What are you reading in March?

[Garett Hornwood]

Started the month 15% of the way through The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, the first volume of TR biographical trilogy.

The next book will be The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson as I continue the Millennium trilogy.

Probably the last book I'll start for the month will be Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris in continuation of the aforementioned bio trilogy.

I'm currently reading Barbara Tuchman's 'A Distant Mirror' and C.V. Wedgwood's 'The Thirty Years War' both of which I can't recommend highly enough. The authors both have a flair for writing narrative history and there are times when even the best fantasy fiction can't hold a candle to actual history.

I've always heard good things about Tuchman's Mirror and I've been curious about Wedgwood's work since seeing it on Amazon. Thanks for the recommendations.

[Starkess]

I finished Anathem yesterday. The pace definitely picked up through the middle of the book, I was eating it up without even realizing how much time was going by. Oddly enough, I found the ending to start dragging again. Not usual pacing for a book, for sure. But overall, I loved it. One of the best books I've read in a while!

Now I am doing a re-read of the Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix. I remember loving these books when I was younger, and I saw them on Amazon and decided to go for it. Breezing through Sabriel right now.

I'm ploughing through The Magicians. I'm only 25% done and I'm not in love with it by any means. It's an easy enough read but it remains to be seen whether it has teeth.

That seems to be a very divisive book. I had mixed feelings about it at times when I was reading it, but I ended up really liking it.

[Myshkin]

Finished VS Naipaul's Guerrillas, which was a very disturbing and very powerful novel.

Now reading The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks.

[Isis]

That's decided then, I won't bother with The Twelve. Thank you, mash. I <3 this forum. I felt the same way about The Passage, ie, it was entertaining but essentially just an ok novel. Now I needn't waste valuable reading time/money on the sequel. :)

[TheEvilKing]

Currently reading The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay (excellent so far) and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (only just started).

[beniowa]

I didn't post hardly at all last month so I missed a few. One I missed was Trafalgar by Angelica Gorodischer (translated by Amalia Gladheart). Like Kalpa Imperial, it's a mosaic novel of interconnected short stories. This time they're stories about a man who tells outrageous stories of his travels to other planets. Not really fiction, not really science fiction either so the book falls somewhere in between. Each story essentially has the same plot, but that never bothered me at all as it's so well written.

I'm now halfway through The Spirit Gate by Kate Elliot. Going okay so far. Characterization is good, but I'm having trouble with aspects of the world-building and the plot.

Also halfway through Asimov's I, Robot.

[Zorral]

The Red Knight, Book 1 of The Traitor Son Cycle, by Miles Cameron (2012). It's nearly 700 pp. So far I'm only at p. 138, so I've not formed a general attitude about the book, other than I'm willing to continue for a while longer.

I don't like how he's structured his chapters, all them broken into discontinuous multiple short bits featuring a different character and location. New characters and locations are still being introduced at this point too. It breaks one out of immersion far too often. There are quite a few 'joke' references to all kinds of more contemporary fiction, films and television. Probably the author and a lot of his readers think this is cunning but I find it increasingly annoying, because again, it breaks immersion.

What I do like is that it seems, so far, to convey some of the feeling we received from the classic founding works of arthurian fantasy such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Whether it will meld well all the way through this and the following volumes with the more contemporary grimness of high fantasy fiction can't be known so far either.

[Samsaptakas]

I started reading First book of Prince Of Nothing series, yesterday. It is awesome. It is totally my kind of fantasy.

[SkynJay]

I can't think of the last time I didn't have a new book (or at least a choice between two) lined up when I finished the last one. But I honestly have no idea what I am going to read. My curiosity caused me to grab the very first Dragonlance book from the library, but the pure silliness of the first two chapters stopped that in its tracks.

I guess it is either Trickster, Shards of Honor, or I say screw it and pick something I already read off my shelf. Frustrating.

[Melonica Stormborn]

70% into The Return of Sherlock Holmes. I'm not in a hurry to meet my Wheel of Time monthly quota so I plan to check out Lindsay Buroker who is getting positive comments here. It helps that the first book is free and the rest are quite cheap. I just don't feel like getting into the books that have been perpetually on my to-read pile.

[Whitestripe]

I am now reading Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness. I'm about halfway through and I'm not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. It's missing the things I loved in the first one. I hope it improves quickly.

It doesn't really. It wasn't terrible, but could have been better. I am looking forward to the final showdown, though.

[Guinevere Seaworth]

I blasted through the third book in the Emperor's Edge , Deadly Games by Lindsay Buroker. I'm having too much fun reading this series and going to start the fourth book, Conspiracy.

[SkynJay]

I am reading the second one now myself. Glad to here it stays fun

[Whitestripe]

Currently reading AS Byatt's The Children's Book. She was here on campus last week and I got to have lunch with her. I have such s different perspective on the book since meeting her.

[Starkess]

Finished Sabriel and halfway through Lirael. It's always nice to revisit books from my childhood and see that I still like them!

[Eponine]

Borges' Collected Fictions was probably the wrong thing to read this month, and I might put it down in favor of lighter reading. I have a lot going on right now, and it's not something where I can easily pick it up, read 2 pages while compiling and put it down, and it deserves more attention than that anyway.

Next would be The Forever War – Joe Haldeman. I've never heard of it... Read the Wiki summary and I'm not super excited, but I think it would be better than fumbling through Borges - I'll pick that back up when I have a few hours of solid reading time to dedicate.

ETA: Well, hallelujah it's short. I appreciate short books. Not being sarcastic at all.

[Melonica Stormborn]

I blasted through the third book in the Emperor's Edge , Deadly Games by Lindsay Buroker. I'm having too much fun reading this series and going to start the fourth book, Conspiracy.

I started with Emperor's Edge last night (as in around midnight after finishing The Return of Sherlock Holmes)...it wasn't what I expected at all. Sometimes it sounded fan-fictiony but it's fun, exciting, and very light. I had a hard time sleeping because of the rush.

[thistlepong]

I finished The Twelve by Justin Cronin just as February ended. I was unimpressed. I had liked The Passage without being crazy about it because it had several weak points, The Twelve is a mess compared to it. Too many plot twists that aren't based on anything, too many things happening just because it's convenient, too much mysticism, if you want. I have nothing against mysticism but this book is very different than the first one. It did have some great action moments but the actual characters felt very one-dimensional, not much depth in them, even in moments that should have been very emotional.

That's decided then, I won't bother with The Twelve. Thank you, mash. I <3 this forum. I felt the same way about The Passage, ie, it was entertaining but essentially just an ok novel. Now I needn't waste valuable reading time/money on the sequel. :)

Seconded. You can chalk up two folks you took the bullet for and you have my thanks.

My curiosity caused me to grab the very first Dragonlance book from the library, but the pure silliness of the first two chapters stopped that in its tracks.

I reread it relatively (this century) recently and stuck it out to the end. Raistlin's a totally badass third level magic user by the end. His badass spell? Knock. Should I have spoilered that?

Anyway, I finished Zelazny's This Immortal and Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko on March 1st. Slow reading in February will make March look totally productive. The Zelazny was my first and it looks like he went on to win more Hugos, so there's more in my future. This one was fine, robots wrestling the elderly and whatnot, but not great; yet not so bad that I dread reading more. Ceremony is fantastic and even more so when reread. There's so much in such delicate balance that your left uncertain until the very end when uncertainty is glorified. It's also a briskly pagan palate cleanser between CS Lewis novels.

Going forward, I'm reading That Hideous Strength by Lewis, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and some books starting to form a 2013 logjam.

[Eponine]

I'm flying through The Forever War, but the fact that it's short and easy to read is about the only positive thing I can say about it.

It could have been a good book with a lot of interesting themes and situations. And I guess that it's not that the themes aren't there, but that the whole thing is poorly executed. Interesting things aren't explored well, largely because characters are barely developed beyond the narrator and his inept comparatively useless girlfriend. And the mechanics of the setting are patchy. There's no fucking way for an instant that I believe that the narrator was ever a top physicist.

2/3rd through the book, it's already been established that in the future world, many people will be gay, so far in the story > 30%. That's interesting. But there's no real exploration of what this means except for how the narrator finds it somewhat distasteful. I guess this was interesting when the story was written, what it's like to be a leftover homophobe in a world that's changed toward homosexual acceptance. And maybe that's why I'm not enjoying the book, between that and the casual way that pseudo-rape is treated at the beginning of the book, it's less like an exploration of a new world and a new way of looking at the future, and more like if a trip to my hometown was in the middle of a space war. Indeed Mandella and Marygay feel an awful lot like a sci-fi version of my parents.

ETA: The theme of a bureaucracy running an indefinitely long war that props up the planets economy but that most of the citizens who are paying for the war never experience in any real way gets lost because the narrator mostly experiences it through info-dumps.

[Isis]

I'm about 30 pages from the end of The Magicians. I admit that I want to see how it ends. But in a kind of trashy, airport thriller novel, kind of way. It took me until about 200 pages into it to get the Bret Easton Ellis vibe. But after that it became glaringly obvious. I am a fan of Ellis but onbviously he does MORE with the 'brash, insensitive, shallow, overly concerned with physical appearances' trope. Way, way, more. And I don't really get how that element connects with the magical quest element. For me, there are lots of different things going on here that don't properly meld together and feel right to me. That said, it's obviously written well enough to keep me rapidly turning the pages. I can't deny that.

I forgot to mention that I read Graham Joyce's collection of short stories, Tales for a Dark Evening. He says at the opening of the book that he isn't keen on writing shorts. But I really enjoyed them. They reminded me of both M John Harrison and Christopher Priest's short stories in settings and themes. And that can ONLY ever be a good thing. :) I liked the first story 'Leningrad Nights' well enough (?award-winning story), but I probably liked the others even better. Only £1.53 for the Kindle version right now. Grab it if you like Joyce.