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July 2011 Reading thread


mashiara

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I finished Last Argument of Kings a few days ago, and I still don't know how I feel about it. Even though the characters actions make sense, the end of the book definitely caught me by surprise.

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Finished Unseen Academics shortly prior to my recent trip to the great midwest and finished A Shadow in Summer on the plane. Not 100% sure what I think of ASiS yet, but I'll definitely be reading the followup. Started The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sax, which is fascinating and heartbreaking in turns while I was on my trip and then The Folding Knife on the way home. I'm about three quarters of the way through TFK and while I'm enjoying it, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. It's my first KJ Parker book and she's very different than anything I'd expected. It's not often that you read a book that 90% of the time comes across as if it's set in a fantasy version of Rome, but every now and again characters use contemporary slang saying that 'the truth is their land sucks' or 'oh come on!'. Unless the book utterly falls apart in the end, though, I'll likely pick up the Engineer trilogy and give that a read.

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Just finished Dance with Dragons last night (thank you swedish stores from breaking the street date), now what?

Oh, still have The White-Luck Warrior to read, guess that will be next!

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Started The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sax, which is fascinating and heartbreaking in turns

I haven't read that one yet, but I've read An Anthropologist on Mars and The Island of the Colorblind. I agree it's fascinating, the stuff that goes on in/with our brains!

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I finished The Black Lung Captain by Chris Wooding a lot quicker than I thought and I had a grand time doing it. Quick, fun, adventurous with some character development -though that wasn't necessary a requirement- it was a really good second book that carried on in the same spirit as the first one. And yes, it did feel like Firefly all over again, but that's not a bad thing.

I just finished that as well. I agree with what you said about it, it was a very entertaining read and an improvement on the first book.

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Started The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sax, which is fascinating and heartbreaking in turns

It is a fascinating book, though having had personal experience of cerebral palsy since reading it I find his story about that somewhat skewed. The implication that hand function will establish if you just 'give the patient a chance' is certainly not one you should generalise. My daughter has no use of her hands and it's not because nobody took the time to help her.

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Based on recommendations here and on the sffworld board, I just started The Steel Remains. I'm enjoying it so far, crossing my fingers that I keep liking it. :)

Well, I'm definitely gonna have to read more Morgan. This is the first book of his I've read, and I'm still pretty much lovin' it. It seems a little too narcissistic, somehow, but I love the prose and so far the characters are interesting. Not a heckuva lot of plot, yet. Also, the narrator (Simon Vance) is doing a fine job -- and since he appears to also narrate the Morgan sf books, I won't have to worry about suffering through a bad narrator on them. :)

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I read The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter by Lucius Shepard, an interesting little book with a lot more sex in it than I was expecting. Last night I started In the Forest of Serre by Patricia McKillip.

I'm not sure if I will start A Dance With Dragons before Saturday, when I head off to Yellowstone.

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Last night I finished Leviathan Wakes. It's not a great book, but it's quite good and it's exactly the solar system space opera story that SF has been missing lately. One drawback is that I could tell the parts that each author was writing, which felt like reading a book by a schizophrenic. That got better by the end though. Looking forward to the second book.

Have to work today, but will be picking up A Dance with Dragons afterward. Woohoo!

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All books have been cast aside from today's biggest release, Laura Ingrahm's Of Thee I Zing: America's Cultural Decline from Muffin Tops to Body Shots.

Oh, no, wait. That's not right. What the fuck am I reading again?

Right, right. Dancing with the Dragons. I'm rooting for the team of Mario Lopez and Tyrion Lannister to take first prize!

It is a fascinating book, though having had personal experience of cerebral palsy since reading it I find his story about that somewhat skewed.

I found a lot of things in the book were dated enough that they needed to be taken with a grain of salt. The chapter where he goes on at length about the 'retard' 'mental defective' who is by turns an 'idiot' and a 'moron'* was just shy of suggesting it would have been better she be left to the wolves until Oliver discovers that, holy shit, she's actually a human capable of emotion and thought!

*Just in case someone decides to crawl up my ass, yes, I get that these were once actual medical terms. That's my point.

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i've been really trying to avoid getting back into Martin's series this early on, plus the fact that I am really enjoying Mark Hodder's Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack right now, but damned if i couldn't avoid the bookstore at lunch today. just flipping through, seeing the badass new maps, and reading the prologue, and now i want to get back into it. so probably finish Jack up and start my full series re-read. damn you Martin!

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I don't like reading two books at once, so I very quickly read through the last 400 or so pages of Jacqueline Carey's Naamah's Blessing last night before midnight PST. It was alright. Moirin and Bao don't have much of a personality. There are armies of ants. The villian is ridiculous. But it's still better than Curse.

I'm very early on in ADWD on the Kindle. I plan to savour it slowly so I suppose I should just disappear from here for a couple weeks :read:

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