Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading? - Page 1624

Dazrin · 07-29-2016, 08:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dazrin

Next: Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon's Army & Other Diabolical Insects by Amy Stewart. Another book in this series, The Drunken Botanist, was nominated for the science category of the book club and I found this then. Maybe some creepy non-fiction will get me past my doldrums, although I really am just waiting for my next Terry Pratchett Discworld book to become available from my library. I have been on hold since May and only had 2-3 people in front of me, so I must be close.

Well, I itch all over now. I am fairly sure it is all in my head though. There are some really creepy creatures out there. Yuck.

Next: Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. Yay!

drjd · 07-31-2016, 03:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by drjd

Next up The Devil's Elixir by Raymond Khoury.

Finished The Devil's Elixir by Raymond Khoury. A typical Khoury style chase against time to find the evil people trying to introduce an ancient potion as the next generation superdrug. Lots of action, shootings and killings.

After that book, I also finished a mystery and crime classic novel downloaded from Patricia Clark Memorial Library, The Lost Parchment: A Detective Story by Fergus Hume. I will soon plan to read other books by Hume, available in the library. Worth reading.

For now, I am taking up an archaeology book, In the Valley of the Kings: Howard Carter and the Mystery of King Tutankhamun's Tomb by Daniel Meyerson.

pdurrant · 07-31-2016, 05:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: Asimov's SF, August 2016, edited by Sheila Williams.

Which was an average issue.

Next up: Undercity by Catherine Asaro. A recent Baen Purchase

HarryT · 07-31-2016, 08:34 AM

I've recently completed:

"The Creatures of Man", by Howard L. Myers. Myers is a virtually unknown SF author today, but had a short but successful writing career from 1967 to 1971, before dying of a heart attack at the age of 41. This Baen book, edited by Eric Flint, presents a selection of Myers's work. Extremely enjoyable and highly recommended.

"The Seventh Scroll", by Wilbur Smith. In this book, a sequel to "River God", we have the story of a modern-day hunt for the hidden burial of the (fictitious) Egyptian King Mamose, whose story was told in "River God". An extremely good thriller. Recommended, but do read "River God" first!

drjd · 07-31-2016, 09:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by HarryT

"The Seventh Scroll", by Wilbur Smith. In this book, a sequel to "River God", we have the story of a modern-day hunt for the hidden burial of the (fictitious) Egyptian King Mamose, whose story was told in "River God". An extremely good thriller. Recommended, but do read "River God" first!

Added to my wish list. Thanks, HarryT.

MickeyC · 07-31-2016, 06:35 PM

Just finished Dark Matter by Blake Crouch and it was a very good read. Although it's sci fi, it is based largely on quantum mechanics and even Schrodinger's Cat gets a mention. Basically, the protagonist gets mixed up in numerous mega-universes trying to find his family and deal with numerous versions of himself. Very fast read.

arcadata · 07-31-2016, 09:57 PM

Just skipped over my entire TBR pile to read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Since there's no way I'll get to watch the play, this is the next best thing for me.

Dngrsone · 07-31-2016, 11:52 PM

Finished Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones. I grew up on Sesame Street, and I remember faithfully watching The Muppet Show when it first aired.

I didn't know about all the stuff Henson did before those television shows. I remember my dad being excited to see Rowlf on the show, though I had never seen that muppet before. Now I understand that Rowlf is almost as old as Kermit, and both were advertising staples well before I was born.

At any rate, it is a very nice look into the life and career of a bona fide genius.

Next, I am looking at maybe The Girl with a Clock for a Heart by Peter Swanson, or The Ghost Brigade by John Scalzi, and Invader by C. J. Cherryh. Though I might squeeze Drew Barrymore's Wildflower in there somewhere.

Then again, there's a potential for a pair of freebies tomorrow, neh?

ATDrake · 08-01-2016, 01:18 AM

So, it being Hugo voting season, I finally opened up the Voter Packet sometime last week to try out the stuff I hadn't already read earlier in preparation for the nomination rounds, and went to the library a few days ago to pick up the "missing" novels.

As far as Best Novel goes, Uprooted by Naomi Novik gets the 3rd place slot. It was a very charming coming-of-age fantasy which it took me quite a while to realize was actually set in an historical folkloric version of our world. I didn't even notice who one of the famous fairy tale figures was until it was made explicitly clear, though it was pretty obvious in retrospect, and having them not be a villain in the piece probably helped obscure it for me. While it didn't seem wildly original or even particularly inventive with the fairly standard fairy tale fantasy elements it was playing with, it handled them in a pleasantly entertaining manner. Recommended if you want an engagingly told heroine's journey adventure tale in a slightly unusual setting drawn from Eastern European traditions.

Neal Stephenson's Seveneves gets the 4th slot. This had some very interesting ideas going into the setup, which actually turned out to just be the setup for some even more interesting ideas partway through. And the level of detail about trying to make the initial ideas work was also interesting, and generally not too much of a slog to follow.

But IMHO, the execution just wasn't quite there for the back portion which the twist was supposed to set up, and I think it just kind of ran into the limits of the author's imagination. It's rare that I think that an already 700+ page book could have used another 300+ pages in the same volume to properly follow-up on something or other with the same lavishness and attention to detail as the first 400 or so pages got, but in this case, I do.

No real spoilers for particular plot-important details, just some opinions on certain things about the general direction of how the setting ended up, which is alluded to vaguely:

Spoiler:

I really think that the outcome of the idea which set up the altered world in the back portion was insufficiently explored, and got rather short-changed compared to the apparent thematic wrapping-up the author might have been intending as the main plot thread regarding the various ways in which humanity could survive. I'd have liked to have seen more of that world in greater depth, since it really did give the impression of a great deal more lurking under the surface of the ensuing societies, which I found more interesting than the other stuff later.

Though I think the plausibility of it all suffered from what TVTropes likes to call Planet of Hats and Sci-Fi Writers Writers Have No Sense of Scale, since IMHO the author is probably greatly underestimating how much speciation and philosophical schism would likely be going on in the timeframe given, as well as their descendants' probable level of knowledge about and attachment to their ancestors' speech and original cultural references, and the number of ensuing factions, even with rigid and ruthless suppression as a method of social control for some of them.

While I'm willing to buy that the availability of video-recordings would probably keep a spoken language standard even longer than a written one, and maybe an aggressive die-out of native speakers of the other languages would lead to just one remaining and no other ones springing up in the future even from Latin-style fragmentation, I don't think the effect would last nearly that long over such an extended time. Even within the past half-century or so, IIRC there's been change recorded in living memory from the BBC switching over from RP accents to something more middle-class (not to mention all the regional stuff) and even the Queen's own speech having been recorded as changed from her ultra-posh accent in the radio days to a more blended-class pronunciation in recent years.

It all just read a little too homogeneous for all the societies involved, after their initial splits from each other, and not enough development of new culture as a result from having the old one literally die out and having to improvise from there. (And I'd have liked to see more of the subsociety hinted at being slightly less homogeneous than the others, though they were still pretty Planet of Hats from what we saw of them.)

Mild recommend. Very interesting potential, somewhat let down by the depth of its exploration, apparently in favour of concentrating upon foregrounding a less interesting plot thread, and really too long to pick up on the basis of it unless you're already into this style of novel anyway.

Jim Butcher's The Aeronaut's Windlass, which I finally finished this morning, I'm just going to have to leave off the voting. There's nothing obviously wrong with it and it seemed like a perfectly cromulent swashbuckling steampunk adventure fantasy, but whatever it was about Butcher's prose or storytelling style or whatever, I just couldn't get into it. It took so long to read because I kept finding excuses to make snacks and surf the internet between pages, and when I finally did try to set aside a chunk of time to devote my attention to it, I ended up taking a nap. That just seems like not the sort of thing I can honestly place a vote for in what's essentially a Reader's Choice award, when I literally start to fall asleep in the middle of reading it (and wasn't even exhausted from staying up all night to finish the one before it like I had been for Uprooted), even if it were only to rank it behind the others.

That said, it was a pretty decently-written and plotty action adventure tale that held together well enough and had some moderately interesting worldbuilding going into it and considerably less obtrusive infodump than Seveneves (which I actually did stay up to finish to see how it turned out, even though my eyes were glazing over), so for Gentle Readers who get along better with the prose or storytelling or whatever it was, they'd probably enjoy this quite a bit.

As for Best Graphic Story, I only bothered to read the stuff supplied in the packet, but Invisible Republic by Corinna Bechko & Gabriel Hardman was pretty good and got 1st place. It had a very interesting and slightly unusually structured story which alternated using occurrences at a future point to try and unravel what happened in the past which set up the future and now I'm quite curious as to where the story will go in further installments.

In 2nd place, Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman with art by J. H. Williams was lovely to look at, and fleshed out pieces of Sandman backstory as well as providing some new stuff, but the packet sample was incomplete and the overall story not as compelling as Invisible Republic, even with the added nostalgia value. I kind of gave a pity 3rd place vote to The Divine by Boaz Lavie with art by Asaf & Tomer Hanuka. It was an okay but not that interesting sort of standard tragic stuff happens in exploited countries sort of story, and the art just didn't appeal to me. But publisher First Second did supply the entire thing to the Hugo Voter Packet and it did contain a reasonable amount of fantasy element and exploration of the themes it set out to do, so it might as well place a little above the candidates who actually didn't show up instead of being left off entirely.

Apparently I still have a few hours left in which to fiddle with the voting ballot, so maybe I'll have a re-skim of the shorter fiction categories and adjust my choices for the middle places, which were a little less obvious to figure out than the stuff which obviously ranked above the rest.

Cinisajoy · 08-01-2016, 02:38 PM

Finished Maybe, Maybe not by Robert Fulgrum.

orlok · 08-01-2016, 04:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Finished Maybe, Maybe not by Robert Fulgrum.

I initially read that as "Maybe, Maybe", not by Robert Fulgrum. Was a tad confused

.

3/4 of the way through The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin. I listened to the first two books in the series as audiobooks and really enjoyed them. However, reading the last one has somehow enhanced the experience, and I am completely captivated. It could just be that it's the best of the three, of course.

covingtoncat73 · 08-02-2016, 09:21 AM

I finished Dogsbody by Dianna Wynne Jones. I can't believe I didn't know about her when I was a kid. I probably would have if I was British, I guess. Anyway, I loved it.

Now I am reading Ink and Bone (the Great Library 1) by Rachel Caine. I'm only 8% in but I'll let you know. It is intriguing so far.

Dazrin · 08-02-2016, 02:28 PM

Well, despite my hopes, Small Gods still hasn't arrived so I read I am Legend by Richard Matheson which I picked up on sale last week. This was a much more satisfying vampire book than the part of Interview with the Vampire I was able to finish. I will have to watch at least 1 of the movies some day, although I suspect (may have heard?) that the ending will be changed in a movie.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dazrin

Next: Small Gods by Terry Pratchett.

If I keep saying this it will come true at some point.

If Small Gods doesn't come in this evening I will probably start Fair Warning by George E. Simpson and Neal R. Burger.

Quote:

They had the weapon to end the war. Would they have to use it?

JULY 1945

America has an awesome new bomb--a weapon unlike any the world has ever known. And good reason to use it.

But in Washington an urgent mission has taken shape. A mission carefully hidden from the president. A mission the Russians will do anything to intercept. A daring intelligence officer is given the most difficult assignment of his career: smuggle a team of nuclear scientists into Japan. To plead for surrender. To avert a disaster unlike any the world has ever seen. To give the enemy fair warning.

Cinisajoy · 08-02-2016, 02:32 PM

Yesterday I bought and read JA Konrath's Rum Runner. The 9th in his Jack Daniels series. It is or was on sale for $1.99.

CRussel · 08-03-2016, 01:10 AM

Just finished a re-read of Elizabeth Moon's Serrano/Suiza series. These six books (available as three 2-book volumes), are some of her earlier works, but they have held up reasonably well. I'm looking forward to the new book in the series, due out next year.

Next up, a complete change--#10 in Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver series, Pilgrim's Rest apa Dark Threat. This delightful series of English Cozies are simply and wonderfully soothing.

08-01-2016, 01:18 AM	#24354
ATDrake Wizzard Posts: 11,517 Karma: 33048258 Join Date: Mar 2010 Location: Roundworld Device: Kindle 2 International, Sony PRS-T1, BlackBerry PlayBook, Acer Iconia	So, it being Hugo voting season, I finally opened up the Voter Packet sometime last week to try out the stuff I hadn't already read earlier in preparation for the nomination rounds, and went to the library a few days ago to pick up the "missing" novels. As far as Best Novel goes, Uprooted by Naomi Novik gets the 3rd place slot. It was a very charming coming-of-age fantasy which it took me quite a while to realize was actually set in an historical folkloric version of our world. I didn't even notice who one of the famous fairy tale figures was until it was made explicitly clear, though it was pretty obvious in retrospect, and having them not be a villain in the piece probably helped obscure it for me. While it didn't seem wildly original or even particularly inventive with the fairly standard fairy tale fantasy elements it was playing with, it handled them in a pleasantly entertaining manner. Recommended if you want an engagingly told heroine's journey adventure tale in a slightly unusual setting drawn from Eastern European traditions. Neal Stephenson's Seveneves gets the 4th slot. This had some very interesting ideas going into the setup, which actually turned out to just be the setup for some even more interesting ideas partway through. And the level of detail about trying to make the initial ideas work was also interesting, and generally not too much of a slog to follow. But IMHO, the execution just wasn't quite there for the back portion which the twist was supposed to set up, and I think it just kind of ran into the limits of the author's imagination. It's rare that I think that an already 700+ page book could have used another 300+ pages in the same volume to properly follow-up on something or other with the same lavishness and attention to detail as the first 400 or so pages got, but in this case, I do. No real spoilers for particular plot-important details, just some opinions on certain things about the general direction of how the setting ended up, which is alluded to vaguely: Spoiler: I really think that the outcome of the idea which set up the altered world in the back portion was insufficiently explored, and got rather short-changed compared to the apparent thematic wrapping-up the author might have been intending as the main plot thread regarding the various ways in which humanity could survive. I'd have liked to have seen more of that world in greater depth, since it really did give the impression of a great deal more lurking under the surface of the ensuing societies, which I found more interesting than the other stuff later. Though I think the plausibility of it all suffered from what TVTropes likes to call Planet of Hats and Sci-Fi Writers Writers Have No Sense of Scale, since IMHO the author is probably greatly underestimating how much speciation and philosophical schism would likely be going on in the timeframe given, as well as their descendants' probable level of knowledge about and attachment to their ancestors' speech and original cultural references, and the number of ensuing factions, even with rigid and ruthless suppression as a method of social control for some of them. While I'm willing to buy that the availability of video-recordings would probably keep a spoken language standard even longer than a written one, and maybe an aggressive die-out of native speakers of the other languages would lead to just one remaining and no other ones springing up in the future even from Latin-style fragmentation, I don't think the effect would last nearly that long over such an extended time. Even within the past half-century or so, IIRC there's been change recorded in living memory from the BBC switching over from RP accents to something more middle-class (not to mention all the regional stuff) and even the Queen's own speech having been recorded as changed from her ultra-posh accent in the radio days to a more blended-class pronunciation in recent years. It all just read a little too homogeneous for all the societies involved, after their initial splits from each other, and not enough development of new culture as a result from having the old one literally die out and having to improvise from there. (And I'd have liked to see more of the subsociety hinted at being slightly less homogeneous than the others, though they were still pretty Planet of Hats from what we saw of them.) Mild recommend. Very interesting potential, somewhat let down by the depth of its exploration, apparently in favour of concentrating upon foregrounding a less interesting plot thread, and really too long to pick up on the basis of it unless you're already into this style of novel anyway. Jim Butcher's The Aeronaut's Windlass, which I finally finished this morning, I'm just going to have to leave off the voting. There's nothing obviously wrong with it and it seemed like a perfectly cromulent swashbuckling steampunk adventure fantasy, but whatever it was about Butcher's prose or storytelling style or whatever, I just couldn't get into it. It took so long to read because I kept finding excuses to make snacks and surf the internet between pages, and when I finally did try to set aside a chunk of time to devote my attention to it, I ended up taking a nap. That just seems like not the sort of thing I can honestly place a vote for in what's essentially a Reader's Choice award, when I literally start to fall asleep in the middle of reading it (and wasn't even exhausted from staying up all night to finish the one before it like I had been for Uprooted), even if it were only to rank it behind the others. That said, it was a pretty decently-written and plotty action adventure tale that held together well enough and had some moderately interesting worldbuilding going into it and considerably less obtrusive infodump than Seveneves (which I actually did stay up to finish to see how it turned out, even though my eyes were glazing over), so for Gentle Readers who get along better with the prose or storytelling or whatever it was, they'd probably enjoy this quite a bit. As for Best Graphic Story, I only bothered to read the stuff supplied in the packet, but Invisible Republic by Corinna Bechko & Gabriel Hardman was pretty good and got 1st place. It had a very interesting and slightly unusually structured story which alternated using occurrences at a future point to try and unravel what happened in the past which set up the future and now I'm quite curious as to where the story will go in further installments. In 2nd place, Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman with art by J. H. Williams was lovely to look at, and fleshed out pieces of Sandman backstory as well as providing some new stuff, but the packet sample was incomplete and the overall story not as compelling as Invisible Republic, even with the added nostalgia value. I kind of gave a pity 3rd place vote to The Divine by Boaz Lavie with art by Asaf & Tomer Hanuka. It was an okay but not that interesting sort of standard tragic stuff happens in exploited countries sort of story, and the art just didn't appeal to me. But publisher First Second did supply the entire thing to the Hugo Voter Packet and it did contain a reasonable amount of fantasy element and exploration of the themes it set out to do, so it might as well place a little above the candidates who actually didn't show up instead of being left off entirely. Apparently I still have a few hours left in which to fiddle with the voting ballot, so maybe I'll have a re-skim of the shorter fiction categories and adjust my choices for the middle places, which were a little less obvious to figure out than the stuff which obviously ranked above the rest. Last edited by ATDrake; 08-01-2016 at 01:27 AM. Reason: Misspelt author name.

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07-31-2016, 08:34 AM	#24349
HarryT eBook Enthusiast Posts: 85,544 Karma: 93383043 Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: UK Device: Kindle Oasis 2, iPad Pro 10.5", iPhone 6	I've recently completed: "The Creatures of Man", by Howard L. Myers. Myers is a virtually unknown SF author today, but had a short but successful writing career from 1967 to 1971, before dying of a heart attack at the age of 41. This Baen book, edited by Eric Flint, presents a selection of Myers's work. Extremely enjoyable and highly recommended. "The Seventh Scroll", by Wilbur Smith. In this book, a sequel to "River God", we have the story of a modern-day hunt for the hidden burial of the (fictitious) Egyptian King Mamose, whose story was told in "River God". An extremely good thriller. Recommended, but do read "River God" first!

07-31-2016, 06:35 PM	#24351
MickeyC Grand Sorcerer Posts: 16,732 Karma: 12185114 Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Florida Device: iPhone 6 plus, Sony T1, iPad 3	Just finished *Dark Matter* by Blake Crouch and it was a very good read. Although it's sci fi, it is based largely on quantum mechanics and even Schrodinger's Cat gets a mention. Basically, the protagonist gets mixed up in numerous mega-universes trying to find his family and deal with numerous versions of himself. Very fast read.

07-31-2016, 09:57 PM	#24352
arcadata Grand Sorcerer Posts: 11,230 Karma: 4651787 Join Date: Mar 2009 Device: Kindle, Kindle Fire, iPad, iPod Touch, Sony PRS-350	Just skipped over my entire TBR pile to read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Since there's no way I'll get to watch the play, this is the next best thing for me.

07-31-2016, 11:52 PM	#24353
Dngrsone Almost legible Posts: 1,457 Karma: 4611110 Join Date: Dec 2013 Location: In a high desert, CA Device: Galaxy Note 9, Galaxy Tab A (2017), Likebook P78	Finished Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones. I grew up on Sesame Street, and I remember faithfully watching The Muppet Show when it first aired. I didn't know about all the stuff Henson did before those television shows. I remember my dad being excited to see Rowlf on the show, though I had never seen that muppet before. Now I understand that Rowlf is almost as old as Kermit, and both were advertising staples well before I was born. At any rate, it is a very nice look into the life and career of a bona fide genius. Next, I am looking at maybe The Girl with a Clock for a Heart by Peter Swanson, or The Ghost Brigade by John Scalzi, and Invader by C. J. Cherryh. Though I might squeeze Drew Barrymore's Wildflower in there somewhere. Then again, there's a potential for a pair of freebies tomorrow, neh?

08-01-2016, 02:38 PM	#24355
Cinisajoy Just a Yellow Smiley. Posts: 19,161 Karma: 83862859 Join Date: Jul 2015 Location: Texas Device: K4, K5, fire, kobo, galaxy	Finished Maybe, Maybe not by Robert Fulgrum.

08-02-2016, 09:21 AM	#24357
covingtoncat73 Wizard Posts: 2,745 Karma: 83407757 Join Date: Mar 2011 Device: Kindle Paperwhite, Lenovo Duet Chromebook, Moto e	I finished Dogsbody by Dianna Wynne Jones. I can't believe I didn't know about her when I was a kid. I probably would have if I was British, I guess. Anyway, I loved it. Now I am reading Ink and Bone (the Great Library 1) by Rachel Caine. I'm only 8% in but I'll let you know. It is intriguing so far.

08-02-2016, 02:32 PM	#24359
Cinisajoy Just a Yellow Smiley. Posts: 19,161 Karma: 83862859 Join Date: Jul 2015 Location: Texas Device: K4, K5, fire, kobo, galaxy	Yesterday I bought and read JA Konrath's Rum Runner. The 9th in his Jack Daniels series. It is or was on sale for $1.99.

08-03-2016, 01:10 AM	#24360
CRussel (he/him/his) Posts: 12,161 Karma: 79742714 Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: Sunshine Coast, BC Device: Oasis (Gen3),Paperwhite (Gen10), Voyage, Paperwhite(orig), Fire HD 8	Just finished a re-read of Elizabeth Moon's Serrano/Suiza series. These six books (available as three 2-book volumes), are some of her earlier works, but they have held up reasonably well. I'm looking forward to the new book in the series, due out next year. Next up, a complete change--#10 in Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver series, Pilgrim's Rest apa Dark Threat. This delightful series of English Cozies are simply and wonderfully soothing.

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