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

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by carld

Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a bundle covering the whole dodo story. I'd have to buy at least two of them.

I haven't got to the end of the story, so I don't know when it ends, but it starts in #32, so you could get this bundle (which starts at #32) and this bundle (which runs from #35 onwards - currently only #35 and #36, since #37 isn't out yet.)

But if you think you might want them all in the end, it might be worth spending the extra $12 to get the six book #29-#34 bundle instead of the thee volume bundle.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Finished "How To Slay a Dragon" by Bill Allen today. Meh. Alright. Humour wasn't overly humourous. Had good promise and a reasonable story line.

Just started Scarlett Thomas's "Our Tragic Universe" which has gotten a lot of mixed reviews. Some don't like her philosophical meanderings interfering with the story.

[irina]

Does anybody know whether "The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath" have been edited as an ebook ? I'd like to read the book, but cannot find it, neither in "hard" edition, nor in an electronic one.
I've just watched the movie - Sylvia ( 2003) - with Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig. Very impressive...

[irina]

I've just finished the "Stone Diaries" by Carol Shields (nice, but a bit rambling...). Now, I'm reading "Plainsong" by Kent Haruf. I remember watching the tie-in movie, some years ago - "Plainsong"(2004) with Aidan Quinn. Simple neat story, touching and beautifully written.

[bjones6416]

Originally Posted by irina

I've just finished the "Stone Diaries" by Carol Shields (nice, but a bit rambling...). Now, I'm reading "Plainsong" by Kent Haruf. I remember watching the tie-in movie, some years ago - "Plainsong"(2004) with Aidan Quinn. Simple neat story, touching and beautifully written.

I loved the book "Plainsong." You are right, a simple story, beautifully written. I don't think I saw the movie, though.

[alexandree.spier]

I'd suggest "Magical Universe" and "Essential Ken Wilber" by Shambala Publications...

[Ditchleyportrait]

have to finish that fuggin' naked and the dead

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Which was great, and I've just finished #34 too, and I'm going straight onto #35.

(The Dodo plot line is on-going, I hope there's another episode in #35.)

There was, and more in #36, and the story obviously has a lot further to run. But now I must wait until September for the next issue to be issued.

the other stories were good too, although one of the ones in #36 jumped around a little too much for comfort.

Next up: F&SF Magazine, July/August 2011 by Spilogate Authors

This is the first issue to appear as a magazine subscription in the Kindle store. The formatting is much improved over the Fictionwise issues, but it is only available to people with an actual Kindle, or an iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad/Android device.

Somewhat to my surprise, the Kindle subscription turns out to be a little bit cheaper for me, and a lot cheaper for US subscribers, than the Fictionwise subscription rates.

[ATDrake]

Only a few things finished this past week, but I managed to read enough to do my Hugo Awards voting for the major classic categories.

There were some really good things in the Novella category this year: best of the lot were Ted Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Rachel Swirsky's The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window, and Troika by Alistair Reynolds. I had a hard time deciding which of them would get my 2nd-place vote (Ted Chiang's story obviously got 1st place).

Elizabeth Hand's The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellepheron and Geoffrey A. Landis' The Sultan of the Clouds were a bit easier to place, but still well worth reading and SotC has an interesting take on group marriages reminiscent of the "line-marriage" concept in Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Actually, in retrospect it seems to be semi-homage, with some very similar themes, I think.

Novelette and Short Story offerings not so great this year, but I did enjoy Allen M. Steele's charming The Emperor of Mars, which reminded me a bit of the turn-of-the-century Emperor Norton I of San Francisco. And Peter Watts' The Things and Kij Johnson's Ponies were interestingly creepy takes on pop-culture staples. I wonder if someone will be doing a Care Bears riff next year.

Some of the nominated stories/novellas are available to read free online (Watts, Johnson, and Chiang's works at least) if anyone's interested.

Didn't manage to finish the graphic novel bundle in time to properly evaluate and vote fairly, unfortunately, but I did cram in most of the novels.

1) My 1st place vote went to N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which was an imaginative fish-out-of-water-all-is-not-what-it-seems take on a young heiress' sudden ascension to a position of apparent power. It's got an interesting premise based on "if humans are made in the gods' image, then considering how messed up humanity us, how much more messed up must the gods be if we're supposed to be reflections of them?"

Even though I actually enjoyed the next book I voted for more, this one was very entertaining and I felt rather better written and more inventive.

Highly recommended, and has a lot of nice bonuses in the back (faux cultural appendices, which I always love, and an author interview).

2) Mira Grant's Feed got a very deserved 2nd place vote.

It's a great book about the convergence of zombies, bloggers, and politics in a semi-apocalyptic landscape as post-modern newshounds Georgia, Shaun, and Buffy follow the US presidential campaign trail in a world that's been warped by the brain-eating undead menace.

Very imaginatively thought out as to how the presence of zombies would affect societal structures and blogging/social networking would alter mass media, and strongly analoguous to the present-day situation of the "War on Terror" with fear lurking in the background of everyday life.

It's weird, but this and the previous year's also-zombie nomination by Cherie Priest were two of the most upbeat books in their respective voter packets.

Anyway, very highly recommended and I look forward to finding the sequel in the library hopefully Real Soon Now.

Didn't manage to finish before the deadline, but voted Ian McDonald's The Dervish House 3rd place because what I read thus far seemed pretty promising and both Lois McMaster Bujold and Connie Willis had previously won Hugos for better-written books in the same series that were nominated this year, even though I did quite enjoy Cryoburn and Blackout/All Clear a lot and were happy to have bought and read them last year despite their flaws. They just weren't really Hugo quality in comparison to what had gone before.

[sstoltman]

Just finished Guava Gravy by Clytie Koehler. Its an awesome story about two young girls raised in bad situations and defeat all odds. A tearjerker, makes you feel like your tagging right along. I highly recommend this ebook! available on amazon and barnes and noble!

[Ron.]

Right now I am reading "The Summer Tree - Guy Gavriel Kay" it's not bad, one thing that irks me in it is you are reading along and all of a sudden the next paragraph is different people a different time etc.. It's like a paragraph out of some other book..

[lila55]

Originally Posted by irina

Does anybody know whether "The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath" have been edited as an ebook ? I'd like to read the book, but cannot find it, neither in "hard" edition, nor in an electronic one.
I've just watched the movie - Sylvia ( 2003) - with Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig. Very impressive...

According to Inkmesh it is available in these places.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: F&SF Magazine, July/August 2011 by Spilogate Authors

I liked pretty much every story in this issue, and some of them I liked a lot. The Novella "The Ants of Flanders" was very good, as was the Novelet "Bronsky's Dates with Death" and the short story "Someone Like You".

Next up: This month's book club book, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

I bought this back in May 2009, so it's about time I got to read it!

[DiapDealer]

I gave Bradley P. Beaulieu's The Winds of Khalakovo a second chance, and this time, I made it to the half-way point before I had to put it down again.

From Publishers Weekly

Debut novelist Beaulieu paints a detailed and realistic portrayal of individual fates bound up in social responsibilities as well-grounded cultures clash. Prince Nikandr Khalakovo, facing an arranged marriage, also suffers from a wasting disease plaguing the Anuskaya islands. When the rebellious Maharraht loose a fire elemental and kill the visiting Grand Duke Stasa Bolgravya, civil war erupts, and all factions seek to capture a mysterious autistic boy who straddles both the spirit and the material worlds. Beaulieu skillfully juggles elements borrowed from familiar cultures (primarily Russian and Bedouin) as well as telepathy, airborne ships, and magical gems. Viewpoint shifts are occasionally confusing, but the prose is often poetic—airborne skiffs under attack "dropped like kingfishers" and "twisted in the air like maple seeds"—and the characters have welcome depth.

He has a talent for writing surreal imagery, but is struggling (IMHO) in making the jump from short-story to novel. It's mainly his characters—they just never came to life for me. I don't love any of them and I don't hate any of them. I just don't give a damn about any of them. And even though I'm interested in what they're doing at times, it's just not enough.

The narrative can be disjointed and clunky in spots—and he uses an overlapping POV technique in a rigid, formulaic manner that just rubs me the wrong way: One POV stops at a crucial moment and the next POV backs up a bit in time and covers much of the same ground from the previous POV, but goes a little bit beyond the crisis of the previous one. It's like literary leapfrog—which can be effective when used sparingly, but just tends to annoy me when a whole book is written that way. Too much rehashing of the exact same material in a very short amount of time.

There's also some descriptive passages that just don't make any sense, and THAT'S what ultimately sounded this book's death knell for me. I put it down immediately after reading the following sentence: "The sound of gunfire lit the afternoon sky as they prepared to leave." Whether it was a snafu that was corrected in a later version, or the author's mistake, or an editor didn't catch it, or whatever... that kind of thing just can't make it all the way to the reader if you want to be taken seriously.

As grim as my review may sound, I hold out a lot of hope that Beaulieu's novel-writing skills may improve with time. After all, it was his impressive stort-story skills that made me give the novel a chance in the first place. I doubt I will return for later installments of this particular series (Khalakovo is the first installment in a series), but I'd be up for trying something new from him in the future.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: This month's book club book, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

There's a school library in Missouri who'd love to have your copy after you've finished with it..