Bred Any Good Rooks Lately?

Notaro

Kurben said:

Reading here in the winter darkness The Complete History Of Jack The Ripper by Philip Sugden. One of the best, perhaps even the best book on the subject i read. One thing i like a lot is that he doesn't claim to have a solution. He presents all the facts, Autopsy protocols, Witness statements, inquest protocols, police rapports and so on for every canonical murder plus a few extra that he considers possibles. He discusses the witness statements and what they say, their strengrhs and weaknesses. He is not a fan of newspaper articles as sources because what are fact and fiction in them are impossible to say. A course that i find reasonable. When he does mention them he is very careful. He goes through what some major policemen later written about the case in letters and memoirs and pointing out where they simply remember wrong or has mixed up different cases (can easily happen when you write about 25-30 years after the actual events and are getting old and has to rely mainly on memory). He also goes through a host of suspects and says why they were suspects (mostly they looked suspicious which isn't the most firm ground for an accusation which the police recogniced. He also goes through what i call the usual suspects (like Druitt, Chapman, Ostrog, Klosowski, Leather Apron and so on) and its amazing how little proof, if any, there is against them. He does have a favourite but thats more of a gut feeling, nothing that can be called final and no court of law would convict on existing proof which he says. He also, which i like because i like an author that can speak his mind, slaughters some books on the subject like Stephen Knights Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution which he says should belong in the fiction section of a bookstore because there are so many made up facts and and total ignorance of other facts. Sugden is proud to be a ripperologist and thinks to many authors sully that name by producing sloppily researched books supporting a thesis they dreamed up that isn't supported by actual facts. I kind of agree with him on that. I have read some extremely silly things on the subject.

That's an excellent book Kurben. I loved it for the same reasons, no solution given, just every fact available to him at the time. A fascinating read. Donald Rumbelow's The Complete Jack The Ripoer is akso a good one.

GNTLGNT

...y'all killin' it!!.....

Grant87

At the halfway mark of The Dark Tower. Earlier today, I read the part where

Eddie died. Not gonna lie, I got choked up as he was saying his last goodbyes. Love his character.

FlakeNoir

Grant87 said:

At the halfway mark of The Dark Tower. Earlier today, I read the part where

Eddie died. Not gonna lie, I got choked up as he was saying his last goodbyes. Love his character.

It absolutely broke my heart.  😭

GNTLGNT

....at long last, I dusted off another orphan in my TBR pile-Chiz's Becoming the Boogeyman.....this is one exemplary book.....he once again weaves real/not-real into a fabric of pure delight.....

Kurben

Reading Aunts Arent Gentlemen by P.G. Wodehouse. He always make me smile. He is probably the most consistently funny author i know. It has nothing to do with real life but it is funny as hell.

FlakeNoir

Still reading Holly, enjoying it a great deal.
I'm behind in my Marsha reading too. (sorry🥹)
I have book II in the cozy mystery series, still need to purchase III. I'm back at work after my annual leave holiday break, so have less time.

Hedda Gabler

Flake, did you finish Fairytale?  I don’t remember you saying anything??? I still haven’t finished it.  It’s a good book. I need to dig in and complete it. Very much reminds me of The Talisman. 

Hedda Gabler

Kurben said:

Reading Aunts Arent Gentlemen by P.G. Wodehouse. He always make me smile. He is probably the most consistently funny author i know. It has nothing to do with real life but it is funny as hell.

This podcast has a lot of Wodehouse. 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-classic-tales-podcast/id258214995

FlakeNoir

Hedda Gabler said:

Flake, did you finish Fairytale?  I don’t remember you saying anything??? I still haven’t finished it.  It’s a good book. I need to dig in and complete it. Very much reminds me of The Talisman. 

I did finish it, I must have forgotten to mention it. I had the same feeling ( The Talisman) especially early on. I do feel like it weakened further in, there were elements towards the end that had me WTF-ing a bit. But over-all I liked it. 

Kurben

Reading From Holmes To Sherlock by Mattias Boström. It is a book about the evolution of the Sherlock Holmes figure to the appearance of the Sherlock tv-series where he is planted in a contemporary context. From when the young medical student Conan Doyle watched in admiration his teacher Joseph Bell explain the importance of observation when it comes to medical diagnosis. It is interesting. It is a swedish book so dont know if its translated or not but thats what the title would be translated to english. Goes through Doyles creation, exploration, development and how he ultimately got bored of the figure. Relates what other writers and moviemakers has made out of him. 

Lou_Sytsma

Read Patrick Stewart's biography - Make It So. The era of his career from Star Trek on, is quite interesting. As well as his childhood.

Kurben

After reading that book on Sherlock Holmes i got an urge to read some of the original stories. So i picked out my special annotated facsimile edition with all the original illustrations included from the shelves and read A Scandal In Bohemia, The Silver Blaze and The Speckled Band again. It was fun to meet the old friend again. And Sir Arthur would be angry with me put i still prefer his best Holmes stories to his historical novels, like The White Company and Sir Nigel, or his Professer Challenger stories, like The Lost World or The Poison Belt. But please dont be to mad because at least i have read the others too. Far from all authors are read 100 years after their death (well almost, i think he died in 1930).

Kurben

Reading Far from True by Linwood Barclay. The Master of the ordinary man thriller. 

Grant87

Currently reading They Thirst by Robert McCammon. Loved Boy's Life and Swan Song, so hoping for good things with this one.

After that, I'm going back to finish the second half of The Dark Tower. I took a break at the halfway point and read a couple other books. 

Kurben

Grant87 said:

Currently reading They Thirst by Robert McCammon. Loved Boy's Life and Swan Song, so hoping for good things with this one.

After that, I'm going back to finish the second half of The Dark Tower. I took a break at the halfway point and read a couple other books. 

Youre into a good one. It is one of his earlier books but good. If you get interested in him Stinger, Mine and Wolf's Hour are really good also. And of course there is the Matthew Corbett series rabbit hole starting with Speaks The Nightbird. The problem with them being that they, at least for me, are hard to lay a hand for a reasonable price. But the ones i have read were good.

Grant87

Kurben said:

Grant87 said:

Currently reading They Thirst by Robert McCammon. Loved Boy's Life and Swan Song, so hoping for good things with this one.

After that, I'm going back to finish the second half of The Dark Tower. I took a break at the halfway point and read a couple other books. 

Youre into a good one. It is one of his earlier books but good. If you get interested in him Stinger, Mine and Wolf's Hour are really good also. And of course there is the Matthew Corbett series rabbit hole starting with Speaks The Nightbird. The problem with them being that they, at least for me, are hard to lay a hand for a reasonable price. But the ones i have read were good.

I've scooped up most of his books, but haven't picked up any of the Matthew Corbett series yet. That series gets rave reviews, so I imagine I'll grab those too at some point.

Kurben

Reading The Disappearance by Bentley Little. Thought i just read a little before turning in but suddenly i was 180 pages into the story! How did that happen??

Kurben

Reading The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the search for the good life. It is basically a biography over Socrates, one of the most important philosophers to date. It is based on contemporary witnesses which mainly means three persons; Plato, Xenophon and  Aristophanes who all was living alongside him and mentioned him in their writings. Socrates did not write anything down, he believed in the spoken word but his followers made him immortal. Killed by his people (one of several parallell you can draw to another wisdom teacher in galilee some 400 years later). Oh, and the hemlock cup was the way to execute in Athens back then. He was much later known as The First Martyr in medieval times among both christian and muslems because he is the first that we know of that is executed for ideological reasons and not because of some crime he committed. So this is a history over the athens he lived in and the life he led, not a philosophical history.

Kurben

Reading Jesus Wars by Philip Jenkins. A history of the conflict, both miitary, politiical and theological, that raged between different christians for centuries with its focus on the 5,th century when they were at their most violent against eachother. The ones that came up on top in the end is more the result of historical chance than anything else. It is kind of ironic that the man who preached turn the other cheek and tolerance also is the man at the root of the movement that has made a habit of killing eachother for small, very small, differences in how they look at the nature of Jesus. Personally it makes me wonder if Jesus would approve? Somehow i doubt it.

GNTLGNT

.....I have often wondered how religion justifies war and killing for differences in ideology....

Hedda Gabler

Yeah, it’s amazing. 

Kurben

GNTLGNT said:

.....I have often wondered how religion justifies war and killing for differences in ideology....

Same. Interestingly they all called themselfes Orthodox since it means "Right teaching" (right as in correct of course...). There are real horror stories about bishops and munks going in to a nunnery (christian Monophysites whose only crime was considering Christ as mostly wholly divine and not an even mixture of human and divine) and dragging them out by the hair and then killing them if they did not convert. A christian in the 5,th and 6,th centuries consider himself orthodox and everyone that did not completely agree with his view was a heretic and a danger to the church and therefore not really worthy of life.

GNTLGNT

...it's why, as I got older-I began to believe less and less in "organized" religion and more in an agnostic point of view....I believe that there is some type of power "out there" but not one that necessarily gives a tin shit about me or mankind for that matter....to quote Firesign Theatre-"we're all just bozos on this bus".....

FlakeNoir

I can't stand organised religion... of any kind.
Human beings are wretched as far as a species-in-general. 
The things we've used as excuses to hurt those that were/are not exactly the same as ourselves.  Disgusting.