March Reading Thread

[Nous]

I started the month by reading Warhammer popcorn--some of the adventures of Malus Darkblade. Then I read Evensong, the last graphic novel in Carey's Lucifer series. Next, I'll try to finish Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, and maybe I'll read Nabokov's Lolita.

When that I look at that list, I think I may actually be suffering from an overdose of evil by the end of the month!

Yesterday I got Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography, Infidel in the mail, and finished it on the same day. What a magnificent woman, and an excellent writer to boot!

I'm also reading Nathaniel Branden's The Psychology of Self-esteem.

[sparky]

So, that was a bad idea, reading Vellum and Ink back to back.

I just finished Vellum a few weeks ago (quasi-loved it), so the temptation to dive right into Ink was both tempting and dispiriting at the same time. Yeah, now I don't think so. Maybe later in the year - there's only so much literary confusion one can stand in a short period of time.

You know, Duncan is SO smart, you're always tempted to think 'Well, I'm just not getting it.' But, as you say, maybe there IS no method to the madness and maybe being lost is, while part of the 'fun' I guess, also a symptom of underlying flaws. Dunno...

Mike

[VerySmallMonster]

I've been reading Midnight Tides (Erikson) this month, and loving it. I haven't had any problems with the pacing of the book, I enjoyed the slower opening with lots of great dialogue, particularly from the amazing comic duo of Tehol and Bugg. And now with the plot picking up...very exciting.

Next up are Lies of Lock Lamora and River of Gods.

[Arbor Gold]

I suffered through Through a Glass Darkly, which ended up being a well-written romance novel (or a poorly-written historical novel).

I followed it up with The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, which was AMAZING! I started it on the plane for a business trip, and I ended up finishing it in ~48 hours. I was captivated from the onset, which is essentially an ode to reading and the joy of a good book. The setting sucked me in and the actual story hooked me instantly. I was sad when I finished the last page!

Now I am tackling the 4 issues of The New Yorker that have piled up on my coffee table, while trying to decide what to read next.

[Calibandar]

Reading The Blade Itself by Abercrombie at the moment. It's a very witty book, but also a real pageturner heavily reliant on characterization ( which I like). Hardly an uninteresting character in there. On the Scott Lynch level I'd say and one fo the best debuts of past decade.

[senseichow]

Powered my way through Winterbirth as well as both The Blade Itself and Before They Are Hanged.

Its been a good book month for me

[RaceBannon42]

I finished up Brasyl by Ian McDonald the other day. Man.. that is some book. Mind blowing. Much of it went over my head, but I still loved it. I will need to reread it at some point. That and brush up on my quantom theory and portuguese.

I will post a full review closer to the book's May release date.

After watching 300 last weekend. I'm jonesin' for some more Spartan ass kicking so I started in on Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. Hopefully I'll get time to finish it this weekend, its a much easier read than Brasyl, and its pretty damn good so far.

[Caine]

I enjoyed Bertin's light-weight The Last Dragonlord, and I enjoyed it enough to continue reading its sequel Dragon and Phoenix. I'm also reading Dave Duncan's The Gilded Chain in conjunction.

Quick likes/dislikes on Bertin's The Last Dragonlord:

I enjoyed the romantic element to it, even though I'm not big on romance in my fantasy novels in general. Bertin writes very enjoyable female characterizations and even as a guy reading it, I found it very endearing to read about a girl who lands her lifelong hero. In general, all of Bertin's female characterizations are top-notch: Maurynna, Maulin, Tasha, even Sherrine. The plot mostly deals with political intrigue, and even though the magic is there, it's still subtle, and I like the concept behind dragonlords.

Her male characterizations are pretty weak if not altogether uninteresting. Which is ironic, since our female heroine moons over the last Dragonlord, Linden Rathan. There's a joke during a romantic scene when Maurynna and Linden first meet about how big brutes and brains don't go together. I think it's not a joke in Linden's case. Linden is pretty dense, stupid (he easily falls into all the political traps set in motion), and also shown very weak. Despite all the stories of Linden's prowess with the sword and with magic, there's no evidence of it in the book, he's a fairly weak character that constantly needs saving. Also the plot had a few holes in it, but what book is perfect anyway....

[Astra]

Just finished Salem's Lot and starting Hearts in Atlantis. Next The Dark Tower itself, by Stephen King

[Isis]

Phew. Finished River of Gods at last. I'm sure that a re-read (one day in the faaaaar distant future) would improve the story further for me. I think it was probably the glaring inaccuracy concerning magnification/resolution that took me out of the story and made it hard for me to think well of it for a while. Some books you read and don't really give your full trust to the author to be 100% accurate with their facts but up to that point I had trusted McDonald (probably because most of the mechanics of the AI stuff goes over my head anyhow) so it was a surprise to be let down. Overall, I liked it, but I didn't love it.

Also whipped through I am Legend in a day. Thanks to Barry for that. I love that no-frills, immediate, straight to the point, in your face style of story telling. At first I was really enjoying it but by the time I hit the halfway point I was fighting a losing battle to ignore the screamingly bad science. I know it's a book about vampires, it's not real, I know! And of course I can suspend belief otherwise I couldn't read fantasy, scifi or horror stories. But jesus, there is a limit. If a thing could be possible then I can swallow it, but if I know that isn't possible and an author says it is, that's where the trouble starts. It's different if a concept was unclear at the time an author published, but FFS! people knew 50+ years before this book was published that you can't see microorganisms in liquid blood with a light microscope! Although charlatans will still try to make money this way even to this very day, but it's bulllshit and it's against the law. I digress... I really just wish that he'd made the science fuzzier, that's all. But apart from being utterly inaccurate, it IS a great read.

Next up, Winter's Tale.

btw Wert: page 102 now.

[Calibandar]

Wert, you have the Sapkowski book right? It is about 380 pages or about 280 pages? Pagecounts on Amazon and Orionbooks differ markedly.

[DrBloodmoney]

Finished Grey by Jon Armstrong. It was pretty good. I have a hard time warming to first-person narratives. The main character was, by design, difficult to like for the first 2/3rd's of the book. But it ended well, and I think there's going to be sequels. It's from Night Shade Books, and I like to support them, so I'll pick up the rest of the series when it's out, which is the best endorsement I ever offer.

Starting Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston. This is the first book in his non-genre trilogy that he wrote prior to Already Dead and No Dominion (which were extremely entertaining). I all 3 books based on the strength of his two in-genre novels. Hopefully they don't disappoint.

[Bellis]

Also whipped through I am Legend in a day. Thanks to Barry for that. I love that no-frills, immediate, straight to the point, in your face style of story telling. At first I was really enjoying it but by the time I hit the halfway point I was fighting a losing battle to ignore the screamingly bad science. I know it's a book about vampires, it's not real, I know! And of course I can suspend belief otherwise I couldn't read fantasy, scifi or horror stories. But jesus, there is a limit.

I also just read I am Legend. I guess I missed the part about the light micro, and I cut them a bit of slack about some of the molecular biology bc it was written several decades ago. I thought the science was better than Blindsight (vampires were an evolutionary hominid trajectory and were really scared of perpendicular lines i mean the number of genetic modifications necessary to make a vampire makes it highly unlikely they would be more closely related than, well, vampire bats). I generally avoid hard SF for this reason.

BTW, what was your issue with River of Gods? I didn't quite buy a lot of the future India society stuff, but I thought it was overall pretty good.

[Isis]

I also just read I am Legend. I guess I missed the part about the light micro, and I cut them a bit of slack about some of the molecular biology bc it was written several decades ago. I thought the science was better than Blindsight (vampires were an evolutionary hominid trajectory and were really scared of perpendicular lines i mean the number of genetic modifications necessary to make a vampire makes it highly unlikely they would be more closely related than, well, vampire bats). I generally avoid hard SF for this reason.

BTW, what was your issue with River of Gods? I didn't quite buy a lot of the future India society stuff, but I thought it was overall pretty good.

The issues with I am Legend were microbiology ones. There's no mol bio in it. Just going back to first principles it's all wrong. Anyway, the writing appealed to me and the story was good. As I said, had the science bit been a little more indistinct or fuzzy it would have worked better AND aged better. Of course I make allowances for the technical knowledge available at the time. But Gram staining to identify bacteria was developed in the late 1800s so by the 1950s (around about the time that Crick and Watson were publishing their groundbreaking paper) scientists knew a few things about what you could and couldn't do as far as identifying and incriminating bacteria goes. But despite the effort I had to make to ignore the outright inaccuracies I still enjoyed the book a lot.

River of Gods - a minor mistake but a glaring one to a microscopist. Magnification and resolution are not the same thing. Far from it. I have just got back from returning the book otherwise I would look the passage up. But it just illustrated to me that I had truly placed my trust in the author and it was a surprise to be let down. Overall I did like the book, it had some very entertaining scenes and some lovely prose, but I just didn't LOVE it. There was a comparison to Neuromancer on the back cover and in terms of a reading experience Neuromancer wins for me.

[Bellis]

I'm a skimmer, Isis, so the only thing that really stuck out for me in I Am Legend was that I think he got phages and spores kind of confused. Or maybe I didn't read carefully enough. I try not to pay too much attention to science in books.

[saint777]

After starting and stopping about five books I've finally locked on to Chasm City and Perdido Street Station.

[kcf]

I finished The Dragon and the Unicorn by A.A. Attanasio - I really did not like much of anything about this book (full review). It's a needless addition to Arthurian myth.

I just started Bone Song by John Meaney which is starting out really excellent.

[Calibandar]

Keep us posted on that one KCF, I've yet to find a review of that on the Net ( outside of a small blurb here or there from the Guardian).

[Werthead]

Wert, you have the Sapkowski book right? It is about 380 pages or about 280 pages? Pagecounts on Amazon and Orionbooks differ markedly.

The proof is 261 pages long. Apparently the book is a tie-in with a computer game called The Witcher (apparently a fantasised version of the War on Terror with elves as one's side's freedom fighters and the other side's terrorists), which has gotten interesting previews.

Red Seas Under Red Skies is at the post office, where I can't get at it for another two days. Damnit!

[kcf]

Keep us posted on that one KCF, I've yet to find a review of that on the Net ( outside of a small blurb here or there from the Guardian).

No worries - I hope to have a reivew up in a week or so. Rob B over at SFFWorld is reading it right now as well, so you can expect a review there at some point.