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August Reading 2017


RedEyedGhost

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4 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Finished The Stone Sky by Jemisin.  Good conclusion to a very good trilogy that offers a very different story to most current fantasy.  There's a thread dedicated to the trilogy.  Definitely recommended.  

I am also reading this right now. Currently about a third of the way through. Loved the first two books, and loving this one so far.

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The Stone Sky is fantastic. 

 

I don't even know what I'm going to read next. That will probably come down to what I find tomorrow morning when I'm on the subway and decide to look at what's available on my Kindle.

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I started and abandoned PS From Paris.  This was one of the free monthly books on Kindle and supposedly from the best selling French author of recent years, offering a humorous, insightful contemporary fiction.  Bollocks!  It seems to be the plot of the movie Notting Hill rehashed slightly with a handful of other rom-com movie plots and written with wooden prose and flat characters.  It feels like a weak fanfic attempt to write a rom-com, without any comedy or verve at all.  When did contemporary fiction become a euphemism for romance set in present day?  I honestly thought it was a distinct genre from romance, focusing on current social themes.

I'm consciously trying to vary genres with each book but sometimes that leaves me with with utter tripe from a genre I tend not to read.  Perhaps that is evidence to continue ignoring that genre, or perhaps it is evidence that I don't know the genre well enough to pick a quality read (and big sales are rarely an indicator of quality).  

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I read Bujold's Penric's Fox, which was a decent murder mystery and Bujold's characters are as interesting as ever with some good supporting characters introduced and reading it after the stories that are chronologically later does add a poignant note to the ending ...

we see Penric being really excited about the possibility of studying to be a sorcerer-physician but we know from Penric's Mission that vocation would eventually make him suicidal.

The resolution to the mystery perhaps feels a bit too easy and too neat, so I'd probably say it wasn't as good as some of the other stories in the series but it was still entertaining.

Now I've gone back to Max Gladstone's Craft Cycle with Full Fathom Five.

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On Friday finished my reread of The 12th Planet by Zecharia Sitchin, the science arguments was some what cringe-worthy and argumentative transitions weren't well written.  However when he examined Sumerian myths and histories, or at least his translations and interpretations of them, it was a better read.  Overall, what you expect from a nearly 40 year old book laying out a the "ancient astronaut' theory.

On Sunday began reading Christianity by Roland H. Bainton. This book is a part of the American Heritage Library, a series of general history books on different subjects published in the middle-late 80s.  It was one of my textbooks for Church History, but I only took the 2nd semester of the class so anything before the Reformation I never read not that I remember anything from the textbooks I read for a class 15+ years ago...though I do remember the books I read for the book reports for the class.  Honestly, the lectures that this particular professor gave were the reason you took his classes. 

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Alan Taylor's American Colonies: The Settling of North America.  Due to the scope of the work, which covers the history of all European nations in North America,  it serves as a very good overview generally, but with very detailed and interesting treatment of specific aspects like the West Indies and Colonial America, which were the strongest parts of the book.

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August was a balance of fiction and non-fiction for me. Finished reading The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer. Then read The Path of Daggers (book 8 in Jordan's WoT series). Now I'm in the middle of The Rise of Rome by Anthony Everitt.

Highly recommend both of the non-fiction books if you're a history buff. 

WoT series is pretty divisive around here, but I'm a fan and book 8 was decent. Not as good as some, not as bad as others ;) 

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Finished off my August reading with Fitzroy MacLean's A Concise History of Scotland. As I am woefully ignorant of most of Scotland's history, it was a decent overview for me, but lacked any real depth to understand that history. It was a book relatives had brought home from travels for me to read. I'll have to find a meatier coverage of the history of Scotland. The illustrations were wonderful, however.

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