What BOOK(s) are you reading? ARCHIVE

I'm about 70% through A Storm of Swords. Holy crap. It's a good thing Martin started with 800 main characters because they die in spades. Great books.

Now that I got a Kindle for xmas this year, I've decided to make a list of classic SciFi that is missing from my list. I just finished

Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination..Which is about a man who is left abandoned in a interplanetary space craft spends the rest of his life pursuing revenge on the people who left him to die in that derelict ship.

What I'm reading now is Eon by Greg Bear. This is a series that I've been wanting to read for years.

Neal Stephenson's System of the World trilogy is great for the kindle because each volume is about a million pages. I can't be arsed to carry heavy books around...

The writing is absolutely incredible in terms of research and storyline. I absolutely love this author and I want to have his babies. Don't read when drunk or you have to keep rereading the same bit again and again....this is often a problem for me.

I just started The Fifties by David Halberstam.

Got Jimmy Carter's WHITE HOUSE DIARIES for xmas. Looks like it'll be good.

Chapel wrote:

Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination..Which is about a man who is left abandoned in a interplanetary space craft spends the rest of his life pursuing revenge on the people who left him to die in that derelict ship.

Amazing book. I have a strange fascination with it in fact, and this song about it:

Halfway through Philipp Blom's The Vertigo Years on Europe 1900-1914, without constantly referring to ww1.

So there's lots of developments that were stillborn, cut short and made insignificant or postponed. From Marie Curie and nuclear science to Freud and sexual morals to Emily Pankhurst and male insecurity to Rudolf Steiner and old school new age to modernism, futurism and other art forms.

Mixed with a limited dose of politics and economy. Very readable.

Just finished 'The Drowning Pool' by Ross Macdonald. Gripping hardboiled detective novel. Macdonald is right up there with Chandler and Hammett.

I have read about 40 WH40K novels in the past four months. The quality varies widely and is not great literature even for the best ones, but for some strange reason I keep on going.

Also reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity to have more background for playing Here I Stand (I have read Reformation already a couple of months ago).

I just finished Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys. It was very good, but not quite Adeventures of Kavalier and Clay. I started A Confederacy of Dunces. After finishing that, I'll go back to reading something light and easy. I had been lazy with my reading lately and wanted something a little more meaty, but my brain will need a rest after Dunces. So far, it has been very funny and is living up to the hype.

Estragon wrote:

I have read about 40 WH40K novels in the past four months. The quality varies widely and is not great literature even for the best ones, but for some strange reason I keep on going.

Also reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity to have more background for playing Here I Stand (I have read Reformation already a couple of months ago).

If you read Farseer, what did you think of it?

Just finished Monster Hunter Vendetta by Larry Correia, the sequel to Monster Hunter International. Four words... Fucking great & Gangsta Gnomes.

I am extremely late to the Star Wars Expanded Universe bandwagon, but my students have been begging me to read a few and my wife picked up Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy at a used bookstore for a grand total of $3.00, so I made the leap.

I enjoyed Heir to the Empire and am almost finished with Dark Force Rising. I am really enjoying the nice little touches Zahn added to the universe, and even as someone who did not outright hate the Prequels, I really wish they hadn't thrown out some of the great stuff he put in.

Found my long thought to be lost copy of THE STARS MY DESTINATION by Alfred Bester. So glad I found it, as it appears to be out of print. Can't wait to read it again. Not sure where exactly it would fall, but I'm pretty sure I'd rank in my top 5 favorite sci-fi novels.

I've been reading quite a bit of fantasy lately. The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie; Great series. Funny, savage, and no happy endings. Awesome stuff, really looking forward to more by this guy. Pretty sure I grabbed these books on a recommendation from here.

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. Wildly entertaining book about a few young thieves in a canal town. In Lynch's world magic users are an evil for profit lot. Pretty refreshing. I'm halfway through the sequel Red Seas under Red Skies right now.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Great first novel of an infamous mages biography. retty cliche stuff, but it's done very well. Looking forward to the next installment.

Gardens of the Moon; volume one of Malazan Book of the Fallen. This is an epic series in process, and it shows in this 1st volume as it feels like a 700 page setup or primer. Pretty entertaining though.

Lamentation and Canticle; the first 2 volumes of the Psalms of Issak by Ken Scholes. I love this series so far. Great mix of steampunky scifi and fantasy. Reminds me quite a bit of Dune with the inter house intrigue and the way combat is written about. Highly recommended.

I also read John Lecarre's newest, Our Kind of Traitor. Pretty good post-cold war spy novel. Quick read too. About a Russian money launderer who wants to give himself up.

Finally, I read Underworld by Delillo. Don't really know what to say about this one. The word 'epic' doesn't begin to do this book justice. Simply put, it's a masterpiece, although not the easiest nor quickest of reads.