alive. It's a vivid book that puts you in a time where a guy (or gal!) would record and press a song, load up his car with records of that song, and drive for two weeks, hitting all the furniture stores (which is where you'd buy records) and try to get the store-owners to buy them. DENSE with information, pouring off every page. It's organized in the weirdest way too, you just have to start the book and go with it. Or you can open to any page, and start there.

Here's one of my favorite nuggets. Ahmet Ertegun, who started Atlantic Records, the greatest label of all time, had an amazing philosophy that I think has been missing from record-making for a long, long time: This was what they were going for when they started Atlantic in the late 1940s: a poor southern sharecropper, he works from the earliest glimmer of sunrise until the sun goes down in the last evening. He's tired and he's beat.

He comes home, sits down and puts on the radio. On the radio, he hears a song that is so good that he gets up, walks a mile into town and puts down his hard earned money for that one song.

"That's the kind of record we need to make", says Ahmet, in "Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Age of Rhythm & Blues" by Arnold Shaw. There's no other book like it.