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

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: Fool's Errand by Robin Hobb. The first in the Tawny Man trilogy, which follows her Farseer trilogy. I'm enjoying this one.

A very good start to a new trilogy, which seems to be a proper trilogy rather than one book spread over three volumes. (In that the first book had a proper story arc of its own.) I'm looking forward to reading the others, but first

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peter. The first in the Cadfael series, which I have read before, many years ago. It will be interesting to re-read this (& the rest of the series) and find out where I missed some. (I think I haven't read the last two or three.)

[HarryT]

Finished "Frost", by Mark A. Garland and Charles C. McGraw, which I bought from Baen sometime around 2000-ish. This is the sequel to "Demon Blade", which I read a few days ago. "Frost" is still available from Baen, but "Demon Blade" is not, presumably due to rights issues.

The story follows straight on from the events of "Demon Blade". Having recovered the legendary sword known as the "Demon Blade", the wizard "Frost" decides to return to his homeland to try to put right a wrong he did when he was a young man, when he was tricked into helping an evil man win the throne. Word is spreading far and wide, however, that Frost has recovered the Demon Blade, and everyone is determined to take it from him.

Very good fantasy and a worthy sequel to "Demon Blade". The ending leaves scope for a sequel, but sufficient loose ends are tied up to make it a worthwhile read. Recommended.

[CharredScribe]

I finished King's Firestarter. I loved it. Great pacing, and I was reading in big gulps. Moved on to the next book in the DCI Banks series by Peter Robinson - Dead Right. Enjoying it so far.

[Latinandgreek]

Originally Posted by bfisher

I was intrigued enough by the above to start reading Scepter of the Ancients (Skulduggery Pleasant #1). 35% in and enjoying it immensely.

I just added it to my TBR list.... and pushed it to the top

[Loosheesh]

Originally Posted by Loosheesh

I finally completed True Honor and I liked it. Just one more book (True Courage) to complete the Uncommon Heroes series.

The highlight of my reading week was Rebecca and Jamaica Inn, both by Daphne du Maurier; such good stuff! I started My Cousin Rachel right after and it's shaping up to be equally enjoyable.

I'm also halfway into the Father Brown Omnibus; the average length of the stories fits well into my short commute. I picked up the excellently crafted ebook right here at MobileRead; HarryT!

Not much reading done in the past week; didn't pick up My Cousin Rachel at all during this time, so I'm still only a third way in. I made some more headway into the Father Brown omnibus (now on to the fourth set of stories [The Secret of Father Brown])

I finally completed Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book that I started in July. I now have to review my notes and highlights which, put together, are about 1/3 the size of the book

I also completed my lone issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (June 2011) that I picked up when Fictionwise was still alive.

Other than the du Maurier book, I have no firm plans on what to read this coming week ... 'too much choice dilemma'

[PurpleStar]

Tonight, I am going to start Fire with Fire by Charles E. Gannon. One of the many, many Baen books I have to read. I think I will declare it Baen month for me and read only Baen books in October.

[Hampshire Nanny]

Originally Posted by Hampshire Nanny

I'm currently reading Monk's Hood, the 3rd book. I plan to race through these as quickly as I can get them from the library's Freading eBook service.

Finished Monk's Hood in the car today. Now reading Murder Tightly Knit by Vanetta Chapman. It's a review book from Zondervan.

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by alansplace

I finished reading the 2nd book in the October Daye series, A Local Habitation. It's a supernatural mystery tale that held my interest throughout. Two in a row was enough exposure to that world for now and I'm taking a break from urban fantasy and giving Jane Austen another whirl (I recently read my first Jane Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice) and am 5 chapters into Emma.

I've changed my mind and am starting a new (to me) urban fantasy series (trilogy maybe?) called Spook Squad. The first book is called Memory Zero (Spook Squad #1) by Keri Arthur. I've shoved the others I've recently started (except for the October Daye series) onto the back burner for a while.

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by Dazrin

I am thinking that some Tom Swift would be a good quick distraction, starting with Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle; I will be using HarryT's omnibus volume 1 out of the MR Library.

Tom Swift was ok but not great. I had never read a Tom Swift book before and therefore don't have nostalgia helping me to enjoy them; I probably won't continue the series.

My library holds are still holding so I will need to find something else this afternoon.

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by Dazrin

Tom Swift was ok but not great. I had never read a Tom Swift book before and therefore don't have nostalgia helping me to enjoy them; I probably won't continue the series.

My library holds are still holding so I will need to find something else this afternoon.

Read a few when I was a Boy Sprout; they seemed better than Joe and Frank Hardy. Then i discovered real sci-fi ...

[chookie2]

Just completed the first Seanan Maguire Rosemary & Rue, also this week have begun Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child's Relic ...not holding me though, a slow start...will go back to it later. Have just started Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare in it's place. Was intending to reread Robin Hobbs but too many new ones call me. Lol
looking forward to the new Odd Thomas when it arrives...love my Oddie. ...Will drop everything for him.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by CRussel

On to Carpe Diem. That should get knocked off late today or tomorrow, followed by Plan B. And I'm going to have to circle back around and pick up a couple of the short stories. I seem to be missing things that happen "off screen".

Finished Plan B, now circling back to Fledgling before continuing with I Dare. I may well do Saltation before I Dare as well, but haven't decided. The two arcs have interleaving timelines (and later, story lines) so that it becomes tricky to decide exactly what order to use. And overall? It doesn't really matter, I'm enjoying the heck out of this combined audio/eBook re-read.

[ATDrake]

So, due to the Kobo weekend sale, everything I was reading previously got put on hold so I could try some new stuff to see if I wanted to get some other new stuff that was related to it. The answer turned out to be mostly "yes".

Bought and finished Ian Hamilton's The Dragon Head of Hong Kong and The Water Rat of Wanchai in the bundle edition of the 1st novel and its prequel in his Ava Lee series starring a Chinese-Canadian Hong Kong-born Toronto-raised-and-resident Catholic (ex-Roman) lesbian forensic accountant who works for a slightly extra-legal collections agency tracking down white-collar crime throughout the East Asian portions of the Pacific Rim. Which just strikes me somehow as a rather Canadian kind of character to invent.

Refreshingly, these are basically non-murder mysteries involving solving where a whole bunch of money went and the best way to get it back, with a few occasional kidnappings and beatings and extortion rackets thrown in.

They are pretty heavy on the travel/exotic cultural differences/food porn (which I do kind of like to a certain extent) and Hamilton does tend to write Lee rather like a favourite idealized action heroine on occasion (smart! sexy! tough! resourceful! well-connected! knows a special martial art which often gets her out of physical trouble! and also gay! so that you don't have to worry about Romantic Plot Tumours with the guys she meets taking over the narrative!), but they're entertaining overall and there are worse role models to have than Modesty Blaise, really. And you do find out a lot about how small-scale corporate petty theft and banking shenanigans work (kids, don't try this at home).

I rather liked these, enough to go and purchase* the next couple in series once they dropped to $4.99 (couponable!) after having hovered over the $10 mark at the start of the sale.

Recommended if any of the elements listed above appeal to you and/or you'd like to try a slightly off-beat non-murder sleuth-y type action mystery and you can get the 1st novel at a reasonably low cost. Incidentally, the 1st in series did win the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel (this is our major national mystery/crime writing prize), and the 2nd in series is a Barry Award finalist.

Also finished Michael Jecks' Squire Throwleigh's Heir, 7th in his long-running Knights Templar series of medieval murder mysteries starring an ex-Crusader returned to England and his bailiff buddy, which had several out of its 32 total volumes on sale for $1.99 from Simon & Schuster UK (non-couponable).

I rather liked the lengthy historical note with which the author introduced this, giving details about stuff he'd incorporated into the novels and further recommended non-fiction reading.

The actual story wasn't quite as good as I was hoping for, but still fairly well-done, with the historical details incorporated smoothly, and a good depiction of medieval attitudes in daily life as well as towards the crime itself.

The recounting and unfolding of the whodunnit was rather twisty and muddled, as a lot of people were in a position to be under suspicion and promptly muddied the waters further by throwing accusation upon others to divert attention from their own possible guilts and/or those of persons they thought were guilty and were trying to protect/expose. And as it turns out, a lot of suspects were guilty of a lot of stuff, but not necessarily the ultimate crime, which Sir Baldwin and Simon had to gradually figure out.

This was one of the sorts of books where the author does omniscient viewpoint involving the suspects so you can not only try to follow along with the sleuths on their investigations, but also try and guess for yourself exactly what the guilty-sounding party was up to/and or will be able to get away with.

Moderate recommend for historical medieval mystery aficionados. I liked this enough to go back and pick up all the other titles in the series which were on sale for $1.99, but it wasn't compelling enough in terms of storytelling or character personality appeal that I think I'd be tracking down the rest of the series via the library as I would for the Ava Lee books, though that may change after I read the next few.

And read through Danny Peary's Cult Sci-Fi Movies: Discover the 10 Best Intergalactic, Astonishing, Far-Out, and Epic Cinema Classics, a recent freebie which seems to be a sampler for an upcoming set of similar cult cinema essay volumes (horror, crime, midnight movies), apparently reprinted from his ground-breaking 80s Cult Movies series of books, the 1st of which has its own Wikipedia article (Peary is a professional film critic who's credited with popularizing the very notion of cult movies to begin with).

This was surprisingly better and even more in-depth to read than I'd hoped for based on an initial skim, providing rather good background info as well as analysis on a number of films ranging from the obscure to the widely-known.

Even though the author warns straight-up that it's a overall harsh, ugly film threaded through with interesting ideas, I kind of want to have a look at Liquid Sky because of some of the things he mentions about its themes, and I'm similarly curious about a number of other films which TBH, I'll probably never bother to watch.

On the strength of this freebie, I think I've decided to pre-order at least the Crime and Midnight Movies volumes, since they're couponable at Kobo as well as currently discounted by a dollar off the list price and I can cancel if the cost changes significantly before the release date. I'm kind of waffling about the Horror one, since horror is not a genre that I care to watch (except for the occasional times when a favourite middling-obscure actor I like who doesn't get enough work lands a role in one, sigh); on the other hand, I'd be interested in seeing Peary's insider production info and insights on certain films that are part of our current cultural zeitgeist which let's face it, I'm not going to actually sit down and see if I don't have to.

(ETA: Can't pre-order with coupons, guess I'll wait for the release date and hope good discounts are available by then.)

Highly recommended if you've any interest in film history or cult cinema or just want to see what someone who takes the genre seriously has to say about sometimes schlocky sci-fi movies. Especially for free! (while it lasts)

NB: At the time these were written, it was assumed that people would have a hard time getting viewing copies of the films, so there's a thorough spoiler-laden synopsis of each one before the beginning of each essay, which you might want to skip past if you don't want to know all the details going in.

* But apparently I picked the wrong set of items to sleep upon because if I'd gotten the other thing that I wanted at $4.99 yesterday evening (a HarperCollins bundle now up to $13.99 in all venues, aarghdammit and who changes the prices in the middle of the day on a Monday anyway?!) and waited until today to pick up #2-4 of the Ava Lee series, I could have gotten them at an extra 50¢-$1 off per (adjusted for coupon deduction from the sale price that is, which knocks the savings down to 30-50 cents or so), since apparently the $4.99 is not just the special weekend sale price anymore, but small publisher Spiderline's new introductory price which Kobo then took it upon themselves to discount further this afternoon.

Oh well, at least it makes things cheaper for future Canadian buyers to pick up and enjoy? (Apparently Macmillan's Picador imprint holds the rights to these in the US and price them at $9.99 each, non-couponable and no bundle omnibuses.)

And considering that I just paid more in overdue library fines over the weekend, I don't begrudge an extra dollar or so going to Support A Canadian Author and a specialty Canadian independent small-press imprint which makes their wares couponable (and occasionally deep-discounts them, if that's not just Kobo being wonky with the sale prices on the last day) since I did get 4 books + a bonus prequel novella which I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy for just $3.14 CAD each for the 4.

[trichobezoar]

This evening I began reading The 100 by Kass Morgan. It seems like a good read:

In the future, humans live in city-like spaceships orbiting far above Earth's toxic atmosphere. No one knows when, or even if, the long-abandoned planet will be habitable again. Faced with dwindling resources and a growing populace, government leaders know they must reclaim their homeland before it is too late.

Now, one hundred juvenile delinquents are being sent on a high-stakes mission to recolonize Earth. After a brutal crash landing, the teens arrive on a savagely beautiful planet they have only seen from space. Confronting the dangers of this rugged new world, they struggle to form a tentative community. But they are haunted by their past and uncertain about the future. To survive, they must learn to trust - and even love - again.

Source: http://the100.wikia.com/wiki/The_100_%28Novel%29


'Hope everyone's having a good night/morning!

[Mivo]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peter. The first in the Cadfael series, which I have read before, many years ago. It will be interesting to re-read this (& the rest of the series) and find out where I missed some. (I think I haven't read the last two or three.)

Thanks (I think!) for reminding me of that series. It had been on my horizon a few times, but only after reading your post I finally picked up the first book. If it's enjoyable, there will be twenty more.