Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[phenomshel]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Soon to be a 4th, since apparently the revival of the series has been popular enough that the new publisher is doing at least up to a 5th book.

I get them in hardcover myself, but they're cheapest at Kobo with discount coupons and Severn House has been pretty good about doing e-editions of Hambly's latest with only a couple of months' delay from the HC release.

Anyway, to make up for making you buy a new book and thereby its entire accompanying series, there were a number of freebie cozy/comedy/amateur sleuth mysteries that came free yesterday. If you frequent the Deals forum, you may have already seen them, but just in case:

June Bug by Jess Loury (1st in Murder-By-Month)[/URL]
I Spy by Kate Johnson (1st in Sophie Green Mysteries)
In the Belly of Jonah and Lot's Return to Sodom by Sandra Brennan (1st and 2nd in Liv Bergen mystery/thrillers)

It does nothing for the state of your TBR mountain, but at least your wallet will be a little happier? Though probably not if you end up picking the rest of those series, as well.



Yeah, I noticed. I'm wondering if there's some sort of 7 Stages of Romantic Whateverness like there is for grief and such.

So far the star couple has been through

1. Constant Petty Bickering Due to Unresolved Sexual Tension and have moved on to
2. Contrived Misunderstandings That Conveniently Showcase Exactly How Attractive Each Member of the Couple is to the Opposite Sex and Reinforce the Existing Relationship By Resorting to Jealous Clinginess.

Anyway, just finished Jim and Joyce Lavene's 2nd book in what turns out to actually be called the "Renaissance Faire" mysteries, in which once again ex-academic amateur sleuth and craft apprentice Jessie Morton takes on a new craft apprenticeship at the year-round Renfaire tourist village, which is now having its highly out-of-period Hallowe'en season with costumed werewolves and such.

Well, I'm not reading these things for historical accuracy anyway. Or for the relationship drama, either, which leads me to think once the main plot is underway, "Well, no wonder someone's apparently trying to kill you. If I had to stand and watch your repeated snipe-then-smooching all day, then I'd be tempted to make with the stabbity, too!"

And then I remember that I actually am sitting and watching their repeated snipe-then-smooching. And then I wonder exactly how one would go about stabbing fictional characters, if one were so inclined. Probably with one of those fictionalizer book-contents-visiting machines like in Futurama.

Mind you, I think in part it can be chalked up to the fact that the leads clearly have an unequal relationship. After all, one of them is a promising young person with a decent career behind them and a maybe-bright future ahead, and the other is a lawyer named for a merged banking megacorp.

Maybe traditional naming practices in the US mean that the latter is actually a perfectly suitable moniker for loving parents to inflict upon their child, but I know that if I were to spend a season working at the replica Viking tourist village over at L'Anse aux Meadows and happened to meet an attractive person of any gender who was named something similar, like, say, Toronto Dominion, even if he/she/it were an academic redhead, I would be too busy trying to suppress uncontrollable snickering to get anywhere near the smooching stage.

Anyway, aside from the relationship drama and the amateur sleuth's personal issues, which I could have cheerfully skipped, this was an okay book with good glimpses into the craft being ostensibly studied and a decent whodunnit with multiple suspects and a reasonable resolution.

A bit better than the last one, but still some rather ridiculous elements, though a little less over-the-top than last time. And I did like the faux-newsletter of Renaissance-ish activities and customs in the back.

Can't really recommend unless you've got a high tolerance for silliness and really like looking at dysfunctional historical recreation performance projects and the dysfunctional persons who recreate them while projecting their personal issues, but I liked this enough that I'm willing to seek out the next book from the library, even if I personally wouldn't shell more than about $2.50 out of pocket for a copy and only then if I were feeling very generous.

Yes, I picked up June Bug - since it's a series I've had on my wishlist for months now.
I enjoy snickering at the Renaissance Faire series, but at this point, I'm having even MORE fun snickering at your above post!

[MeiLin]

@Fbone if you ever get a chance to listen to Phil read "Agatha H," *take it.* Not only does he look exactly like he draws (even from the back!), he *sounds* exactly like he draws. Kinda scary.

I am stuck in ebook limbo. I'm picking at yet another in the 1632 series--mired in it, really--and am too broke to buy anything. I think I'll begin picking at "Cranford," by Mrs Gaskill. At least it'll be more my time period than 17th century Germany by way of West Virginia...

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by MeiLin

I think I'll begin picking at "Cranford," by Mrs Gaskill. At least it'll be more my time period than 17th century Germany by way of West Virginia...

You might want to try watching the BBC's adaptation of the Cranford series, if you haven't already. It's very nicely done and has Dame Judi Dench and Simon Woods in it.

Originally Posted by phenomshel

Yes, I picked up June Bug - since it's a series I've had on my wishlist for months now.

Awesome. Always nice when books you've been meaning to try out go free before you've actually bought them.

Speaking of which, I was very pleased to see that sf/fantasy re-publisher Phoenix Pick had as their free e-book of the month selection for June Charles Sheffield's Georgia on My Mind, his Nebula and Hugo dual-award-winning novelette.

I've been meaning to try Sheffield for some time, since he's got a good reputation and was married to Nancy Kress, one of my favourite writers. But he's been dead awhile and his books seem to have been mostly paperback, so the libraries have mostly kind of turfed their copies since then.

Anyway this was a slow-starting but gradually very interesting story about trying to track down what really happened to an anomalous Babbage-ish Analytical Machine, which has lots of nifty bits about early computers and early computer programming (with punchcards and cogwheels).

The resolution is a rather open-ended and I'd kind of liked to have found out what happened next, but in the end I rather enjoyed it, even if some of the technobabble went over my head.

Recommended if you like early computer science stuff and figuring the mysterious whereabouts of disappeared Babbage Engines.

The only thing better than getting this novelette for free would have been getting the entire story collection for free, but the next best thing is to get it for 50% off with coupon, which you can via the download page for the freebie novelette and which I myself will be picking up once I've paid off this month's CC bills.

Also, remember about a month or so ago when I recommended Stephen Leigh's Le Guin-ish Dark Water's Embrace and The Speaking Stone? It turns out all three of Leigh's Phoenix Pick backlist are on special sale, bundled up for just $7.64 (works out to $2.57 each) and they're sold DRM-free worldwide if you want them. Details are in their email newsletter.

[maggievnc]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Hey, someone else who's read Laxness! I don't think I've read The Fish Can Sing, but I kind of liked World Light and Independent People* when I tried them way back during my Nordic authors phase.

Fun fact: Iceland has one of the highest per capita would-be author populations in the world. Apparently at least 30%+ of all Icelanders will at one point try their hand at writing and publishing something, even if it's only an article in a magazine.

* I should probably warn that IP is quite good, but very depressing.

yes. i can see your point. I would like to add that this was written with a sense of humor on one hand, and great sensitivity to the human nature on the other.
Hope i will get the chance to visit iceland before it loses it's uniqueness completely and becomes totaly ordinary.

[GraceKrispy]

I just finished (what I thought was) a really cool novella. The author took the poem "Jabberwocky" and made it into a relatively short fantasy story. I never paid any attention to that poem before, but I think what he did with it was really cool! My review here.

(It's "Jabberwocky" by Daniel Coleman)

[maianhvk]

I'm reading C. S. Lewis' Prince Caspian and for the first time I think they did it better with the movie!

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by MeiLin

@Fbone if you ever get a chance to listen to Phil read "Agatha H," *take it.* Not only does he look exactly like he draws (even from the back!), he *sounds* exactly like he draws. Kinda scary.

I am stuck in ebook limbo. I'm picking at yet another in the 1632 series--mired in it, really--and am too broke to buy anything. I think I'll begin picking at "Cranford," by Mrs Gaskill. At least it'll be more my time period than 17th century Germany by way of West Virginia...

Apart from the out-of-copyright stuff, don't neglect the numerous free ebooks out there. The Baen Free Library and the Baen CDs are just the start. There are numerous free ebooks offered at Amazon and elsewhere.

[Rumpelteazer]

I'm taking a break from reading Birdman (#1 Jack Caffery) by Mo Hayder to read Island People by William Meikle. I do like Birdman but I was more in the mood for a horror and my new Kindle makes is way to easy to download a sample and buy a book.

[thinkpad]

Starting on A Game Of Thrones.

[covingtoncat73]

I got an audiobook on CD from Goodwill and listened to it over the weekend. It was Saxons, Vikings, and Celts by Bryan Sykes. I recognized him from Before the Dawn, which he didn't write but was mentioned/interviewed in/a source for. I love genetics. It might be fun but expensive to have my MDNA analyzed. I do know it is Irish but I wonder which of the seven or eight "daughters of Eve" it falls into. Not bad for $1.99, though basically just a bit of expansion on his chapter in Before the Dawn.

I just finished listening to Vaclav & Lena by Haley Tanner as an eAudio loan from the public library. I am normally not into contemporary literary fiction but I really enjoyed this tale of 2 Russian immigrant childhood sweethearts and the girl's search for the truth about her family.

I still need to finish Deathless by Cathrynne Valente. I am really on a Russian kick, apparently. It is excellent but I have been kind of busy, stressed, and distracted so it has been hard to sit down and read.

Also, it is a pBook from the library and I forgot to bring it with me but I did bring my eReader which has Barbara Hambly's Those Who Hunt the Night on it. I read about 18 pages of that yesterday and it seems like I will really enjoy and such a deal at 99 cents. I loved her Benjamin January books (she really did her NOLA research on those).

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

Also, it is a pBook from the library and I forgot to bring it with me but I did bring my eReader which has Barbara Hambly's Those Who Hunt the Night on it. I read about 18 pages of that yesterday and it seems like I will really enjoy and such a deal at 99 cents.

Hee. Another maybe-convert!

I hope good sales at the discount price encourage the publisher to try lowering the price on more titles (or Amazon to just randomly pricedrop them, which also works for me).

Fun fact: Hambly used to be married to native New Orleans writer George Alec Effinger and lived there part-time for a number of years before they split up. If you ever wonder what their relationship would be kind of like if they'd met during 1920s Hollywood while trying to keep a Manchu demon from killing again, then you should pick up Hambly's marvelously entertaining retro-historical paranormal thriller Bride of the Rat God, especially if you like old silent films and wonder about the industry behind them.

I just finished my own re-read of my brand-new legal digital copy of Barbara Hambly's Those Who Hunt the Night (1989 Locus Best Horror Novel, only 99 cents at Amazon's summer sale, good until June 15th).

It was as brilliant and clever and thus, excellent and awesome, as I remembered it, and for the main part Open Road Media have done a pretty good job with the e-book. Nice formatting with faux-small caps opening the first line of each chapter, no-indent on first paragraph of a scene, proper flickable chapter marks, etc.

The only problem was a semi-regular squishing together of two words or a word and punctuation, probably due to an overzealous line-break-removal script, which shows up every few page turns.

But that's a fairly minor issue which otherwise does not interfere with the meaning or readability of the text that I'll be contacting Amazon about with my highlighted clippings w/locations so that it can be fixed.

Aside from that, the book appears to be typo free and comes with a nifty bonus of Hambly's personal pictures following her biography in the back. ORM's blurbs say that this and all the other Hambly re-pubs contain an exclusive photogallery and I'm wondering if it's the same one for all, or they vary the pictures in some of them.

Highest possible recommend as one of the best-of-breed-if-you're-wanting-to-try-this-genre novels you should pick up if you have any interest whatsoever in gaslight paranormal investigations of vampire murders.

And even if you're not, you still can't go wrong for only 99 cents as long as you've some vague interest in Edwardian-era British mystery/suspense Great Game/detective thrillers because it's a very good one of those, too.

[jleliekelly]

The Last Child by John Hart so far so good but for for a really good read (ive only read it 600 times i swear) is A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown.

[WT Sharpe]

I just finished The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Icon by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan. The scholarship was sound and I learned a few new things about the first century missionary and self-proclaimed apostle. I wasn't as embracing of some of the major thrusts of what the authors claimed as Paul's theology, but that's okay. If nothing else, Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan always make you think.

They begin their book by writing of how the seven letters which are nearly universally accepted among scholars as genuinely Pauline reveal a man who was extremely revolutionary and egalitarian in his thinking. They call him The Radical Paul. Then they contrasted those letters with the disputed letters, written, in their opinion, by other people in the name of Paul. The "Paul" of these letters they refer to as The Conservative Paul; a Paul who was toned down to make him more appealing to the official powers. The last letters to be considered are the Pastorals (1 & 2 Timothy and Titus), which they say were written in Paul's name long after he was dead. These, they claim, reveal a very different "Paul" who they refer to as The Reactionary Paul; a man so different in his thinking and his message that he could even be thought of as The Anti-Paul.

From there, they go on to challenge the way the genuine (Radical) Paul and his message have been understood for the last 1,000 years and beyond.

The book was well-written and well-paced, but I felt that some of the fresh slants they apply to theological terms and phrases used by Paul were a bit nebulous. Then again, perhaps the fault is mine and a re-reading would clarify in my mind what they mean by those terms.

[maianhvk]

I'm reading C. S. Lewis' The Silver Chair. At first I tried reading it in time order but it was disturbing so I thought I should read Narnia Chronicles like how the author wrote it.

[siraks]

Originally Posted by maianhvk

I'm reading C. S. Lewis' The Silver Chair. At first I tried reading it in time order but it was disturbing so I thought I should read Narnia Chronicles like how the author wrote it.

rippin through those c.s. lewis books.
everytime i look here i see you post another !!

i'm 66% through mockingjay overall the series as a whole is pretty good but the first book is top notch