January Reading 2017

[Darth Richard II]

4 hours ago, Triskan said:

Oooh, tell me more.

Well, find any article he's ever written. The hitpiece, er, article he did for I think Time on Harry Potter comes to mind. Also when you read his crap book you'll see what I mean.

I am, uh, not a fan, let's say. (Although lots of people on here are).

[Iskaral Pust]

On 1/28/2017 at 1:12 PM, Triskan said:

I finished TH White's The Once and Future King and had mixed feeling about it but did think that it got better as it went along.  I'm kind of amazed that Lev Grossman says it's the best book ever (or rather that it's the one in his library that he returns to most).  

That book got a lot of positive recs around here but when I tried it I had to drop it after a few chapters.  Not only was it far too childish, it was the story of Disney's movie The Sword In The Stone.  Maybe it diverges later but the first quarter or more of the book was an exact copy of a movie I saw a dozen times as a kid.  There was zero value to reading further. 

[Darth Richard II]

23 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

That book got a lot of positive recs around here but when I tried it I had to drop it after a few chapters.  Not only was it far too childish, it was the story of Disney's movie The Sword In The Stone.  Maybe it diverges later but the first quarter or more of the book was an exact copy of a movie I saw a dozen times as a kid.  There was zero value to reading further. 

...you know the disney film is based on the book right?

[Iskaral Pust]

13 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

...you know the disney film is based on the book right?

Of course, although I only realized it once I started reading the first few pages of the book.  I had never before that heard of any connection between the two.  (I hardly thought the book was an adaptation of the movie) 

But why is such a childish story regularly rec'd as a great read?  It's not Watership Down, for example.  And for me personally, I knew the movie so well that it felt like there was no point reading the book.  Often the book is much better than any movie adaptation and still worth reading, but in this case it seemed pretty much identical.

[Iskaral Pust]

I finished Amid The Shadows, a SF/F thriller that turned out to be pretty blah.  The only thing that will really stick in my mind is how did Amazon recommend this to me?  The path was 15 Live Of Harry August -> Dark Matter -> Amid The Shadows.  I think their algorithm needs some work.  I will freely acknowledge that my greatest bone of contention is the political ideology bleeding into the book, and I am a liberal elitist who never complains that most fiction is influence by the viewpoint of the liberal-leaning author.

To sum up, you will enjoy this book if you love: fundamental Christians, the military, guns, Israel.
You will enjoy it even more if you hate: Muslims, non-believers, government, the Patriot Act, teenage girls with boyfriends.

Now reading Senlin Ascends.  Really well written so far but, frustratingly, I have not had a chance to read it yet for more than ten minutes at a time.

[Peadar]

I'm reading The Sandman Omnibus Vol 1 by Neil Gaiman and several artists. Extremely enjoyable.

[Plessiez]

I only read five of the eight books I'd hoped to read last month; but I also read three books I hadn't planned to, so things more or less balanced out.

The best thing I read in January was probably Kate Atkinson's A God In Ruins, but it was thoroughly depressing and I'm not sure that I wouldn't have been happier not reading it.  Marge Piercy's Woman On The Edge Of Time was also uncomfortably bleak -- or at least the first fifty pages were; I couldn't get any further than that.  (I might try again later, but not for a while.)

I also admitted defeat on Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity -- just couldn't muster any enthusiasm to get back into it -- and I wasn't able to find a copy of Ada Palmer's Too Like The Lightning.  The latter is apparently out in paperback in the UK now though, so that's probably something for February.

I did finish Cherryh's Rusalka but it was a bit of a slog.   I just couldn't really work out what the point of it all was.  A shame, because I've read a good portion of her previous work and was expecting to like this a lot more than I did.

[Garett Hornwood]

Last night (Jan. 31) I finished Centuries of Change by Ian Mortimer.  I thought it was a very good book, thought-provoking yet very readable for a general audience as well.

Since it's a new month I'll post on the February thread about what I've started reading.

[polishgenius]

On 30/01/2017 at 7:13 PM, Iskaral Pust said:

Of course, although I only realized it once I started reading the first few pages of the book.  I had never before that heard of any connection between the two.  (I hardly thought the book was an adaptation of the movie) 

But why is such a childish story regularly rec'd as a great read?  It's not Watership Down, for example.  And for me personally, I knew the movie so well that it felt like there was no point reading the book.  Often the book is much better than any movie adaptation and still worth reading, but in this case it seemed pretty much identical.

 

I need to get back to the book, I paused it a little way in, and forgot to go back- but tbh while it's childike I don't think it's childish. I enjoyed all the stories and vignettes (never having seen the movie), but it did start to get repetitive after a while without moving the story on at all.