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

[siraks]

Originally Posted by caleb72

I must read this one day before I'm the last person on Earth to do so.

lol. everyone will get to it sooner or later i'm in the later category but have on the home page on the kobo with a couple of others that are on the tbr short list.

-----

finished monster hunter vendetta last night, well early this morning i guess. i read all evening in spurts while watching hockey and baseball on mute, went through 200 pages +. read till 230am because i wanted to finish the story. it had me sucked right in, again.
it was quite an emotional ride for being a 'brute' butt kicking book. there were high's and low's and everything in between. this second part did not disappoint and i am anxious and excited for july to read monster hunter alpha.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by caleb72

I must read this one day before I'm the last person on Earth to do so.

Don't worry. You won't ever be last. I have no intention of reading it and I'm sure there are others of us.

Also, I never read any of The Girl Who series.

Sorry, I stopped The City & The City after 40 pages. I found Mieville's writing difficult to read. Jerky run-on sentences. British colloquialisms. I felt I was somewhere else watching from afar. Difficult to visualize what was happening.

[orlok]

Originally Posted by siraks

finished monster hunter vendetta last night, well early this morning i guess. i read all evening in spurts while watching hockey and baseball on mute, went through 200 pages +. read till 230am because i wanted to finish the story. it had me sucked right in, again.
it was quite an emotional ride for being a 'brute' butt kicking book. there were high's and low's and everything in between. this second part did not disappoint and i am anxious and excited for july to read monster hunter alpha.

The first Monster Hunter is on my list to read next, again because of positive reviews from the forum.

[siraks]

Originally Posted by orlok

The first Monster Hunter is on my list to read next, again because of positive reviews from the forum.

that's how i found out about the books. wouldn't have come across it otherwise i don't think, so a big thank you to the mobile read community!!

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by siraks

[...] i am anxious and excited for july to read monster hunter alpha.

You know, you don't have to wait until mid-July. For just $15 you can get the eARC right now, a whole two months before the final ebook gets released, and ten weeks before the hardback!

Or if you bought the August 2011 webcription for $18, you could read the first half now, get the next quarter in mid June, and get the finished book (& six others) in mid July.

Baen offer you lots of ways to spend your money. :-)

(They used to send out mailings about eARCs. My favourites included lines like this:

$15. NO WAITING!

You can do better ($6.00) by waiting, but if you are a true Weber and Alicia Dierdre DeVries fan we want to take advantage of you.

Order In Fury Born, now instead of when it debuts as a WebScription title, (April 2006)

(bold added)

Honesty in advertising. Most refreshing.)

[siraks]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

You know, you don't have to wait until mid-July. For just $15 you can get the eARC right now, a whole two months before the final ebook gets released, and ten weeks before the hardback!

Or if you bought the August 2011 webcription for $18, you could read the first half now, get the next quarter in mid June, and get the finished book (& six others) in mid July.

Baen offer you lots of ways to spend your money. :-)

i did know about both options but i thought the ARC was an early non final copy, with errors and certain parts changed up for the final version?

as for the webscription, that i know of as well but haven't put much thought towards it, i like to buy books i want to read and getting 6 books and 1 that i really want to read isn't for me. it's like the bargain bin at stores, buy 2 get a 3rd free but sometimes there aren't any books i want but you grab that 3rd one just because you can.

[richvalle]

Originally Posted by caleb72

I must read this one day before I'm the last person on Earth to do so.

Or just wait for the movie.

[ATDrake]

Finished the next two books in Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody series: The Hippopotamus Pool and Seeing a Large Cat.

At a certain point, it seems like Peters realized she'd kind of written herself into a corner with the inordinately precocious child continually disappearing off for a few chapters before popping back up to save the day, not to mention a couple of repeated stylistic tics, and just decided to go with it.

One improbably talented and uncanny child whom the natives view with superstitious maybe-respect? Why not add one or two more?

One strange and uncanny cat of the ancient Egyptian temple type which the natives view with superstitious maybe-respect? Let's have two; in fact, let's have an entire litter of them!

Amelia repeatedly suspects people of being other people in disguise and then it turns out it was an entirely different set of people who were actually in disguise? Hey, let's break out the disguise kit again!

Another shirt ruined as buttons pop off in an attempt to rapidly remove it? Shirt-ruining scenes every five chapters from now on!

I actually kind of approve.

But then I tend to believe that when life hands you plot-lemons, you should stick a bar of zinc and a bar of copper into them, wire your makeshift electrodes up to the bolts of your Frankenstory, and scream "It's alive! ALIIIIIIIVE!!!!!!" in your best mad scientist voice as you turn up the juice.

Anyway, now that the books seem to have realized the utter existential absurdity of certain of the core elements, they seem a lot more relaxed and thus, fun to read, now that they're no longer asking me to take Ramses et al. seriously.

Recommend both. The Hippopotamus Pool had the marginally more realistic plot which will make more sense if you've read a previous book (The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog iirc) and actually has Ramses getting into trouble with his disappearance and not saving the day, for a change. And it seems to be the source of the "Queen Tetisheri" artifacts that show up in a Vicky Bliss book later.

But Seeing a Large Cat is actually more fun, with sheer over-the-top melodramatic silliness underlying the story, especially with the switching narrative devices. And it can be mostly read standalone, though of course it'll help to have read Lion in the Valley (though not actually necessary, since they recap the essential stuff), which was also full of sheer over-the-top melodramatic silliness.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by siraks

i did know about both options but i thought the ARC was an early non final copy, with errors and certain parts changed up for the final version?

as for the webscription, that i know of as well but haven't put much thought towards it, i like to buy books i want to read and getting 6 books and 1 that i really want to read isn't for me. it's like the bargain bin at stores, buy 2 get a 3rd free but sometimes there aren't any books i want but you grab that 3rd one just because you can.

Yes, eARCs haven't gone through final copy edit. (& depending on how late the author is on getting the book done, might be an even earlier version.)

If there are at least three ebooks in a webscription that I want, I get it. Although I've been holding off on purchases lately trying to get my TBR pile down a bit. (Fictionwise's 60% off sale rather destroyed my resolve though.)

[Fbone]

Picked up Gideon's Sword by Preston & Child from the library today.

I went there forgetting my to-be-read list and couldn't remember what was on the list. It was a pathetic scene.

[dreams]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Picked up Gideon's Sword by Preston & Child from the library today.

I went there forgetting my to-be-read list and couldn't remember what was on the list. It was a pathetic scene.

I thought I was the only one that did that.

Still reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Finished yet another in Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody, Plucky Victorian Egyptologist With Inordinately Precocious Day-Saving Offspring mysteries.

But there's a new and different demented Mary Poppins-like bloomer and parasol-wielding Amelia Peabody silhouette for the chapter headers in the library's hardcover edition. I wouldn't have thought they'd go to the trouble of designing more than one.

As a parasol wielder myself, you *cannot* have too many parasol wielding silhouettes. Just as there are many a ninja pose, there are many *important* parasol stances. It was a true genius who saw to this in the books!

[caleb72]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Sorry, I stopped The City & The City after 40 pages. I found Mieville's writing difficult to read. Jerky run-on sentences. British colloquialisms. I felt I was somewhere else watching from afar. Difficult to visualize what was happening.

I didn't have a problem with the language, but it's definitely difficult to visualise what's happening in this book. Strangely enough, that's what I fell in love with.

[WT Sharpe]

Those folks who say that Simon Hayes' Hal Spacejock: Second Course is even better than his Hal Spacejock are right. That is one funny sequel. For some reason his robot pal Clunk reminds me of Bender from Futurama. I don't know why; Clunk is much more ethical and loyal, but every time he speaks, I think of Bender.

I also just finished a short story recommended by kennyc, "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" by Roger Zelazny. It's about a poet/researcher on Mars and his investigations of and entanglement in Martian culture (it was written in 1963, when folks still had hopes of intelligent life on Mars). It's a wonderful and poetic tale with lots of heart, and I can see why it's one of Kenny's favorites.

[ATDrake]

Finished Changeless, 2nd in Gail Carriger's spoofy steampunk paranormal Victorian semi-satire investigative Parasol Protectorate/Alexia Tarabotti series.

This was considerably less deliberately silly than the first, and had a quite decent actual plot and a bit more in the way of characterization, though it was still fairly light in the latter regard.

Also had rather less of the "alpha couple" pawing at each other and as predicted, the gist of the story has settled from being romance-y to action adventure-y now that they've gotten it mostly out of their systems.

While the "mystery" wasn't really a solvable sleuthy one where you can figure out from clues given but rather the type where you follow the heroine as she follows the breadcrumb trail, it was a fairly good whatsbehindit which made sense in the context of what had been previously established in the setting.

I rather liked the gaslight gadget technobabble in this one. And the visit to uncouth and barbarous Scotland, where people (shock!) serve haggis for supper and ladies (swoon!) openly discuss their actual ages in polite company!

More serious and less of a spoof than the first volume in the series would lead you to expect, but still entertainingly tongue-in-cheek.

Recommended if you like tongue-in-cheek paranormal steampunk investigative Victorian semi-satires. With gadget-laden parasol whacking action.