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

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

It's actually the 6th book which wasn't completed (which is a shame, since it would have been fun to see the skewering of the dot.com bubble), but Cook's put part of what he'd written so far online. The 5th book, The Wizardry Quested, is only available in paperback, though.

Ah, yes. My mistake; I should've remembered that, especially given how much time I spent searching for it.

I just finished a self-pub novel that shows the value of a good copyeditor...in that it really needed one. The copyright page actually names an editor, but there were some shockingly glaring oversights - and I'm not talking about once in a while, but in every chapter. Homophones were abused, with "reign" standing in for "rein" and sometimes even "rain," and in one case fir/fur were used interchangeably in the same short paragraph.

Now, I know that sounds like a hit job, which is why I'm not naming the book...but the tragedy is that the story itself is pretty good. Yes, there are a couple of head-scratcher plot points, but I enjoyed it overall and will probably pick up the sequel. It's just that, well...

The beast story on urf aint no dam gud if it looks like this. Nobodies gonna reed it.

[Rev. Bob]

Oh, my.

Just finished Robert Kroese's Starship Grifters, an absolutely hilarious space opera novel that I wolfed down in two sittings. The only thing I dislike about it is that it's a 47North book, and thus an Amazon exclusive. If the prequel short ("The Chicolini Incident") were 99 cents instead of $1.99, I'd snap it right up - but I don't enjoy paying that much for a 40-page story that I'd have to convert to EPUB before reading. Thankfully, I do have another novel by the same author - Disenchanted, a comic fantasy - that may have just moved up the list by a few spots.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Next up, the latest from Wen Spencer, Wood Sprites. I'm looking forward to this, and expect to have a lot of fun with it.

Well, that wasn't quite what I expected, since it follows a parallel story line and really doesn't include Tinker at all. But, having said that, I enjoyed it a lot.

[Stitchawl]

I'm about a quarter way through Robert Crais's "Demolition Angel," and enjoying it. It's been in my TBR folder for a couple of years, and I finally decided it was time. It's keeping my attention with fast moving situations and good dialog.

Stitchawl

[Joy736]

I just finished Pride and Prejudice and I have no words to describe how much I loved this novel! I love the historical setting, the storyline, the characters (especially the depth of these characters), the writing-style and the humor (that silly Mrs. Bennet ).
I want to just read it again right away. I never had that happen to me before.
This must be an instant favorite!

Next up is Jane Eyre and I hope I will love it just as much.

[Yapyap]

And I'm done with Itch - as is the case with many other children's / YA mysteries/thrillers, it required a whole lot of suspension of disbelief, but overall, I enjoyed it very much.

Spoiler:

(Not really sure though whether to classify is as "children's" or "YA" - a lot of the storyline and writing, especially in the first half of the book, seemed more fitting for the 9+ crowd, but the vivid descriptions of people dying / kids about to die from radiation poisoning, complete with a lot of vomiting blood, hair falling out etc might be just a tad too realistically gory for very young readers. Then again, I doubt the idea of "too much gore" exists for a lot of pre-teen boys in particular, so.)

Definitely going to buy and read the second book as well now before moving on to the third, i.e. the actual reason for me reading it at all.

I will now have to decide what to read next - has to be something reasonably short so I'd be done by Wednesday evening even if I turn out to have little time for reading.

Originally Posted by Joy736

I just finished Pride and Prejudice and I have no words to describe how much I loved this novel! I love the historical setting, the storyline, the characters (especially the depth of these characters), the writing-style and the humor (that silly Mrs. Bennet ).
I want to just read it again right away. I never had that happen to me before.
This must be an instant favorite!

Next up is Jane Eyre and I hope I will love it just as much.

Jane Eyre is a very different novel (in writing, mood etc) - the humour that is always there with Austen really isn't so with the Brontes. That said, I love both books, in different ways, although I'm not sure how much it's due to me having read Jane Eyre for the first time when I was fifteen, the perfect age to appreciate a gothic romance.

[Luffy]

Jame Eyre is one book on which I've had my eye, but the unsuccessful reading of P&P put that intent on hold. I must tackle a few serious books, then I'll muster enough determination to both begin and complete the book.

I think I'll feel more confident if I read Mansfield Park and Persuasion first, then I'll read JE.

[Joy736]

Originally Posted by Yapyap

Jane Eyre is a very different novel (in writing, mood etc) - the humour that is always there with Austen really isn't so with the Brontes. That said, I love both books, in different ways, although I'm not sure how much it's due to me having read Jane Eyre for the first time when I was fifteen, the perfect age to appreciate a gothic romance.

Thanks for warning me , but I have seen many Jane Eyre reviews that talked about the darknes of the Bronte-sisters novels.
I have always liked my novels to be either very witty and fluffy or very dark
So Austen and Bronte should both be in my alley.

[Gazella]

Originally Posted by Gazella

Anyway, I'm currently reading The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.

It is a literary non-fiction novel that spans the years surrounding the building of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, also known as The "World's Columbian Exposition", which was designed to commemorate the landing of Columbus in America.

I just finished this a few hours ago. It was fascinating reading about the people who helped build the fair; I had no idea Walt Disney's father was one of them. Similarly fascinating was reading about the people who attended the fair: Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Helen Keller, Susan B. Anthony, Theodore Dreiser, Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, Mark Twain (although he got bedridden sick and saw the fair from his hotel room window only), Archduke Francis Ferdinand, royalty from different countries, and many other famous figures. Also, the new inventions such as the ferris wheel. The introduction of edibles like Cracker Jacks, Juicy Fruit, Shredded Wheat, etc. was all very compelling to read. Now the other story tells the tale of deeply disturbed serial killer, Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, who used the Fair (and his charms) to lure victims (mainly young women and children) to their death. This part of the story was very chilling and mysterious. All in all, this book is very readable. Very interesting. Very intriguing. Very beautifully written.


Next up, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing.

[Yapyap]

After some consideration, I've decided to just continue with Itch Rocks, the sequel to Itch, right away. I'm reasonably confident I'll manage to finish a children's action book in three evenings...

Originally Posted by Joy736

Thanks for warning me , but I have seen many Jane Eyre reviews that talked about the darknes of the Bronte-sisters novels.
I have always liked my novels to be either very witty and fluffy or very dark
So Austen and Bronte should both be in my alley.

I'm not sure I'd classify Jane Eyre as very dark either. It's definitely not in the same ballpark as Wuthering Heights as far as angst and darkness goes, but yeah, fluffy it also isn't.

... and now I find myself wanting to re-read some older books at some point. I had a major "late 18th / 19th century literature" phase in my late teens / very early twenties (Austen, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope), but now that I'm old and my brain can't handle heavy stuff on work day evenings any more I've rather drifted towards somewhat simpler fare.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: Legions of Space by Keith Laumer. My oldest unread purchased ebook, from 15 September 2004.

Which was OK, but not his best work by a long way.

Now for Medics Wild! by Darrell Bain. A freebie from Fictionwise, also from 15 Sep 2004. Fictionalised Vietnam war by a veteran medic.

[MickeyC]

Just finished Support and Defend by Mark Greaney with Tom Clancy's name on the cover. Great thriller and a very fast read!

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by Gazella

Next up, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing.

Great book. I read it before we went to Antarctica in 1999->2000, and went to NYC to see the exhibit there, which included a replica of the James Caird, the boat they used to get to South Georgia. Incredible. Simply incredible.

[Loosheesh]

Originally Posted by Joy736

I just finished Pride and Prejudice and I have no words to describe how much I loved this novel! I love the historical setting, the storyline, the characters (especially the depth of these characters), the writing-style and the humor (that silly Mrs. Bennet ).
I want to just read it again right away. I never had that happen to me before.
This must be an instant favorite!

Next up is Jane Eyre and I hope I will love it just as much.

Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre are two of my favorite books! Jane Eyre is not light-hearted as P&P but still great. I read it last year via an online readalong; we divided up the books into 3 parts and had discussions after reading each part. It was a wonderful experience.

In an earlier post, you mentioned watching the 1995 A&E/BBC version of P&P; I have this as well (the DVDs) and I love it to bits. I try to get everyone in my life to watch it but that's mostly a lost cause *sniff*

I think this is my first time posting here, and I might as well say what I'm currently reading, which is Agatha Christie's The Big Four. From my lurking around here I know HarryT has been reading Agatha Christie lately so I'm hoping he'll stop by and comment on whether this one of hers is any good. I'm not that far in (just started the 3rd chapter) but I'm getting the feeling it'll be overly melodramatic or something.

I completed The Murder of Roger Ackroyd yesterday (finally; I only bought the book in 2010 ) and I enjoyed it immensely. It's gone on the shelf of my top favorite mystery novels. I feel almost sad I can't read it again for the first time

[ATDrake]

Le book du bus ride comprised two books today.

Loaded up the Sony with a couple of things from the latest Humble Bundle e-books bundle, which is the one with all the HarperCollins books in it.

Started and finished Ben Mezrich's Busting Vega$ [sic]: The True Story of Monumental Excess, Sex, Love, Violence, and Beating the Odds, which is a fictionalized account of one of those MIT card-counting casino-hacking teams, and a minor draw for me in terms of buying the full bundle.

I actually would much rather have read the dramatized non-fiction book that Mezrich wrote about the same subject, Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, which got turned into a film, but this was as close as my bundle money could get and I figured it probably wasn't too far off anyway.

As for the actual story, well, remember that episode of Futurama where they visit the amusement park on the moon* and something happens that winds up with Bender saying that he could build his own moonbase? With blackjack! And hookers!

Because yeah, it's kind of like Mezrich decided he could write his own casino-jacking heist flick. With blackjack! And hookers! (Both rather lovingly described.)

While as a novel it's not actually bad, it suffers from, IMHO, thinly-fleshed character types filling in for actual characters (there's the Only Sane Man™, who's got the troubled best friend who goes astray, the initially intimidating but increasingly friendly and approachable hot girl he has hopes of winding up with, the self-absorbed charismatic obsessive who drives them all, etc., etc.) who basically serve to enable the Hollywood film- standard plot and actions, as well as something of a redundant narrative structure that isn't pulled off well enough to justify it.

There's a conceit of having a modern-day writer narrate in the first person interspersing chapters where he's apparently on the trail of the long-disappeared Only Sane Man in the team, dropping little hints about how stuff you'll find out about in the main narrative happened that got out of hand in the past which leads us to his mysterious present situation.

But the anticipatory foreshadowing this is apparently meant to set up was handled perfectly fine in the the opening prologue, told in 3rd person POV from the Only Sane Man's perspective during a crisis point, setting up the flashbacks as to How It All Went Wrong, without needing to resort to inserting the future-writer character. And it's just not done well enough to make it seem anything other than an intrusive break in the real action happening in the book, which is actually rather interesting when it starts to get a bit into the techniques used to count cards for fun and profit while distracting the staff from noticing that you are counting cards for fun and profit.

Mind you, it does make it easier to set up the Where Are They Now? segment, although the lavish praise of the free open source software movement in the outroduction rings a little jarringly in conjunction with

Spoiler:

the apparent sales pitch for the team's card-counting techniques which you too can learn for fun and profit, in order to get back at The Man who is running those casinos which make a living off of stacking each and every deck against their clients while bleating whenever the same treatment is doled out to them, because information wants to be free sold on instructional DVDs for $29.99 and via subscription website access.

In all, this was a mildly interesting, though ultimately rather generic standard Hollywood daring-heist-undermined-by-hubris film-type read whose only distinguishing feature is the behind-the-scenes-of-how-to card-counting stuff, which would probably be much better served by the mostly non-fiction book which the author wrote about the subject.

(ETA: Or maybe not, since this was apparently itself a dramatized non-fiction meant to be a follow-up to the first book he wrote, according to Wikipedia. I thought for sure it had to be a mediocre roman à clef novel with both the writer character and the POV hacker as stand-ins for the author.)

I don't regret the dollar or so I spent for this as part of the Humble HarperCollins Bundle, but I wouldn't recommend it as a standalone purchase for much more than that.

The book that I got and read on the way back from the library, William Sleator's The Last Universe, was much better.

While this still wasn't quite as good as his more classic award-shortlisted YA SF, it was a vast improvement over the more supernatural reads of his I've been sampling over the past week.

This one had a nifty exploration of deliberately-cultivated quantum effects with characters sampling various multiverses with the occasional help of a certain cat‡ in an attempt to understand and better their situation by swapping themselves into an ideal one, with attention paid to the typical Sleator-ish fridge horror examination of the ramifications of such, by looking at the possibilities of

Spoiler:

winding up in a much worse universe when you thought you were getting better, and then thinking you've managed to escape from the worse one into a better and safer situation only to find that initially it seems to have solved things for the people you were hoping it would, only to leave you yourself in a much disimproved state.

And it also had that old-school Sleator-ish look at how the demands of an increasingly invalid family member upon the able-bodied one who's assigned to look after him (to both their increasing resentment and frustration) warps the usual interactive sibling dynamics, as well as the entire family and everyone who comes into their orbit, not unlike how gravity warps space-time, and sets up the entire adventure to begin with.

Moderate recommend for hard-ish SF fans interested in YA subgenre reads. Not among his best, but not bad, and if you had to pick one of his non-sequel 2000s-written things to read, this is actually a pretty decent one.

* To this day, even though I have only ever seen this episode twice (the 2nd time for the DVD commentary) and many years ago at that, I can still sing, with perfect recall, the fake theme park tune†. This means something, I think. Something sad.

† ♪ We're whalers on the moon; we carry a harpoon… ♪ ♫ But there ain't no whales, so we tell tall tales, and sing our whaling tune… ♫

‡ Sometimes the cat is helpful, sometimes it's not. You never know until you open the chapter and have a look.