What book(s) are you reading?

[CajoleJuice]

I've been reading too many baseball-related books that I'm sure no one here would care about, but I also recently finished A Game of Thrones, which was pretty damn good. The writing might not amazing, and some of the female characterization may be a bit misogynistic, but the world is impressive and GRRM's willingness to dispose of characters adds suspense to every decision and encounter.

Reading this now:



Just fantastic.

[Nintendosbooger]

^

I have that book and it is amazing, but if you really do find the Song of Ice and Fire series interesting, you'll need to read it in its entirety without any significant break-time in between novels or else you'll risk forgetting some names, moments, and events.

[Phoenix Dark]

cajole tell me what baseball books you're reading, I'm a big fan

[Cormacaroni]

oh, read the lot, they're all great in their way including the Endymion books. Don't expect the same book another 3 times though.

I loved the first two books but really hated the Endymions ... ymmv

Finished Kingkiller Chronicles 1 and 2 over the last few days. I really enjoyed them but I'd be damned if I could tell you why - they're like popcorn. SPOILER THOUGHTS

spoiler (click to show/hide)

The author is a good writer, not great; he relies too much on clichés but sure knows which ones to deploy for maximum effect. He reminds me of King or Crichton - pulpy, yet still substantial and addictive.

The pacing of the books (especially the second) are shot to all hell. It's like he wrote four separate 250 page novels and strung them together with the barest of connective tissue.

Lotta sex in book 2! Lotta sex.

I like the University setting and its focus on money and busking over magic and adventure. I liked the court intrigue with the Maer, too ... the Adem bored me. I called them a "Mary Suetopia" only to discover via TV Tropes I was not the first to come up with such a bon mot.  The most boring section for me was killing the dragon in Book 1. I can't exactly say why I'd rather read about grinding out deck lamps in the Fishery than killing mythical beasts.

Sympathy is very similar to the magic system used in Emily Short's Savoir-Faire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savoir-Faire

Really enjoy the sharp change in tone between the frame story sections and the flashbacks. I'm willing to forgive some of the rip-roaring "and then I was awesome and the best ever and fucked all the ladies" tone of the narrative because I don't really trust Kvothe as a narrator - between the frame story and the Edema Ruh background, I'm certain he's telling the best story he can, not the most true one.

Auri is mai waifu, Denna is decidedly NOT.

Looking forward to book 3! Not looking forward to books 4 and 5, should that come to pass.

[close]

I agree with most of that. Quite how he managed to make all that seemingly mundane stuff feel so exciting and interesting is a bit of a mystery. It really is quite close in structure and method with Harry Potter (which I find oddly compelling but discard as soon as I'm finished, never to be touched or thought of again. I don't even bother to watch the movies). And didn't certain parts of it literally seem to consist of him returning to the hub (castle) to receive new quests? It was Bioware on paper for a bit there.

He is a fairly weak prose stylist (except for some nicely poetic bits once every couple hundred pages, some of which he repeats 3 or 4 times like the 'waiting to die...' lines). Yet every line of it seems to matter. Kvothe should be wildly smug and irritating but his failures are so spectacular that he kept my complete sympathy throughout. I was just hooked.

[Stoney Mason]

Reading this now:

(Image removed from quote.)

Just fantastic.

I listen to the audiobook a few years back. Very enjoyable. He has a nice writing style.

[chronovore]

Anyone else read Sarah Vowell's books?

(Image removed from quote.)
Two more weeks until it's out. Cannot wait.

I just finished The Wordy Shipmates yesterday.  I wish it were longer.  I'm looking forward to this book, but it's going to be a while.  I'm the 13th in line at my local library.

I just ordered Wordy Shipmates for my step-dad, who is a casual history buff. I may order a copy for myself soon, as well.

[Great Rumbler]

Having finished up Hyperion, I've now started on The Difference Engine. Victorian-era steampunk with the fluid, punkish stylings of William Gibson? Yes, please.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

having finished up Hyperion you should be doing NOTHING else until you finish Fall of Hyperion

[Great Rumbler]

I don't have it!

Plus, I put off reading The Difference Engine until I got Hyperion out of the way.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

ITT Great Rumbler enjoys Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers immensely, will read Return of the King "eventually," decides to investigate "this Xanth thing" instead

[Great Rumbler]

ITT Great Rumbler enjoys Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers immensely, will read Return of the King "eventually," decides to investigate "this Xanth thing" instead

How is The Difference Engine remotely comparable to the Xanth series? 

And I don't even have the second Hyperion book. I borrowed the first one from my brother.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

it's not, Difference Engine is fine

but to not read Fall of Hyperion immediately after Hyperion is like ... it's not a sequel, it's not even "one book in two volumes," it is the actual book

Hyperion is just backstory and prologue ... perhaps a better analogy would be The Hobbit to Fall of Hyperion's Lord of the Rings

[Great Rumbler]

1. I don't have Fall of Hyperion.
2. I've been wanting to read The Difference Engine for several months now.
3. It's not like I'm going to forget what happens between now and when I start reading Fall of Hyperion in a few weeks.

So there!

[Great Rumbler]

Why is your brother such an asshole that he only gave you the one book?

That was the only one he had, never finished it.

[Joe Molotov]

no u

[chronovore]

Difference Engine didn't feel like it had any Gibson-ism in it, and was dry and lame for me. It was a real chore to get through. It should be noted that I've never read any Bruce Sterling, so it could be that the dry and lame-ness was all on him.

[Cormacaroni]

Picked up Kitchen Confidential by Tony Bourdain late the other night and had real trouble putting it down. Great fun.

[Cormacaroni]

Also finished Echo Burning by Lee Child, the worst of the Reacher books so far, by a long way. It was still good but soooooo much set up.

[Eric P]

Michael Cisco's The Great Lover.  I'm about a third of the way through.  It's a slippery novel where you have to pay attention to every moving part to keep a handle on it otherwise you'll find yourself re-reading entire chunks.

It's pretty much amazing.

I think Treesong and Cohen may enjoy it.

[Groogrux]

Reading through The Darktower Series by Stephen King.  Don't hate.  I wanted to see what it's all about.

[Mr. Gundam]

Picked up Kitchen Confidential by Tony Bourdain late the other night and had real trouble putting it down. Great fun.

I read through Kitchen Confidential on the flight back from Tokyo back in 2006. Really fun read.

[Great Rumbler]

The Scar So far I like it better than Perdido Street Station.  It has the same go for broke with every idea imaginable style, but the narrative is a little better plotted.

Man, I've got both of those sitting on my shelf right now. Gonna need to get around to them sometime.

[Joe Molotov]

on my nook

Did anyone pick up DFW's The Pale King?

[Cormacaroni]

no - still haven't read the copy of Infinite Jest I bought approx 5 yrs ago. I'm gonna pirate a copy on Kindle 'cause I'm never gonna lug that brick around with me now, let's face it.

[Polari]

Just ordered this





Admittedly it's not the super awesome £900 one, but it's still 1200 pages of awesomeness for only £28. Plus Amazon are doing free shipping to New Zealand until May 15. Happy days!

[chronovore]

no - still haven't read the copy of Infinite Jest I bought approx 5 yrs ago. I'm gonna pirate a copy on Kindle 'cause I'm never gonna lug that brick around with me now, let's face it.

I'd do the same. I am grateful to be gifted so many of your books when you cleaned your Man Cave™ but I have my iPod Touch and Stanza with me at all times. Dead tree format is so inconvenient.

I want to read a DFW book, but am a'fear'd of dealing with the suicide elements.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

The Scar So far I like it better than Perdido Street Station.  It has the same go for broke with every idea imaginable style, but the narrative is a little better plotted.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Plus Armada is awesome

[close]

The City & The City > The Scar > Perdido Street Station

PSS is rather overrated - it's fun and messy but it reeks of first novel kitchen-sink-throwing non-coherence

[fistfulofmetal]

i'm nearly done with Game of Thrones. loving it.

[chronovore]

Meant to read Iron Sunrise, but accidentally picked up Singularity Sky instead. Which I'd already read once. S'fine with me, Stross is wonderful.

[fistfulofmetal]

i think with a kindle now i may decide to finally finish the Dark Tower series.

i've been sitting on Wolves of Calla for about 5 years now.

sigh

[Joe Molotov]

i think with a kindle now i may decide to finally finish the Dark Tower series.

i've been sitting on Wolves of Calla for about 5 years now.

sigh

lol, same here. I've stopped and started the series 3 or 4 times over the past 15 years. I was ~200 pages into The Wolves of Calla when I gave it up about 4 or 5 years ago.

[GilloD]

Clash of Kings. Way dragg-ier than Game of Thrones, still compelling.

[chronovore]

Finally picked up I Am Legend in paperback, started reading it on my iPod instead. 

The will smith movie was crap, but the vincent price one is pretty good, it feels like this book in many ways. What's surprising is the hero lives in Gardena, CA. My hometown! Pretty easy to picture the mid-'70s Gardena in a post-apocalypse setting.

[Cormacaroni]

I read it and enjoyed it a lot, yeah. As I recall, he is pretty upfront about the actual 'story' only being a small fraction of the book. I enjoyed all of it nonetheless.

(btw I picked up a couple of Bourdain's books recently and enjoyed them a lot. I remember you repping him hard so cheers!)

[chronovore]

Just ran into this review by Gabe at penny-arcade:

The City & The City - I got about half way through this book and gave up. I just don’t understand these fucking cities. His next book should be called “I’m Smarter Than You” and he can just take a shit inside it.

[fistfulofmetal]

lol, same here. I've stopped and started the series 3 or 4 times over the past 15 years. I was ~200 pages into The Wolves of Calla when I gave it up about 4 or 5 years ago.

i just finished it. i'll say it's a slow start but fuck does it pick up. and shit gets crazier and crazier as it goes. we're in full on META zone right now.

there's an entire story in the middle that is a continuation of another King book (spoiler of you havent read it:

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Salem's Lot

[close]

I caught the reference but since I never read it i didn't realize it was literally retelling the story then following the character thereafter. pretty crazy.

[Olivia Wilde Homo]

I finished reading this book.  A real page turner, it basically shows how wealthy industrialists grifted and sucked the country dry for 60 years (1870-1930 - the book was written in the late 1930s) and how the government was helping them almost every step of the way, including the New Deal.  It pretty much covers almost everything that the rich did, including education and philanthropic donations.  It also lists how much what family gave to which candidate for what election years.  The author was totally ruthless with Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

It's a great book and best of all, it is public domain so everyone can read if they like history.  He wrote a sequel about thirty years later that I will probably check out next.

[nice cat but chicken]

(Image removed from quote.)

on my nook

Did anyone pick up DFW's The Pale King?

i've been reading this inbetween others for like 6 months now. it is amazingly funny, often subtly sometimes brazenly. i love it.
definitely not the ideal way to read a book but the scope of it is just so overwhelming!

started reading

the other day. my first DeLillo. i'm loving it so far. incredibly ascerbic and neurotic but he somehow presents a model of a loving home life within a truly morbid context. already thinking about what to read by him next. recommendations?

[tiesto]

I'm taking the Dale Carnegie course via work, so this:

[Joe Molotov]

(Image removed from quote.)

on my nook

Did anyone pick up DFW's The Pale King?

i've been reading this inbetween others for like 6 months now. it is amazingly funny, often subtly sometimes brazenly. i love it.
definitely not the ideal way to read a book but the scope of it is just so overwhelming!

I don't know how far into you are, but I'm up to the part where they're playing Eschaton. Great stuff.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

Just ran into this review by Gabe at penny-arcade:

The City & The City - I got about half way through this book and gave up. I just don’t understand these fucking cities. His next book should be called “I’m Smarter Than You” and he can just take a shit inside it.

not a good idea, how would we tell books apart when they are all renamed "I'm Smarter Than Gabe"?

[Mandark]

Gabe reviews Green Eggs and Ham:  "I don't get it.  I guess the author's more concerned with rubbing in the fact that he's a Doctor than with writing a story I could understand."


The City & The City is a ton of fun.  Reminds me of the Yiddish Policemen's Union, where an author pares down his normally showy prose style because dammit, this is how you write a detective novel.

Also, the world-building (I think with Mieville we should call it city-building) is a lot more focused and serves the story rather than vice versa, as it sometimes felt in PSS.

[fistfulofmetal]

been reading Dark Tower book 6. shit is getting out of control. the comparisons between this and the last few seasons of lost are apt. at first the weirdness was subtle but now it's like a homeless guy waving his dick in your face on the subway. just so blatant. like seriously:

spoiler (click to show/hide)

roland and eddie go and visit STEPHEN KING. WHAT THE FUCK

[close]

[Eric P]

(Image removed from quote.)

I finished reading this book.  A real page turner, it basically shows how wealthy industrialists grifted and sucked the country dry for 60 years (1870-1930 - the book was written in the late 1930s) and how the government was helping them almost every step of the way, including the New Deal.  It pretty much covers almost everything that the rich did, including education and philanthropic donations.  It also lists how much what family gave to which candidate for what election years.  The author was totally ruthless with Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

It's a great book and best of all, it is public domain so everyone can read if they like history.  He wrote a sequel about thirty years later that I will probably check out next.

This does sound pretty cool actually.  thanks for the tip.

I'm currently reading The Last Brother.  It's really really good.

[chronovore]

Just ran into this review by Gabe at penny-arcade:

The City & The City - I got about half way through this book and gave up. I just don’t understand these fucking cities. His next book should be called “I’m Smarter Than You” and he can just take a shit inside it.

not a good idea, how would we tell books apart when they are all renamed "I'm Smarter Than Gabe"?

I hadn't really considered it. I was too busy laughing at a hardcover book with a fresh, steaming poop inside of it.

Gabe reviews Green Eggs and Ham:  "I don't get it.  I guess the author's more concerned with rubbing in the fact that he's a Doctor than with writing a story I could understand."

[Groogrux]

I just finished the first book in The Darktower Series, The Gunslinger.  Not bad.  I hear that King gets kooky with this shit, but I'm game.

[chronovore]

Read the first four or five, then bail. The Blaine the Mono stuff was good, but once he starts traipsing into his other stories and such, it seems masturbatory.

[Polari]

I just finished Taliban Shuffle by Kim Barker.  It's an account of a journalist who spent 5 years or so in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  I was hesitant to pick it up because it's by a woman but the author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City (great read) praised it highly, saying how laugh out loud funny it was.  I figured not reading something I'm interested in because a woman wrote it was pretty dumb so I bought it.

I should have gone with my gut.  It reads like Sex in the City: Afghanistan.  She's constantly talking about what she's wearing, what parties she went to, and who she is dating.  I only found one line even smirk worthy and learned almost nothing about Afghan or Pakistani culture.  In the end she dismisses Obama's Afghanistan policy but nothing in the book makes me value her opinion on the region.  What a waste of time.

Sounds dire, but you're missing out if you hold a prejudice against women journalists. Much of Joan Didion's work, Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and although some people consider her work overly didactic, if you can separate her work from her violent activism, Ulrike Meinhof's essays are brilliant.

[Groogrux]

Just started The Drawing of the Three, the second book in the Darktower Series.  Not bad at all so far.  The Gunslinger started out slow in my opinion, so I'm glad to see this one kinda taking off.

[fistfulofmetal]

Just started The Drawing of the Three, the second book in the Darktower Series.  Not bad at all so far.  The Gunslinger started out slow in my opinion, so I'm glad to see this one kinda taking off.

I'm about half way through the final book and let me tell you... shit gets crazy. Real crazy. I've seen people compare it to Lost in how the later stuff flew off the rails and I think it's apt. Though I think King's writing is still good and the story is well told - it's pretty wacky.

IMO the next book is the best, Wizard and Glass.


Like I said I'm midway through the finale book - The Dark Tower. Depending on my pace in the next three weeks I'm hoping to start Clash of Kings after I'm finished which is hopefully around the same time Game of Thrones season 1 ends.

But I do really want to read The Witcher books. Also kind want to try out those Mass Effect books as well. I feel no shame in wanting to read video game books.

[Great Rumbler]

But I do really want to read The Witcher books. Also kind want to try out those Mass Effect books as well. I feel no shame in wanting to read video game books.

All the Witcher books are actually from the 90's.

[fistfulofmetal]

yeah i know. the last comment was more directed at wanting to read the Mass Effect books. poor wording on my part

[chronovore]

Started William Gibson's Zero History, and am finding it even less compelling than Pattern Recognition and whatever the other Bigend trilogy book was. Spook Country. Christ, I bought that in hardcover, and I can't even remember its name. Gibson is growing contrived as he works to re-establish himself as a fiction writer rather than SF. The trend-chasing thing is cute, but all the descriptions feel overwrought instead of clever.

[Madrun Badrun]

An Introduction to Godel's Theorems

[fistfulofmetal]

The thing I just started noticing about Stephen King's writing (at least in the DT stuff) is that the only time the fiction is really moving forward is when he introduces a new character or set of characters that are simply there to spout exposition then they usually move on or die.

[chronovore]

Zero History is picking up nicely.

[fistfulofmetal]

I'm at the end of The Dark Tower.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Not the end but near it. I'm almost tempted to truly stop here and not really finish it.

[close]

[fistfulofmetal]

mother fucker

[chronovore]

Zero History is picking up nicely.

Finished Zero History last night. I completely turned around on this. Gibson's endings always feel muddled to me. This time, he got it just right. This is the best of the Hubertus Bigend trilogy, which is may be damning through faint praise, so I'll add that his characterization is better than it's ever been.

I laughed out loud at one of the late reveals, which came out of nowhere but is perfect for the world he built.

I'd say the only weak point are multiple points at which he has characters engage in exposition. In a way, it shows motivation, since the characters are voicing what's happening from their own perspective, but they're not wildly differing from each other, so it mostly reads like "Hey, reader! Here's why this is happening..." It only happens a few times though, and considering my confessed history of being confused by his endings, I'm not going to complain too loudly.

[etiolate]