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Reading Roundup, Q4 2023 · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:04
  Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
• 0:07
  as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk
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  home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, listeners. It's a
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  lovely day here in suburban Chicago. The sun is setting, but it's a
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  nice, crisp temperature, maybe the mid forties. I've got a hat on
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  but no gloves, nice warm sweater, and I'm enjoying myself for the walk
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  home. Well, I thought I would spend a little bit of time updating
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  you on my reading, at least my reading from the last quarter of twenty
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  twenty three, as I usually do. Somewhere halfway between into the next quarter,
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  i'll update you on the previous quarter. Thanks to Gabriel for posting a
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  request in the board game Geek forums. It's fun to hear of people hearing
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  the podcast reading update. I didn't read a ton in the last quarter of
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  twenty twenty three. I have eight books recorded, which is plenty, but
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  not a lot. Part of it was work was getting particularly crazy, so
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  I didn't have a ton of time for paper book reading. Most of the
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  reading I was doing was audiobooks, and I generally limit myself to two audiobooks
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  a month so that I have time to listen to the podcast that I like
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  to listen to. To start with, I read The Wasteland. I did
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  not read the Tslio at Wasteland. I read The Stephen King the Wasteland.
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  This is the next book in the Dark Tower series. We are still following
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  Roland and his three companions as they make their way across the mysterious land,
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  heading toward the middle of the Land, which I think is supposed to be
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  a teleport somewhere of sort of losing track of the goal. This is a
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  road movie without an end. In the Wasteland, they are I thinkiing a
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  chunk of the movie is about the book is about writing. This train that
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  we met at the end of the previous episode, and the train is flying
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  across the decade Middle America, and the idea is that they are playing a
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  series a riddle game with the train and if they can ask it, keep
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  asking it riddles until they stump it. If they're able to stump it before
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  they get to Kansas City, it will slow down and let them off at
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  Kansas City. Otherwise it will just plow into Kansas City full speed and blow
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  up. So it's hard to articulate what's going on in the series at this
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  point because it's just so elaborate. But I really did enjoy this one.
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  It's almost like I'm enjoying each one more than the previous, although really it's
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  only the first book that I haven't liked at all. The first book I
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  really didn't like very much, then the second one, and I think The
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  Wasteland is the third one, but it might be the fourth one. Actually,
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  it might be the fourth one or the third one, I can't remember.
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  And then the fourth one is a story from the child hood of Rowland
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  or the teenage years when he went to this town, and it's sort of
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  like a whole alternate story. It's got a weird, kind of wicker Man
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  feel to it, a creepy town where everybody is acting nice but they're actually
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  being mean. There is some sinister implications of things. There's an evil witch.
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  There's love and loss and betrayal and all sorts of great stuff. That
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  one is my favorite one. Yeah, that's Wizard and Glass. It's called
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  and I think it's the fourth book in the series. If The Wasteland was
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  the third, but it could be the fifth book in the series. But
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  I can't remember what the third one would be then, or what the yeah,
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  because certainly the first one is The Dark Tower and the second one is
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  the drawing of the three. The third one might be The Wasteland, in
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  which case the fourth one is with Wizard and Glass. That could be that
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  way, or there could be one more in there that I'm forgetting, and
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  I don't have my phone out, so I'm not gonna be able to go
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  check it. For these two, I read an audiobook. It's the same
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  narrator as has been doing the other ones. He's good, does good inflection,
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  good voices, manages to keep the characters distinct in the way he speaks.
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  All in all, I'm enjoying it quite a bit. If you're somebody
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  who's read a few Stephing King novels and you're thinking The Dark Tower might be
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  for you, I think I'm reasonably happy to say i'd recommend it, although
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  I would say the first book is kind of a slog. Yeah, so
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  that's The Wasteland and Wizard and Glass, both by Stephen King. The next
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  book I read in audiobook form is a nonfiction book. It's a John Ronson
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  book. John Ronson is an excellent writer about weird things. His bread and
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  butter seems to be finding people who do weird things and talking to them in
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  ways that allow him to write about them later. I first encountered him on
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  a couple of stories on This American Life. I believe they had an excerpt
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  from his book The Psychopath Test. But then his book that I read was
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  So You've Been Public Shamed, which is an excellent discussion of sort of social
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  media crowd dynamics. But he also wrote a book earlier called Men Who Stare
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  at Goats which I read as well, and that one's very good also,
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  and them Adventures with Extremists, which is about well spending time with extremist groups
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  and seeing why do they act the way they do, and what do they
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  have to what are their goals? All in all, Ronson is an excellent
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  writer, and it made me very excited to read The Psychopath Test. Now,
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  as I said, I'd heard about this book a long time ago.
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  I think there was a segment on This American Life maybe that was basically a
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  discussion of one piece of the book, talking about this guy Tony who is
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  in I think builtmore or broadmore, maybe a sanitarium or asylum in Britain,
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  and it's for the he's in the wing for the criminally insane, and he's
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  there because he beat up a guy. But then he said a bunch of
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  stuff that made them think he was crazy. And his story is that he
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  did that to get out of going jail. Some of his friends told him,
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  if he says a bunch of crazy stuff, then he'll get to go
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  to a cushy mental hospital instead of a jail. But so he claims he
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  just set a bunch of stuff from movies, and the doctors say no,
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  he's a psychopath. It's an interesting it's an interesting discussion because it's really hard
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  to it's easy to feed both sides of the coin. There's a whole bunch
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  of stuff in The Psychopath Hasts all about the idea of psychopathy, how it's
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  evaluated, where it comes from, how it's defined, and it's just it's
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  a very interesting book, well worth the read. It's not quite as amusing
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  as some of Ronson's other work. I still think so you've been publicly shamed.
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  It's probably my favorite of his books in terms of his enjoyment, but
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  it's really good, well worth a checkout if you get a chance. That's
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  the Psychopath Test by John Ronson. Next up, I have two books by
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  Charles Strass, again both audiobooks. Charles Stross is, of course a science
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  fiction writer stuff I really enjoy. The first book of his I read was
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  Ecceleroando, and it's an amazingscussion of sort of how things might change as the
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  future evolves. But Strass has written a number of interesting books and including a
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  couple different series. I've read a couple books from his Rule thirty four series.
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  I've read quite a few books of his from the Laundry Files, which
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  imagines a world where we discovered enough about mathematics and computers to be able to
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  cast magical spells. It turns out magical spells are just a sort of higher
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  form of mathematics. And basically there's two premises. Magical spells are higher math.
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  Higher math, and the elder gods of Cthulhu exist. Those two things
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  are elder gods of the mythos, the Cthulhu Mythos exist. Those two things
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  together make for the story in Strass's books. Basically, he writes a series
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  of spy thrillers, each one modeled on a different classic set of spy thrillers.
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  He's got one sort of based on James Bond books, one sort of
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  based on Lenditon books, one based on John Lecare And in each one we're
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  following a main character who is a sort of very capable tech who keeps getting
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  roped into espionage situations and having to get his way out of them. The
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  first book that I read from the series, I think it's called The Atrocity
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  Archives, but then there are a number of other ones as well. The
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  two that I read last quarter were The Fuller Memo and The Jennifer morg Both
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  of these are the next ones in the series. I don't think it's worth
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  spending a lot of time on the plots of them specifically, except to say
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  if you read the first one in The Laundry Files, and you thought it
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  was pretty good, and you're like, yeah, I could do so with
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  some more of that, these are more of that. Each one is chock
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  full of amusing character dialogue and fun references to both computer coding and the lovecrafty
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  and mythos, but also just fun pop culture too. Overall, I really
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  like this series, and I'm glad to be reading it. I think,
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  you know, probably every other or every third audiobook that I read. I'm
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  going to go back and read the next one in the series Caught Up.
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  There aren't tons of them, but there's enough, so that's Charles Strauss.
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  I read the Fuller Memo and the Jennifer morg Next up are two books that
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  I read on paper, if you can believe it, physical books that I
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  read in my hands. The first one is called Monster City. This is
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  a book. It is a detective novel written in a kind of older noir
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  style with a bit of snappy dialogue, not unlike Mickey Splaine or Dashal Hammet,
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  in which the main character is the detective, a human living detective in
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  the city of monsters. So the premise here is that there is this city
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  where all these monsters live. So there's vampires and there's werewolves, and there's
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  mummies and ghosts and any manner of creepy ghul type figure, and they all
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  come out at night, of course, so the whole city operates on a
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  night's schedule, where during the day pretty much everybody's asleep and at night it's
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  monster time. The main character is a human private detective who gets tangled up
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  in the monster world. He I mean, by the when the story begins,
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  he's already working as a detective four monsters in the monster world, but
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  we follow him on a case. Mean, obviously the plot's more involved than
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  that, but it gives you the hook. Either you think that's fun or
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  not. I think it was fun. It's a good time. Full disclosure,
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  This book was written by a friend of mine named John Cowlin, and
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  so I'm probably predisposed to like it a little bit more than I wouldn't be
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  if it were just a book I pulled off the shelf that said it's pretty
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  fun. I check it out if you get a chance. That's Monster City
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  by John Cowlan. Next up is the other paper book that I read this
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  quarter, and this is The Tenth Man by Green Graham Green. Now,
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  Graham Green is one of those writers where people tend to really like his stuff,
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  and I think he's good, but I have trouble seeing the true depths
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  of the literary value in his work. Maybe I just haven't brought my scholarly
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  view to it. But I really do like his writing. It's compelling and
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  he knows how to weave characters together in The Tenth Man. We have a
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  group of prisoners and Nazi held resistance jail. They're French prisoners in a jail
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  held by Nazis, and I can't remember exactly why, but the Nazi they
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  decide to execute somebody, and everybody has to like draw a straw to see
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  who's going to get executed in the morning. And this one guy who draws
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  the straw is somebody who has a lot of property or did a lot of
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  wealth, and so he basically begs all the other people in the cell.
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  He's like, you know, some of you, one of you take my
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  place. You can have all my money. And people are like, well,
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  what good is money if I'm dead? And he's like, well,
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  all, we'll write you a will. You can leave it to your family.
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  And somebody takes him up on it. And so it's about what happens
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  to him, what happens to the family, what happens to the money,
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  what it means to be a survivor or having survivor's guilt in the time when
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  other people died, particularly when you paid someone to die for you. It's
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  a fascinating book, really good, even if I'm not sure what to say
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  about it. It's a pretty short read, maybe one hundred and thirty pages
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  or something. It's longer, longer than a novella, but not dramatically longer.
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  Overall really compelling. That's The Tenth Man by Graham Green. Finally,
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  the last book I read in quarter four of twenty twenty three was The Devil's
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  Candy, Anatomy of a Hollywood failure or something like that, a Hollywood disaster.
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  Basically, what it was is there's this reporter, Julie Solomon, who
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  was looking to do a piece about how films are made. She's a reporter
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  who writes a lot about film and so she talked to Brian de Palma and
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  asked if she could embed herself in the production of his next big blockbuster,
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  which the time was The Bonfire the Vanities. So The Bonfire of the Vanities
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  is sort of famously a disaster from a filmmaking perspective. It did not make
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  much money. It was widely panned. There were a lot of good actors
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  in it, but they were all generally dismissed. Overall, it was seen
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  as a failure, a very expensive failure. It cost them like forty million
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  dollars to make and it raised like three million dollars, and this is not
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  early eighties. And Julie Solomon was there for the whole thing, from soup
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  to nuts, and she wrote a very thorough book about the making of the
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  movie. She did not pull her punches when talking about some people. In
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  particular, Bruce Willis thought he came off, thought he was not well received
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  by the book or not well depicted by the book, so he apparently held
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  a grudge about it for a long time. It was a really interesting book.
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  I didn't know a lot about De Palma as a filmmaker, so it
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  was interesting to learn about that. It was interesting to learn about what happened
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  in the movie, where things went wrong or where they went well. Overall,
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  just a very delicious book about the making of a film. So if
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  you're interested in something a detailed discussion of a film, particularly where it could
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  have gone wrong and why you couldn't do much worse or you couldn't do much
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  better than The Devil's Candy by Julie Salomon. So do listeners, fellow gamers,
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  what have you been reading lately? I'd love to hear it. Head
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  over to board Games. You guilt three, two, six, y nine,
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  Jump on the forums and let them know what did you read in the
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  last quarter of twenty twenty four or twenty twenty three. I mean, I
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  want to hear it, I want to know about it. Thanks for joining
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  me on a walk today. I hope your next walk is as pleasant as
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  mind loss. Goodbye. Brought to you by rattle Box