August 2011 reading thread

[Ratatoskr]

After finishing ADwD, I picked up Gridlinked by Neal Asher. Liking it so far.

[Nearly Headless Ned]

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. Love her writing style. Company of Wolves and Puss in Boots were the standouts in this collection.

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. Bleak but the black humour was effective and a good twist ending.

Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link. This author is my favourite discovery of the year. Love her prose which is simple yet very evocative. Heard she's a big fan of Dianna Wyn Jones so I'll have to check her out as well.

Retribution Falls By Chris Wooding. Compared to the other writers I've been reading he's not exactly a stylist but he tells an excellent story with some intriguing characters. Not as likeable as the Joss Wheedons space pirates but good enough to persuade me to read the sequel at some point.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Well written but it didn't really do it for me. Some nice ideas but the fact is I took around 2 months to finish it.

[Dumas]

Finishing up Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. It's a good novel, but I can't help hearing Bogart's voice along with the rest of the cast from the movie. And I really want a trenchcoat now even though it's still summer.

[Cuchulain]

Finished the first Thomas Covenant trilogy. Didn't care for it much at first, but from the second book onward I started to enjoy it. I probably would have liked it more if I had read it years ago. Still, I'll try the second trilogy at some point.

I'm now reading Bram Stoker's Dracula. So far it's great.

[pat5150]

Just finished the excellent The Inheritance and Other Stories, a collection of short fiction by Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm. If you are a fan of the author, you should definitely give it a shot. :)

Check out the full review on the blog. . .

Patrick

[Jojen]

Just finished Max Barry's Machine Man. I liked it. It starts off so ordinary, then quicking becomes harrowing and provocative, but also manages to be funny at times. I can't say I liked the main character as a person, but I was certaintly intrigued by his journey.

[Deedles]

Finding Ghost Story by Jim Butcher to be pretty hard going actually. I've torn through the rest of the Dresden files but this one, it's just not working. Also, comments by Lea and Fr Forthill have me thinking about a possible plot twist.

Chatting about books and films recently had me recommending the book of World War Z by Max Brooks to a friend. When he said he'd give it a bash, I hunted it down to bring in to him. As I'd found it, I took a look at the first 2 or 3 entries - and then found I'd torn through the whole thing agian in 2 nights. A really fun, quick read. Thoroughly recommended.

At lunch I'm making heavy work of Robin McKinleys' Deerskin. It's certainly no Sunshine, or even The Blue Sword. Two emo, and the language feels overworked.

[Knight of Ashes]

The Last Unicorn graphic novel, written by Peter Beagle. A lot better than I expected.

[Bellis]

I read Lev Grossman's The Magician King. It was well-written for the most part, but I couldn't quite figure out the point.

I'm also about a quarter through No Name by Wilkie Collins. I love :love: Collins. I like how his characters defy nineteenth century convention. So far, it's more engrossing than Woman in White or The Moonstone.

[Eponine]

Finished Vance's The Dying Earth - only the first book, but I'm going to put off reading any of the others. I have to admit that I'm kind of perplexed as to why people think he's so wonderful. There was nothing wrong with the stories, but I didn't really find anything special about them either.

Almost finished K.J. Parker's Colours in the Steel. I enjoyed the first few chapters more than I've enjoyed the remainder of the book so far, although it all was good. I will definitely keep reading the next two books, but felt that after the beginning, the urgency to find out what was going to happen next diminished so that it didn't turn into the kind of book that I would stay up all night to finish.

[RedEyedGhost]

I finished Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf today and it was fantastic. Jacob Marlowe, at age 34, became a werewolf in 1842; and in 2009 his mole in WOCOP (World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena) informs him that he is the last of his kind. After 201 years of life Jacob has had enough and is ready to meet his end. Sounds kind of standard for a werewolf novel, right? Well it is, but Duncan has really created a masterpiece here. It's told as a series of journal entries by Marlowe, and typically in the type of novel the secondary characters are quite hollow but Duncan does a great job of drawing out most of his with only a couple of them being caricatures. The mythology is quite interesting as is the plot which is paced very well. However, what really sets this novel apart is the prose, Duncan really made me feel that the text was written by a 200 year old man born in the early 19th century. Here's a short passage from Marlowe detailing his first moon:

A brother, a tall twin from before birth with an agenda of brisk recalibration. He arrived with nonnegotiable needs -- or needs negotiable only in their potential expansion: Enough now with no guarantee of enough later. My shoulders shifted, not without difficulty learned the strange game of osteomorphosis, bore the hurried tectonics, the sensation of turning to ice and the shocking thaw that left a new grammar of movement. Shoulders, wrist, ankles -- first to Change, last to Change back. I rolled onto my side. Fairytaleishly too big for the bed, since everything was growing. The not toenails nor quite claws had scarred the inlaid rosewood. I dropped onto the floor dizzied by the inrushing night's symphony of smells, from the garden's shut roses to the fields' wealth of dung. An acre of wheat in the south crackled and splashed. Invisible giant hands gripped my neck and twisted in opposite directions, the schoolyard bully's Chinese burn writ large, a necessity it turned out for the head's jerky magic into its more blatantly predatory lineaments. My Lupine twin was impatient. A being was no good without a body. The slow hindquarters tested his tolerance of delay and mine of pain.

It can be a little purple, because it's the journal of a melancholic 200 year old monster and it totally works!

Highly recommended, and a can't miss for fans of Werewolves or Urban Fantasy. Seriously, read this book.

Started KJ Parker's The Folding Knife, and it's looking very promising so far. Although, in a thread about prologues (? - or something else) awhile back it was recommend to skip the prologue, so I did do that. Should I go back and read it or wait until I'm finished?

[Procrastimancer]

Since I finally got off my ass today and got a library card, I ended up putting aside my reread of The Gone-Away World in favor of Graham Joyce's The Silent Land.

The book is a quick read and I have blow through the first seventy pages. So far, not impressed, but there are a couple hundred pages to go.

[Phoenix]

I finished Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf today and it was fantastic. Jacob Marlowe, at age 34, became a werewolf in 1842; and in 2009 his mole in WOCOP (World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena) informs him that he is the last of his kind. After 201 years of life Jacob has had enough and is ready to meet his end. Sounds kind of standard for a werewolf novel, right? Well it is, but Duncan has really created a masterpiece here. It's told as a series of journal entries by Marlowe, and typically in the type of novel the secondary characters are quite hollow but Duncan does a great job of drawing out most of his with only a couple of them being caricatures. The mythology is quite interesting as is the plot which is paced very well. However, what really sets this novel apart is the prose, Duncan really made me feel that the text was written by a 200 year old man born in the early 19th century. Here's a short passage from Marlowe detailing his first moon:

It can be a little purple, because it's the journal of a melancholic 200 year old monster and it totally works!

Highly recommended, and a can't miss for fans of Werewolves or Urban Fantasy. Seriously, read this book.

Thanks for this review, REG! Amazon recommended this to me based on my purchases, etc, and from the description and all it looked schlocky and terrible. I'm glad to know it's not and will add it to my list.

As for me, still struggling with RSURS, about halfway through The Magician King, a quarter of the way through In the Garden of the Beasts. I will probably finish the first 2 before the month is out, but the Larsen is a slower burn, being non-fiction, and will take longer I think.

[beniowa]

REG, you know I love werewolves, but that snippet actually convinces me not to buy the book.

[jdiddyesquire]

Started KJ Parker's The Folding Knife, and it's looking very promising so far. Although, in a thread about prologues (? - or something else) awhile back it was recommend to skip the prologue, so I did do that. Should I go back and read it or wait until I'm finished?

Well, Parker wrote it that way, so I'd go ahead and read it. That said, it does reveal where the main character ends up.

[Guinevere Seaworth]

I finished Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. It was a strange blend of The DaVinci Code and Ysabel, but somehow it worked.

Up next is one of my favorite authors; Tim Severin and the book is The Spice Island Voyage.

[RedEyedGhost]

Thanks for this review, REG! Amazon recommended this to me based on my purchases, etc, and from the description and all it looked schlocky and terrible. I'm glad to know it's not and will add it to my list.

As for me, still struggling with RSURS, about halfway through The Magician King, a quarter of the way through In the Garden of the Beasts. I will probably finish the first 2 before the month is out, but the Larsen is a slower burn, being non-fiction, and will take longer I think.

It is a little schlocky, but it's great at the same time. There's a few pop culture references early in the book that I hope don't age the book, otherwise it could be a timeless novel.

Did you feel bad when Bartman said he had no trouble getting through RSURS on page 7? I think you have to be getting close to the turning point...

REG, you know I love werewolves, but that snippet actually convinces me not to buy the book.

:lol:

The prose isn't that... dense through most of the book, but there are passages that are even heavier than that. I chose that one because it was a bit on the heavier side, it's also an important moment for the main character, and I think it lets prospective buyers know what they're getting into.

It took me awhile to get into the book partly because of the prose and partly because work has been crazy - it took me seven days to read the first 80 pages and three to read the last 220.

Well, Parker wrote it that way, so I'd go ahead and read it. That said, it does reveal where the main character ends up.

Parker wrote it that way, or hir (yeah I wrote hir) editor made hir include it...?

It's just over two pages long, so I don't feel too bad about skipping it.

[Grack21]

The Folding Knife Prologue kinda sets up the whole thing as a tragedy, since you know where certain things are going, but, I mean, its a Parker book, of course its going to have a unpleasant ending. Hard to say more without spoiling it.

[SkynJay]

I can think of zero reason to skip the prologue on The Folding Knife. It gives away no more than the blurb on the back of the book does.

[Lord Dracarys]

I just finished Leviathan Wakes, which was fantastic. It's the first epic science fiction I've read in quite a while and I thought it was very well done.

Currently working on a reading Deserter by our friendly boarder Peadar Ó Guilín, and also re-reading Inside Straight. WorldCon has given me far too many books to read (as if that were possible).