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

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

French Fried by Chris Dolley. I've read some of this in blog posts. I've read his science fiction and really enjoyed it. I think I shall enjoy this, especially to see how things get resolved in the end.

It was fun, but a little more disjointed than I'd hoped, and the denouement was sort-of anticlimactic. His SF novels are a lot better.

Now for the latest Analog, September 2010 by Dell Magazines.

Hopefully up to the usual standard.

[Trebro]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Just finished reading Was it Heaven or Hell by Mark Twain; a pleasant morality tale on the virtues of lying. It is available for download as part of the collection of stories in The 30,000 Dollar Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain at this Gutenberg.org link.

I tend to find Twain's shorter writings to be among his best. Is Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg in that collection? I can't remember if that was published in his lifetime or if it was a post-1910 story.

[Trebro]

Originally Posted by lilac_jive

Quake, what did you think of "Blockade Billy?" I've never read Stephen King but that sounded interesting.

Only get it as a library download. $5.00 for only 50 pages is a total ripoff!

The story itself is just okay, IMO. King uses the same narrative trick I didn't care for in Deloris Claiborne. It's a love letter to the old days of baseball with a King "hook" but I didn't find it very satisfying. I am glad I didn't pay for it.

[Trebro]

So...as mentioned above, I finished Blockade Billy by King and didn't think a whole lot of it. It might have made for an okay teleplay for a modern horror anthology show (oh why cant' we have one of these, please?), but in text form, it was too contrived.

However, I did also finish "The Losing Role" by none other than MR's Steve Anderson and I thought it was excellent. I gave it a quickie review on Smashwords. I thought it was a very good character study, with just enough use of setting to make me understand the world without getting bogged down in the details.

Anyone got a recommendation for which of his books to read next?

Currently kinda slogging my way through the book club book Sheepfarmer's Daughter. So many unneeded sections about the minutia of being in the military and the fact that our main character keeps getting magically saved from every problem she has is getting on my nerves.

I'm starting to think my taste for fantasy is gone, which makes me a little sad. I might see if I can get a fantasy short story collection to see if it's the genre or the padding I'm having an issue with.

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

Originally Posted by neilmarr

And I'll third Rog. I do think, though, that SK's 'Misery' is too often sadly overlooked ... what a tale, what characters! Neil

Misery was the first Stephen King book I read as an adult (I read a few as a teen but wasn't too taken by them), and... it put me right off him

I also got very odd looks when I was reading it... I'm not sure if it was just because I was laughing out loud on the London Underground, or because I was laughing out loud on the London Underground whilst reading a Stephen King book.

[FlorenceArt]

Just back from the public library, where I gave back the Larsson (unfinished) and a graphic novel by Joann Sfar. I still have the Seneca and will have to give it back soon, although I'm barely at letter 23 out of about a hundred I think. I'm planning to finish the foreword at least, which is very interesting, and I bought an e-book version of the letters to Lucilius so that I can finish them in my own time.

I brought back from the library another Joann Sfar, and a book by Olivier Rolin that I was considering buying as an e-book (overpriced of course) and found by chance. I downloaded the first chapter and liked it a lot, it's called "Baku, last days" and is a tale of his visit in his city in 2009. He went there because a fortune teller told him that if he traveled to Baku in 2009, he would die he once wrote a short story describing his suicide in a hotel room in Baku in 2009. So of course, he had to go there in 2009 and see what happened.

Also visited the BoB store in preparation for my holidays, and I wanted to buy 3 books but they checked my IP address and found out I'm not in the U.S. so I could only buy one of the three, "The City and the City" by China Miéville.

[neilmarr]

***Misery was the first Stephen King book I read as an adult (I read a few as a teen but wasn't too taken by them), and... it put me right off him***

As always, Am, horses for courses. I guess if we all had the same taste, we'd only read one author and maybe even a single book. We'd miss so much, eh? Even a book you don't like broadens your horizons. Very best. Neil

[carld]

I realized after the fact that Harris's short story collection Touch of Dead, includes all sorts of major spoilers for the Sookie Stackhouse series. It's not something you really want to read until you've read all the books.

Moving on, I'm dipping into A Newbie's Guild to Publishing by J. A. Kornath, re-reading Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark, and checking out The Last Rakosh F. Paul Wilson, which was just posted as a freebie, while I'm waiting for the fourth Sookie Stackhouse ebook to become available from the library.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by carld

I realized after the fact that Harris's short story collection Touch of Dead, includes all sorts of major spoilers for the Sookie Stackhouse series. It's not something you really want to read until you've read all the books.

Moving on, I'm dipping into A Newbie's Guild to Publishing by J. A. Kornath, re-reading Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark, and checking out The Last Rakosh F. Paul Wilson, which was just posted as a freebie, while I'm waiting for the fourth Sookie Stackhouse ebook to become available from the library.

The first three are the best in the Sookie series (IMO). After that they start to wander, although a lot of people liked book ... 4 or 5. I skipped one, but I don't remember which one! Then I read a couple more and it was enough.

I did like the Briggs series a LOT. I love her work. It is so much fun. I loved her "When Demon's Walk" an older book of hers. Not UF, more fantasy--just a great read.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Trebro

I tend to find Twain's shorter writings to be among his best. Is Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg in that collection? I can't remember if that was published in his lifetime or if it was a post-1910 story.

Unfortunately, no.

[lilac_jive]

I also went to the library today and picked up four books.

"Of Mice and Men" I finished in about an hour. Fabulous, but depressing. Then I started "The Art Thief" (forget the author), but put it back down when on page two I read "He turned towards the anachronism.." Blegh. Now I've switched to my Sony and am about halfway through "The Canal" by Daniel Morris, which I got on smashwords a few months ago. So far a solid horror story.

Also checked out from the library: "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins, which I keep hearing great things about, and "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains" by Nicholas Carr. I really do love my library

[kennyc]

Of Mice and Men -- Incredible!

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

Originally Posted by neilmarr

***Misery was the first Stephen King book I read as an adult (I read a few as a teen but wasn't too taken by them), and... it put me right off him***

As always, Am, horses for courses. I guess if we all had the same taste, we'd only read one author and maybe even a single book. We'd miss so much, eh? Even a book you don't like broadens your horizons. Very best. Neil

Very, very true.

[recluse]

Currently reading "The Lovers" by John Connolly, a Charlie Parker mystery. Very dark, creepy noir mystery/thriller. Evil walks here, in all it's forms. Even the good guys are very scary. Highly recommended.

[lilac_jive]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Of Mice and Men -- Incredible!

Agreed. I may have read the book before, but it's either been so long I couldn't remember it or I'm just confusing it with the movie. Regardless, I'm glad I read it (again?).

Just finished "The Canal." Super creepy. Didn't help that I got ding-dong-ditched in the middle of it. After that I wanted to read something light and fun, so I skipped my library books and have now started "Crocodile on the Sandbank" by Elizabeth Peters, the first Amelia Peabody mystery (picked up at a used book sale).