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November 2009


Ski the Swift

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Finished Robert Greenberger's 'Iron Man: Femmes Fatales' where Iron Man must help a newly formed S.H.I.E.L.D combat HYDRA incursions into New York. It's not exactly a challenging read but 'Femmes Fatales' entertained the hell out of me and that was the main thing. My full review is over Here. Now it's back to 'Finch' again, hopefully I'll finish it off over the weekend.

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Since reading Cryptonomicon this summer and going on and on about how awesome it was, a mate lent me The Code Book by Simon Singh, which is a real-life history of cryptography. It's really interesting and very funny in places (some of the anecdotes about Charles Babbage's life are hilarious), though the actual technical bits about the codes are sometimes a bit much for a sleepy train journey.

I read it a few years ago, I agree it was a good book. I thought Singh did a good job of explaining the more technical bits in a concise way that was probably about as easy-to-understand as it was possible to make them.

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Finished Arrow's Flight and now starting Arrow's Fall by Mercedes Lackey. The second book was mediocre. I was hoping the loose plot threads in the first book would show up in the second novel. Instead the author takes the reader on a tour of the kingdom, and then spends the characters in a cabin while stuck in a blizzard for most of the novel. :dunno: The only positive was the insight to the magic system and character development. Here is hoping that the plot goes somewhere meaningful for the third novel.

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Just started The Cardinal's Blades by Pierre Pevel, which is out next week. It's basically the story of Cardinal Richelieu recruiting some badass soldiers to go head off the machinations of Spain and its dragon allies. So far, very good.

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Last night I finished Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. This was my first introduction to the author and I'm happy to say he did not disappoint. I loved the alternate world he created where steam-driven machines and bio-engineered creatures exist on the eve of the First World War. I really enjoyed following the adventures of Alek, son of the Hapsburg heir, and Deryn, a girl posing as a boy in the British Air Service as the war erupts around them forcing their paths and lives to cross. Leviathan may be young adult, but it's also very well written. Strongly recommended.

I was unable to get my copy of The Sad Tales of the Brothers Grossbart yesterday because stupid Amazon wanted a signature and I wasn't home. Reading Nightingale's Lament by Simon R. Green instead.

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I finished Brian Keene's Dark Hollow on Wednesday. It was pretty much awful. The premise is a small town in Pennsylvania is getting an unusually warm early spring, when things start going a little strange. First everybody's libido is geared into overdrive, and then women start to go missing. It started out okay, then lagged for way too long, then got kind of stupid, then it got a little interesting, but that was then ruined as it got extremely stupid, and then it ended. While some bits of the book were interesting overall it just fell flat, and the writing itself was pretty poor. I won't be reading his author again.

3/10

After that I read Paul Melko's The Walls of the Universe and it was bloody brilliant. As soon as I read the synopsis for this book I was extremely excited about reading it, and I'm thrilled that it didn't disappoint. The book isn't high literature by any means, but the writing was adequate and it was paced very nicely. The story opens with John Rayburn meeting himself (John Prime) in the woods by his house. John Prime gives him a device that allows him to travel to different universes. In part one we get to see several interesting universes as John travels through them (think Sliders seasons 1 and 2), part two follows John and John Prime as they settle into living in the universes they have chosen to make their lives and we have a very nice contrasting parallel between their two stories (think the movie Sliding Doors), and then we get the conclusion which nicely points to much more going on yet concludes this part of the story very satisfyingly. I don't know if Melko is planning to write more books in follow up, but he's definitely set up plenty of fertile ground (the multiverse is a big place after all).

Melko deals with the concepts behind the work in a slow enough fashion that you don't have to have an in depth history in reading comic books or watching this type of science fiction to follow whats going on. I'd recommend this to all ages and especially anybody curious in trying sci-fi as a genre.

7/10 for the technical aspects, 10/10 for pure enjoyment, so I'll average it to 9/10

I'm now about about 50 pages into The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington. So far it's very interesting and I've been thoroughly repulsed twice.

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I read James Lee Burke's Cadillac Jukebox and thought it was Ok. It was an interesting crime/mystery novel but nothing out of the ordinary.

Then I read The Isle of Stone by Nicholas Nicastro, a historical novel about the Peloponnesian war. I found it very good as it looked at the story from a different perspective than the one I was used to. It focuses on Sparta and how children were raised there (in ways that seem brutal and barbaric to us today) but the most important part of the story relates the tale of the battle of Sphakteria, the first time the Spartans decided to surrender to their opponents instead of fighting until the bitter end. Good book, I enjoyed it.

I also picked up Soul Mountain (original title Lingshan) by Gao Xingjian. I admit I don't know much about modern China, or for that matter, ancient China, I only picked it up because it said it won the Nobel prize in 2000 and I thought it would be interesting to learn more about a culture I'm unfamiliar with. I was disappointed, I did not enjoy this book. I found it tedious and had it not been for yet another 4 hours I had to wait at the doctor's office on Saturday I would not have finished it as quickly. There were beautiful parts but in the end it didn't work for me.

I doubt I'll have any time for reading today but on Monday I'm hoping to start Daughters of Crete by Suzanne Selfors.

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Just finished Lord of Silence by Mark Chadbourn. It was a good read, with a very good mystery at the center of it. Strongly reminiscent or Mark Charon Newton's Nights of Villjamur.

Now starting Adrian Tchaikovsky's Blood of the Mantis.

I also picked up Soul Mountain (original title Lingshan) by Gao Xingjian. I admit I don't know much about modern China, or for that matter, ancient China, I only picked it up because it said it won the Nobel prize in 2000 and I thought it would be interesting to learn more about a culture I'm unfamiliar with. I was disappointed, I did not enjoy this book. I found it tedious and had it not been for yet another 4 hours I had to wait at the doctor's office on Saturday I would not have finished it as quickly. There were beautiful parts but in the end it didn't work for me.

I think this is a book that very much depends on your mood at the time of reading. I can easily see how you could find it tedious, but for me it was beautiful.

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Just because I love the book so much, I'm reading El Prinicipito (Le Petit Prince, The Little Prince, etc.). I'm getting a few weird looks for carrying around what's apparently considered a kids' book, but I don't really care. :P

Next up, if I'm feeling brave, is El Rey de Hierro. If I'd known it was originally a French book (Le roi de fer - Les rois maudits 1) I would have looked for that version instead. I'm also still looking for a copy of Juego de Tronos, but given that it's now 15 years since publication (!!), it's proving difficult. (I'm also looking for the Sapkowski books, but so far no luck there either.)

It doesn't help that I can't for the life of me figure out how bookstores are organised here -- the signs on the walls don't correspond to the actual books in those shelves; English-language books are sometimes mixed in with the castellano ones, and sometimes not; and even within sections I can't see any sort of alphabetising or anything. Authors' works are often placed somewhat together, but finding a particular author within a genre? Good luck!

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I think this is a book that very much depends on your mood at the time of reading. I can easily see how you could find it tedious, but for me it was beautiful.

I could see the beauty of it at times, I really could. I think you are right about being in the wrong mood for it, under different circumstances I might have reacted differently to it. I find this true for a lot of books.

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Just because I love the book so much, I'm reading El Prinicipito (Le Petit Prince, The Little Prince, etc.). I'm getting a few weird looks for carrying around what's apparently considered a kids' book, but I don't really care. :P

It's a wonderful book and if people give you strange looks instead of a smile it means they haven't read it or understood it.

And good luck with les rois maudits ;)

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The Company by KJ Parker. I liked this, I wished I liked it more, but I felt there were too many missed opportunities, that in the end it compared unfavorably to other island stories, or other war stories. I would agree with many other reviewers that the characters were not well-differentiated sufficiently. I found I had to go back and re-read many sections after I'd figured out who was who.

Variations on Night and Day by Abdelrahmen Munif - oddly paced historical fiction of the generation of first contact between a remote Arab kingdom and British speculators.

I also re-read Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, because it had been long enough that I didn't remember what had happened in it, just that I hadn't enjoyed it as much as some of his other novels. This reading, I appreciated many of the individual passages (it's highly quotable out of context), but together it doesn't hang together quite as well as MC or SV, and the magic realist conceit, that the protagonist ages twice as fast as normal, is underdeveloped.

I'm on the cusp of ordering Finch and Brothers Grossbart - just waiting for more reviews from this thread :)

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I've just finished Melville's Moby-Dick. Well, what can I say about it ? This being a literature forum, I don't think this book needs an introduction. It took me a while to read it, but in the end I'm really glad I did. (not only for its importance and impact on literature, but also for the book itself). I just love the fact that I can now recognize the many references to MD you come across in books, movies,...

I'm still working on Gravity's Rainbow (only a hundred pages in) and I'm about to start Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut.

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It's a wonderful book and if people give you strange looks instead of a smile it means they haven't read it or understood it.

And good luck with les rois maudits ;)

If it were Les Rois Maudits I'd be less worried! ;)

Bellis, did you ever start/finish the Pears? I'm interested in your reaction to it. (Not as interested as I am to Xenogenesis, of course!) Until cyrano mentioned it, I wasn't sure whether anybody was still reading it. I figured I was fairly late to the party on that one.

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Bellis, did you ever start/finish the Pears? I'm interested in your reaction to it. (Not as interested as I am to Xenogenesis, of course!) Until cyrano mentioned it, I wasn't sure whether anybody was still reading it. I figured I was fairly late to the party on that one.

Just started An Instance of the Fingerpost tonight - the first section has got me quite hooked! Xenogenesis is in the plans for later this month :)

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I am reading The Discoverers: A history of man's search to know his world and himself . It is a somewhat sweeping history of human exploration and the people who made these discoveries possible. Sweeping in the sense that it describes explorers (Polo/Batuta/Columbus and others), anatomists (Silvenus/Galen/Harvey),physical scientists (Newton/Galileo), biologists (Darwin/Wallace) and even economists (Adam Smith/Keynes) amongst others. There are criticisms of his book based on the emphasis he places on certain discoveries and their relative import, but I enjoyed the book mainly for the storytelling aspect of it and the little nuggets of information and backstories to the discoveries.

For instance, I learnt that Kublai Khan was using paper as currency in his kingdom back in the early 13th century. Or how the ancients kept time by the use of water clocks. Or how Newton established his priority in the field of differential calculus. And so on.....

Edit: I once attended a talk by Simon Singh. He's a pretty entertaining speaker, but I'm not sure I want to read books about mathematical geekery intended for the layperson. Its a prejudice I have, I know. And yeah, I'd be interested in the reaction to Pear's book as well.

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