March 2010 Reading

[Isis]

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. Buried in a lot of filler is, as I discovered close to the end, a good story. I wouldn't say it's worse than Secret History though - I found that book very flawed as well in its own way. But it is different enough that you wouldn't believe they are the same author.

Couldn't agree more with the bolded part. I just read this last month. I enjoyed it enormously and I think that part of that was the sheer surprise that it was written by the same person who wrote The Secret History - which I found to be a disappointment.

[Bellis]

Couldn't agree more with the bolded part. I just read this last month. I enjoyed it enormously and I think that part of that was the sheer surprise that it was written by the same person who wrote The Secret History - which I found to be a disappointment.

I only read it because of your recommendation. Most of the critics panned it when it came out.

[Bellis]

The book was strange or the finding of it? I just finished it last week and loved it!

The book was strange but I loved the writing.

[Seak]

The book was strange but I loved the writing.

The Man Who Was Thursday was definitely strange, but I loved it too. I couldn't stop laughing throughout.

[Larry.]

Currently reading Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's fun illustrated homage to Borges, The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals and J.K. Huysmans' The Damned (Là Bas). After that, it'll be Kate Griffin's first two non-YA novels then a whole host of others to be read/reviewed over the next week or so.

[Quarterman]

I've just read the first chapter of Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan and honestly, I'm not impressed but my final opinion will be reserved until I finish it (obviously...).

Arthur Machen is one of my favorite classic horror writers, his influence is enormous from H. P. Lovecraft to Guillermo Del Toro. His storie are a fusion of ancient horror, eldritch magic, and lost races... Picts "elves" "fairies". He commonly revisits this race of "little people" or "white people" that reside in caves and hollows under the hills. I love The Great God Pan, very creepy, creepy, story.

After reading this story I'd recommend

The Shining Pyramid

The Novel of the Black Seal

The Novel of the White Powder

The White People

Still reading The Stand but also started Different Seasons too.

[Seak]

Still reading The Stand but also started Different Seasons too.

I couldn't stand the Stand. :) But seriously, there was maybe one character I liked and the rest drove me nuts, plus it was just too long.

I almost gave up on King, but luckily I tried the Gunslinger recently and quite enjoyed it.

[BookWyrm]

So I'm very close to finishing Taran Wanderer, and I can easily finish The Great God Pan in an hour or two, but The Princess Bride got in the way so now I'm reading three at once. I sat down today and just checked out the beginning and got drawn in; now I've finished half of the Bride so there's no point in abandoning it at this point. Not that I would, it's great.

I think however, tonight I'll be finishing Taran Wanderer or The Great God Pan (both if it's not too late).

*I'll comment more on Machen when I've finished tGGP. The positive opinions have lightened my heart so I look forward to reading it.

[Isis]

I only read it because of your recommendation. Most of the critics panned it when it came out.

Oh, I feel like I've been naughty.

For me the story/plot of The Little Friend was incidental to my enjoyment of the book. What I liked about it was the characters, the descriptions, the black humour, and above all else, the atmosphere. You could see early on where it was all leading plot-wise so you wouldn't get invested in the book for that reason alone, I don't think.

[lokisnow]

I just read the Trade of Queens in one sitting, props to Stross for finishing a six book cycle in record time. All the novels in the series read like a season of 24, but this one really busted ass to cover tons of plot threads and developments and resolve them all, mostly, in a single volume. I think that would be my complaint, this novel is most like the first novel, in a sort of bookendish way, but the second-fifth novel expanded, developed and matured a lot of fascinating ideas and really burgeoned about with a very cool universe, then it's sort of like by the end of the fifth book, it had gotten too big and he had to work hard to constrain it all back to make the resolution fit into a single volume. I will say that I admire him for doing it because there was a ton of story to be told, but very little plot to support it with, so it could have been a deadly dull and very long volume where little to nothing happens (like a typical travelogue, "see the world!" middle volume of many a fantasy series) but instead he managed to corral everything together in a satisfying but not terribly memorable way.

Stross in a way had written himself into a bit of a corner. The development of Miriam's rape by artificial insemination in the last volume was pretty dispicable and he held off her actually getting an abortion, but then he realized that it was difficult to write Miriam into the story and keep up her continuing pregnancy so he gives her a convenient miscarraige halfway through the book, showing that her losing the rape-fetus was not the political disaster that he said it would be in the earlier volume. Additionally, Miriam is present for only about 1/12 of the volume, with most of it being a frantic race to cover thirty or forty varying points of view, ala a michael bay movie, in order to tell the reader everything they need to know to understand what's happening. It works, but it doesn't give you a protagonist to root for, since Miriam is basically passive. Additionally, the big nuclear explosions at the end of book five don't actually happen until about 40 pages into this volume, so there's overlap, and then the response to that--although it is somewhat predictable, except in scale--takes up the entirety of the book despite being so predictable. There's a lot of talk and chatter about the politics in the faux-Boston and these seem more accurate than what we've seen before there, but I sort of feel like Stross got a bit hamstrung by the more simplistic and cackling variety of politics he employed in earlier volumes. Again, Miriam's hyper intelligence in everything but navigating the simplistic politics of Gruinmarket was always a bit of a problem for the series. On the other hand, it was her major flaw, in a way, that kept the character making realistic, if stupid decisions based on her 'entitled' upbringing of equal rights and such nonsense. Her indignation often overcame her intelligence and waryness, which is interesting writing and character development but it so often came across as grating in a character you wanted to root for but who would often be willfully stupid in a self-righteous way.

Oh and Stross got to carpet bomb an entire continent with nuclear weapons, insane, chilling and impressive.

[snake]

Just finished The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Excellent read.

Starting The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon.

[Starkess]

Finished up Polaris. It was good, but something was lacking. I think the characters were just so vanilla. Even the psychotic woman was pretty cliche. Still, it kept me reading and was entertaining enough that I wasn't disappointed. I might try to check out the previous novel in the series if I get a chance.

[palin99999]

Finished:

The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter - 8/10 - Very interesting book, kind of reminiscent of Breaking Bad.

Starting:

This Wicked World by Richard Lange

[siemprepe]

Finished the greatest knight by Elizabeth Chadwick and found it to be an entertaining read. Specially because I love medieval stuff :).

Also finished at the gates of darkness by Feist. I do not know why I keep reading Feist because I find his writing to become more and more annoying but still.. His books are finished quickly, so I squeeze em in.

Started now in the left hand of god by Hoffman. The first 50 pages looked promising so I am curious to see it it lives up to my expectations (hope so).

[mashiara]

For me the story/plot of The Little Friend was incidental to my enjoyment of the book. What I liked about it was the characters, the descriptions, the black humour, and above all else, the atmosphere. You could see early on where it was all leading plot-wise so you wouldn't get invested in the book for that reason alone, I don't think.

I feel a reread is in order. I remember I enjoyed this book a lot more that The Secret History but I'd love to refresh my memory and see how I feel about it now.

I finished The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It didn't live up to my expectations. Don't get me wrong, it was a good read and enjoyable most of the time but I found it underwhelming compared to the Shadow of the Wind, which I thought to be a brilliant book. The Angel's Game was a lot darker and contained many tales within tales and questions that didn't quite get answered (or could be answered in more than one way) and several memorable characters but the conclusion was disappointing and the plot itself failed to thrill me.

It didn't help that I found out the copy I was reading was misprinted and was missing about 70 pages. :tantrum: I managed to piece together most of the events I missed but that's nowhere near the same as reading the text. My mind was pretty much made about this book before that but maybe if I hadn't skipped ahead like that I would have a more favorable opinion.

Tomorrow I'm planning on starting My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.

[beniowa]

Sorry about the missing pages, M. :(

Last night I finished The Adamantine Palace by Stephen Deas. I liked the take on dragons and it seems Deas has put together a fairly interesting world. Characterization suffered a bit and the politics felt a little simplistic, but on the whole I enjoyed it.

I to satisfy my Pratchett fix so I'm going to read Faust Eric, which I understand was originally a graphic novel. As it'll be a pretty quick read, I'll probably get to Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth by Simon R. Green after that.

[Quarterman]

I couldn't stand the Stand. :) But seriously, there was maybe one character I liked and the rest drove me nuts, plus it was just too long.

I almost gave up on King, but luckily I tried the Gunslinger recently and quite enjoyed it.

Yeah I am just chugging along with The Stand only like 250 pages in, I like the sidestories and can't say the characters are all that rich to read. Cornucopia of King standards.

*I'll comment more on Machen when I've finished tGGP. The positive opinions have lightened my heart so I look forward to reading it.

Oh I love Arthur Machen, most of his tales run between 20-30 pages. I heartily recommend the collection Tales of Horror And The Supernatural by Machen. It is collection of his "best of" material.

Different Seasons 7/10

Stephen King's Danse Macabre 8/10 (knocked this nearly 400 page book in a single afternoon. King writes about horror with child-like delight.)

Still reading The Stand but now have begun Skeleton Crew as Night Shift hasn't arrived yet.

[Xalinor]

Recently finished Robert Jordan's The Path of Daggers and have begun Winter's Heart. I've decided to finish the series (at least as far as it has gotten at this point) to be more up to date with new releases without having to wait months to catch up. The series has been on a downturn, starting with Lord of Chaos. I've had quite enough of the endless descriptions of clothing. I don't know why Jordan felt he needed to describe every set of boobs in the entire series, but he manages. Rand is quickly fading out of the books entirely, and even Perrin and Mat (the most interesting characters) are losing their key roles. Egwene's scenes make me want to blow my head off, as she talks to the same Aes Sedai about the same damn issues for four to five chapters straight. It's unreal just how little happens in the massive paragraphs that comprise the text.

And speaking of Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, it's mentioned in "N." one of the stories in Stephen King's Just After Sunset, which I am currently reading (about a short story a day, following 150-200 pages of the Wheel of Time). In general, most of the stories are good.

[williamjm]

I finished N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Overall, I liked it, it was an entertaining read with an interesting premise and the story was told fairly efficiently by fantasy standards - although it is the first book in a trilogy it does tell a complete story in just over 400 pages. The quality of the writing was good, particularly for a debut novel, I liked Jemisin's writing style, although I can imagine opinion varying on that, probably not everyone would like it. I liked the main character, but her story arc was a bit frustrating at times, she did achieve quite a lot throughout the novel but often not through her own actions, she is often fairly passive (or ineffective when she does set out to deliberately do things) and the plot does rely heavily on other characters setting things up for her. It also overuses the plot device of Yeine being completely naive and unrealistically ignorant of how things worked to give an excuse for the author to explain things. I liked the various Gods that are significant characters in the story, but thought that some of Yeine's family were a bit undercharacterised, they tended to be fairly uninteresting sadistic villains. The world-building was a bit weak as well at times, the backstory on the religious war was done fairly well but I didn't get much of an impression of what the world outside of Sky was actually like. It had a few flaws, but on the whole I thought it was a pretty good book. I'm not sure I'm all that enthused about the premise for the sequel, though.

It's been a while since I've read any Science Fiction, been reading lots of fantasy in the last few months, so I've just started Iain M Banks' Against A Dark Background.

[Bellis]

I've been working my way through Warriors in the last week. Most of the stories are not in genres or authors that I would normally read, so I'm not as enthused by this collection as some of you. I gave every story a chance, but I just couldn't get into the more traditional space operas or military fictions. I was pretty impressed that most of the authors used this collection as an opportunity to branch out from their usual settings or genres. Some of these (like the Williams or the Vaughn) were even among the better stories of the collection.

So, what was really good? The Martin by itself is worth the cost of the collection. The only flaw is that, unlike the Hedge Knight, The Mystery Knight doesn't really stand on its own and does require true-fan-level familiarity with Westerosi history. Then, Beagle is of course writing at a very different level from the rest. I also enjoyed the Hobb, and the Haldeman and the Carrie Vaughn. The Tad Williams had an interesting premise in a futuristic world I'd like to see further developed. The Rollins (the one with the dog POV) was cute. On the other side, I didn't quite buy Clean Slate (Block) or The Scroll. They seemed sensationalist, tawdry. But, all in all, not a bad collection, worth the read, and easy to pass on afterwards. Anyone local want my copy?

I also read Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles which, being canon and all, is better than most stories being written today.