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

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Then came The Chaos Gate by Josepha Sherman. From a recent Baen monthly bundle. A generic fantasy that didn't catch my interest, and I abandoned about 1/3rd of the way in.

A perceptive decision. IIRC that was originally written as the sequel to a video game tie-in, which is not usually the breeding ground for depths of artistic creativity. (I actually quite like the late Josepha Sherman's novels and am pleased to see Baen posthumously reprinting some of them, but she's much better with the original work she did, especially her historical and folklore-based fantasies, rather than the assorted collabs and franchise tie-ins.) Get well soon!

As for me, continuing the impromptu re-read of Leena Lehtolainen's Maria Kallio series. Copper Heart, #3, was another one that I completely forgot the whodunnit of, right until the confrontation/confession scene.

I did notice that after having bandied about every suspect's names and the myriad ways in which they could be guilty, in pretty much every book once Maria really does have things figured out and goes off to collar the culprit, the internal narrative suddenly switches to a sort of coy, no names given* semi-ambiguity as to who it really could be while she sets off, thinking about how to deal with them and the hints that led her to. The shift in tone is a little weird, but kind of nice, like it's giving you half a chapter to do remedial catch up and try to figure it out yourself before All Is Revealed. <-- despite the extra leeway, this still didn't happen to me, though

Anyway, currently partway through a lazy re-read of #5, Death Spiral, which I actually read just a few weeks ago, and with just this short distance, I can see carefully-laid Clues I totally missed the first time around. I'm mostly on this through inertia, and will probably switch to something else now that I'm no longer quite as infectious (or at least no longer at the stages of making aackthbppt! noises like Bill the Cat from Bloom County and hacking up hairballs phlegm) and can finally handle my library books without accruing as much bad karma for spreading disease to my fellow patrons.

* And probably in the original Finnish, no genders, since IIRC they don't have gendered 3rd person pronouns, increasing the pool of last-minute suspect choices.

[Dngrsone]

Finished The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown, which is fascinating if only for the depth of information that archaeologists are capable of gleaning from the most minuscule of clues.

I think I will finally start Redshirts by John Scalzi. It ought to prove fun, and I am fighting a little depression/inertia right now.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

Due to life, a new addictive computer game and a temporary reading burn-out it took me a week and a half to finish my reread of American Gods by Neil Gaiman. It wasn't a slow read, yesterday I read 40% in only a couple of hours, I just wasn't in the mood to read much.

However, I loved the book even more than the first time around. I'm planning to read the sequel some time during summer.

Did you read the new authors preferred text edition of American Gods? If not, get ready for yet another read.

[Dngrsone]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Did you read the new authors preferred text edition of American Gods? If not, get ready for yet another read.

Dude, don't say that! It took me forever to read the original version on paper.

... dang it! the tenth anniversary version is in my e-library.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

Dude, don't say that! It took me forever to read the original version on paper.

... dang it! the tenth anniversary version is in my e-library.

You better get started. You've a long read ahead of you. And this time you cannot count it as a reread.

[Dngrsone]

LOL. It's so far down in the TBR, it'll be a reread two years from now.

[astrangerhere]

Gave Sarah Gailey's "City of Villains: Why I Don't Trust Batman" in this month's Uncanny Magazine while I was having lunch.

Fun and an interesting perspective (especially for me, a big Batman fan).

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I'm now reading Hour Game by David Baldacci, the second in his King and Maxwell series.

And a good second novel in the series, although one plot element was a bit of a cliche. I shall be cross if the series ends up with a romantic relationship before the protagonists.

Next up: A re-read of The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. The first novel in his Mistborn series. which I last read when I got it as a freebie from Tor back in 2008.

I've enjoyed the follow-on volumes set some time after the first trilogy, so a re-read is well overdue.

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by Rev. Bob

Starting my ARC of James Morrow's upcoming The Asylum of Dr. Caligari, which at $9.99 for 182 pages appears to be aimed at the "premium novella" market. I've already gotten a good chuckle out of Picasso's cameo appearance.

Nope, not finished yet. It's a short book, but the linguistic style and unfamiliar setting make it a somewhat dense one. It's a sequel of sorts to the old silent movie, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which perhaps I should have made time to watch first.

[Dngrsone]

Well, Redshirts was as fun as I'd hoped it would be. Now I am reading The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick.

[mewmartigan]

Finished up The Fireman by Joe Hill after getting it on sale from the bargains thread.

It was decent...I'm more of a SFF guy but it was entertaining. The ideas behind the disease were neat.

Not sure what to read next.....

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Next I'll complete the Rhiannsu series with The Empty Chair by Diane Duane.

I hoped for more of out of Diane Duane. There seemed to be hundreds of pages of build-up for a rather tepid finish. She waited a long time to finish the series so I expected super fabulous instead I got just ok. All that planning by Kirk made the ending come neatly together. Rated C+ [3 stars].

Next is a recent purchase, The Island Deception by Dan Koboldt. His second in the Gateways to Alissia series.

[ATDrake]

Finished The Last Pilgrim by Norwegian author Gard Sveen, 1st in his Tommy Bergmann series which I got as an AmazonCrossing pricedrop a while ago. According to the author bio-blurb in the back, this was a debut novel which netted him a hat trick of the Glass Key, Riverton Prize, and Maurits Hansen Award, putting him one up on fellow Norwegian Jo Nesbø, who got the Glass Key and Riverton for the debut of his Harry Hole* series.

This was one of those cases where the discovery of a long-dead body sparks an investigation which is as much about figuring out what was really going on back then from the reader POV as well as whodunnit from the sleuth POV. For a while, I thought it was really going to be a dual investigation case, with a sleuth in the past and a sleuth in the present each tackling related murders, which would have been pretty cool and I still hope to read one day, but it took a different approach which was nearly as interesting.

Even if it did revolve around a rather common plotline of WWII resistance/collaborator/embarrassing government secrets in occupied European countries coming to light and sparking a hasty panic cover-up and/or bonus murder chain, which I think I've seen in like, 3/4s of the cases where a sleuth has to investigate a decades-old body discovery/disappearance. Not just in European crime novels, but also visiting Americans from series like Gideon Oliver and the Faith Fairchild cozies.

Oh well, when in doubt, blame the Nazis. They're probably responsible for it in some manner anyway.

There was some clunkiness in the flow of the writing in some places (a tendency to play over-coy with pronouns instead of names when trying to hide something from the reader without really hiding it), and a lot of suspiciously specific twistiness which seemed to be set up in order that you were probably supposed to think that certain characters could have been other characters playing the same or similar roles in the plot. But the major reveals were all ultimately plausibly hinted at in advance, so while some turns were unexpected, you could see how the characters involved might have been moved to act in that way under the circumstances.

Medium-high recommend for a standard story given interesting and unusual twists (probably not if you're sensitive about bad things happening to pets or children, though) in a manner that keeps you reading by overturning your expectations about what initially seemed to have probably happened in order to find out what was really going on. I liked this one more than I thought I would going in, what with the mildly overused setup, and it certainly gave me value for money in terms of wordcount, at 7000 Kindle locations. I'm pleased that AmazonCrossing has already translated the 2nd novel (even if it looks to be an even more cliché plotline of crazed sadistic psychosexual serial killer who targets vulnerable young women, sigh), and hope they plan on getting the 3rd.

* Bergmann does seem rather Harry Hole-alike, what with his deep personal dysfunction, substance addiction, and tendency to go off on unofficially approved investigation tangent which nevertheless gets results. I'm reminded of Jørn Lier Horst's remark about how “being fed up with all the drunkards who solve crimes in Norwegian literature” led him to start writing his own successful Scandicrime novels with blackjack! and hookers!, with a reasonably well-adjusted mostly by-the-book team player career cop, even if Bergmann smokes rather than drinks to the level of borderline alcoholism.

[ReadingManiac]

I'm starting to get into the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch. It seems amusing.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: A re-read of The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. The first novel in his Mistborn series. which I last read when I got it as a freebie from Tor back in 2008.

I've enjoyed the follow-on volumes set some time after the first trilogy, so a re-read is well overdue.

And I enjoyed the book a lot - more than the first time around, now that I know more about this universe. Perhaps that shows that the book is technically not as good as it should be in introducing the reader to the world.

I'm going straight on to The Well of Ascension, the second in the trilogy.