Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Imic]

Curse of chalion. 'Tis brilliant.

[ChairmanPoo]

Rereading the Second Apocalypse by R. Scott Bakker. Currently at the first book of the second trilogy. Hope to get to the great ordeal (part 1 of The Unholy Consult, which has been split) soon

[Flying Dice]

Finally got my mitts on a copy of The Road to Hell. It continues to hold its title as the only series Weber didn't fuck up.

I hadn't realized there were more books in that series...I knew it wasn't complete, but I didn't know if it was abandoned or if there were some I was missing (and it wasn't important enough to me at the time to check). Some review comments lead me to believe there are more books beyond that yet (or that there should be anyway), I think I'll wait to see if more books materialize before I acquire them.

I generally like Weber's work, as long as it ends before he ruins it. The Honor Harrington series was pretty good... until it got stupid (after the peeps got their asses kicked). Safehold is still mostly OK. Most of his other stuff isn't really memorable enough for me to list (it, mostly, wasn't terrible, but it wasn't awesome either). Some of the standalone books were pretty good, but I mostly worry about series.

It just came out this Spring/Summer, so I'm not surprised.

And as I said, it's pretty much the only series he's done that I can tolerate. Everything else is just fucking stuffed with author tract nonsense that overshadows the fun bits. :/

--

I'm onto Lies My Teacher Told Me (second ed.) now. Plenty that I already knew, but plenty that I hadn't as well. Good stuff.

[NRDL]

Reading the Last Wish, first book of the Witcher Series.  Just having come off watching a play through of the Wild Hunt, I'm really enjoying this.  It's weird going from a visual medium to a text one, as the characters I already know have pre-determined appearances and voices in my mind, and the characters that are just introduced in the books I basically have to make their appearances up.  A small bit of dissonance, but nothing too bad. 

[Oneir]

Working my way through Tor ebookclub. (Free stuff!) So far I've been really enjoying Range of Ghosts (high fantasy "based on the Asian steppe in the time of Genghis Khan." You can still grab it today only here: http://ebookclub.tor.com/

Sadly last months book wasn't anywhere near my tastes. :/ I've heard a lot of good things about the Malazan series, but mostly it felt like it wanted to be Black Company but couldn't.

Curse of chalion. 'Tis brilliant.

Yessss. That whole series is great.

[Emma]

I just started reading Fahrenheit 451 after finishing The View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman, Small Gods by Pratchett and Firefight by Brandon Sanderson. I started reading Dune by Frank Herbert again and discovered that I didn't actually hate it, it's actually pretty good if you put some effort into it. Unfortunately I kinda-sorta forgot to bring it with me so I can't finish it yet.

[Arcvasti]

Just finished Good Omens. Was great. I gotta say, this book has one of the most sympathetic and reasonable portrayals of angels[Well, Aziraphale is, anyways], barring maybe the Dresden Files.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Huh? Isn't that the turtle one?

Edit: Nevermind, that's Small Gods.

Fahrenheit 451 was really good, it made me think more about free thought and press and stuff like that. Also liked the ending because it didn't conclude at all AFAIR. Not even kidding, I like books that do that.

[pondicherry]

Vanity Fair, by William Thackeray

Best 2016 discovery

(Better than Dickens some say...)

[NJW2000]

Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula LeGuin. Great as ever.

Also must recommend The THing Itself, Adam Roberts, kinda existential sci-fi. Lots of Kant.

[NRDL]

Bryan Cranston's autobiography, "A Life in Parts", is pretty fricking good, I'm only halfway through and I'm loving it. He hasn't even gotten to his acting career yet, his hijinks as a youth are honestly hilarious, especially because I'm reading them in his voice.

If Cranston really wrote this just by himself, then he's a damn good writer. Engaging, witty, with a sense of energy that I only really ever see in fiction books. I honestly felt I was reading a Stephen King novel in the first few chapters. Definitely recommend this.

[Yoink]

I've been reading The Siege of Krishnapur, by J. G. Farrell.

Too early to say what I think of it. Bought this years ago whilst overseas (and thus having to scrape what reading material I could from a very small, scattered and widely-varied collection of English-language books) and for some reason never got around to reading more than the first page.
I'm kind of liking the atmosphere it summons, so far.

Bryan Cranston's autobiography, "A Life in Parts", is pretty fricking good, I'm only halfway through and I'm loving it. He hasn't even gotten to his acting career yet, his hijinks as a youth are honestly hilarious, especially because I'm reading them in his voice.

That sounds interesting. I've actually not heard anything about his life outside of acting so far as I can remember. ...Unless you count that time he made out with Julia Louis-Dreyfus at the Emmy awards, I guess.

[Tomasque]

 I've been reading The King In Yellow. It's quite interesting, and I like how there's a bit of a meta-story to it all.

[ChairmanPoo]

I've been reading The King In Yellow. It's quite interesting, and I like how there's a bit of a meta-story to it all.

You, sir, should unmask.

[BodyGripper]

I've been reading The Greatship by Robert Reed.  I just recently finished two of his novels, Marrow and The Well of Stars, which are set on an enormous spherical spaceship, about the size of Jupiter.  The ship is believed to have been abandoned for billions of years, but for about 100,000 years it has been ruled by humans, who by now are immortal and nearly indestructible due to bioengineering.  The ship contains about 100 billion passengers, mostly aliens who paid enormous prices to live there.

The Greatship is a collection of novellas and short stories in that same setting.  It has many of the same characters, but it also goes into more details about some of the different aliens and their cultures.

I must say, even though it's a sort of Space Opera, Marrow really reminds me of Dwarf Fortress in some parts.  The humans have carved opulent rooms out of stone and filled them with luxurious furniture.  One person is described as living inside an old hollowed out volcano with a carpet of mushrooms.  A big part of the plot involves people who are stranded in a place with lots of magma and have to rebuild civilization.