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September Reading Thread


Stubby

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Reading Perdido Street Station. The first 300 pages or so were good, but all about the worldbuilding with not so much of a hint of the 'plot' forming. Then Mieville obviously watched the entire Aliens series of movies or something and decided to kick some arse. The story is now in overdrive and it's great.

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I've recently finished A Princess of Roumania, The Prestige, How the Mind Works, The Dispossessed, and The Light Ages.

I'm currently reading The Blank Slate and The Etched City.

Thoughts:

I was kind of underwhelmed by Princess of Roumania.

I loved The Prestige and can't wait for the movie.

I don't think I'm going to enjoy Blank Slate as much as How the Mind Works, which I thought was awesome.

Both Dispossessed and Light Ages were really good, but kind of slow.

I think I'm going to like Etched City a lot.

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I'm just about finished with Kiss of Darkness by Heather Graham.

Rollergirl became a writer? Good for her. Provides hope that Mark Wahlberg may finally finish up The Chronicles of Brock Landers and Chest Rockwell. And PLEASE let someone on this board get this reference. Restore my faith.

Right now, I'm reading Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room mainly because I love a good descent story. S'actually really fascinating. So much went so very wrong for so very long, it was remarkable not only how utterly immoral any number of the wildly eccentric Enron executives were, but even more so, how downright stupid Lay, Skilling and Fastow were about the whole "running a major international corporation" thing. They ran Enron like a jungle, unleashing the traders and executives like wild animals, and then had the gall to be surprised when chaos and excess came to reign.

I also found the documentary that came out two years back to be beyond riveting. I'd be really curious to see if anyone on the board has either read the book or seen the documentary and their impressions of it. Just goes to show how oftentimes reality can be stranger than fiction.

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Rollergirl became a writer? Good for her. Provides hope that Mark Wahlberg may finally finish up The Chronicles of Brock Landers and Chest Rockwell. And PLEASE let someone on this board get this reference. Restore my faith.

I kept forgetting these names. I guess my brain is feeling the pressure of years. However, Dirk Diggler is unforgettable, even for me. :D

Finally, it's one of the best movies ever, IMHO. Currently, No.5 on my all time list. :rofl:

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I just read Pratchett and Gaiman's GOD OMENS to get me in the mood for Gaiman's FRAGILE THINGS.

It's an hilarious take on the Last Battle between Heaven and Hell, and a very entertaining read!

Check the blog for the full review. . .

Patrick

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Just finished a couple of "black comedy" books by Charles Higson, aka Squire Ted from the Fast Show - well, I finished one of them (King of the Ants) which was pretty average, neither particularly black nor comedic, and stopped after 30 pages of the other one (Getting Rid of Mister Kitchen) because it was just pure bloody awful. Trying too damn hard to be wacky and zany. And did I follow these up with a good book to get the taste out of my mouth? Hell no, I'm now struggling through book 2 of Otherland, where Tad Williams has his characters keep themselves busy in various dull ways, going nowhere in particular, while he makes lots of pretty internet worlds for them to play in. World-builders' disease x100000000000.

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A couple easy in-one-sitting reads:

Childhood's End Arthur C. Clarke. Thought-provoking as any big idea SF. I disagreed with a lot of what Clarke was apparently saying, and if I thought for a second he really agreed, i would have to demote my appreciation. as it is, an interesting if pessimistic meditation on future sociology, imperialism, and fate/ free-will/freedom. just a half-step down from Huxley, Orwell and Burgess territory.

A Shadow in Summer Daniel Abraham. Some interesting ideas (andat) but ultimately, the world and the characters and the overall plot isn't captivating enough to hold my interest in the series. Not a bad book, just not memorable. LoLL (Scott Lynch) this is not.

Little,Big John Crowley. This book gets mentioned a lot here as one of the all-time bests, so I wanted to see what the fuss is about. The blurb sounded like a rip-off of One Hundred Years of Solitude. However, it is almost nothing like that book, in terms of writing or scope or anything. It is a good, but very frustrating, read. Ultimately, nothing is explained. Characters constantly start to say, "it's time i told you what i know" and then proceed to say absolutely nothing. Perhaps that was the point. I dunno, I can see how it might speak deeply to some people, but for me, there was no real ending and none of the journey is terribly memorable. Very whimsical. Oddly enough, it made me think of Susanna Clarke's JS&MN, and how much better a job she did in conveying the dark mystery of the fairy world.

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Oh yeah, forgot that bit. :P

Consider Phlebas was very good, and i'm glad I read it first as it's a nice introduction to the setting.

Player of Games is great if you like that sort of thing, which I do, but the brilliant gamer aspect of things might turn some people off. I didn't see the ending coming at all, which was nice.

I really couldn't put this book down - I needed to get a good nights sleep as I was moving house the next day, so I thought i'd just read the first few chapters. I finished it at about 3am.

Use of Weapons has the potential to be the best yet, but the chronology is a bit confusing at the moment, which makes it easier to put down at the end of chapters.

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Finished Forest Mage today. Robin Hobb is a sadist. This book was just painful to read; not because it was poorly written (it was OK), but because she beat the piss out of the main character over and over again.

Like I said the writing was OK, but it could have been much, much better. If all of the repetition of all of Nevare's loss - I seriously think the book could have been 100-150 pages shorter.

SPOILER: examples
"I used to be in the academy, I used to be thin, I used to have a fiance, etc., etc., etc."
Well, let me change that, the writing was less than OK.

I'm going to reserve judgement on this series until after the final volume... but I can't see it making the recommendation list at this point in time. My least favorite Hobb book to date.

Next I'm going to read some Sherlock Holmes short stories, and then Anubis Gates.

Edit: fixed spoilers

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Currently reading Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller and Gaiman's American Gods. Greatly enjoying the former (as I have with all the Calvino I've read so far), but AG is turning out to be a disappointment. The story just seems to be spinning its wheels, getting nowhere fast.

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The story just seems to be spinning its wheels, getting nowhere fast.

I know, but persevere. I actuallu dropped the book because of it's start, and picked it up a few months later and now it is one of the ten best books I've read.

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Based on recommendations from these boards, rounding out September, we have:

Hyperion Dan Simmons. Thanks to Winterfella and Xray. I'd been avoiding Simmons because his recent stuff sounds, from reading Stego's blog, like something I might not want to subject myself to. But I found this book pretty transparent (i.e. his views weren't strong in it). Some of the short stories were better than others, but the Priest's Tale and the Scholar's Tale were both excellent and definately worth reading the book for those sequences alone. The sequel sounds like more conventional space opera, and the stories do sort of work on their own, so I'm going to wait a bit before I find out what happened at the end...

Blindness Jose Saramago. Thanks to Dylanfanatic. Thanks very much :kiss: This is excellent. the stream-of-consciousness style is perfect for the story - about a town suffering from an epidemic of blindness, and its aftermath. The best and worst of human nature. Just read it!

Good Omens Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett. Thanks Pat. Somehow I hadn't gotten around to this one yet. It's cute and funny in the right places, would make a great movie in the style of Kevin Smith's Dogma. A lot of the same sorts of themes Gaiman later developed, more soberly, in AG.

Moving into next week, I've started reading Burning Your Boats the collected short stories by Angela Carter. A little intense perhaps to read all at once, might need to break this up with something else... perhaps Iain Banks...

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Well, I was planning on just reading The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell. However, the book was so damn good, I went and bought Enemy of God and Excalibur. I read the entire trilogy this month and it is great. I have not enjoyed a series that much since...well...A Song of Ice and Fire.

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