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

[xg4bx]

Earth Strike by Ian Douglas.

i want to like it but the info-dumps are driving me mad. i don't need to know how everything works, just toss it in there and i'll accept it. its like reading a fantasy novel and being subjected to a lesson in forging and blacksmithing with every sword swing. i'm not a physics professor, just shoot the damn alien.

[maianhvk]

I'm still reading A Tale of 2 Cities. No big deal, I've been reading it for only a month now... Only if I could keep my eyes open from the 5th minute on...

Originally Posted by The Terminator

Yeah but he put it in the book so I thought what the heck I might as well read it, I'm about 400pg through it now. I didn't know you had read it, how did you like it?

It was so hard. It took me a very long boring while to plow through the miscellaneous details of Bishop Myriel's life, including his habits, sister, home decorations... even his meeting an outlaw, if I remember it right.

So you can see, after all the efforts, I was resentful to discover that Bishop Myriel plays no big role but merely a sleeping beauty to look at in less than a minute

I think you already made it to the later parts, but I put this in spoiler in case you didn't.

Spoiler:

Why Hugo couldn't just say,
"Valjean met this Bishop named Myriel. Valjean happened to have a sneak peek when the bishop was sleeping and his pure, kind face (under the moonlight) changed the ex-prisoner's nature completely: Valjean suddenly turned good, etc."
and save us some hundred pages, remains a mystery to me Was he paid by word count?

But from that on, things went very smoothly and easily. The story became interesting, truly touching, and of course had less nonsense.

[Traye]

Originally Posted by aquabel

I just finished reading Tess Gerritsen's The Apprentice. I really enjoyed it, although not as much as The Surgeon. I haven't watched the Rizzoli and Isles series yet, so will be interesting to see how it compares with the books.

I just bought Matthew Reilly's Scarecrow Returns, so think I'll read that next.

I'm a huge TG fan. I love the Rizzoli and Isles book and have them all in paperback.

Originally Posted by mikealalind

I am reading Book of Shadows by Alexandra Sokoloff. So far I am enjoying it a lot

I really liked The Harrowing by Sokoloff. I might look into this one.

[ATDrake]

First graphic novel and also first library book finished of the year. Also first Canadian interest book. Though I'd need to read another to get myself to the CRTC-mandated 30% CanCon minimum.

Scott Chantler's Two Generals is a memoir of his grandfather Law Chantler's time during WWII, when as a young man he signed up and shipped out with the Highland Light Infantry of Canada, which apparently comes with its own battle-bagpipers, which is the most awesome thing I have heard about any branch of the Canadian military.

Chantler grandpère would eventually see action during the Invasion of Normandy, and would be part of the crucial series of assaults on the way to Caen, which helped tie up German forces enough to allow Normandy to be taken.

Based on the diaries of Law Chantler and letters from his best friend Jack Chrysler, who accompanied him all the way to the front, as well as official records of the HLI, this was a fairly standard young-man-prepares-to-go-to-war-and-finds-out-it's-not-at-all-like-he-expected sort of story, with moments of insight and humour and friendship and folly amidst the inevitable tragedy.

But it's distinguished by being told both simply and poignantly with beautiful art, done very ligne claire in that cartoony almost-iconically stylized human figures combined with lushly detailed settings which the Tintin albums popularized and refined.

The colouring of these is done with elegant minimalism: the black and white outlines filled and toned by gradations of army fatigue drab, splashes of red not unlike drying blood, and shades of grey. These are used nearly monochromatically, with the separate colours usually confined to illuminating just one section, and in the scenes where they are finally combined, the juxtaposition carries a sudden, shocking effect.

Seriously, this is gorgeous work, and you can see a few pages of it yourself over at Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart's webpage for the book using the Browse & Search feature (or perhaps try Amazon's Look Inside, which will probably have more pages available).

Highly recommended for graphic novel and/or WWII historical/personal experience buffs. It's got interesting anecdotes about life in training in England as well as the Normandy stuff and gives a good sense of what it was like for some of the men who went over there.

I really liked this one (but then I was inclined to like it anyway, since Chantler is one of my favourite GN creators and his Hudson's Bay Company fur trading war-with-the-French-over-Rupert's-Land historical fictional GN Northwest Passage is also highly recommended, especially in the excellent deluxe annotated edition) and hope Chantler does more like it in the future.

[carld]

Originally Posted by Xanthe

"Red Storm Rising" is, I think, my favorite Tom Clancy book. That's one that I re-read every few years.

That was the first book of his I ever read. It was a real "wow" experience. I haven't enjoyed anything else of his nearly as much.

[benham]

Originally Posted by carld

That was the first book of his I ever read. It was a real "wow" experience. I haven't enjoyed anything else of his nearly as much.

It will be awhile for Red Storm Rising. I am doing the series first and am only up to Patriot Games.

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by alansplace

Well I finished reading Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire and then finished watching the movie as well. The book was great and the movie was a well-done adaptation of the book. So now I'm starting to read the final Book in the Millennium series, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. It'll probably be just as good. At least I hope so.

Well, IMHO The Millennium Trilogy is really super special. A tip, if you read The Girl Who Played With Fire, just assume that you're going to also read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is much more of a free-standing book than these two). And also plan to read them back-to-back. I decided that I can't leave Sweden till I've also read John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let The Right One In. So I'm starting to read it right now.

[missimpossible]

Finished Castle in the Pyrenees. What a turd. Glad I've read some other of Gaarder's work, because if I hadn't, I wouldn't have continued after this. Which would have been a shame as I loved Sophie's World.

Not sure what to start now. Read the first chapter of Gardens of the Moon and I'm enjoying it already, but it takes a lot of concentration and now that I'm back at uni most of my focus goes on my work. Might give Wonder Boys a whirl alongside it.

[tecweston]

Just finished:

- The Nerdist Way by Chris Hardwick - I loved this book. It's a self-help book for nerds, about how to take the obsessive energy we normally put into playing video games and following TV shows, and refocus them into creative outputs effectively.

Currently reading:

- 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (78%)

- 11/22/63 by Stephen King (39%)

- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (37%)

- A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin (19%)

- A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin (13%)

Reading next:

- The House of Silk: A Sherlock Holmes Novel by Anthony Horowitz

- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Edit: apparently I'm not allowed to say what I do for a living. Okey doke.

[Todd Young]

Going Wrong by Ruth Rendell.

[caleb72]

Originally Posted by alansplace

I decided that I can't leave Sweden till I've also read John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let The Right One In. So I'm starting to read it right now.

Oooh - tell me what you think of it.

[coderserdar]

jack higgins - the president's daughter

an excellent sean dillon adventure
everyone should read that

[xg4bx]

still struggling through Earth Strike. 70% of the way through and i'm starting to skip entire passages.

no insult to the author but even the driest David Weber info-dumps and political discussions are a michael bay movie compared to this sleeping pill.

theres a battle for the first 50 pages or so. since then its been the poor outcast/backwater pilot moping about how miserable he is and talking to his shrink. no lie. its making me hate space opera.

but i've gotta power through because i can't give up this late in the game. and theres 2 more books in this series....ugh.

i've read indie sci-fi infinitely superior to this agency novel. next time anybody tells me that indie authors aren't "as good" i'm going to laugh in their face

[ATDrake]

Finished another library book and another purchase from Poisoned Pen Press' 99 cent introductory mystery sale.

Changes by Mercedes Lackey is the latest in her "Collegium Chronicles" series-within-the-Valdemar-series. And it does seem to be intended as an ongoing, rather than the standard trilogy these things used to be, as once again we get slow-burn "development" of Mags and his friends' issues, and some form of progression on the "mysterious foreigners who have it in for the Valdemarans in general and Mags in particular" plot.

Actually, this can be best summed up by a thoroughly ironic passage within the actual book:

Everything else was, oh gods, the same old problems. Nothing had actually been done about them.
...
Nothing had changed. They were all circling the same stagnant problems, accomplishing nothing. And from the way things looked, they would keep circling the same stagnant problems forever.

Three books in, I totally agree with this assessment, and I freely admit I've been continuing to read the new volumes in the series out of sheer morbid trainwreck curiosity.

This is not to say that the book is a total retread, because while the plots and character points are being drawn out and extended and recycled (and they've even re-invented that polo/volleyball/field hockey game they used in the Alberich books), you do find out some semi-nifty background details, such as the fact that there's a CSI: Haven team out there investigating mysterious causes of death and more of what happened to magic and the knowledge of it between Vanyel's death and Selenay's reign. And there is some actual baby-steps-forward progress on the overarching mysterious assassin/saboteur plot and the characters' personal issues.

But aside from that, the protagonist's continuing use of phonetically-spelt dialect in word and thought is seriously annoying, since he's started talking and thinking and internal-monologuing more, and I just want to club him like I was actually working in a goth club. Bartending. In the dark.

Speak proper Valdemaran; I know you can because you made a point of it in one passage. I don't care if you keep up the spoken-word pretense to fool people into thinking that you're dumber and worse-educated than you actually are. But I don't want to see that many needless eliding apostrophes and quaint folksy mispellings in your stupid thoughts, dammit!

Can't recommend, especially as it looks like they're going to keep dragging out the story over even more volumes. But okay for a library read if you're curious about developments to the setting.

Mary Reed & Eric Meyer's Four for a Boy in their Istanbul (not Constantinople)-set "John the Chamberlain" historical mystery series, was quite good.

Though 4th in the series (and they all seem to have conveniently cutesily numbered-theme naming which makes it easier to read in order when the volumes are available), this appears to be chronologically the first, telling a flashback adventure which probably explains how the eunuched John rose to his position of power within the Emperor Justin/future Emperor Justinian's court.

I can never see that first emperor's name without thinking of a passage I read in Pulitzer prize-winner Justin Kaplan & Anne Bernays' quasi-academic pop-culture book, The Language of Names: What We Call Ourselves and Why It Matters, where he writes that until the recent generational surge of popularity, his given name had been an unusual, anomalous choice mainly remembered for having once been a middling-obscure Roman emperor.

With that in mind, I kind of wonder which middling-obscure Roman emperor's name will once again rise the waves of popularity to the top of the naming charts. Probably not Commodus.

Anyway, this was quite well done, with nice research, interesting and well-drawn characters, the sort of usual backstabbing intrigue one gets when getting caught up in Imperial politics, and a rather clever who-ultimately-dunnit which was quite unexpected, though all the clues had been laid in advance and were occasionally even pointed at for the Gentle Reader like me who can't figure out what's right under our noses.

Mind you, the portrayal of the future Empress Theodora seemed a bit one-note, but perhaps she gets more nuance in the other volumes.

Plus it had a glossary of historical terms/notes in the back, which I always like to see.

Strong recommend for historical mystery readers (also a good general read for clever whodunnits, IMHO), especially considering that it's currently a dirt-cheap 99 cents in publisher Poisoned Pen Press' DRM-free introductory sale. I've already looked up the other books in the library and will be borrowing them once I've finished some other stuff and have more free time (and non-inclement weather).

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by xg4bx

still struggling through Earth Strike. 70% of the way through and i'm starting to skip entire passages.

no insult to the author but even the driest David Weber info-dumps and political discussions are a michael bay movie compared to this sleeping pill.

theres a battle for the first 50 pages or so. since then its been the poor outcast/backwater pilot moping about how miserable he is and talking to his shrink. no lie. its making me hate space opera.

but i've gotta power through because i can't give up this late in the game. and theres 2 more books in this series....ugh.

i've read indie sci-fi infinitely superior to this agency novel. next time anybody tells me that indie authors aren't "as good" i'm going to laugh in their face

But it's only $1.99