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[Lear]

 

[ChocolateCupcakes]

Well, I actually just finished it and did not like it at all. Maybe the hype did it in for me. I really did not see anything special about it.

 

[British Monsoon]

Just finishing off 'A Stitch in Time' by Andrew J. Robinson;

I'm not a huge fan of Star Trek novels, as they too often veer into poorly-written, fan-fiction territory - but I've been quite enjoying this one and would consider it a must read for any fans of the character Elim Garak (the actor who played him is also the author, and he concocted this elaborate back-story about his rather insular character so as to give a thorough performance in the series, and it obviously showed as Garak remains one of the most beloved DS9 characters today).

Then I'm going to start The Black Lung Captain by Chris Wooding;

Retribution Falls was one of my favourite reads last summer, a fantastically paced action-adventure, set in an intriguing world with a bunch of disreputable, but thoroughly likeable characters. Can't wait to see if Wooding's managed to pull of a sequel as good as his debut.

 

[Kuraudo]

Can't pick mine up until Saturday. Really crap shift at work this week, so this'll be my treat for getting it over.

Don't suppose you're far enough in for any impressions?

 

[Panda1]

Just finished shadow of the wind. I recommend it to everyone

 

[sparky2112]

This (rightfully) generated good buzz earlier this year, and I'm fairly certain it'll be short-listed for the big awards. It's about an English language newpaper in Rome that is sputtering to its death, and each chapter is told from the perspective of a different person associated with the paper. So you've got a first-time novellist knocking off about twelve different voices, which, in my book at least, is quite a nice trick to pull off as well as he does.

 

[Mr Solo Dolo]

 

[survivor]

Some Hercule Poirot novels I finished recently. I like Affair at Styles the most due to Hastings. Death in the Clouds had a good mystery but not a satisfying resolution. Cards on the Table was pretty good. Good all around mystery and pretty interesting characters. I liked how it was divided into criminals vs sleuths. Plus the revelations at the end were great.

Also had some time to read The Zombie Survival Guide. I didn't bother with the recorded attacks at the end but I liked the actual guide part. It really made the situation look really grim. Also I decided to read I, Robot only due to the awesome cover art but man the short story collection is awesome. One of the best things I ever read. The way the 3 laws were incorporated in every story was just amazing.

Just finished The Way of Shadows today. It really better than I expected it to be. Even though the last half of the book was just one plot twist after the other I actually enjoyed the book and characters. I honestly don't know what will happen in the next 2 books. I mean way too many stuff happened near the end that I thought we would be saved for the second book. Hopefully it doesn't lose steam later on.

 

[Lear]

Can't pick mine up until Saturday. Really crap shift at work this week, so this'll be my treat for getting it over.

Don't suppose you're far enough in for any impressions?

My copy isn't actually due to arrive until tomorrow morning so I don't have any impressions yet.

 

[evilpigking]

Powering through the series, though I'll have to take a break while I wait for Quicksilver and Pewter to arrive. So once I get to that point I'll probably get back to

 

[Maklershed]

Just finished shadow of the wind. I recommend it to everyone

x 2

I loved that book. Have you read any of his other stuff? I was checking out The Angel's Game but it sounded a little too similar to Shadow of the Wind.

 

[Plywood]

Hopefully I can get through this before the end of the month, I tend to reread pages/paragraph's a lot to make sure I didn't miss anything. :lol

 

[Salazar]

Martin Amis: Money.
Alex Kerr: Lost Japan.
Terry Pratchett: Pyramids.
James Thurber: The Years with Ross.

All good. Thurber's book is divine, though. Harold Ross is my hero.

 

[Cohsae]

Just finished shadow of the wind. I recommend it to everyone

I just finished it as well (finally, haven't been reading as much as I'd like thanks to uni), really great book.
Now starting this:

 

[Shinjitsu]

Reading the entire series again for kicks.

 

[ReiGun]

Re-reading this. Just love this book.

 

[KidDork]

Finished The Eyeless last night. Drove to Chapters and bought The Long Ships on Gaf's recommendation. Was in love with the book by the end of the second chapter.

 

[EraldoCoil]

i'm glad i got back into reading

Just finished "the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"

starting this month

 

[Staccat0]

No need to clutter a thread with book covers

Packing for Mars: the Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary "fucking!" Roach
Fables Trades #9 & 10 (Good toilet/ work reading)
Later this month I plan on finishing Blood Meridian which I enjoyed, but put down for too long due to other obligations

 

[MustacheBandit_]

god is not Great-Hitchens. I love it.

 

[mjc]

Has anyone read this new one from Brandon Sanderson? Is it tied to his previous books at all?

 

[eznark]

Finishing up Lowboy. Super short but dense and interesting. A lot of the book is either spoken or internal dialog. Since the main character is a schizophrenic teenager, it makes for some fascinating stuff.

Trying to plow through it because I bought Freedom this weekend and after the Time piece I cannot wait to dig into it...even though I think I am going to hate it. Will probably switch to the new Pratchett after I get too fed up.

Let's be honest though, we're all just killing time until Fall of Giants comes out!

 

[Maklershed]

Finished The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart and on to The Island Beneath the Sea

 

[threenote]

 

[rareside]

Just ordered it from Amazon. From one of my favorite contemporary authors.

 

[Coldsnap]

Giving this book a shot. Its taken me three days to get through the sample amazon gives, not sure if I dig it.

I read the series as a kid, wondering if it would be good to revisit.

 

[ClassyPenguin]

Just finished.
Took me a while to get into(after all that happened in All The pretty Horses) but I was definitely hooked
I love the Southwest/Northern Mexico setting of the Border Trilogy.
And I'm now starting Cities of the Plain

 

[soul creator]

some people in this thread should probably check these out :lol

 

[_Isaac]

Just finished The Way of Shadows today. It really better than I expected it to be. Even though the last half of the book was just one plot twist after the other I actually enjoyed the book and characters. I honestly don't know what will happen in the next 2 books. I mean way too many stuff happened near the end that I thought we would be saved for the second book. Hopefully it doesn't lose steam later on.

This book pops up every single month.

Well, I actually just finished it and did not like it at all. Maybe the hype did it in for me. I really did not see anything special about it.

I didn't know there was hype for this book. I thought it was fantastic.

 

[sparky2112]

Has anyone read this new one from Brandon Sanderson? Is it tied to his previous books at all?

Nope, totally new. He says he can see it going 10 books, but no. 2 isn't even a glimmer in his eye yet, so...

 

[mjc]

Nope, totally new. He says he can see it going 10 books, but no. 2 isn't even a glimmer in his eye yet, so...

He's been churning out books pretty quickly though.

 

[Arment]

Re-reading A Song of Ice and Fire. Just started A Clash of Kings today. It's been an excellent re-read so far.

 

[_Isaac]

Well I just finished
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

It was good, but Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was better. It actually took me a very long time to finish this book because I was reading it and then I lost it for months. I recently found it and finished it up.

Now I'm starting
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I just have to say that it has the worst start to a novel I have ever read in my life. Ugh. I can't get through it.

 

[el jacko]

FINALLY finished this just before Sept hit:

So fantastic. Some parts I trudged through because my inadequate knowledge allowed me to be overwhelmed with names and dates and places, but I was into it for a vast majority of the 1136 pages, which is really damn impressive. Just a stunning achievement and a good place to start for anyone looking to get into European history.

Oh my god I love this book! I didn't think anyone else read it. He's got a great sense of humor, don't you think?

If you like history books, I would highly recommend his books on Poland, God's Playground. Really detailed, and a seriously interesting read.

 

[Maklershed]

In addition to Island Beneath the Sea I've decided to start reading The Stand

 

[sparky2112]

He's been churning out books pretty quickly though.

No doubt - Sanderson is an animal - a writing machine. Still, it seems like he had a lot stockpiled by the time Elantris first came out. Way of Kings, I think, was something he had a first draft of years ago; it was the recent-ish revisions/edits that make it the book that it is. He's fast, to be sure, but he's also not cranking these things out from scratch as it might first appear...

 

[AndyD]

Wilkie Collins' Moonstone.

 

[Majmun]

Ordered it for €24,99. Should arrive on monday. Hope it's any good.

 

[braves01]

 

[Amir0x]

just started. does anyone know if this book is any good?

:lol :lol

that was a rhetorical question, right?

Right now I'm re-reading Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. I read it before but then recently someone asked me for suggestions for good crime/thriller novels, and I recommended this one to him and it got me in the mood to read it again.

It's so amazing.

 

[Snowman Prophet of Doom]

I'm about halfway done with Blood Meridian, am also about halfway through an unpublished novel by a guy I follow online, and am working on a book of the complete poetry of Yeats.

 

[blazinglord]

Currently reading a massive book of collected New York Observer articles from the past two decades:

And I'm also reading Stephen King's homage to Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca:

 

[Captain Howdy]

Amazing.

 

[Locke562]

I'm almost finished with these two, and I'm about to start Silence. Mmmmm, both so good.

 

[Coldsnap]

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I just have to say that it has the worst start to a novel I have ever read in my life. Ugh. I can't get through it.

Dude same here, I like how the author resorts to giving Salander some "badass" tattoos and dressing her in hot topic geart to show how "edgy" she is; give me a break.

 

[sparky2112]

And I'm also reading Stephen King's homage to Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca:

This was King's supposedly first 'literary' novel. Maybe...I don't know. I do know, though, that it was largely crap...

 

[besada]

Right now I'm re-reading Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. I read it before but then recently someone asked me for suggestions for good crime/thriller novels, and I recommended this one to him and it got me in the mood to read it again.

It's so amazing.

If you haven't read Isaac's Storm by Larson, you should. It's as good as Devil in the White City, or better. Less serial killing, but vastly more death. Thunderstruck is okay, but not as good as the other two.

 

[tyguy20204]

Trying to plow through it because I bought Freedom this weekend and after the Time piece I cannot wait to dig into it...even though I think I am going to hate it. Will probably switch to the new Pratchett after I get too fed up.

Let's be honest though, we're all just killing time until Fall of Giants comes out!

Hey what's up eznark. Too bad about the Crew. Anyway, I just read Freedom because I really enjoyed The Corrections, and also because it's been getting raves.

I thought it was pretty poor.

Here's the review I wrote up on Amazon.


Franzen is a talented writer, and by giving this novel three stars I am by no means making an attack upon him. In fact, it is my opinion that The Corrections is a sublime piece of literature. Franzen wrote that novel with a perfect combination of humor and pathos, straddling the line between farce and melodrama while only occasionally going astray.

Chip was a character for the ages. Funny, flawed, and deeply interesting. Who can forget the scene in which Chip shoplifts $78.40 worth of Wild Norwegian Salmon? Chip screws up again and again throughout the novel, but he screws up in ways that the reader can understand. He is a believable and consistent character, rather than being a slave to the novel's narrative/thematic arc.

There are no characters in Freedom that come close to matching Chip's quality. I'm sitting here a mere four hours after finishing the novel, and I can't recall any scenes that particularly stand out to me. Make no mistake, when I complain about the characters in Freedom, I do not complain about them being unlikable - although they are indeed unlikable - rather, I complain about them being uninteresting.

Patty hates her family growing up. She is good at basketball, is therefore a good competitor, therefore enjoys to win. She is raped at a party in high school. She has an attraction to the musician Richard. She marries Walter instead. She loves Walter but she doesn't.

This is all that we ever learn about Patty, and it's simply not enough. Not enough to make her into a fleshed out character, let alone to make her into a character deserving of empathy. And all the other characters are just the same way. There is no consistency to them, no meat.

The problem is that the characters function only to serve the theme. And lord, what a clunky theme it is. There is such a thing as subtly exploring an idea and then there is the other thing - using a sledgehammer. Franzen has his sledgehammer out for this novel, and he's going crazy with it. The first half of the novel is not so bad in this regard, but at some point around the halfway mark, the word freedom shows up. From that point on, freedom is mentioned almost twice or thrice a page, often times in the form of a rather simple, child-like rumination by one of the characters. Franzen's use of the thematic sledgehammer really slogs down this portion of the book. As does his penchant for inserting similarly unsubtle - and unoriginal - political rants.

Do I really care what Franzen thinks about freedom or politics? I have yet to see a particularly nuanced argument coming from him on these subjects. What I have seen - in The Corrections - is his immense ability to tell a story.

And that's what it comes down to here. He hasn't told his story well. The characters are boring. There's very little humor. There's not much suspense. It's all themes, themes, themes. Blah, blah blah.

 

[TestMonkey]

I love Bury. He's evil but he means well.

 

[VGChampion]

Just finished rereading this. Liked it more than the first time. Probably going to finish the next two by next week. They're pretty easy reads so it should only take a couple of days for each book.

And still plugging away at this. I like the idea but it just isn't hooking me.

No need to clutter a thread with book covers

Book covers make the topic vastly more interesting. It's like the pick up thread on gaming.