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

[Ravensknight]

United States of Japan
Peter Tieryas
2 Stars

Ugh. Really wished I'd known this was hardcore Alt-History and not a mecha battlefest like I wanted. No more Peter Tieryas for me, ever.

[drjd]

Originally Posted by drjd

Now I'll proceed with The Bethlehem Scroll, book 1 of the Brian Sadler Archaeological Mystery Series containing four books, which I bought yesterday. This will be my first read from the author, Bill Thompson.

Just finished The Bethlehem Scroll by Bill Thompson. With this first book of the series I think he has successfully laid the foundation of the main character Brian Sadler. In my opinion the author has been over descriptive in some chapters which stretches the reader to the limits of boredom. On the other hand, he has suddenly and unexpectedly truncated some parts of the story which demanded more elaborations. Thus few questions remain unanswered, leading the reader to further investigate in the next books of the series.

All in all, it was an okay read, and since I have already bought all the four books in the series, I will read the next one Ancient for now, to observe the development in the character of Brian Sadler and his next adventures.

[astrangerhere]

It took me two weeks to work my way through Virginia Woolf's Night and Day. Not Woolf's best work for me. Too much romance and too little substance. I really missed the teeth of Orlando and the nuance of Mrs. Dalloway.

Moving on to a librivox recording of Thomas More's Utopia.

[kansaskyle]

I finished The Rising Sun, which I gave a four-star rating. It was an enjoyable, fast-paced detective story that really exposed the economic relations between the US and Japan. The book shows its age a little bit given it was written in the early 90's, but I found it interesting as it noted how the countries view things differently in regards to conducting business, telling the 'truth', showing respect, etc.

Up next is A Man Called Ove.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Currently reading In This Grave Hour, the new Maise Dobbs book from Jacqueline Winspear, and quite enjoying it. Also reading Stiff, by Mary Roach, and that's been the perfect book to read while sitting in a restaurant, eating my solitary meal while I'm on the road this week. (Really - makes a great conversation starter!)

Finished In This Grave Hour. This book is set during the Phoney War, that period from the initial declaration of war by England and France against Germany on September 3rd, 1939. The action takes place primarily in the UK, with a brief foray into Belgium, but centres around Belgian refugees from the first world war. A solid 4 stars for me. If you've enjoyed her earlier books, you'll definitely enjoy this one.

Still reading Stiff, and enjoying it. Now starting Blood Lure, the 9th Anna Pigeon book by Nevada Barr. This one is set in Glacier Park and features grizzly bears. Meanwhile, on the audio book side, next up is The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny. #5 in the Chief Inspector Gamache series of Three Pines mysteries.

[Crusader]

Finished Infinity Engine by Neal Asher. Quite a stunning conclusion to his Transformation series, and for an author that doesn't plan out his books he manages to pull of an intricate web of events that were set up from the first book and only fully manifests their true importance at the end.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: The Snake, the Dog and the Crocodile by Elizabeth Peters. The seventh in her excellent Amelia Peabody series.

Which was once again a good yarn. One of my bargain buys that turned out well.

Next up: The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding by Agatha Christie. A collection of short stories. The title story I'd already read in a Christmas anthology, but it was fun to re-read it. I'm enjoying the others.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

Moving on to a librivox recording of Thomas More's Utopia.

My Latin is pretty reasonable, but I found this a tough read (it was the first book I'd read in Medieval rather than Classical Latin). I guess your Medieval Latin is better than mine .

[Fbone]

Finished Star Trek: Gods of Night by David Mack. A lot happening all at once. Multiple story-lines with multiple ships and crew including flashbacks. I was confusing everything and everyone. Then there were a few personal interest scenes acting as an unnecessary diversion. Things were starting to come together at the end, though. And I'm sure the next book in the series will follow the pattern. Hopefully, the author can continue the momentum. The book was well written and well thought out although there were a few inconsistencies that bothered me. Rated C [3 stars].

[ATDrake]

Today's transit trip took hours longer than expected (in my more paranoid moments I suspect the new bus schedules to be exquisitely timed to pull into the station just as one's connection is pulling out, so that the cost of an extra transfer will be needed), so I was able to both start and finish Gaston Dorren's Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe, which I picked up on sale from Kobo last year, which turns out to be an adapted partial translation of his Dutch-language Taaltoerisme (Language Tourism, according to the acknowledgements in the back) with some added material to make it more appealing to English-speakers.

This was a nice, light overview of the characteristic features and distinctive quirks of various European languages (both as families and dialects), with a greater amount of depth than I was expecting. While brief, each topic provided rather a lot of interesting trivia and explanations for how the assorted languages got to be the way they were, in terms of local dominance, isolated development, etc., as well regular end-pieces on loan-words contributed to English, and a selected single word from each language that expresses a useful concept that doesn't exist or takes an entire phrase in English, such as madárlátta from Hungarian, which means “food taken for an outing but brought back home uneaten”.

A lot of fairly obscure languages get their own chapter, such as Sorbian (not a typo for Serbian) and Galician (ancestor of Portuguese), and the book overall is divided into nicely thematic sections which group together endangered languages that have had modern revival attempts of varying success (Manx, Monégasque), languages that have had significant reforms which totally changed some aspect or other (post-Ottoman Empire Turkey dropping the actual Ottoman language which was an artificial conglomerate used by officials and also switching to a Latin-based alphabet), languages that have had basically one person guiding and strongly influencing its future (apparently the low phonetic correspondence of Farøese can be blamed on one man during the 19th century, who thought it should be spelt as his ancestors spelt it and not as the language was actually pronounced by then), and other common factors.

While it generally provides a light overview of most topics, there's a few it goes into rather a lot of depth upon. I knew that Swedish had some argument over its recent adoption of hen as a gender-neutral 3rd person pronoun, but I had no idea there was such a dispute over ni as an old-fashioned 2nd person formal pronoun that some groups are advocating a return to (and pre-1960s, a very complicated system of polite address that seems to have been a social minefield). And it turns out that the Sami reindeer-herding indigenous people actually have more words that technically refer to forms of snow than the Inuit do (the assertion that they had dozens having long since been debunked). These more focused essay-ettes give this a nice touch of added-value beyond being a pleasant “lite” trivia reference book.

Recommended for anyone interested in language and linguistics-related trivia. I bought this expecting to like it because this is the type of book and topic that I'm already inclined towards, but I ended up enjoying it even more than I'd thought I would. The ebook version is pretty nicely done. There's an actual index in the back with working links to pages with the various mentions of a given subject, the few footnotes mostly work (I think there were one or two that weren't linked properly, but they were all visible at the end of chapter), and the author includes an annotated further reading list in the back, which is always welcome.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding by Agatha Christie. A collection of short stories. The title story I'd already read in a Christmas anthology, but it was fun to re-read it. I'm enjoying the others.

Five short mysteries, four solved by Poirot, and one by Miss Marple. All excellent, but especially the title story.


Next up: The Mislaid Magician by Patricia C. Wrede. The third and final Kate and Cecelia adventure.

[ATDrake]

Finished Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal, which was on the library's New Books shelf. This one was a standalone occult espionage mystery adventure set during WWI, where Britain has secretly leveraged the use of spiritualist mediums to get information from soldiers killed at the front, and of course there's a threat to that which leads to murders which need to be solved and a nefarious plot to be thwarted.

This was a lighter-hearted, more cozy-esque feeling read than I was expecting, given the setting and premise and the opening (which I agree with the author's note in the back is much improved from the dinner party idea she was originally going to go with until fellow Tor author John Scalzi suggested otherwise), but still had touching as well as tragic emotional moments. And I was surprised but pleased that what seemed be fairly standard devotedly romantic and dastardly villain identification subplots eventually played out in ways which made for a nice bit of misdirection for a few things. Also, there were brief cameos by author J. R. R. Tolkien and one of the Doctors Who, I think, which were fun to spot.

Medium recommend (pun intended). While I wouldn't consider it a standout book, the story is fairly entertaining, the characters and ideas are mostly engaging (I like that there was some going-over of the logistics of how spirit-enabling and blocking would work, as well as the practical aspects of secret communications), and the author includes a note in the back about some of the real history she drew upon (with recommended reading mentions), as well as what she took creative liberties with, which is always nice to have included in any quasi-historical work.

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

Moving on to a librivox recording of Thomas More's Utopia.

Bob Nufeld's reading was most excellent!

For my next audiobook, I am listening to Stephen Fry's reading of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I am abashed to admit, I've never read.

In ebook, I'm still working on Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest.

[ReadingManiac]

Originally Posted by Ravensknight

I'd recommend "The Tower at Stony Wood" or "The Book of Atrix Wolfe" as start offs. If you don't like them, you probably won't like the rest of her stuff. If you want a more traditional "story" from her, try her Cygnet duology.

Thank you! I'll have a look at those.

[ReadingManiac]

Just got the new Time Shifters series book by Shanna Lauffey, Sweet Child of Time. Already hooked!

If you like intelligent time travel, I highly recommend this series.