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

[Ravensknight]

They Were 11! (Eyeshield 21 #21)
Riichiro Inagaki
4 Stars

The games are starting to get longer and more intense and hence are spanning multiple volumes. I kind of miss the 1 volume, 1 football game thing. Oh well, if it was that way the whole time I'd be complaining about how the manga-ka needed to spread things out a little. I guess I just can't be pleased :-D

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'm just beginning Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes: billed as an interstellar closed-room murder mystery--with clones.

Bit of a slow start for me, but all in all, a fun little mystery with unique premise/setting. Great characters.

Now starting The Iron Ghost: the second in Jen Williams' "Copper Cat" series.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kansaskyle

Midnight Riot was a three-star read for me. While I enjoyed the Harry Potter series, this one with modern magic was just okay for me. I suspect some of it has to be with being an American and not getting some of the acronyms and cultural references.

I read Midnight Riot aka Rivers of London and a rather enjoyed it. My wife is from Scotland and I;ve watched a lot of UK TV shows that were shown in the US. So I do know a lot about UKisms and cultural references.

If I could have, I would have read the UK versions of the Harry Potter series. I would have preferred to read the books as written.

[MickeyC]

Originally Posted by drjd

And that was excellent. A plain case of possible accidental death turned into something highly unexpected. I can't describe the plot here because that will be a spoiler. Recommended for thriller and mystery readers.

Just finished Nothing Lasts Forever - No Secret Can Stay Buried by Vish Dhamija based on this reco from drjd and it was exactly as described. Couldn't put it down and had absolutely no idea where the plot was going as it unfolded. Great read!

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by Rev. Bob

I'm working on Christopher Nuttall's Schooled in Magic, first of eleven in the series (to date), but I'm having a little trouble getting into it. A little of that is editing, and at least some is general distraction on my part.

Still slogging away at this one, although it's speeding up. Full disclosure: It's competing with a couple of app games for my attention, which is somewhat rare for me.

I don't fault the book for this, but when one takes a generically-modern character and tosses her through a portal into a completely new world, then boots her into their equivalent of Hogwarts and makes her deal with remedial and combat magic on top of an unfamiliar society, a whole bunch of worldbuilding has to happen pretty quickly. It's handled fairly well, but there's still a lot of background to chew on in a relatively short space.

As a rough comparison, imagine Harry Potter with the whole Great Destiny thing, but nobody knows his backstory and student-on-student magic is both more common and more dangerous. It's not exactly that, but the water's about that deep.

I expect the second book to go more quickly, now that the setting's been defined and the main character's finding her place in it, and I'm weighing whether or not to buy the third right away. (It's been marked down to $1.99, but it's not obvious whether that's a sale or a permanent reduction.) Either way, once I finish what I've bought, I'll probably hop back over to finish the Big Sigma omnibus. After that... who knows?

[Rumpelteazer]

I'm currently reading Cassandra Clark's Hangman Blind, the first book in the Abbess of Meaux series. It has been on my TBR list for years and I'm sad to say it's a bit of a disappointment. The writing itself is good, but the author assumes that the average reader has a relatively good knowledge about the late 1300s. Thanks to recently watching A History of Britain series again I have a general idea, I still had to look up the details about Wat Tyler and the Peasant's Revolt. The author is also very descriptive, using the correct, but unknown names of things. Add to that that the story itself is slow (for me) and it looks like this is a series I won't be continuing with.

I will finish the story, because it isn't a bad book, but it's just one I find it hard to concentrate on and I keep getting distracted.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: Analog SFF, Mar/Apr 2017 edited by Trevor Quachri

I'm still reading this, but I've also been reading a paper copy of Callahan's Con by Spider Robinson.

Barely three stars. The problems with it are that the peril is all contrived and/or trivial, their wonderful abilities are not properly utilized, and they are too powerful to have real problems any more. Except those they have and aren't solving properly.

A disappointing fizzle to a good series.

Back to the Analog!

[issybird]

I'm reading The Six by Laura Thompson, yet another! biography of the Mitford sisters. When this came out last fall, my immediate reaction was that I had been Mitforded out and didn't need to read this (and the most immediately preceding bio of the sisters had been dreadful), but the NYTBR said in so many words that yes, you needed to read this one, too. So far, it's more impressionistic than factual, which I think is a good approach. At this point, any old Mitford hand knows the specifics.

[drjd]

Originally Posted by MickeyC

Just finished Nothing Lasts Forever - No Secret Can Stay Buried by Vish Dhamija based on this reco from drjd and it was exactly as described. Couldn't put it down and had absolutely no idea where the plot was going as it unfolded. Great read!

Glad you like it MickeyC. I can recommend another twisty crime fiction by Vish Dhamija - Doosra - The Other One, I read a few months back. It was the first novel of this British Indian author I ever read, and sincerely appreciated his talent. Although he is frequently referred to in the press as the "master of legal crime and courtroom drama", I am yet to buy any book in this genre by the author, but I wish to read them in future.

[Dngrsone]

Finished Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, From Arsenic to Zinc by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. Very interesting.

Now I am torn between a bunch of TBRs... got some Scalzi, continuing the Foreigner series, a few Biographies and some true-crime books all near the top of the list..

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

IBack to the Analog!

Which was only average overall.

The cover story, Nexus by Michael F. Flynn was only OK. I didn't really like the style or the unexplained coincidences.
The other novella, Plaisir d'Amour by John Alfred Taylor, on the other hand, was excellent.

There were three novelettes:
Europa's Survivors by Marianne J. Dyson was implausible and with an obvious ending.
Host by Eneasz Brodski was interestingly ambiguous, but a bit depressing.
The Human Way by Tony Ballantyne was OK, but no more. Given the technology shown, the economics didn't make sense.

Nine Short Stories: Six of which are time travel stories, only one of which is worth mentioning: Alexander's Theory of Special Relativity by Shane Halbach. An excellent love story involving time travel gone wrong. (The others were all rather trite.)
Of the other shorts, Unbearable Burden by Gwendolyn Clare was a very good look at AI from the AI's point of view, Concerning the Devestation Wrought by the Nefarious Gray Comma and Its Ilk: A Men in Tie-Dye Adventure by Tim McDaniel should have been shortened to a Probability Zero story, and Ecuador vs. the Bug-Eyed Monsters by Jay Werkheiser had too many implausible hidden things going on.

And then I read a short from the Baen web site: Do Bears Shoot in the Woods? by Wen Spencer. An excellent short set in the same universe as her new novel, The Black Wolves of Boston, but not the same characters.

Next up: Triple Crown by Felix Francis. I've read all the novels by Dick Francis, so it's time to see how his son gets on.

[drjd]

Originally Posted by drjd

Next up, a piece of humor, Emails From an Asshole: Real People Being Stupid by John Lindsay.

Just finished Emails From an Asshole: Real People Being Stupid by John Lindsay. A classic account of humor and pun offering an opportunity to revel in people's gullibility. Posing himself as a customer or seller, the author responds to a variety of classified ads, making ridiculous offers to unsuspecting victims. Their responses, and the ensuing conversations, lead to simultaneously non-stop laughing and gasping with disbelief.

I guess there is one more volume of this book, More Emails From an Asshole, in the market. I'll plan to buy and read that too soon.

For now, I will take up He Won't Need it Now, the first novel of James Hadley Chase, published in 1939. I bought an ebook pack of 90 novels of Chase in 2015, but did not read any, though I have read some of his books decades ago in print.

[MickeyC]

Originally Posted by drjd

Glad you like it MickeyC. I can recommend another twisty crime fiction by Vish Dhamija - Doosra - The Other One, I read a few months back. It was the first novel of this British Indian author I ever read, and sincerely appreciated his talent. Although he is frequently referred to in the press as the "master of legal crime and courtroom drama", I am yet to buy any book in this genre by the author, but I wish to read them in future.

Thanks, just put it on my TBR list

[Ravensknight]

Dune
Frank Herbert
5 Stars


Now that is a good book! It definitely deserves the accolade of Finest Science Fiction novel.

[WT Sharpe]

I'm reading Norse Mythology, the latest book by Neil Gaiman in which he retells the old stories that have had such an influence on his own writing. Like many people, his own introduction to Norse Mythology was by way of The Mighty Thor by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Larry Lieber (Lee's brother).