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[i2amroy]

And book 5, When Darkness Falls, by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory is finished at 602 pages!

Spoiler: Books Finished (click to show/hide)

Valentine's Exile - E.E. Knight
Valentine's Resolve - E.E. Knight
Fall With Honor - E.E. Knight
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein
When Darkness Falls - Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory

Total Pages: 1993

[Simmura McCrea]

Finished 4 books so far:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Three Musketeers by Andre Dumas - 520 pages
Summer Knight by Jim Butcher - 405 pages
Look to Windward by Iain M Banks - 403 pages
The Player of Games by Iain M Banks - 308 pages
Total page count: 1636 pages

Number 5's gonna take a while, though. It's the final book of the Wheel of Time, about 900 pages. Also got the Harry Potter set on my phone to get through.

[i2amroy]

Number 5's gonna take a while, though. It's the final book of the Wheel of Time, about 900 pages.

I still need to get my hands on a copy of that, though it's been so long that I'm probably going to need to re-read the other 13 before I can read it to remember who everyone is (plus it's alway fun to re-read a series).

[Simmura McCrea]

Yeah, I'll likely reread the series at some point this year. Probably during the summer.

[Flying Dice]

Ah, thanks for reminding me that I still need to get a copy of A Memory of Light.

[RedWarrior0]

Except book ten.

I might do this for, say, 26 books. Possibly. I'm thinking A Memory of Light, reread Watership Down, some translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh, and some 23 other books.

[Cthulhu]

I tried really hard to read The Brothers Karamazov once. I spent months forcing myself to slog through the pages, most of which I had to read more than once because by the end of a paragraph I had no idea what I had read. Maybe it was just the translation, but it was denser and more difficult to read than a law textbook. After two chapters (and about three months) I finally threw in the towel, though I was disappointed because I had heard it was a really good book.

By way of comparison, I first read The Lord of the Rings in its entirety when I was 10 and it only took me about 2 months.

I tried to read it too, I got somewhere around the part where the traveling monk met the crazy hermit monk, and gave up.  It wasn't /hard/ per se, but it also wasn't very interesting.

Also, I found a goldmine.  The half price books near my house has an obscure/out of print rack with some seriously rad stuff.  "Spock, Messiah" is the only name I remember out of hand but it had a lot of old military trade paperbacks, dime novels really, stuff with a muscular dude and a swooning lady on the front.  Bet I could find some Gor books there.   All of them three dollars each.  I am gonna read the shit out of them

[fqllve]

Ahaha. I hope Spock, Messiah is exactly what it sounds like. Now if only it was some kind of New Age self-help book.

--Week of Jan. 13th

A Feast for Crows by George R R Martin [6.5/10]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This one was hard to get through, I didn't actually finish it until 5am this morning because I just couldn't read it every day. It wasn't a bad book, it just wasn't particularly interesting, and Martin's books have a tendency to wear on me even when they're better than this one. Still, there were some parts I enjoyed, I may have enjoyed the Alayne chapters even more than the Arya ones, and I didn't think it was as bad as I'd been lead to believe, but I think I'll put off reading the next book for a few months, even though I'd decided to get caught up before the show begins again.

One thing that did bother me about the book was that the printing I have had noticeably larger type than the previous books. I suspect it's because people wouldn't have taken it seriously if it had been shorter, or would have been disappointed since it took him so long to finish. But there's nothing wrong with a short book so long as it's good (generally I prefer them, even) and this one could have been shorter than it was. Misrepresenting the length like that only made it harder to get though, because every time I picked it up I'd sigh at how much left there was to read.

[PTTG??]

Just finished Leviathan Wakes, a fantastic hard science space opera cyberpunk film noir. It's my favorite kind of science fiction- it shows you a future world without distracting you with absurd star-trek techno-babble. For one thing, there isn't artificial gravity.

George RailRoad Martin apparently liked it, and I can see why.

[Sappho]

I just accidentally read for 2 hours straight, after an hour earlier today. Got through about 325 pages just today. Damn you, Neil Gaiman.

Current List:
Junky (William S. Burroughs) - 256 pages
Sourcery (Terry Pratchett) - 270 pages
The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm (Nancy Farmer) - 310 pages
American Gods - Author's Preferred Text (Neil Gaiman) - 650 pages

According to the introduction, this text is 12,000 words longer than the originally published version. I never read the original but I can't imagine sacrificing a single sentence from this book. I'm glad this is the edition I got. When I'm not an hour and a half overdue for bed (oh god I have to get up so early tomorrow) I will have more to say on this marvelous book. For now, just... if you haven't read it, go read it already.

[Flying Dice]

Stephen Hero
James Joyce
20/1/13

Quite good. Put briefly, if you enjoyed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, you will most likely find this to your taste as well, given its nature.

[vagel7]

Finished A Rakvere novel yesterday which is historical fiction. But the historical background here is very strong and most of the characters are from history, so it is hard to tell where the fiction begins and the history ends. I quite liked the book, but a friend of mine thought it was awful.

Spoiler: 3/52 (click to show/hide)

1.A Dance With Dragons - George R.R. Martin - 959 pages
2.Diamonds are Forever - Ian Fleming - 304 pages
3.A Rakvere novel(Rakvere romaan) - Jaan Kross - 372 pages

Next up, The Good Firm by Armin Kõomägi, another Estonian author.

[palsch]

Haven't been posting much because I've drastically cut back on internet time. Not quite as far ahead on books as I'd hoped but a decent start I think.

Spoiler: First eight (click to show/hide)

Charles Stross
Merchant Princes series ;
1 - The Family Trade
2 - The Hidden Family
3 - The Clan Corporate
4 - The Merchant's War
5 - The Revolution Business
6 - The Queen of Trades
From the Laundry Files series;
The Apocalypse Codex

China Mieville
New Crobuzon series;
Iron Council

I'll put up an updated reading list and maybe a few reviews later in the week. I'm starting the October Daye (TVTropes warning because the other wiki doesn't have an entry) series next, maybe with a break for Blue Remembered Earth or The Hydrogen Sonata depending on how into the genre I can get. Never really read urban fantasy, but I know and trust the author so... here we go.

[Sappho]

Just finished Hell by Robert Olen Butler. Another re-read and I had read about half of it before the new year, but I wanted to finish it anyway and I think with all the non-book things I've been reading (including stories on here and various articles and such) I can include it guilt-free.

Spoiler: Currently Finished (click to show/hide)

Junky (William S. Burroughs) - 256 pages
Sourcery (Terry Pratchett) - 270 pages
The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm (Nancy Farmer) - 310 pages
American Gods - Author's Preferred Text (Neil Gaiman) - 650 pages
Hell (Robert Olen Butler) - 232 pages

I stumbled upon Hell in a secondhand bookshop on a sidestreet of Prague. It's not exactly a "great work of literature," but it is original and funny and entertaining and I enjoyed reading it a second time. There is a lot of attempted philosophy, much of which seemed to me to fail, but some of it was pretty good. I think it would have been better off without some of the contemporary pop culture references, but again, there's nothing really "bad" there, just some parts were great and some were so-so. Overall, a good light read with plenty of laughs and cheap shots at various cultural icons, and the occasional passage that makes you think twice about something you've always taken for granted.

[pisskop]

Halfway through Dune.  While entertaining in a way, it is exactly the kind of fantasy I don't quite get into.  That and I think the dinner party scene was 'out of this world'.  Good enough, but not going to reread it any time soon.