Just finished Starfish by Peter Watts, and am starting Maelstrom, the second in the series. I’m not usually big on novels in series, but this is good hard science fiction with a great suspenseful plot.
Just waiting forRedshirts by John Scalzi and David Brin’s Existence to drop next month, as well as Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter’s collaberation in The Long Earth.
About 600 pages into the first 4000 pages of Songs of Ice and Fire - I will copy/paste this for the next ‘what are you reading’ threads in the foreseeable future
This should be fun. I’ve liked everything I’ve ever read of Scalzi’s.
I eyed up Redshirts, but decided to wait for feedback on it. Let me know how you guys like it.
Post #18??
ETA: Ah, post #13. How on Earth did I miss that? It is a good book though, isn’t it?
I just finished up the audiobook for Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation, which was read by Wil Wheaton. Can’t recommend it highly enough - I loved it.
Finished Stephen King’s The Wind Through The Keyhole. It really adds nothing to the Dark Tower story, of course, but it was so nice to revisit Mid-World and hear Roland tell a tale (two, actually). Lovely book; King continues his upward trend!
Sorry; need to wear my damn reading glasses. Yes, it’s fascinating. The Jazz Age was truly the Poison Age.
So, was Fuzzy Nation good? It’s the only thing I haven’t read yet by him. Not sure why, but I’m dubious. Maybe it’s the re-booting, but something about it just didn’t gel with me.
Maybe I’ll pick it up next month.
I liked it a lot - I tried the paper book first, and couldn’t quite get into it, but I was pretty stressed out and distracted at the time and my attention span was short, so it’s probably not the book’s fault. I listened to the audiobook on my commute over the course of a week, and on at least two occasions I stayed in my car for a few minutes after pulling into my driveway because I had to keep listening.
I’m halfway through A Feast for Crows. Pepper Mill bought it along with Christopher Moore’s Sacre Bleu (noted above) which is on the to-read list.
I’ve also picked up oger Lancelyn Green’s [BpThe Uncollected Sherlock Holmes***, which I’ve never even heard of before. I’ve been reading Sherlock Holmes for years, have three editions of the Canon (including both Annotated editions), and have the play credited to Doyle and Gillette and the “Apocrypha”, not to mention tons of pastiches. I have Sherlock Holmes encyclopedias and indices, and I never knew these works existed – they’re Sherlock Holmes pieces actually written by Arthur Conan Doyle himself, that are not any of the 56 stories, 4 novels, or the Apocrypha. I did actually know about two of the other plays in this volume, although not the third, and the extremely short stories and other pieces are a complete surprise.
I’ve also got The Best Stories of Hoffman, which I’ve been looking for for some time (Hoffman wrote the story The Nutcracker is based on, among others. He also wrote hhis own musical pieces, although that’s generally forgotten today), and I’ve started the last of the Hunhger Games trilogy, Mockingjay.
In addition, I’ve pur chased my first e-book (at least the first one not written by me), Jules Vernes North and South, which i haven’t been able to find.
*Surely the title is a self-denying prophecy, since Greene has collected them.
Just for the sheer fun of it, I’m reading “When Everybody Ate At Schrafft’s” by Joan Kanel Slomanson. Because I love reading about food and history, and this is a combo. (I can just remember the last Schrafft’s in our city when I was verrrry young). And now I wish I could put on my flowered fascinator (mini-hat), mink stole, white gloves,and pointy glasses and take the bus downtown. For a chicken salad sandwich garnished with a queen olive, an extra-dry martini (I didn’t know Schrafft’s was a bar, too!) and a butterscotch and toasted almond sundae. What fun! Fast food joints, Applebees, the mall food court - yeah, you can fill your stomach, but where’s the panache??
Just finished **The Gods Themselves **by Isaac Asimov. It was decent, but the 2nd part of this 3 part story was almost entirely useless.
Finished Heir of Novron (Riyria Revelations) and enjoyed the whole series - even though it didn’t hold too many surprises. OK, it did occasionally break some of the tropes, but in general, I knew what was going to happen.
None-the-less, it was better written most of the fantasy I read (my fault that), it had good action and overall I enjoyed it. I will keep reading his work.
I read The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch – this was terrific! It had been recommended to me a number of times, but I had been hesitant to pick it up because the genre seemed like a vaguely fantasy-like thing that I’m not really crazy about. However, it ended up really impressing me. It’s marketed as YA, but not so much so that most adults wouldn’t enjoy it.
I also FINALLY finished 11/22/63 by Stephen King. In my defense, I got it for Christmas in hardcover, and we had a new baby so my days of staying up all night to read a new release cover to cover are over, at least for now. I liked this a lot, I did go back and read the Cafe Society thread about it, although I feel like I’m too late to the party to post anything new to it.
Now reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, which I first heard about in this thread. It’s interesting so far.
I really liked it, too. The sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies, is almost as good. Lynch is working on a third book but health issues are slowing him down.
I just finished the latest Matthew Shardlake Tudor mystery, Heartstone. This is a pretty good series - they’re set during the last years of Henry VIII’s reign, and they focus on a hunchbacked lawyer working in London. This last book climaxes with the Battle of the Solent in 1545 and the sinking of the Mary Rose - and yes, it takes some dedicated contriving to get a London lawyer down to Portsmouth for this.
I’m now more than halfway through this and it just isn’t clicking. I guess Herbert wanted it to be semi-mystical post-apocalyptic saga like The Stand, or something like that, but he just didn’t have the writing chops for it. Too much happens offstage - Herbert didn’t grasp the importance of “show, don’t tell.” Meh.
Finished Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker last week and thought it was excellent. Just as good, if not better, than his first book, The Gone-Away World. The two are very similar in tone and style, but very different in plot and setting; a nice blend of comedy, intrigue and straight-up “WTF.”
I also just finished the 6-volume Scott Pilgrim series. I’ve been a fan of the movie since its release, but had never read the books. It was a pleasant surprise to see how much of my favorite bits from the movie came straight from the comic.
Is it health issues? I thought it was a rocky relationship and plain old writer’s block.
Polished off *Flashman and the Angel of the Lord *while I was on jury duty. I took a shot at getting the kindle edition of *Flashman and the Mountain of Light *from amazon.co.uk, but no dice; it’s a touch odd that the electronic edition is available to UKians but not Americans, particularly when most of the other installments are available electronically here.
Needing another read for jury duty, I picked up Naomi Novik’s *Victory of Eagles *with a bit of hesitation. The earlier Temeraire novels I’d “read” by audiobook, and I’ve become very attached to the narrator’s delivery and characterization. It’s still how I hear Temeraire in my mind. But I’ve been enjoying this so far, more or less–it’s a bit bleak, with Temeraire stuck in the breeding grounds and Laurence just marking days until they can execute him for treason. I hope things start to look up soon.
An aside regarding technical difficulties: I recently picked up Erin Morgenstern’s *The Night Circus *on iBooks, planning to use it as a test of that platform vs. Kindle now that I have an iPad that I use as my primary e-reader. The only trouble is that iBooks won’t properly load–I get the bookshelf and a pinwheel that never resolves into any actual books. Anyone else who’s had this problem have any ideas on how to resolve, or is there some way I can get my money back from Apple?