July 2011 Reading thread

[Grack21]

I finished The Edge of the World by Kevin J. Anderson. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The story is a blend of age of exploration and the Crusades. The narrative structure is like GRRM with different POV's for each chapter. It also has low magic and a surprisingly high body count, including major characters. The only downside is that there are alot of POVs and the chapters are short, giving a lack of character development. The plot is fantastic and I'm a sucker for sailing/exploration themes. I'm already halfway through the second book of the series, The Map of All Things.

Ok, now I KNOW I woke up in bizarro land.

[Deedles]

Picked up Borges' Ficciones yesterday. Seems fairly interesting.

I've fifty-ish pages of At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien to go aswell.

Oh! Hav you read any other O'Brien. I liked At Swim but loved

The Third Policeman

Thinking about diving into Sabriel and/or Wolf Hall.

Wolf Hall. Seriously, a thousand times Wolf Hall.Sabriel ws vaguely entertaining. Wolf Hall carrys a story.

[SkynJay]

Ok, now I KNOW I woke up in bizarro land.

Ya. Not often I see praise for my most hated author.

[Grack21]

Ya. Not often I see praise for my most hated author.

All we need now is a real Stanek fan, and the apocalypse can begin!

[Mudguard]

Finished ADwD a few days ago. An enjoyable read, for the most part. One of the bigger suprises for me was how much I ended up liking [redacted].

Also surprising to me is how little I care about how long it will take for GRRM to finish the next book. I imagine it will take about 5 years, give or take a year or two, but I guess all the waiting I've done for the past two books has inured me to the lengthy wait.

[Krelian91]

Started yesterday Ken Follett's Fall of Giants. Not bad for now, I am at page 100 or so. Is it worth it?

[TheEvilKing]

Finished ADWD. Whew.

Now gonna jump back into The Three Musketeers, I think I was about 250 pages in.

Also recently started Foundation by Isaac Asimov, as I have a desire to read more sci fi.

[Golden Imp]

I read ADWD and just finished The Name of the Wind and I am about to start Deadhouse Gates The Name of the Wind was really good

[Guinevere Seaworth]

I finished The Map of All Things by Kevin J. Anderson. Still really enjoying this series so far.

I know he gets trashed around here for the Dune sequels (which I have not read), but I happen to think his fantasy series is quite good. So shoot me. :fencing:

Up next is Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen while I wait for the library to come up with the third book of the Terra Incognita series.

[Mjolnir]

Datepalm wrote:

I couldn't get past the first ten pages because of this. Wanted to throttle him the moment he appeared.

Well, if that was annoying you I think you did right, because it has bloody well not gotten any better. A hundred pages in now and he is clearly some sort of god. His great flaw is he has malaria, which he fights against manfully in the performance of his duties, which are many and varied.

There was one scene early on when he's depicted as being a bit of a broken man, drunken and despairing and a little used-up, but that element of the story seems to have quite gone away. I think it's one of those cases where character suffering and development-by-fire is basically just something for the heroes to grit their teeth through.

I dunno why, because I'm usually an absolute sucker for period dialogue, but a lot of the speech makes me want to punch something as well. Possibly because of all the "gov" and terms of socially-acceptable endearment murmured to Burton by his many and fervent admirers among the lower classes. I'm not even being fair here; this isn't as big an issue in the book as I'm making it out to be in terms of how often it crops up. But it really, really grinds at me. I'm all for the 19th century [altered or not] as a setting, and I'm even for enjoying that setting despite the many evils on which the British homeland relied heavily. But there are entirely too many happy peasants and square-jawed officers of the law and suchlike for me to be at all comfortable in the setting. I've got nothing against the heroes being fundamentally good people; I like that fine. But there's too much black-and-white to this setting for me, and too much insertion of 21st-century values on the part of the heroes when such would be convenient and make them look good whilst falling back on the Victorian class system when that is convenient instead. I don't think I can keep reading it and be fair to it. Too bad, those were some wicked alternate technological inventions...

I read John Scalzi's Piper reboot Fuzzy Nation. Lot of fun. I've seen it suggested that Scalzi has mastered the art of doing the same thing over again but doing it so well nobody gives a shit when he repeats himself, and I partially agree but not wholly. This is very, very much a Scalzi book, certainly. There's a way characters talk, an eloquent snap to their arguments and their insults [specially their insults], a sparkle to everyday conversation that is very much Scalzi. There's also an accessability, an easily-engaging draw to the writing that pulls you through that is again very much Scalzi. And there is a very competent but not Gary-Stu, intelligent, quick-thinking male protagonist with the aforementioned sense of humour who is also very much Scalzi. [He tends to write about very competent people generally, even outside this protagonist.] But in all other respects I think Fuzzy Nation is very unlike a lot of what he's done before.

First and foremost, it's family fun. Or, well, not quite, but pretty close. There are definitely tense moments where life is in peril, and there's one quite shockingly violent thing that has to happen so the plot can work, but outside of that this is not a story about ... well, it actually is a story about shit blowing up, but outside a couple individual episodes it's not a violent story. There's mild swearing, but in keeping with his lighter, bouncier tone here Scalzi has parted company with the f-word completely, and uses other cussings sparingly. And it is not a military book, as Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades are, and as their sequels are to a lesser degree. It's a book about corporate shinanagans and legal battles of wits and first contact with alien life, not at any point a war story, and the difference in tone and feel from the OMW books is nontrivial. The storytelling voice picks up on the light tone as well, throwing in plenty of cute moments outside of dialogue and keeping the descriptions crisply, plainly written and occasionally funny. It's also hypercontemporary, going so far as to incorporate thoughts of "super awesome ninja assassins" and other things that stink of the modern internet into characters' thought processes. Fun book, and I think most Scalzi fans will get a big kick out of it. OMW's still his best book, for me, and this falls squarely into the category of light fun, but when Scalzi sets out to bring the light fun he does it in style. Haven't read Little Fuzzy, I'm afraid, so can't say how it compares so far as I'm concerned.

Don't wanna finish ADWD yet. Now reading Genaviv Valentine's Mechanique.

[Absurd Samuel Johnson]

I'll have to check out A Star Shall Fall.

[RedEyedGhost]

:shocked:

[Anatúrinbor]

Just finished ADWD. An improvement over the previous volume, but still meh.

[jagilki]

it took three years?

[End of Disc One]

Finishing up my re-read of ASoIaF in anticipation for ADwD!

After all the set-up in AFfC I expect George to pull no punches in ADwD. Will Dany sit on the Iron Throne by the end of the book? We will see.

[Nicomo Cosca]

Re-reading ACoK at the moment in anticipation for ADWD! Wondering how they'll be able to pull of Blackwater in the tv show (probably with fade to black, like they did in Baelor)

[mashiara]

:shocked:

My thoughts exactly.

For a second there I wondered what possessed me to start a July reading thread, then I noticed the date.

[Darth Richard II]

:shocked:

:agree:

[TheEvilKing]

Can't remember what I'm reading in July 2011.

[Snowborn]

In July 2011 I'm rereading Angela's Ashes for the third time, also a couple of short stories by authors I can't remember and a book on English phonology I'll never finish. Why am I posting here in July 2011? I haven't even heard of Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire yet!