The Marquis de Leech Posted February 22, 2017 Share Posted February 22, 2017 Finished off The Call. Delightfully disturbing (I'm still weighing up whether I buy Conor's craziness though. While there is more than a whiff of The Lord of the Flies to proceedings, he's still operating in a supervised environment). Next up is Troll: A Love Story,by Johanna Sinisalo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AncalagonTheBlack Posted February 22, 2017 Share Posted February 22, 2017 About to start Nicholas Eames's debut,Kings of the Wyld (The Band #1).Reviews have been very good,plus Orbit debuts are more hit than miss for me as compared to Tor Books. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garett Hornwood Posted February 22, 2017 Author Share Posted February 22, 2017 I finished The Great Controversy by Ellen G. White on Monday, since it's taking me a lot of time to get through The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume II) I'm going to be reading that essentially exclusively at both work and home until I complete it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SkynJay Posted February 23, 2017 Share Posted February 23, 2017 11 hours ago, AncalagonTheBlack said: About to start Nicholas Eames's debut,Kings of the Wyld (The Band #1).Reviews have been very good,plus Orbit debuts are more hit than miss for me as compared to Tor Books. It was good, really good. One of the funniest books I've read in a while and suprisingly tight for a debut. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jango Posted February 23, 2017 Share Posted February 23, 2017 Seeing as I have a Comparative World Literature class on Fiction and Fantasy books, you can imagine we're bound to read a good amount of books. I just recently finished up reading Sabriel by Garth Nix for my class, am now reading Don Quixote for my class. I'm also reading a couple of books on the side for pleasure, those being The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe and Lost Gods by Gerald Brom. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Marquis de Leech Posted February 23, 2017 Share Posted February 23, 2017 Finished off Troll: A Love Story. Full credit to Sinisalo for her ambition here: using beastiality (consensual, sympathetically-portrayed beastiality no less!) to explore themes of love makes for unconventional reading. The additional bits and pieces from faux articles and actual books (something Sinisalo does in some of her other works) is good fun too: it's an almost Lovecraftian devotion to providing inter-story evidence for what is going on. I do get the sense though that she bit off more than she could chew with the characters in this one: the mail-order bride in particular needed more fleshing out, and Mikael/Angel could have done with more development (his actions at the end strike me as a bit too extreme). Next up is Exile, by R.A. Salvatore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jo498 Posted February 23, 2017 Share Posted February 23, 2017 Finished Le Guin's "The left hand of darkness". It is an interesting and well written book but I think it tries too much in a middle-length novel. It is a "first contact story" but with humans as the aliens, a story about a hermaphroditic race (this is the most "spectacular" thing at first glance but overall it remains rather irrelevant, no kinky space porn, no obvious effect on the political systems, one we encounter seems feudalist, the other bureaucratic socialist), about political intrigues and a perilous journey crossing glaciers (it is an ice planet, a very tough environment) that leads to the human envoy and a native becoming friends. There are background stories interspersed, sketching elements of the myths and history of the planet Gethen/"Winter" and there is a zen-style religion. The humans are able of psychic communication, the religious sages of Gethen can to some extent predict future events but these two features are also hardly relevant for the main plot. Overall it sometimes feels like a little too much background for the plot although it is certainly well done with two alternating first person narratives and those background stories in between. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
C Rutherford Posted February 23, 2017 Share Posted February 23, 2017 The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak was okay I guess. A bit too self-aware. The characters and situations felt a bit too desperate to be a cute nostalgic teen flick. Put All Our Wrong Todays by Mastai aside. Just wasn't clicking and mainly I think because my patience to hold out on Hobb just frayed to the point of breaking. So off it is to Assassin's Fate. With dread and quivering anticipation and what I suspect with be an emotional gut punch or two. Plus I am already feeling a sense of withdrawal (and why I held off taking up the ARC when I got it) since I also suspect that the gap between this and whatever her next book is will be a bit lengthier than normal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beniowa Posted February 24, 2017 Share Posted February 24, 2017 Finished Too Like the Lightning. It's easy to see why this is getting so much praise. It's a very impressive debut novel with incredible world-building and chock-full of philosophy, political science, and sociology. That being said I did feel it was a little full of itself. That the author was trying a little too hard to show her knowledge and cleverness. It's an odd book, which worked for me for the most part so I will be checking out the next one. Now reading Twelve Kings in Sharakhai by Bradley P. Beaulieu. On 2/19/2017 at 6:06 AM, Peadar said: Wildcards Volume 1 -- I read this a decade ago and am having fun all over again... After that, I'll be moving onto Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Bear and the Serpent. I always enjoy his books. I'm surprised more people haven't read the first in this series. It should be right up the alley of most of us on this board. I'm planning to read The Tiger and the Wolf in the next month or so. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starkess Posted February 24, 2017 Share Posted February 24, 2017 Finished Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix. Gods, Harry is a right prick in this one. Rowling does a great job with his inner turmoil and hormones and everything else on top. This is Harry's everything-is-darkest moment in the series and it really is dark. I read the Sirius scene in a public place and had to bite back tears even though I've read this like a dozen times already! Now on to Half-Blood Prince. This one came out when I was in college and I have consequently read it many fewer times than the others. This will maybe be the fourth or fifth time? (Oh and the trivia competition I was preparing for was last night. We were doing really well and then we missed the final question by a hair (it was to rank the frequency of spells being cast throughout the whole series, we put expelliarmus-accio-crucio-reparo but it was accio-expelliarmus-crucio-reparo. Had we gotten it right we would have gotten 2nd place out of 127 teams. Alas.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Marquis de Leech Posted February 24, 2017 Share Posted February 24, 2017 Finished off Exile. Just as badly written as Homeland, but with fewer redeeming features (it's basically a novelised RPG). Not too bad if you just put your brain on autopilot though, and accept it as literary candyfloss. Next up is Psycho, by Robert Bloch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HexMachina Posted February 25, 2017 Share Posted February 25, 2017 On 23/02/2017 at 6:18 PM, C Rutherford said: The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak was okay I guess. A bit too self-aware. The characters and situations felt a bit too desperate to be a cute nostalgic teen flick. Put All Our Wrong Todays by Mastai aside. Just wasn't clicking and mainly I think because my patience to hold out on Hobb just frayed to the point of breaking. So off it is to Assassin's Fate. With dread and quivering anticipation and what I suspect with be an emotional gut punch or two. Plus I am already feeling a sense of withdrawal (and why I held off taking up the ARC when I got it) since I also suspect that the gap between this and whatever her next book is will be a bit lengthier than normal. What...gah, my jealousy knows no bounds! You are probably right about a long wait before any more books (I believe she said this will be the last Fitz book) On a related matter, I finished up my re-read of Golden Fool and jumped straight into Fool's Fate. Also going to start Gaiman's Norse Mythology. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darth Richard II Posted February 25, 2017 Share Posted February 25, 2017 Well this would be the 3rd final fitz book. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peadar Posted February 25, 2017 Share Posted February 25, 2017 On 2/22/2017 at 9:21 AM, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said: Finished off The Call. Delightfully disturbing (I'm still weighing up whether I buy Conor's craziness though. While there is more than a whiff of The Lord of the Flies to proceedings, he's still operating in a supervised environment). Many thanks Glad you enjoyed it! 9 hours ago, beniowa said: I'm planning to read The Tiger and the Wolf in the next month or so. Really hoping you love it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Marquis de Leech Posted February 25, 2017 Share Posted February 25, 2017 Finished off Psycho. While very good, it just can't match up to the Hitchcock adaptation (Bloch making Bates fat, middle-aged and disgusting renders the villain a figure of ridicule rather than horror). Oh, and that obnoxious final scene, where everything about Bates is spoon-fed to the audience? That's in the book too. So, yeah, an example of the film being better than the book. Next up is Sojourn, by R.A. Salvatore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
First of My Name Posted February 25, 2017 Share Posted February 25, 2017 I finished The Obelisk Gate and really liked it, so I'm eager for the last book in the trilogy. If Jemisin's writing and grasp of character remain as strong as they have been thus far she'll have created something pretty unique. I'm now finally, finally reading the first Dunk & Egg novella, as part of the A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms collection. I'm enjoying it a lot, and I love the illustrations that this version has, I've always been a sucker for those. It's nice to have some new Westeros stuff on paper too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AncalagonTheBlack Posted February 25, 2017 Share Posted February 25, 2017 On 2/23/2017 at 6:39 AM, SkynJay said: It was good, really good. One of the funniest books I've read in a while and suprisingly tight for a debut. I'm 30% done with it and yes you're absolutely right,it's damn funny and enjoyable as hell so far.An assured debut for sure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unJon Posted February 25, 2017 Share Posted February 25, 2017 16 hours ago, beniowa said: Finished Too Like the Lightning. It's easy to see why this is getting so much praise. It's a very impressive debut novel with incredible world-building and chock-full of philosophy, political science, and sociology. That being said I did feel it was a little full of itself. That the author was trying a little too hard to show her knowledge and cleverness. It's an odd book, which worked for me for the most part so I will be checking out the next one. Now reading Twelve Kings in Sharakhai by Bradley P. Beaulieu. I'm planning to read The Tiger and the Wolf in the next month or so. I also just finished Too Like The Lightning. My impression was similar to yours. There was a lot to like. Interesting world and characters. Very interesting narrative devices. Some good twists. Wrapped in a detetictve story. Still somewhat a bit too full of itself. Also I thought it was just a two book series but it looks like a trilogy? Oh well, next book out in March and final book in December so all good. I have pre ordered book 2. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Astromech Posted February 25, 2017 Share Posted February 25, 2017 Christopher Buehlman's, The Lesser Dead, a tale of vampires in 1978 New York City. Creepy, lots of cultural references to the times and an interesting take on the vampire myth. Ted Chiang's, The Merchant and The Alchemist's Gate, was a clever series of intertwined time travel stories set in medieval Baghdad. Very short read, but excellent. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guinevere Seaworth Posted February 25, 2017 Share Posted February 25, 2017 Babylon's Ashes was another fine instalment to The Expanse series. I admit I am not sure where the series is heading next in terms of plot as it seems the plot arc of the last three books came to a conclusion. Mexico by James Michener was a disappointment. I just couldn't connect with the characters and the imagined dialogue of the Aztec and other tribes was cringe worthy. I re-read a series that I hadn't read in at least 20 years ago, Prince of the Blood by Raymond Feist. It passed the time test better than I thought, even though I generally do not like teenage boys as the main protagonists. As an added bonus, it has been so long since I read it last, I completely forgot who were the main conspirators in the treason plot. It was like I had never read the book before. I am about 1/3 of the way through The King's Buccaneer by Raymond Feist. This is another re-read in which I barely remember from long ago. I do like Nicholas much more than Borric or Erland. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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