May 2012 Reading Thread, Take Two

[Myshkin]

Finished J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur. Awesome book. Farrell highlights the absurdity and arrogance of British colonial rule in India, while never passing authorial judgment. He shows us, and we shake our heads at the ridiculousness of it all.

Now onto The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat.

[Werthead]

Halfway through The King's Blood by Daniel Abraham. A substantial improvement on the already-impressive Dragon's Path.

Next up should be The Killing Moon by NK Jemisin.

[peterbound]

It's been hectic and I'm just trying to stay above the water. But, I did finally get a review posted for Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed - which I really enjoyed. I also read (and loved) Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover. I'll finish up my review of that one in the next week or so. Last night I finished up Tricked by Kevin Hearne - I didn't like it as much as the other three, but it's still good and these books have become almost a form of comfort read for me. I'm not sure yet what I'll pick up next - too many good books to choose from.

Enjoy the Stover. I love those 'Acts of Caine' The last one, Caine's Law, confused the ever-loving shit out of me. Maybe you can help me out when you read it.

[beniowa]

Finished Paolo Bacigalupi's latest, The Drowned Cities. It was pretty good, but I didn't like it as much as his previous works, which I practically absorbed. Someday I hope he goes back to adult fiction.

Just started The Highest Frontier by Joan Slonczewski.

[afterroots]

Enjoy the Stover. I love those 'Acts of Caine' The last one, Caine's Law, confused the ever-loving shit out of me. Maybe you can help me out when you read it.

I just finished the novel myself and as much as I enjoyed it I don't think I could write a plot synopsis if my life depended on it. I did enjoy all the cameo's from the past it produced though and it was interesting to watch Caine's character continue to develop. He's actually a significantly different person to the Caine of 'Heroe's Die' while still retaining the qualities that draw readers to him in the first place.

[RedEyedGhost]

....

If you don't like something you don't have to read it. You've expressed nothing but a profound dislike of Tie-in novels and insulted me for liking them. So why are you reading them now?

It's a time honored tradition on this board to read books you don't like and mock them relentlessly - see the 50+ Goodkind threads, the Barbarian Snark threads, etc.

[Werthead]

It's a time honored tradition on this board to read books you don't like and mock them relentlessly - see the 50+ Goodkind threads, the Barbarian Snark threads, etc.

'Mocking' books which are objectively terrible (or are as close as consensus can decide) and have few to no fans on the board is one thing. Calm and legitimate criticism of a book regardless of how many fans it has is another. However, rolling in and criticising books you've never read and then insulting the people who have when those books are quite popular on the board is simple flaming and trolling, and will not be tolerated.

And this is the last word on this subject in this thread I want to see. If people want to discuss the BL books, then they can do so in the Black Library thread after they've read some of them.

[jdiddyesquire]

Just finished:

The King's Blood by Daniel Abraham

Redshirts by John Scalzi

Now working on:

Actually... nothing... what should I start next? David Brin's Existence? Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312? Daniel Wilson's Amped? Lance of Earth and Sky by Erin Hoffman? I'm torn!

[Alytha]

Interesting. My copy of the book has an appendix featuring a timeline and summary exactly like that you are talking about. The book's website also has one.

Oops, mine actually does too. I had a look at the last page of the book, and it looked like normal text so I didn't read it so I wouldn't spoil myself. Turns out that's an extract of the next book, and the appendices are in front of that. Reading the index helps... :dunce:

[Whiskeyjak]

Just finished:

The King's Blood by Daniel Abraham

Redshirts by John Scalzi

Now working on:

Actually... nothing... what should I start next? David Brin's Existence? Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312? Daniel Wilson's Amped? Lance of Earth and Sky by Erin Hoffman? I'm torn!

Dude- you can really go through the books.

How was Redshirts? I find we generally have very similar tastes in books we have both liked.

[jdiddyesquire]

Dude- you can really go through the books.

How was Redshirts? I find we generally have very similar tastes in books we have both liked.

I need to marinate on it for a bit before I put my words down. I have some real problems with it, but enjoyed parts of it as well.

King's Blood is much easier to talk about. OMG SO GOOD.

[Procrastimancer]

I've stopped reading Tululla Rising and moved on to a re-read of Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway. Like Isis, I am going to pretend that The Last Werewolf was a standalone and be much, much happier for it.

---

[W]hat should I start next? David Brin's Existence? Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312? Daniel Wilson's Amped? Lance of Earth and Sky by Erin Hoffman? I'm torn!

Given how poor Robopocalypse was, I'd suggest either leaving Amped for last or using it to prop up furniture.

[Contrarius]

I've stopped reading Tululla Rising and moved on to a re-read of Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway. Like Isis, I am going to pretend that The Last Werewolf was a standalone and be much, much happier for it.

Oh damn, that doesn't sound good.

That's exactly what I've been afraid of, too. I never ever thought that TLW would be a "first" book -- until I found out that he wrote a sequel. It doesn't NEED a sequel. But I've been hoping that the sequel would be good anyway. Sigh....

[Nearly Headless Ned]

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman. Brilliant biography of the authors father Vladek, a polish jew who survived Auschwitz. Its more than just a tale of tradgedy and survival though. What was particularly interesting to me was the complex relationship between me father and son. How the very qualities that enabled him to survive the holocaust make him such a difficult person to deal with afterwards.

[Whitestripe]

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman. Brilliant biography of the authors father Vladek, a polish jew who survived Auschwitz. Its more than just a tale of tradgedy and survival though. What was particularly interesting to me was the complex relationship between me father and son. How the very qualities that enabled him to survive the holocaust make him such a difficult person to deal with afterwards.

Art Spiegelman just lectured at my place. I thought it was rather dull, but it was a packed house and everyone else seemed to like it. He talked about comics, his father, and a few other things. He was extremely particular about the color of his projected images and insisted on smoking everywhere (his limo, his hotel, at dinner, the dressing room, on stage) but other than that was a really nice guy.

[Nearly Headless Ned]

Art Spiegelman just lectured at my place. I thought it was rather dull, but it was a packed house and everyone else seemed to like it. He talked about comics, his father, and a few other things. He was extremely particular about the color of his projected images and insisted on smoking everywhere (his limo, his hotel, at dinner, the dressing room, on stage) but other than that was a really nice guy.

Funny about the smoking. In Maus he never stops either.

[Whitestripe]

Yes. We actually had to have the dinner catered at a faculty member's house instead of on campus or at a fancy restaurant in town to allow for the smoking. He was driven around by a another faculty member instead of the limo company for the same reason. Very particular about his diet (pre-diabetic) but smokes like a chimney.

[Myshkin]

Finished The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat. Wow. There's really no way to describe this book. Reading it is like being in a trance; the repeated imagery creates an atmosphere of madness which you become part of.

Now reading Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes.

[Maia]

"Let the Great World Spin" by Collum McCann - read it for the book group, which I have joined a couple of months ago. A collection of various personal and dramatic stories set in New York, which are supposed to be tied together/affected by Petit's wire-walk between the Twin Towers. Didn't really work that way for me, although some of the stories themselves are OK.

"The Halting State" by Charlie Stross. A near-future SF published in 2007, which combines being already embarrassingly out of date in some of it's technological aspects with being obviously erroneous in the first place in others. It is also utterly forgettable in all other respects. Major disappointment, since I am a fan of Stross's "Capital Laundry" series and used to think that Wooding was completely unfair in his criticism of him...

I can only hope that that my luck re: reading picks changes soon.

Still can't quite kick this Urban Fantasy stage that I'm going through so I've just finished Stacia Kane's new book Sacrificial Magic (4th in the Chess Putnam series). I'm really enjoying the fact that the protagonist is growing and evolving through the series and doesn't seem to have forgotten everything she knows from the previous books (I'm looking at you Rachel Morgan).

Are the setting and plot-lines interesting? Do the romance(s) get in the way of the plausible plot development? Are there other female characters? Is there a deluge of alpha-males? Would you recommend it to somebody like me, who is usually irritated by romance in UF?

Finished Feed. Took me a little while to get into it because of the writing (it's written first person from a teenager--blech), but once I did it went very fast. I actually ended up liking it a lot. Some very funny bits of satire and just enough realism to make it chilling.

Not chilling enough to be plausible, I thought, and has some other problems with consistency of the setting :

For instance, given the risks, I would expect mandatory euthanasia at a certain age and/or health condition. Or mandatory ghettos for the old and the ill, at the very least. It was so unbelievable that people weren't afraid to be close to the aged during that convention.

Also, how do they manage to maintain production when people are usually afraid to assemble in groups? What do they live on?

And why on earth are people still interested in watching zombie-baiting? Shouldn't it be, like, a completely old hat by this point?

Didn't mind the teenage POV, actually, but the villains seem kind of flat at this point. But otherwise, yea, I liked it too. It was certainly refreshingly different.

[SkynJay]

Finished my reread of The Dragon's Path in hope of starting the next one, but the library is still processing the copy. Also against all odds someone has checked out the only copies of the next two Crown of Stars books. So I am going for a quick read, and pulled First and Only by Abnett off my shelf, from a used book store haul from a month ago.