What books are you reading?

[LizzyBean]

I'm trying to make myself read more. Right now I've borrowed Inheretance from a friend at work to read. I figure I read the other three books, I might as well read the last.

I also got Me Talk Pretty Someday by David Sedaras that I need to get reading on.

[Cinnamon]

Originally Posted by Algae

Cinnamon, after saying that I don't know how many times, I've started an account on Goodreads. It's really handy and easy to use to keep track of what I've read, what I want to read and finding new books to read.

Thanks, I'll have a look at that. I did sign up to LibraryThing, but after 200 books you need to pay to add more and I haven't really done anything with it.

[RingKeeper]

I'm reading A Game of Thrones right now, mostly because everyone else in my life seems to be reading the series. It has far more fantasy elements in it than I expected, and so I am enjoying it much more than I anticipated.

I have a Goodreads account, but I keep forgetting about it. I started a challenge early in the year to read 80 books. I have certainly read that, but I forgot to put them all in. I think it shows I read 10 books this year.

[Dutch Angua]

I've read Snuff by Terry Pratchett. I liked it.

And I've read the first 3 trilogies by Robin Hobb. Good stories, I like them very much, but I'm a bit torn over the ending of Fool's Fate.

SPOILERS!

Maybe it's just because I like Burrich so much, but I really felt that the only reason Hobb killed him off was so that Fitz and Molly could be together again...actually, I never really likes the whole Fitz/Molly romance very much.

[MacLloyd]

I am currently reading Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston. Not as good as all the rest of Crichton's ouvre, but so far it is intriguing and I do want to find out how it all turns out, so that's not bad.

MacLloyd

[Dasla]

Originally Posted by Dutch Angua

I've read Snuff by Terry Pratchett. I liked it.

They are showing the television version of "Going Postal" on the ABC (Australian) on Saturaday night.

I have just read "The Year Nick McGowan Came to Stay" by Rebecca Sparrow a local Brisbane writer. It actually a young adult (industry talk for teenager) book, but I like her writting plus I try to read any local writters if I can.

It is about a girl in grade 12 and I relised the school that the girl attends (and also the school Rebecca attended) is the sister school too the school I did grade 11 and 12 at. So I feel even more connected to her. Not long after I started at the school I work at, Rebecca Sparrow did a talk there. So the copy I have is signesd.

Currently I am reading "Mice" by Gorden Reece (another young adult book, the perials of working in a library at a girl's high school). It a thriller and quite adictive, I will have to try to stop myself staying up all night to finnish it. I may be on holidays but I don't want to stuff up my sleep patterns too much.

[Alarm]

Yesterday, I purchased:
Snuff, By Terry Pratchett,
Side Jobs by Jim Butcher, and
How Firm a Foundation (Safehold Book 5), by David Weber


Snuff is done and I'm 60 pages into Side Jobs so I should be done reading my purcahses by the end of the week!

[llewtrah]

I started reading "An Echo in the Bone" (Diana Gabaldon) that I found in a charity shop not knowing this was part 7 of a series. The time streams/time travel element (living in both past and present) and the historical setting both appealed to me. There's enough background info and recapitulation of events, and an appendix, that it should have worked just fine as a standalone book or as an introduction to the Outlander series. Despite all of these things, 200 pages into this 900+ page book I gave up. The trouble is, the writing is just flabby and it felt like a pot-boiler full of padding. I've read much better novels set in 1770s North America and I've read much better time travel/dual time-stream novels. I felt that it needed some ruthless editing.

I like long, detailed books/series and I don't mind lots of descriptive scene-setting (I read plenty of very verbose 19th Century novels), but this just felt like waffle. It's going straight back to the charity shop.

I'm just about to start "No Logo" (Naomi Klein) which seems like an ideal book to read in the shopping-frenzied run-up to the gift-giving season (especially as the desire for design brands is such that there is a huge increase in counterfeit "designer label" goods being seized).

[PatYoung]

I just finished The Protestant Crusade 1800-1860 by Ray Allen Billington about the origin of anti-immigrant sentiment in America.

[Aud 1]

Llewtrah - I had the same trouble with that book and I've been with the series since the beginning. You hopefully missed out on the finger amputation scene where the author reminds one and all that she was once a professor of anatomy.

I highly recommend the first couple books. She was somewhat more economical with words way back then.

[Pinecone]

I just finished the Hunger Games trilogy and I loved it. It was very difficult to put them down - the housework suffered somewhat!

[Moku]

I just re-read Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett. I haven't read it for years as my hard copy got damp and went mouldy and having a shiny new birthday Kindle seemed as good a reason as any to get a new copy. Having just re-read the whole Tiffany Aching series it was interesting to see the changes in Granny Weatherwax and to be reminded that she *had* to be the 'good one'.

Am half way through Pandaemonium by Christopher Brookmyre and can't for the life of me guess how he is going to play the story out, but right now it feels as though he is having a bit of a dig at Dan Brown.

I have Two-Way Split by Allan Guthrie lined up next. I know nothing about the book or writer other than that he supposedly does 'Tartan Noir'.

[E. Q. Taft]

My father sent me one of the new Kindles as a Christmas present. So far I'm trying to stock up primarily on free books (budget being what it is). But I noticed that several of David Gerrold's books are in the Kindle store for pretty cheap. I paid a whole eighty-nine cents for Alternate Gerrolds: An Assortment of Fictitious Lives, and damn, I haven't enjoyed a short story collection that much since I don't know when. As the title suggests, many of the stories deal with alternate histories, some of which are merely cute (the story where John F. Kennedy goes into acting instead of politics, and winds up replacing Shatner as captain of the Enterprise), but others are really good. "Franz Kafka: Superhero" is a brilliant pastiche; "...And Eight Rabid Pigs" is pretty grippingly intense. Others of the stories are more conventional, but they are all at least entertaining.

Interestingly, at least two of the stories contained within, "The Kennedy Enterprise" and "The Seminar from Hell", are for sale separately in Kindle form....and they each go for $2.99. Not sure what's up with that. But I think just about anyone can get more than eighty-nine cents worth of enjoyment from the collection.

[llewtrah]

Originally Posted by Aud 1

Llewtrah - I had the same trouble with that book and I've been with the series since the beginning. You hopefully missed out on the finger amputation scene where the author reminds one and all that she was once a professor of anatomy.

I highly recommend the first couple books. She was somewhat more economical with words way back then.

Dang - I could have compared the finger amputation with one of my old anatomy textbooks! Though I get the feelign I owuld have enjoyed the textbook slight more for succinctness of style

[Richard W]

Originally Posted by Richard W

Fremde by Russell Hoban. I'm never quite sure what I think of Russell Hoban. He's technically a very good writer, and he has some interesting ideas, but I'm often not sure what he's getting at.

... ironically, his most famous book, Riddley Walker, is probably the most accessible of his that I've read, even though it's all written in a made-up dialect. He's a bit like Anthony Burgess, I suppose.

Hm. I didn't know much about Russell Hoban at all as a person, but apparently he just died:

Russell Hoban, cult author, dies aged 86

Legendary cult author Russell Hoban, whose apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker was described by Anthony Burgess as "what literature is meant to be", died last night aged 86, his publisher has announced.

At least my comparison with Anthony Burgess was accurate!

Death, Hoban predicted in 2002, would "be a good career move". "People will say, 'yes, Hoban, he seems an interesting writer, let's look at him again'," he said.

[llewtrah]

Originally Posted by Richard W

Hm. I didn't know much about Russell Hoban at all as a person, but apparently he just died

I read Riddley Walker quite recently and thoroughly recommend it to anyone into "post future apocalypse" type science fiction set in a post-technological (or recovering technological) world. I haven't read any of his other works yet. I had great fun matching the places in Riddley Walker to the current day places that I know and figuring out how events in the current world had been garbled into legend in the Riddley Walker world.

(If you're into future post-apocalypse/post-technological fiction, Will Self's The Book of Dave is good too, as is Reeve's Mortal Engines series)

[Darth Credence]

I finished a few recently released Star wars books, and have just started up on 11/22/63 by Stephen King. Not very far into it, but what I have read is really good.

[ULTRAGOTHA]

I'm reading Snuff by Terry Pratchett also.

It makes me sad. The story is there, but the execution thereof is spotty and disjointed and it's just heartbreaking.

[Dasla]

Originally Posted by Dasla

They are showing the television version of "Going Postal" on the ABC (Australian) on Saturaday night.

Another unrelated channel is showing "The Colour of Magic" mini series at Mid-day today and tommorrow. I don't recall any other adaptions of his works being shown on Australian tv so why this week all of a sudden.

I have enjoyed the first episode today but gasp...the LIBRARIAN IS HUMAN, that's just wrong!! He was turned into an Orangutan at the end of the first episode but that not how I recall it happening in the books. From what I remember from the start of the books he was an orangutan and had been for so long the university staff didn't know what he had looked like as a human.

[Dropbear]

Sorry, the librarian turns into an orang in the 2nd book - The Light Fantastic.

Dropbear