November 2010 Reads

[palin99999]

Finished:

The Limits of Enchantment by Graham Joyce - 6/10

Starting:

The Thief-taker's Apprentice by Stephen Deas

Go, Mutants! by Larry Doyle

[Cuchulain]

Finished Paul Kearney's Corvus. I was a bit disappointed with the lack of originality. Every aspect of the novel covers familiar territory and if you've ever read one of Kearney's novels, Corvus is just more of the same. That said, the prose is good and the battle scenes are great. I did enjoy reading Corvus and look forward to The Kings of Morning.

Apart from that, I've been reading more of Edgar Allan Poe's short fiction. The range of his stories is really impressive.

Lastly, I also finished Tom Fletcher's The Leaping. It's a relatively well-written werewolf novel with a good first half, but then it all devolves into a carnage fest and implausible ending.

Up next is Miéville's King Rat.

[Stone-Made-Soft]

Weight of Stone by Laura Anne Gilman http://www.amazon.ca/Weight-Stone-Book-Two-Vineart/dp/1439101450 I cannot recommend it, which is dissapointing because Flesh and Fire http://www.amazon.ca/Flesh-Fire-Book-One-Vineart/dp/1439101418 was a solid fantasy series debut.

[RedEyedGhost]

How do you compare this with the previous book?

Gilman's voice and style comes through completely, and even though the settings are utterly different it's easy to tell that they're written by the same person. tH-MW has much better pacing than Thunderer (which I really liked, but the middle 50-60% was way too slow). The weirdness of Thunderer is replaced by a wildness in the frontier of tH-MW, and I really like that.

If you liked, loved, or were even just lukewarm about Thunderer then I think you'll enjoy tH-MW; if you didn't then I wouldn't bother because Gilman's style is so very distinctive.

[WickerMan]

Well, let's see, two at the moment:

1. Deathly Hallows (do I even need to name the author?)

2. A Walk in the Woods (Bill Bryson)

Pretty soon I'm gonna need to read As I Lay Dying by Faulkner for my American Lit class. That's gonna suck, but at least I'm gonna listen to As I Lay Dying (the metal band) to get me through it. Maybe it'll help me understand Faulk's ridiculous deep-south style which I could barely decipher back in high school with The Sound and Fury...

[TheHalfman]

Finished two, both the starting books in ongoing series.

First was Grimspace by Ann Aguirre, kind of a light sci fi read but very enjoyable. It reminded me of Firefly/Serenity so I enjoyed every second of it. The second was State of Decay by James Knapp, an interesting thriller/horror book involving some good zombie concepts and shadowy conspiracies. I'll probably continue reading these series since I already bought the books that come after them.

That or I'll finally read The Name of the Wind.

[Inigima]

First of the month was Greg Rucka's A Fistful of Rain. It was... okay. The story was decent if not amazing but the writing bugged me. Rucka did something I see with some frequency and think is poor style, which is to feature something in which he has an interest and then write about it in detail that doesn't belong there. In this case it's music and guitars -- I'm a musician, Greg, I know what this stuff means and I don't care because no one needs to see the word "diatonic" in a book unless it's relevant to the plot.

[Isis]

Gilman's voice and style comes through completely, and even though the settings are utterly different it's easy to tell that they're written by the same person. tH-MW has much better pacing than Thunderer (which I really liked, but the middle 50-60% was way too slow). The weirdness of Thunderer is replaced by a wildness in the frontier of tH-MW, and I really like that.

If you liked, loved, or were even just lukewarm about Thunderer then I think you'll enjoy tH-MW; if you didn't then I wouldn't bother because Gilman's style is so very distinctive.

Sounds promising. I think that 'like' would be too strong an adjective, but 'lukewarm' is maybe a bit too harsh. Mostly I was underwhelmed by Thunderer, but there were some aspects of it I liked so I'm willing to give Gilman another go.

[Peadar]

I have just started Child of Fire by Harry Connolly. So far, it seems to be a Jim Butcher type urban fantasy.

[Nearly Headless Ned]

Finnished Tehanu, last of the Earthsea Quartet by Leguin. Is this the best series in fantasy? Hard to argue against it imo.

[Rhaegon Targaryen]

Went in to buy "Towers of Midnight" today and picked up Donaldson's "Against All Things Ending" aswell! Score, didn't even know it was out!

[Nearly Headless Ned]

Onto Drood by Dan Simmons. Loved Hyperion so I thought I'd give this a go.

[Werthead]

Going old-school for an interesting HG Wells 'sequel by other hands' reviewing project, starting with War of the Worlds and then one of its modern sequels (in this case Robert Rankin's The Japanese Devil Fish Girl), then going back to The Time Machine and then Baxter's Time Ships. Should be intriguing.

[Cuchulain]

Going old-school for an interesting HG Wells 'sequel by other hands' reviewing project, starting with War of the Worlds and then one of its modern sequels (in this case Robert Rankin's The Japanese Devil Fish Girl), then going back to The Time Machine and then Baxter's Time Ships. Should be intriguing.

Don't forget Christopher Priest's The Space Machine.

[nickg]

Finished Dragonfly Falling. Reading House of Suns, but I'm picking up Blood of the Mantis and I doubt I will be able to hold off reading it. This always happens when I try to pick up some SF

[Werthead]

Don't forget Christopher Priest's The Space Machine.

That was my plan to finish off (as The Space Machine is a sequel to both The Time Machine and War of the Worlds). The only problem was that I couldn't find a good-quality copy that wasn't quite expensive. Annoyingly, Gollancz haven't gotten round to reprinting this one (although they're doing Fuge for a Darkening Island next year) either.

[nickg]

Get home and find out my wife picked up The Winter King and King's Dragon from the library. Guess its a good problem to have but I have no clue what I want to start next.

[Teng Ai Hui]

Just finished rereading an old classic, Foundation, and have now started Foundation and Empire.

[Vrana]

Ah, I missed this, reading this thread always fires me up for further reading.

I have recently finished Herta mullers The land of the Green Plums, a book I thoroughly enoyed, her style of writing and the narrative was very easy for me to get into and be absorbed by, which usually isn't the case with books that are so conservatively written.

Orhan Pamuk's The New Life, a book I was told I would love as it is about someone who is consumed by a book and then spends endless hours, days, weeks on buses travelling around to nowhere. But I found very few aspects of the book appealed to me, the writing wasn't bad, but I can never really relate to these novels filled with anxiety with a lot of young mindless passion and fervor. Even though the narrator's my age I have never been or known anyone else to have been that heedless and passionately insane as an adolescent so the whole premise of the book kept grinding me the wrong way.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, nothing about it stood out for me.

Now beginning Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. A bit apprehensive of this one, the way its bee described to me makes it sound like a self-help type book, or something along the lines of Illusions, or jonathan Livingston Seagull. Neither of which is appealing.

[Inigima]

This morning I finished Lev Grossman's The Magicians, which is essentially an exercise in shitting on your childhood. It was very good but was probably the most depressing thing I've read since Robin Hobb.