What are you reading right now?

[piñata]

I'm with you on the thrillers, Ape. Some of those plot twists are a bit too weird. But sometimes they make up for it with lots of fan service... was there a lot of sex in this book?

[Ape]

Unfortunately not. The writing was really good though, I actually really liked and legitimately cared about what happened to the main character. But yea, the twist was a little bit extreme.

[Ape]

Whoops. Been awhile since I updated the stuff I've been reading on this site. >_<

After One of Us I read Tyrannosaur Canyon by Preston Douglas. It's a thriller that starts out with a suspicious murder in the desert and it turns out to be an epic struggle between scientists/government secret agents/random cowboy+monk over a dinosaur fossil...As I said, it's a thriller. =P

Then I read Renfield: Slave of Dracula by Barbara Hambly. It's a spin-off of the traditional story of Dracula from the view point of Renfield. I liked it.

After that was Valley of the Kings by Cecelia Holland. It starts out as a simple story about a man trying to discover King Tuts tomb (I believe it was based on the true story as well) and then the 2nd half of the book is a historical fiction on Tuts life and whatnot. Each story is a bit short but it wasn't bad.

Then I read The Fiend in Human by John MacLachlan Gray. It had GREAT atmosphere. The story itself is fairly generic. Just a random murder mystery with the typical twists and turns. But what the novel was good at was really giving the reader a sense of the time period, which is Victorian London.

After that was Jackal by Charles Grant. There are quotes on the cover by Stephen King about how Grant is some great horror writer and one of the greatest of all time. I think he was drugged. It wasn't very good.

Then came The Rainy Season by James P. Baylock. I really liked it, though it wasn't quite what I expected.

Then I read another book by Charles Grant, called The Black Carousel. It was aweful! I won't be looking into Charles Grant any time soon.

[piñata]

Dec 1, 2008 20:25:13 GMT -5 Ape said:

Then I read Renfield: Slave of Dracula by Barbara Hambly. It's a spin-off of the traditional story of Dracula from the view point of Renfield. I liked it.

Hey, I know that name! Barbara Hambly writes Star Wars novels. I didn't know she did vampire stuff too... gonna have to check that out.

[Ape]

She also has some big series that seems to be either horror or some murder/thriller type of deal. I almost checked out one of the books when I realized just as I was about to walk away from the area that all the surrounding books had similar titles. Why don't they just print it on the damn cover/binder that it's part of a multi-book series!!


Or hell, printing it inside the cover would be fine to. Just do SOMETHING to let us know.


In the book I'm reading now, War of the Gods by Poul Anderson, one of the characters died and I was legitimately sad about it.

[piñata]

That's happened to me before, usually in long series with continuing storylines where you can get really attached to the characters (Star Wars, Harry Potter, Magic: The Gathering). The Silmarillion made me cry.

[Ape]

Yea, the only problem is I'm only 50 pages into the book. Either he did a hell of a job getting me attached to the character (which I was ) or I'm too emotional during the winter...

...let's go with the first one. =P

[Ape]

Man, I havn't updated on this site since The Black Carousel? I have some catching up to do...

I read War of the Gods by Poul Anderson. It's about a viking child, whose father dies and is sent to live and grow up with giants, and then returns to his homelands to take vengeance on his father's killer. It was pretty good.

Then I read Sharkman Six by Owen West, a story about a group of marines in Somalia who keep getting harassed by a group of locals, but can't legally defend themselves due to the rules of engagement. Another good story.

Then I read Requiem by Graham Joyce, A man moves to Jerusalem after his wife dies and there he starts being tormented by a demon (or Djinn as an arab man calls it.) It was interesting enough.

Then I read Shadowmoor, a collection of short stories about the Magic: the Gathering plane by the same name. Some were good, some were bad, you know how anthologies are.

Then I read The Translator by Ward Just, which is just a story about a mans struggles living in Paris, translating books from German to English.

Then I read Locked Doors by Blake Crouch, one of the best thrillers I've ever read...and it was a sequel to another book that I didn't read.

Waterloo Station by Emily Grayson was next, where I was completely out of my element. Basically a romance starts between a student and her married teacher in college, and then the man get's sent to war and she becomes a nurse for the army. Not really my thing.

Now I'm reading Modern Magic by Anne Cordwainer, and Advanced Reading Copy that I won online. It's very good so far, definitely going to get a postive review from me.

I'm also about 80 percent through a collection of short stories called The Screaming Skull, which is incredibly lame (most of the time.)

[AnimaStone]

Heh. I must have missed this thread the first time around. I guess I'll go in order of arbitrary choice.

1) The Sandman (vols. 1-10) by Neil Gaiman. Shows, better than anything else I've come across, the reason graphic novel doesn't mean comic book. The central character, Dream, is multifaceted and genuinely interesting, and Gaiman has some rather profound stuff to say amidst the gorgeous artwork and witty author-reader dialogue. If you haven't read them, do. They're literature that's enjoying to read, which is the best kind.

2) One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. It's not pure fantasy, I know--I'm writing a senior research paper about magical realism--but DAMN, is it good. Like Sandman, it's literature that you love to read--the best kind.

3) Stuff by Tim Powers. His most recent is 3 Days to Never, which deals with Einstein, time travel paradoxes, the Illuminati-like European "secret societies", and Charlie Chaplin. A fresh and interesting take on the standard sci-fi fare of causality and such things. Last Call, Declare, and The Stress of Her Regard are probably his best. Books like these are why I'm proud to be a nerd, you know?

4) I reread Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence. Its target audience is the 13-to-15 age range, and it shows, but they're still very enjoyable.

5) Same with Lloyd Alexander's The Black Cauldron series, just replace 13-to-15 with 10-to-12.

6) Snow Queen and Summer Queen by Joan Vinge. Like Dune, they get very involved with political minutiae that isn't always interesting, but overall they're redeemed by their general coolness. Snow Queen is better IMO.

7) The Tempest by Shakespeare. It's not strictly fantasy, but it has magic in it, so I'll use that as my excuse to shamelessly plug one of the greatest authors of all time. The Tempest is one of his best.

[piñata]

Hmm. I'm reading 18 books right now... will try to find time to post them at some point.

I saw the TV-movie version of The Tempest with Peter Fonda, which was good but had a lot of Civil War-era politics in it that made me think liberties were probably taken (after all, the Civil War was way after Shakespeare's time). Haven't read Shakespeare's version, at any rate.

Books I recently finished included Eragon (good, but not great) and The Golden Compass (better than Eragon, but still not as actiony as I had hoped). One of these days Robert Rodriguez will do something in the fantasy genre, and I will rejoice.

[Predator-Fan]

Don't laugh at me but I'm reading the Twilight series.....books are amazing, havn't seen the film yet and Im probably going to waste like 20 bucks just to get the two disk edition when it comes out this sat.....so you can yell at me if I go on the movie site crying on how bad the acting is....several of my friends say that Bella was awful like she was.......don't let me finish that sentence

[piñata]

I'm reading book 1 of Twilight myself, and I have to agree it's good so far. I didn't think Bella was all that bad in the movie, though I'm biased because she was so fucking hot she could have run face-first into the camera and I would've been fine with it.

[Ape]

*refrains from commenting on the Twilight topic*

Since my last post, I have read...

The Dark Portal by Robin Jarvis
A young adult book about talking animals, mice in an old ladies basement being terrorized by evil rats from the sewers, and crazy psychic bats in the attick. I read it because I was out of books, and my car is dead so I couldn't get to the library.

Spares by Michael Marshall Smith
One of the best books I've ever read. Michael Marshall Smith is amazing, One of Us was great too. I plan on checking out the last of his books (that my library carries) during my next trip.

The Cobra Event by Richard Preston
Bioloical weapons are scary as shit, that's for sure. Definitely an eye-opener.

Photosphere by Scott MacKay
I very cool blending of science fiction and post-apocalypse fiction. I really liked it, may look into more Scott MacKay in the future, but I'm a little biased towards apocalypse lit so we'll see.

The Servants by Michale Marshall Smith
A completely different genre than the cyberpunk stuff I'm used to by him, and he still delivers. A good book if you read it with an open mind, otherwise you may get dissapointed that it's not the horror novel that it proclaims to be.

I'm currently reading The Terror by Dan Simmons, which is a massively huge 950+ pager that's both a historical fiction about Sir John Franklin's voyage to seek out the North Passage, and a horror novel, since they get frozen solid for multiple years and a strange beast emerges from the desolate wasteland of ice and snow to slowly eat and kill the crew 1 person at a time. Just to give you an idea, 2 people just disappeared, and when a crew member found "them" they found the top half of 1 man connected to the bottom half of the 2nd man sitting upright in the center of the ship, and no one saw anything. Both an educational and creepy novel, albeit it massively huge. Only 280 pages into it right now.

[Predator-Fan]

Mar 16, 2009 12:52:10 GMT -5 piñata said:

I'm reading book 1 of Twilight myself, and I have to agree it's good so far. I didn't think Bella was all that bad in the movie, though I'm biased because she was so fucking hot she could have run face-first into the camera and I would've been fine with it.

So literally you wished to bang her through the camera.........o well I wonder how the fourth movie is going to work out because.......um.....well........lets just say there are explicit scenes within the chapters four through six and probably not suited well for the younger members of the audience.........you're going to miss your chance dude.



*Looks at ape strangely* What do you have against the Twilight series? *cringes* wait.....you saw the movie and thought it was shit and then decided that the series was probably shitty too

[Ape]

Mar 22, 2009 13:23:27 GMT -5 Predator-Fan said:

*Looks at ape strangely* What do you have against the Twilight series? *cringes* wait.....you saw the movie and thought it was shit and then decided that the series was probably shitty too

I've just heard too many negative things about it by adults who actually read books regularly. It seems the only people who like the books are teenage girls who have never read a book in their lives. And Pinata, but (almost) like me, he likes everything, so he doesn't count. =P

But seriously, I've read alot of the discussions some of the people are having on Librarything.com, and the stuff these woman are talking about is pretty scary. If teenage girls are reading this and thinking it's how real relationships work, then that's pretty messed up. If Bella is half as annoying/whiny/obsessive as adult women who have read the book say she is, then I'm honestly concerned for their well-being. Harry Potter may have been intended for a younger audience (at first) but atleast Hermione was a good role model.

I guess all this is good for me though, maybe i'll hit up the local high school. If teenage girls are going to look up to Bella, then I guess I, being an adult, would be considered a 'forbidden love' to obsessive over, right? *shudder*

Seriously though, I'm not going to waste my time with it. There are hundreds of thousands of books out there, and my time on earth is limited. I'll spend my time on books that aren't intended for teenage girls.

Edit: Just checked Librarything's Zeitgeist, did I say hundreds of thousands? I mean millions, 4,300,000 to be precise. If I read 50 books a year for the next 40 years (until I'm 60) I will have read only 2,000 books in my lifetime. Two thousand books out of 4.3 million? I think I'll try to spend my time more wisely.