Never mind…apparently Firefox untwisted it’s knickers and is letting the page load. Carry on!
Oh yeah, I stated The Last Assassin/Extremis by Barry Eisler. I love the flow of his narrative. 
I read that in his collection Dreamsongs and was underwhelmed. Not his best short story, not by a long shot.
I finished Scalzi’s Redshirts a few days ago and loved it. I now see it’ll be an FX miniseries - no word on when.
Still enjoying Firefly: A Celebration, and am also tackling the next in The Stand graphic novel series, Soul Survivors and Hardcases. As before, good writing and poor drawing.
Come hell or high water, I am finishing my present bugaboos. (Bugsaboo?) Manchester: The City Years, McIlvanney on Football, and Churchill’s first volume of history of the Great War have all been sitting on my figurative bedstand for months now, and I am going to finish them so I can move the hell on.
What will I move on to? Well, I’ve got my eyes on a few things. Sergei Lukyanenko, Russian author of the “Watches” series, has a new novel out, The Genome. I’d also not mind getting caught up on The Expanse with the fourth novel, Cibola Burn. Finally, a stray mention somewhere or another brought Titanic Thompson: The Man Who Bet on Everything to my attention.
But first things first! Must finish the current books before I can start new ones.
Yesterday afternoon I (finally) finished The Magician’s Land. I enjoyed that trilogy way more than I thought I would. 
I think I’m glad it’s done, but if Grossman ever writes a fourth one I’ll most likely get it.
I’d planned to read some Stephen King next, but then the Kindle First email arrived and I got tempted…by a romance novel. :o
So, last night I started Gerri Russell’s Flirting With Felicity. I don’t know why I thought it might be better/different from any of the other romance novels I’ve tried over the years: the cliches started only two pages in, and show no signs of letting up. (Maybe I keep wanting to find one without the hyperbole?) Still, I’ve read worse, so I think I’ll keep going as kind of a mental cleanse before I delve into the waiting King books. At least, unless/until I run into something unforgiveable…like when I discovered that the main character in the last romance novel I tried to read was named “Abracadabra.” :smack:
Oh my. 
Currnetly reading City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams. It is the first book of a four part Otherland Series. I had heard great things about but it is proving to be a difficult read for me. There are multiple points of view of which only two seem to be set in the same setting. I am about halfway through and none of the story lines seem to connect, and I am not sure what diection the story is going in. I do plan on trudging me way through it by the end of the month.
Depending on how it turns out, I will either move on to book two, River of the Blue Fire, or switch it up. Still need to read the last two Mortal Instruments books, by Cassandra Clare, and the fourth Ender novel, Children of the Mind, by Orson Scott Card.
Oh dear, should we warn Misnomer about Doctor Sleep? 
I spent a nice chunk of yesterday evening (and a bit of this morning) reading Robert T. Bakker’s Raptor Red. Recommended by Becky2844 & **Grrlbrarian ** - I added it to Mount ToBeRead sometime in the past year and finally dove in.
The novel follows a year in the life of a female dinosaur (specifically Utahraptor) in the plains and mountains of what will eventually become Utah. Bakker’s background in archaeology is very evident, but the info dumps are very well-handled; you’re learning a great deal about these creatures, but it’s not a chore. I came to empathize greatly with Raptor Red, and found her adventures compelling. Bakker does anthropomorphize the characters, but with some solid scientific background justifying it. I especially liked the episodes showing the raptor’s sense of curiosity and even of play.
I’d recommend this novel to any fans of Jurassic Park and/or Watership Down.
Nooooooo! 
Luckily, Doctor Sleep is down the list a bit: first up will be 11/22/63, then Revival. But you know what? King could name a character “Abracadabra” and it would probably be ok with me.
Maybe.
I like the idea of romance novels, but almost everything I’ve tried labeled “romance” has been unreadable. I’ve mostly had to settle for romance sub-plots in other books.
I read the newest of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie mysteries, Started Early, Took My Dog. These are quirky, twisty, contemporary British mystery novels. I like Atkinson’s writing very much.
I read Pratchett’s Equal Rites. I like Granny Weatherwax, and I look forward to reading more about her, but the abstract, unsubtle wizard magic in this book doesn’t do much for me. I find Granny’s headology more appealing. So far in Discworld I like the Night Watch books best.
I picked up The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin, which was a 2011 Hugo Award nominee. It’s well written, but the style doesn’t particularly appeal to me, and I don’t know if I’ll finish it. (I first heard about Jemisin after the 2013 incident where nutty sci-fi author Theodore Beale, a modest fellow who uses the pen name “Vox Day”, wrote a blog post about her that was so appallingly racist that the SDMB would have dismissed it as blatant trolling. The post went out in the SFWA Authors Twitter feed, and there was an uproar, and maybe Jemisin sold more books because of it.)
I’m in the middle of a Christopher Brookmyre novel, All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye. It’s one of his standalone Scottish crime/thriller/comedy novels: a bored housewife turns into an action hero when her adult son, a weapons researcher, is threatened by evil arms dealers. The plot is absolutely ludicrous, but Brookmyre is usually a fun read, if you don’t mind the ranting which sometimes overshadows his story. (Brookmyre doesn’t have pet peeves, he has a zoo.)
Granny kicks arse and takes names! She is freakin awesome.
i read somewhere (probably Wikipedia) she’s a: Bad withch by nature and a good witch by inclination. Sums up Granny perfectly.
I’ve begun an audiobook of Mary Roach’s Stiff, about cadavers and our conflicted responses to them. She certainly hits the ground running - the first scene is about plastic surgeons practicing on decapitated heads. Yikes!
After reading more last night and thinking about it, I think what I actually want is a well-written book with complex characters but graphic sex. High-quality erotica, maybe? I very quickly tire of the “he wants to ruin my life, but the first time we met his mere gaze caused me to orgasm” stuff, which Flirting With Felicity has in spades.
I used to love the Anita Blake books by Laurell K. Hamilton, but eventually the plots stopped happening and they became all about the sex. I’m not looking for that, either.
Meh.
I read that a while back: it was very interesting!
You’re my reading twin, Chiroptera! Read and enjoyed both books myself a year or so ago.
And Politzania: SO glad you liked Raptor Red. I was left feeling that if anyone could get into the mindset, so to speak, of a Utahraptor, Bakker had done it. Not that I’m paleontologically savvy, but it all seemed quite likely to me.
I started reading the first book in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series last night, His Majesty’s Dragon. Very intriguing! I know I’m about 9 years late to the party here, but it’s a great Patrick O’Brian-themed take on the dragon world thus far. Reminded me a bit of Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw too, probably due to the intelligence of Temeraire himself as well as the Regency feel of the piece.
Just finished Halfskin and Clay, techno sci-fi (sort of cyber-punk, but without the punk), about nanobots that can replace human cells. Fun stuff, and quite cerebral.
Starting Half a King by Joe Abercrombie. I’ve read all his other novels and loved them, and am very much enjoying this one so far.
Just finished reading [http://www.amazon.com/Hermaphrodites-Medical-Invention-Domurat-Dreger/dp/0674001893/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420575670&sr=8-1&keywords=alice+domurat+dreger]Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex by Alice Domurat Dreger. It looks at the history of hermaphroditism in Great Britain and France, examining how gender has historically been defined, and on what doctors have historically based gender classification. I was fascinated to consider the fluidity of gender (now probably better defined as sex) – how breasts are considered female and facial hair is considered male, but many men have varying degrees of fat accumulation in the pectorals and women have varying degrees of coarseness/thickness in their facial and body hair.
I’m currently reading The Shadow Lover, which is entertaining enough but nothing special. Also reading The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business on audio book, which is good enough that I kind of regret getting it on audio book because occasionally I’ll hear something that I wish I could highlight.
I just finished David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks and wow! I was blown away. I approached it dubiously, and almost didn’t even start it because I just can’t get into Cloud Atlas. I have this sneaking suspicion that someday, the time will come for me and Cloud Atlas, and it’ll end up being a favorite of mine. But not yet, I just can’t get through it.
Bone Clocks came through, though. Easily the best book I’ve read this year
I just got Brandon Sanderson’s Firefight, which is the second book in his Reckoners series (the first was called Steelheart). The last 2 sentences of the third chapter make it one of the best opening sequences I’ve ever read:
I plan on sitting down right now and plowing through the rest of the book. WOOT! I loves me a lazy afternoon with a good book!
Oh boo, I tried to fix the link on my last post but I didn’t make it in time. (For what it’s worth, the link works just fine, it just looks weird.)
Great book. If you’re looking for an audiobook, I’d recommend this and later entries; they’re quite well done, and how I enjoyed them. IMO, the series goes off its rails a bit later, but YMMV, and it’s a lot of fun before you get there.
The Temeraire series is a lovely bit of alt-history IMHO and ends up being quite the travelogue! The last several books have gotten a bit overwrought/angsty in the dramatic sense, but were still worth a cheap/free read, at least to me. According to GoodReads, there’s one last book in the series coming out this year… I’ll probably give it a whirl.
If you’re into audiobooks, I’m with LawMonkey & can definitely recommend checking this series out - Simon Vance gives Temeraire a wonderful voice!
Speaking of audiobooks, I am really enjoying Bellman and Black by Diane Setterfield. The supernatural elements have been relatively understated to this point (and I’m over 3/4 the way through), but it’s still quite atmospheric. William Bellman is a compelling protagonist, and I haven’t been this engrossed by the building of an edifice since The Pillars of the Earth Jack Davenport (who I know better as Commander James Norrington from the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise) is doing a bang-up job with the narration.