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

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'm curious... could Side Jobs be read as an introduction/sampler to the series? Or does the reader need to have read the series in order for the short stories to make sense? What about huge massive spoilers contained in the short story collection? How many questions do you think I can ask in a row?

the last story is a spoiler as it takes place between books 12 and 13 and book 12 ends in a cliff hanger. also i believe you'll enjoy them a bit more if you already know harry. so a qualified yes i guess. just be careful.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Well, if you combine the two books, you'll get the real book...

Ulysses is Wearing Me Out

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

...Moonlight Mile should also be considered a series finale (even though it doesn't have to be read as such). If you have any plans of ever reading them all... I'd recommend starting at the beginning.

[benham]

Ditto that, plus they are all better then Moonlight Mile. It is really interesting to see how they change over the years.

[thinkpad]

Starting on book 3: Kethril in the Willden Trilogy by John H. Carroll

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next: Misson of Honor by David Weber. The next in the Honor Harrington series, that actually came out last year but that I've only just bought.

A splendid addition to the series that really moves the action along. But not the one to start with! You really need to be familiar with the story so far to make any sense of it. Definitely not a stand-alone! I whooshed through this.

Next I read The Amazon Legion by Tom Kratman
More a political/military tract than a story. The new world is a thin allegory of our own. Readable, but irritating and I wouldn't recommend it.

Now: 1636: The Saxon Uprising by Eric Flint.

(Whoops - just realised I should read this before Ring of Fire III)

So next: Ring of Fire III by Eric Flint

The third anthology of stories set in the 1632 universe that are written by well-known authors, and which might have a little more bearing on the main plot lines than the short stories in the Grantville Gazettes. (This is the third "Ring of Fire" anthology. There have been 36 Grantville Gazettes so far!)

So I finally completed Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon. I am definitely looking for a less difficult read at this point. I considered starting on The Chinese Maze Murders on spec, but it looks like the book club winner is still up in the air. That Maze Murders wins is the only reason I would want to read it right now, so I decided to start on The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess; another splinter from The Great War and Modern Memory. This required a special order outside my local library system, it arrived yesterday and is actually quite short.

[BC1130]

Originally Posted by alansplace

wow!

that was a neat first post. don't forget to read the harry dresden short story collection, 'side jobs'.

[Image too large -MODERATOR]

Thank you.
I bought Side Jobs as soon as I finished Changes.

[Russell Brooks]

The Help, half way through it.

[afa]

And I've finally finished A Dance with Dragons.

Since the book has undoubtedly been discussed in great detail, I will not bother giving in-depth thoughts on it. Suffice to say I was disappointed. A decent book, but not great. Probably competing with A Feast for Crows for the title of "Weakest Book in the Series".

I am now going back to the book that I abandoned when ADWD came out: The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. Also, I will still be attempting to read The Illearth War (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #2) alongside, though I actually haven't touched that in weeks.

[xg4bx]

Run by Blake Crouch. its a great, fast paced horror/thriller about a family on the run from a wave of violent lunacy thats sweeping the nation. very fast paced, gory and disturbing.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Badandy

Just finished Hyperion. I enjoyed it, but what I didn't enjoy was the fact that it stopped at a cliff-hanger. Not just any cliffhanger; a cliffhanger that delays, until the next book, what I assumed the entire book was about (the meeting of the pilgrims and the Shrike).

I'm a fan of the entire series, which is four mass market paperback volumes. I strongly recommended to a friend that he read Hyperion. He did, but was utterly incensed to discover it was the first half of a two book publication, and was so infuriated he refused to read anything else Simmons wrote. I told him it wasn't the author's fault if the publisher was stupid, and he really should read the other parts, but to no avail.

I see Bantam Spectra never did correct that failure to label the book as part one of two.

Simmons is adept at peeling layers back like an onion. When you get to Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, you discover that things are nowhere near what you assumed they were.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

The next Nebula/Hugo joint winner for me would be _Rendezvous With Rama_ not in the Kindle store, the year after that _The Disposed_ is in the kindle store.. so maybe that.

I believe you mean Ursula K. LeGuin's _The Dispossesed_. It's a novel in her "Hainish" series, concerning a character who invents the Ansible - a method of instantaneous communication over interstellar distances. The device is used in other novels in the sequence. (The interstellar civilization of the Ekumen does not possess FTL travel, so it takes a bit to get from place to place. Being at least able to talk to each other in real time is a major step forward.)

_The Dispossessed_ won the Hugo in 1975, as well. It's a worthy work, but I found it less satisfying than some of LeGuin's other books. The authorial strings are a little too evident in a few places, because she's more interested in making a point that telling a story.

If you haven't read LeGuin's _The Left Hand of Darkness_ (also in the Hainish cycle), do. It's simply brilliant.

Any recos? What are all the cool kids on the forum reading recently?

At the moment, Northrop Frye's _Anatomy of Criticism_ in trade paper, and a re-read of David Weber';s _Mission of Honor_ in ebook.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

I finished Shogun by James Clavell today. A very good and beautifully written book but, at least for me, a very slow read. The end did disappoint me a bit, it seems that the whole book was working up to that for it to be shortly summarized in a couple of lines. But I think that if it would have been described in it's entirety it would mean that the book would probably have been twice as long.

I read it years ago, and it was a good yarn. I didn't find the ending a let down. It wasn't really what the book was about. Years ago, at an SF convention, the late SF artist Kelly Freas said "You want to read a novel about contact with an alien culture? Read Shogun!", and he was quite right, because that's what it was. Edo period Japan was a very different culture and place than Europe of the period. The protagonist was very much marooned in an alien land and trying to understand it and make a place for himself.

The book got some flak from Japanese, who were unhappy with the portrayal of their people and said it wouldn't have happened that way. That was somewhat amusing, as Clavell had lived in Asia, and put himself forward as an expert on Japanese culture who could help other westerners who had to deal with it.
______
Dennis

[Ron.]

I'm reading Bleeder tonight, it's last in the series I have been reading this week.

The King of Garrick wants to kill her.
The King of Allel wants to love her.
And shapeshifters stole her baby's soul!

A hundred years after sea-level rise and global nuclear war wiped out most of humanity, Mallory is a chalice, one of the world's rare fertile females. Chalices live under the protection of Red City, which contracts with the kings of the Concord Cities to provide natural-born heirs.

It's a pampered and easy life - until Mal is caught between one king's lust for world domination and the goddess Asherah's desperate plays for another god's attention.

When Mal's undeclared - and forbidden - feelings for King Edmund grow too strong to be denied, she must confront the truth of her past and the most terrifying threat of all -- the inevitability of her destiny.