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

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by cearbhallain

She shacked up with this weird director and got juicy parts in his movies?

It seems they're not shacked up - they're LATs.

[cearbhallain]

Originally Posted by MelC

Well, that does explain a lot...didn't know that. Still, chicken or egg?

Mel

Birds of a feather?

[phenomshel]

Originally Posted by Fledchen

I'm listening to an audiobook from NLS. I can't find a commercial ebook or audiobook for this one. I wonder why the rights were granted to publish ebook versions of every book in the series except the first one.

I think the first one was a different publisher, so it may be a rights issue. Alternatively, we could take it as yet another example of publisher's being stupid about ebooks. . Trivial as it may seem, I think what bothers me the most about that series is that the cover artist changed. The old ones were really pretty, the new ones are awful. This is one I'm tempted to scan before I try re-reading it again, though...it's one of my favorite books (and even though it is technically first in a series it stands on it's own merits), so I re-read it fairly often.

[omk3]

Originally Posted by omk3

Just finished Moxie Mezcal's Sweet Dream, Silver Screen. Brilliant!

...followed by everything else by Moxie. I think I have not been so excited to discover a new writer (new to me, anyway) since Ryu Murakami. I'm now eagerly waiting for the novel, supposed to be released on the 13th.

[CJWest]

I just found a new writer myself - Meg Gardiner. I met her at Bouchercon last year and read her book The Dirty Secrets Club for my Blog Talk Radio show.

The writing is superb and the story was gripping. So glad I bumped into her in the lounge.

CJ

[neilmarr]

By the way folks, BeWrite Books is offering twenty-five titles on a pay-what-you-want basis for 'Read An Ebook Week' as of Sunday. So you can download all twenty five if you like, free of charge. Some crackers there.

If you decide to pay a buck or three, though, ALL income will go to the Red Cross to help in Haiti.

Simply visit the the BeWrite Books bookstore at Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/BeWrite to select your ebooks and choose to pay nothing at all or to donate to the Haitian relief fund by offering whatever you think you can afford.

Cheers. Neil

[omk3]

That's a really good offer, Neil, and a nice gesture. I'm looking forward to 'Read an Ebook Week', even though I read ebooks all the other weeks too

[Ea]

I'm in the middle of "Aspects of the novel" by E. M. Forster. Non-fiction - a lecture series about the core structures of a novel. Very highly recommended for readers and writers alike.

Forster has such a great way about him, making things accessible without dumbing it down at all. Something worth reading for all readers of fiction. Stuff that makes you think and is entertaining to boot

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Ea

I'm in the middle of "Aspects of the novel" by E. M. Forster. Non-fiction - a lecture series about the core structures of a novel. Very highly recommended for readers and writers alike.

Forster has such a great way about him, making things accessible without dumbing it down at all. Something worth reading for all readers of fiction. Stuff that makes you think and is entertaining to boot

Thanks for that recommendation, Ea. It's now on my Amazon wish list. (I'd download a sample, but my K2 content is a bit bloated at the moment and I'm trying to trim it down before starting new books.)

[Ea]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Thanks for that recommendation, Ea. It's now on my Amazon wish list. (I'd download a sample, but my K2 content is a bit bloated at the moment and I'm trying to trim it down before starting new books.)

I try to keep my content list at about 10 pages... If I haven't looked at a sample in a month, it's a good indicator I should delete it *g*

Amazon won't even sell this book to me (doubly odd as it's both a British publisher as well as author/copyright-holder ) but I found it at cyberread.com for $5.99.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

So - Grantville Gazette Volume 27, here I come.

And GG 27 was as expected - some fun shorts, a few continuing stories, some intense fact arcticles.

And, since had a long train journey yesterday, I started and finished the fifth in the Southern Vampire series.

Still not disappointing, a good read.

And now back to Grantville Gazette 28...

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Oh, I'm sure there are quite a few liberties taken! I made that comment with tongue-in-cheek after reading somewhere that the Mad Hatter will be Alice's love interest. I seriously doubt it will bear much resemblance to the original, but still I expect an extremely fun ride. Johnny Depp is quite a character, and Tim Burton has such a unique and fertile imagination.

As I understand it, it's really more accurately "Alice's Return to Wonderland", where an older Alice finds herself called back to save the place, as the Red Queen has totally taken over and is leading all to wrack and ruin.

Depp is very good at chewing the scenery when given the chance, and the Mad Hatter should give him plenty of chances.
______
Dennis

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

As I understand it, it's really more accurately "Alice's Return to Wonderland", where an older Alice finds herself called back to save the place, as the Red Queen has totally taken over and is leading all to wrack and ruin.

Depp is very good at chewing the scenery when given the chance, and the Mad Hatter should give him plenty of chances.
______
Dennis

Yes. A grown-up Alice, fleeing her wedding to someone she doesn't love, falls down the rabbit hole to a world she visited as a child but no longer remembers. Might try to catch it this weekend; before the critics get a chance to tell me whether I like it.

[Harryplopper]

I'm starting A Storm of Swords by George R R Martin, Book 3 of A Song of Ice and Fire.

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

Originally Posted by kennyc

I wanna hear about The God Delusion when you finish.

Finished it, and now wondering how to write about it...

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and an atheist. The God Delusion is partly an attempt at examining religion from an evolutionary point of view, and partly a heartfelt, impassioned rant.

It's dedicated to the memory of Douglas Adams (Adams credited one of Dawkins books with converting him (Adams) to atheism), and early on he expresses the hope that this book would have made Douglas Adams laugh. It is a serious book, but not entirely written in a serious tone. The humour tends to be a very British (not really surprising ) observational humour; dry and sarcastic.

The book's stance is unapologetically and unsurprisingly anti-religious. Dawkins takes issue with blind acceptance even when the information available is contradictory, or there is evidence against what is being believed. But whilst this makes up a large portion of the book, it is not what the book is about - it is there as explanatory and background material as much as anything. Dawkins is seeking to find possible evolutionary reasons behind religious belief and to understand why this sort of behaviour might have come about and still seemingly be hard-wired into humans. There is a fascinating section on cargo cults which gives an overview of just how quickly these things take hold and become accepted.

I found it to be an engaging, thought-provoking and sometimes challenging book, and I would recommend it to most people. (Dawkins lists a theist-atheist scale fairly early on in the book - I probably wouldn't recommend it to people who lay in either 1 or 7...)