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

[Tome Keeper]

I tend to have a few books on the go at a time (short attention span), so not including work books we have:

Matilda by Roald Dahl
The Jakarta Pandemic by Steven Konkoly
Year Zero by Jeff Long
Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman
Toxin, the cunning of bacterial poisions by Alastair Lx
What's the least I can believe and still be a Christian? by Martin Thielen

Can't wait till the end of May, after which I'll have all the time in the world to work through my collection.

[caleb72]

Originally Posted by intheendofdays

Matilda by Roald Dahl

I've always felt that I should read more Roald Dahl...or any Roald Dahl. I just looked through his bibliography and realised that I can't actually remember reading any of his books.

That's probably close to criminal negligence on my part.

Regards
Caleb

[kennyc]

But it's okay. It's always good to have things left to read.

[FlorenceArt]

Never too late to read! It's been a while, but I loved Roald Dahl's short stories.

[kainne]

Originally Posted by Crusader

Busy slogging through Dracula. A very slow read.

Took me quite a while also. I finally finished it stuck at my grandparents with nothing else to read.

Just finished Cerulean Sins by Laurell K. Hamilton. I liked it better than the couple preceding it, less sex more story. Whats the rest of the series like?

Currently reading Homefront: The Voice of Freedom by John Milius & Raymond Benson.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Crusader

Busy slogging through Dracula. A very slow read.

Originally Posted by maianhvk

...yeah that happened to me when I first read it, but just at the beginning. how far are you? the story should get better in the middle, or near the ending

Yes, well worth reading. Very creepy, in a spine tingling way.

yeah, I think so too I gave up HP after some chapters and still think that was too quick to judge a book

Originally Posted by kennyc

This is the way it is every time I try to read Ulysses ...(hi Flo!).

Hi, Florence!

Originally Posted by orlok

I'm with you there, though I did manage to get past the first page .

I read about 10% before I gave up. Maybe one day some old hippie will put something in the water supply and I'll be able to finish it.

[WT Sharpe]

Last week I got back to and finished Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth (concept & Story by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, Script by Apostolos Doxiadis, Art by Alecos Papadatos, Color by Annie Di Donna). It's a mammoth sized graphic novel about the life and philosophical struggles of Bertrand Russell (344 pages with the included biographical snapshots of prominent mathematicians & philosophers). Special attention is paid to the relationship of genius and madness (often a fine line apparently) in logisticians.

This is the first graphic novel to ever make me question my basic assumptions about logic, and I know of few better recommendations of any book than that it makes you think.

[pilotbob]

I finished Hunger Games and started the next StarTrek Corp of Engineers omnibus that I am up to. These are always a quick fun read.

I think after than I'm going to go back to Hunger Games series and read Catching Fire. I've already bought it and it is waiting on my Kindle.

BOb

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

And now onto Generation Warriors by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Moon. I'm fairly sure I've read this in the dim and distant past.

I was wrong. I don't think I've ever read this after all. I have read some of the previous stories in the series, Dinosaur Planet, and Sassinak. But I find I've also missed two - Dinosaur Planet Survivors and Death of Sleep.

This is the last book in the series. I enjoyed it, and I remembered enough of the others to understand what was going on. I don't feel any great need to seek out the others.

Spoiler:

Everything gets tied up neatly, if a bit deus ex machina at the end.

Next: Analog SFF, June 2011

[Crusader]

Originally Posted by maianhvk

yeah that happened to me when I first read it, but just at the beginning. how far are you? the story should get better in the middle, or near the ending

I'm more or less in the middle. The story did pick up for a while, but now it's back to those tedious diary entries. Things are starting to slowly gear up for the confrontation though...

[maianhvk]

Originally Posted by Crusader

I'm more or less in the middle. The story did pick up for a while, but now it's back to those tedious diary entries. Things are starting to slowly gear up for the confrontation though...

Just skip the stupid diary parts. Read the conversations, the confrontations!

(I do this all the time and if I like the book enough, I'll re-read to understand the plots )

[Crusader]

Originally Posted by maianhvk

Just skip the stupid diary parts. Read the conversations, the confrontations!

(I do this all the time and if I like the book enough, I'll re-read to understand the plots )

Unfortunately I'm not capable of skipping anything in a book. I have to read everything or else I feel I haven't read it. Of course that excludes indexes, acknowledgements and the like.

[thinkpad]

I'm about halfway through the Scarlet Lion. I like it, what can I say I'm a sucker for historical fiction and Elisabeth Chadwick knows how to write. As a bonus I'm learning a whole bunch of new words that I didn't know from before.

The only thing that bothers me is that it was bought as a package with all three books. You download one file and the file contains all three books.

This is not a good way to publish any series.

First of all it's very hard to keep track off how far you've gotten into the book because the total is shown for all three books .

Second when you want to jump directly to book number two or three you've got to page through the TOC to find the right jump spot

This is a problem I've seen on several occasions when buying a series.
- They're not splitting it into several files which clearly should have been done for the benefit of the consumer. I can see the usefulness of just having one file for organisational purposes but it doesn't way up for the problems with the readability.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Last week I got back to and finished Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth (concept & Story by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, Script by Apostolos Doxiadis, Art by Alecos Papadatos, Color by Annie Di Donna).

Ooh, I loved that when I read it from the library a couple of years ago. Keep meaning to get my own copy, and I've got a discount coupon for Chapters that I have to use up with a minimum requirement amount, so it's going on the list.

If you like "thinky" history-based comics, you might possibly like some of Jim Ottaviani's collaborative science-history graphic novels, especially Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb, Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's life, discoveries, and the century he shaped, and Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards, which is much, much more "lite", but just plain fun about the early feud over dinosaur discoveries.

They're not nearly as serious or in-depth as Logicomix, but still good, informative reads. More info and samples on the GT Labs website, if anyone's interested. There is a 2-part bande dessinée which is about as deep and informative as Logicomix about chemist Fritz Haber and the changing role of invention and social grouping near turn-of-the-century Germany, but it's in French and I can't remember the author's name (and the library catalogue is not helping; I'd have to go over and check the shelves).

As for me, read Michael Flynn's novella The Forest of Time which was a pretty good alternate history/problems of time-travel tale which I rather liked. It turns out I already have a paper copy of this in my old used Gardner Dozois' Fifth Annual Year's Best Science Fiction; however, I've either never read this story, or read it so long ago that I've forgotten it entirely.

This was free from the Phoenix Pick Free Book of the Month promotion sometime last year, and I read it to decide whether or not to get the full story collection, which is 50% off (along with all their other e-books) when buying directly from the publisher's website this month using the coupon code in their newsletter (also posted in the Deals forum, search for this month's free pick "Arm of the Stone" to see the coupon for it and the 50% off sale).

The answer to that is definitely "yes", and I'll be quite happy to spend, as Flynn includes commentary after each of the stories on why he wrote them and the choices he made in writing them. I love that sort of stuff, and definitely worth spending on good DRM-free backlist sf/fantasy reprints.

Also, his filksong "There's a Bimbo on the Cover of My Book!" (which you can read in the portion provided by the Kindle sampling mechanism) is itself alone worth the price of entry. It's just so applicable to so much sf/fantasy cover art.*

Now on to evaluate what else I might want from PPick's other backlist authors who've provided a freebie and have more reprint works for sale.

* Y HELO THAR, BAEN! Mind you, I could live with green scaly dragons on the cover that have nothing to do with the book itself. And one of their Andre Norton reprints managed to incorporate dragons and rocketships, if I recall correctly. Probably needed more rayguns, though.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

If you like "thinky" history-based comics, you might possibly like some of Jim Ottaviani's collaborative science-history graphic novels, especially Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb, Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's life, discoveries, and the century he shaped, and Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards, which is much, much more "lite", but just plain fun about the early feud over dinosaur discoveries.

...More info and samples on the GT Labs website, if anyone's interested....

Thanks for that information and link. I'll be sure to check those out. I wonder if any are available for reading on the iPad? Logicomix is print-only.