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

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by tecweston

Yes! I read Contact twice in high school and although I love the movie, the book is ten times better. That movie/book started me on my life as a skeptic, since after I read the book I also read Sagan's Demon-Haunted World, (a debunking of several paranormal and psuedoscientific topics) and from there started searching the Internet and found the James Randi Educational Foundation. I've been a skeptic ever since, all thanks to Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey.

I moved a few years ago and a box of books got lost in the mail. Among them was my movie-tie-in paperback of Contact. I've still never found another physical copy, but maybe there's an ebook now.

Amazon has a paperback.

[coderserdar]

sir arthur conan doyle - the adventure of solitary cyclist

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

First Contacts by various authors.

A collection of first contact short stories. I thought that this might be a collection of stories whose copyright has expired in the US, but it seems not.

It was an OK anthology. Some interesting stories on the theme of first contact.

Next I read a freebie, the first in a series that had been recommended, and that was on my wishlist at Fictionwise: Infected:Prey by Andrea Speed

Which was indeed a quick fun read. Werecats and private detectives. (Although obviously also an AIDS/HIV analogy in some ways.)

So I did take advantage of the 60% off fictionwise sale to pick up the other books in the series, and I've gone straight onto the second in the series, Infected:Bloodlines by Andrea Speed

[AlexGrama]

Oh, let's see.

1. Lord of the Rings - J.R.R Tolkien (3 in one volume) - [20%]
2. Dance Dance Dance - Haruki Murakami - [5%]
3. Mein Kampf - Adolf Hitler - [7%]
4. 11/22/63 - Stephen King - [3%]

[Randeep]

Originally Posted by tecweston

A Dance with Dragons just showed up again in my inbox from the library, so I'm back to alternating chapters between that and A Feast for Crows.

You are reading Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons at the same time? Um... why?! Unless... had you read FFC already and are just rereading it to remember?

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Randeep

Just finished reading Contact by Carl Sagan. I have been a fan of the movie for a long time and never thought about reading the book until recently. It was fantastic! I won't state that it was better than the movie in every regard as I think they made some pretty interesting changes in the screenplay adaption. I also wonder how it would be received by a wide readership audience today as I think some Creationists might argue that the book makes an original argument for Intelligent Design (the book is fiction, of course, so I think this would be a bit nonsense).

Originally Posted by tecweston

Yes! I read Contact twice in high school and although I love the movie, the book is ten times better. That movie/book started me on my life as a skeptic, since after I read the book I also read Sagan's Demon-Haunted World, (a debunking of several paranormal and psuedoscientific topics) and from there started searching the Internet and found the James Randi Educational Foundation. I've been a skeptic ever since, all thanks to Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey.

I moved a few years ago and a box of books got lost in the mail. Among them was my movie-tie-in paperback of Contact. I've still never found another physical copy, but maybe there's an ebook now.

You guys have convinced me. I've read a lot of Sagan's non-fiction, but I've never read Contact, even though the film is among my top two all-time favorite science fiction movies (the other being 2001: A Space Odyssey). I'm off to download a sample.

[WT Sharpe]

Crap. It's not available as a ebook. I thought there was a reason I hadn't read it.

[tecweston]

Originally Posted by Randeep

You are reading Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons at the same time? Um... why?! Unless... had you read FFC already and are just rereading it to remember?

Because they were meant to be one big book, but it was too big to publish as a single volume, at least that was what GRRM was saying at the time AFfC was published.

They take place simultaneously and are split by characters. All of my favorite characters are in ADwD, so I don't want to have to wait 700+ pages to find out what happens with them.

[bert501]

Originally Posted by cassidym

Just finished Heat Rises by Richard Castle and it was an excellent police procedural. Not just the book, but virtually every chapter, had a surprise twist that I did not see coming. Now I'll have to get the others in the series and read them.

Next up The Drop by Michael Connelly.

I just finished The Drop-good addition to the series. The story was interesting and I didn't see a couple of the twists coming! Also more interaction & character development with Harry's daughter and his partner. Somehow I missed the book before this one (The Closers) so I'm tackling it now.

[poohbear_nc]

I usually read several books simultaneously, so it is a rare book that can grab my attention enough for me to focus solely on one book until it is finished. One such book is Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, which captivated me this weekend. Admittedly I was first intrigued by the wonderfully bizarre photographs found throughout the book, but the story lives up to them. I was reminded firstly of Slaughterhouse Five and also The Lathe of Heaven, then of Nightmare on Elm Street. After which the book morphed into a sort of Rick Riordan universe of children saving the world. Well, sort of children ... peculiar children.

Warning ... the photographs and hand-written letters do NOT display well at all on a Kindle (of any size) ... I switched to reading on a Kindle Fire to fully appreciate the photos (you just have to zoom and study some of the details) (be sure to zoom in on the photo of the creepiest school bus driver you'll ever see outside of a nightmare!) - so I recommend reading this book on a LCD screen device, rather than on an eInk screen.

It's a magical, warped, somber yet hopeful book - a carnival sideshow that has never lost its humanity.

[HomeInMyShoes]

^Okay, you're the second person who has basically said they started and couldn't put it down. I had it on my potential read list and removed it. It has officially been put back on the list.

I started Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain. We'll see how this one goes. The last 500+ page Chinese-author book I read was a bit of a struggle.

[DianNC]

Checked out The Eleventh Plague from my local library this morning and just finished it (it's only a couple hundred pages in ebook form). It's the debut novel of Jeff Hirsch, published in September, I believe -- YA, post-apocalyptic, and the first few pages had me thinking I was revisiting The Road. That changed pretty quickly and while it was not an unpleasant read, there's just not that much there that I can find to recommend. Were I to give it a one-word review, I'd probably say, "Forgettable".

Looking over my TBR list now to hopefully find something a little meatier.

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by alansplace

I'm finished with my re-read of Year 5, Order of the Phoenix and just put it back on the shelf and grabbed up Year 6, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince!

I Just finished re-reading Year 6, 'Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince' and tomorrow I'll begin re-reading Year 7, 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'.

[AlexGrama]

Originally Posted by alansplace

I Just finished re-reading Year 6, 'Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince' and tomorrow I'll begin re-reading Year 7, 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'.

You make me thirsty for some wizardry. Daaammnn.

[Latinandgreek]

Originally Posted by AlexGrama

You make me thirsty for some wizardry. Daaammnn.

I was just thinking the same thing!

I'm re-reading 'Spring Snow' by Yukio Mishima. It's an old favourite. I've had a bad week, and re-reading old favourites is like comfort food to me. The beautiful prose never ceases to amaze me.