What books are you reading?

[MacLloyd]

Originally Posted by ULTRAGOTHA

I'm just about finished with Redshirts. If you are a Star Trek fan, or want some of your fiction very meta-y meta, this is a book for you. Plus, Scalzi!

Good, good book! Haven't had that much fun reading in a while.

Right now I am about 1/3 of the way into Terry Pratchett's new book "The Long Earth". I am very much enjoying it also.

MacLloyd

[Auburn Red]

My sister visited me, so I didn't read for almost a whole month so when she left, so I lost the threads of what I was reading before (and for other reasons didn't read near as much even before she arrived) so I put the books away that I was working on and decided to start over again:

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery-In fact I have a lovely boxed set of the first three books so I will go through them.

London by Edward Rutherford-I missed reading large chunks of it for personal reason so decided to start over.

An Affair to Remember by Christopher Anderson-A biography of Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn. In fact I intend to follow it up with a few other film star biographies.

Titans and Olympians by Time-Life-I have a whole set of Myth and Mankinds and I will continue then.

The Mist-Filled Path by Frank MacEowan-A beautiful book about attributing Celtic lore and beliefs into daily lives.

I also lost so much of the threads of The Book of Goodnight Stories and Simple Abundance that I will skim through the remnants of June and then continue in July.

[Richard W]

This month, I have mostly been reading George R R Martin.

I read A Clash of Kings and both parts of A Storm of Swords. Now I'm having a break so that I don't get through the others too quickly and have to wait ages for something else to be released.

I started to read Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer yesterday, and almost gave up after three pages. I rarely give up on books so I'll carry on, but I don't like it much at all. The narrator is surely the most unconvincing, pretentious and annoying nine-year-old ever, and (although the grandparents' sub-plot is a bit better) I still rolled my eyes a bit when I realised it was going to be about the Holocaust as well as September 11th (which I knew already). I usually like books with puzzles and unreliable narrators, but I can't even tell whether he's meant to be an unreliable narrator, or whether it's just that nothing in the book rings true. And I can't tell if the puzzles are really puzzles either - it's like you're supposed to read something into it, but there's nothing there. The film must be even more annoying - at least in the book it's easy to ignore that he's supposed to be walking around dressed entirely in white and constantly banging on a tambourine during his already-annoying adventures. At least it's not going to take long to read - it's shorter than it looks, what with all the pictures and random text effects.

[Gayle]

I'm reading Brookmyre's Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks. If I'm not careful, I'm going to read it all in one day.

[Cervus]

I've been devouring the Fables series of graphic novels by Bill Willingham. It's about all the traditional storybook, folklore and fable characters we are familiar with in the West (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Prince Charming, the Big Bad Wolf, etc.), whose homelands are under attack from an enemy known only as the Adversary. The Fables found several gateways into our world and have been living in exile here for centuries. Their current headquarters is New York City, though the Arabian fables have their own headquarters in modern Baghdad. Naturally in the series there's magic, battles, wars, revolts, political struggles, all kept secret from the mundane human world (the "Mundys").

It's a really fantastic series and I highly recommend it.

[Tabbyclaw]

After snagging it off the library shelf as an "impulse read" yet again, I finally gave in and bought a copy of The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex. Eleven-year-old Gratuity "Tip" Tucci is on her way to Florida, just like everyone else in the United States, because it's the one state that the Boovish alien invaders have decided the humans can keep. Although rocketpods have generously been provided, Tip has decided that she'd rather drive from Philadelphia to Florida by herself (don't worry, she has corn cans nailed to her shoes so she can reach the pedals and she's been practicing) so that nobody will find out that her mom was abducted by the Boov three weeks before the invasion and she's been living alone ever since. She makes it less than halfway before her car breaks down, and to get it fixed she has to form an uneasy truce with a Boov engineer named J.Lo who has problems of his own.

And that's when it starts to get complicated.

In case it wasn't obvious from that summary, this book is one of the funniest things I've ever read. It's told by Tip herself two years later (it's three versions of an assigned essay on the title topic), and her voice is charming and engaging. The humor is nonstop but full of heart, and the plot is twisty without being meandering. It's one of my favorites, and I think that a lot of my fellow snopesters (and some of their kids) would enjoy it as well.

-Tabby
the princess with claws

[Algae]

That does sound good, Tabbyclaw. I'm adding it to me to-read pile.

I read Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker. I don't think it was very well done. There was a lot of time spent on her adolescence and her angst about being so well known, but not being as rich as her friends or not getting the boy she wanted or her parents being disappointed in her (which is typical for teens), but very little about why she was a Washington Power House. The last 40 years of her life were covered in 100 pages, whereas the first 25 or so were covered in 250 pages. She seemed to have a fantastic intellect, was something of a wit, but was so mean and personal that it seemed to be a case of a Mean Girl bullying the newcomers and less a political disagreement. I felt like the author said a lot, but ended up not telling me anything about this woman.

I've also started Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, which I'm enjoying, but it is weird to get into the world he's created.

[Richard W]

Originally Posted by Algae

I've also started Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, which I'm enjoying, but it is weird to get into the world he's created.

It gets a lot weirder as you go on... he does a really good job of making it all make sense, given how little sense it makes when you try to explain it!

[Chloe]

Originally Posted by Gayle

I'm reading Brookmyre's Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks. If I'm not careful, I'm going to read it all in one day.

I was going to suggest that one for you (and for Joe Bentley). I think it's my favorite.

[Simply Madeline]

I started Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn at around 11:30 Saturday night. By 5:30 Sunday morning, I had finished it. I can't remember the last time a book literally kept me up all night reading.

It falls apart a bit at the end, but it's quite the page-turner (or whatever the kindle-equivalent of a page turner is).

[Richard W]

In July:

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. I suppose it got a bit better as it went along but I still didn't like it much. The best parts were the grandparents narratives. It turned out to be the firebombing of Dresden that they were running away from, not the Holocaust - I just assumed that two characters with plausibly Jewish names fleeing some sort of tragedy in Germany during WWII and meeting again in New York, in a book written by a Jewish person, would be fleeing the Holocaust. I don't think the characters were Jewish at all.

I wondered whether the comparison of September 11th with the firebombing of Dresden was one of the reasons I'd heard it referred to as "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Crass" - or that might just have been the film (which I've not seen). But then I started to wonder what the guy filmed plummeting from one of the Twin Towers would have thought of having his final moments played backwards and turned into a flick book to provide a "moving" finale to a rather pretentious novel, instead.

Next, Miss Felicity Beadle's The World of Poo by Terry Pratchett, which was altogether more subtle. It's a spin-off from Snuff in the same way that Where's My Cow? was a spin-off from Thud! - young Sam is reading it in-universe. So a fairly throwaway sort of story, but entertaining enough.

I couldn't wait any longer and read A Feast For Crows by George R R Martin. There are starting to be almost too many loose ends now - he did explain in a note at the end about having to split it into two books and so only doing half the stories (although I don't know what he meant about telling "all of" half the stories, since they're clearly still left on major cliff-hangers). But I wanted to know what was happening with the existing characters, not with a bunch of new ones... and I'm going to forget it all and not know what's going on when I come back to it. It's still great, though.

Then I read The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. I wasn't expecting it to end on a sequel hook - it seems to be the start of a new series, which I guess Stephen Baxter will continue if Pratchett can't. My copy included an "exclusive" short story that the main novel was partly based on. It was written by Terry Pratchett just after The Colour of Magic was published, and which he'd planned to use as part of the start of a new series except that the Discworld suddenly took off instead. Interesting to know what he might have written in an alternative universe. It's a bit of a shame that the short story has most of the best bits from the rest of the novel in it, and was written just as Terry Pratchett was turning into a really good writer - it just made me want to read the series he would have written, rather than the joint one that will actually exist. The idea would have been more original thirty years ago, as well. But the novel itself wasn't bad either. I enjoyed it at least.

Anyway, I still want to put off reading the final existing volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, so now I'm about a third of the way through Anna Karenina, which has been on my pile for a while. Tolstoy is great.

[Brad from Georgia]

I've been reading two of my own for copyediting purposes: Atlanta Bones, my new e-book, a suspense novel published as by Ken McKea; and Wishing on a Star: the Life of Eddie Carroll, a biography co-written with Eddie's widow, Carolyn. I tell you, there's nothing more depressing than reading your own stuff and seeing errors.

Except reading the published version of your own stuff and seeing them then.

[Don Enrico]

I've been talking to my daughter about giants, and told her about the Big Friendly Giant bringing the dreams. She wanted to know the whole story, and we ended up ordering a German translation of the book so I can read it to her at bedtime.

To prepare for that, I'm re-reading The BFG in the English version. I'm wondering whether the translation will be as whoppsy and scrumdiddlyumptius as the original.

[MooseMacD]

I am currently reading A Clash of Kings. I have enjoyed the first two seasons of Game of Thrones on HBO so my wife bought the first 4 books of A Song of Ice and Fire for my birthday. I loved A Game of Thrones and this second book in the series. I especially enjoy discovering the differences between the HBO show and the book, or things that I simply missed in the show.

However I do have a question for those who have read all the books: does Martin start to add so many characters and additional story lines that it diminishes your enjoyment of the series? I have read a few websites to know of some future story events and new characters. I am afraid that I will get into a situation where the storyline is confusing and no longer enjoyable.

About 15 years ago I started on The Wheel of Time series. I really enjoyed the first 4-5 books, but when Jordan started omitting main characters from some books and adding a seemingly endless array of new people, I began to lose interest. It quickly became a chore to read the books - like a school reading assignment I had to plow through. I believe I stopped reading around Winter's Heart though I own a few books after that.

So, does Martin go down Jordan's path?

[Richard W]

Originally Posted by MooseMacD

However I do have a question for those who have read all the books: does Martin start to add so many characters and additional story lines that it diminishes your enjoyment of the series? I have read a few websites to know of some future story events and new characters. I am afraid that I will get into a situation where the storyline is confusing and no longer enjoyable.

I haven't read all of them yet, but I did find that book 4 (A Feast for Crows) started to do that. Half the plots that were underway were left hanging and he introduced a load of new characters (or at least, started to follow the plots of some previously minor characters into new situations). Meanwhile, you don't have a clue what's happening in some of the more interesting developments in the previous book.

I think that's partly because of the way that it was originally planned and then split into two books (with A Dance with Dragons). He acknowledges this in an afterword and promises he's going to pick up on the bits he's left in the next book. He said he decided each book should have a fuller version of half the plots, rather than half of all the plots.

And to be fair, he does resolve things too. It's not an endless series of repeated cliffhangers and newly-introduced concepts that push out the old ones - like Lost. I think one aspect of his narrative that's most effective is the way that often, you're having to rely on the same rumours as the characters in order to know what's happening.

It's much easier to understand the decisions people make when you can see all the things they don't know, as well as the things they do. He's very good at giving people realistic motives or justifications for their actions, I think - usually you can understand exactly why people are doing things, even if you can also see it's a terrible idea because you know a bit more than they do.

Anyway, I'm still hoping I won't have forgotten everything that was going on by the time I get back to the next one...

[Gayle]

I went on a Brookmyre binge thanks to Amazon's used books. About 1/2 way through Snowball in Hell, I had to stop. I've still got another book to go, but I need a break from all the religious talk.

I just started Ruth Rendell's the Vault which appears to be her only sequel. Not only is it a sequel, but it's a crossover sequel because the original story did not feature Wexford and this one does.

[Cure the Blues]

Originally Posted by MooseMacD

However I do have a question for those who have read all the books: does Martin start to add so many characters and additional story lines that it diminishes your enjoyment of the series? I have read a few websites to know of some future story events and new characters. I am afraid that I will get into a situation where the storyline is confusing and no longer enjoyable.

Well, first, I hope your advance knowledge did not include the RW. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re fine but just don’t Google it or you’ll get right in your face massive spoilers for a major (in fact the major) Storm of Swords plot twist.

I’ve read all of the released books, the advance Winds of Winter POV chapter and 2 of 3 of the Dunk and Egg novellas (which I'd recommend plus "Sworn Sword" provides some nice background for Dance with Dragons). So far I’d agree with the consensus opinion that Storm of Swords is the current high point. Feast and Dance have middle-book syndrome and it feels like Martin is shifting characters around and generally trying to get them where they need to be so he can get the end-game action rolling. This came through a lot in Dance where parts of it were travelogue-like (the mighty Rhoyne, home to a vast and wondrous turtle ecosystem) and then the plot would suddenly jerk forward again. It was almost as if Martin realized he was digressing and was trying to get the action back on track. It made for a choppy reading experience. I enjoyed both Feast and Dance but IMO they're a definite step down from the Storm of Swords craziness. The good news with Dance is that at about 60% of the way through, the timeline passes Feast and the Feast POVs are thrown back into the mix.

Martin ascribed his problem finishing Dance to the Meereenese knot since he needed to get a bunch of characters converging on Meereen. He seems to have had a similar if less severe issue in book 3 where he kept rewriting and moving around the RW to the point where a continuity error slipped past the editorial staff. He also freely owns up to not getting much done if the Jets are on a streak. Somewhere there's an alternate reality where the series is already finished because alternate-world Martin is a Browns fan.

As someone who’s read some of Wheel of Time and stopped around Fires of Heaven/Lord of Chaos, my problem with Jordan was not so much the burgeoning character list but that the plot just stopped for huge stretches, leaving me with little to do except get irritated by the mass outbreaks of braid-pulling and general obtuseness of the characters. A bit of a shame about WoT actually, since I’ve read Sanderson’s Elantris and his first Mistborn novel and he seems to be pretty good at keeping the action from stalling, and from what I’ve heard it seems like he’s eliminated most of the stupid from the main WoT characters. In addition, he is now officially wrapped the final draft. But now I’ve lost track of everything and while re-reading the early books wouldn’t be so bad, I’d much rather not have to go through the later Jordan books, especially that one where everybody says nothing important happens (Path of Daggers?). Maybe that Tor.com re-read would work as a Cliff’s Notes version so I can whisk through the plotless stuff and just pick up the Sanderson final three.

[Mateus]

I'm reading The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln. I can't recommend it, because it's slow, and it's choppy reading, and (frustratingly) everything important that's happened so far has happened between chapters, with the text skipping over events and bringing them up in retrospect. Also, the actual alt-history seems to be taking a semi-backseat to the murder mystery at the heart of the story, which is kinda disappointing (to me).

[Auburn Red]

Now I'm reading

The World of Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse-Johnny Got His Gun was such an emotional experience I decided to read the Dynamic Duo who can always make me laugh. Such great fun and laughs.

Soon I will be finished with Sarum and am planning on reading various historical fiction novels about the kings and queens of England starting with:

The Sunne in Splendour by Mary Kay Penman-An excellent book about Richard III that gives him more dimensions and more character than Shakespeare ever dreamt.

The Girl Who Walked Home Alone by Charlotte Chandler (more like by Bette Davis and transcribed by Chandler. ) I like it tons better than the Bette Davis: A Biography that I read. There's nothing like hearing about someone's life in their own words that make it more fascinating a read.

The Myth and Mankind series by Time-Life- Reading the Enchanted Worlds were so fun, I thought that I would continue with this series starting with Titans and Olympians.

The Dictionary of Signs, Symbols, and Dream Interpretation- I'm really interested in dreams and dream interpretation and this book presents a beautiful visual guide of different symbols in our daily life and how they are used to decode dreams.

Mystery! A Celebration-A nice tribute to one of my all-time favorite TV series.

[PrairieBlueEyes]

Just recently finished Brad from Georgia's two e-books, Atlanta Bones and Cuban Dagger. They have a great protagonist with a good buddy, an intriguing and yet-to-be-completely-revealed back story for the hero and lots of mayhem and twists and turns to keep you reading.