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Lee Child's Bad Luck and Trouble. I have no idea why I keep reading these things. I can accept Reacher's physical invincibility as a necessary element in the premise of the series, but his excursions into Sherlockian deduction drive me insane in their certainty. Example: Reacher discovers that someone has deposited $1030 into his bank account. From this, he deduces that it was put there by an old army friend asking for help. He call his friend, only to discover that she is on her way to LA. He doesn't know where she is staying. He gets on a plane with the intention of tracking her down through deductive reasoning alone. He finds her in the first place he looks. This kind of thing happens three times in every book in the series. Aggravating.
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May 28, 2010 15:48
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Finished The Postman by David Brin. A really good post-apocalyptic novel. I enjoyed the whole going from town to town storyline and meeting different types of communities. The battle with the Holnists especially towards the end of the novel really led to a satisfying end. Hollywood apparently made a movie of this with Kevin Costner and I've decided to torture myself and watch it to compare it with the book.
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May 28, 2010 16:43
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Speaking of Stephen King and talent...O Rapture posted:Just finished The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons and thought that, together with its predecessor, Hyperion, that this was a tremendous work. Who is the better writer between King and Simmons? I am not sure if I can honestly answer this. I think King has better books (which for me were all written before 1990), but considering how many genres Simmons has crossed into (and that I still like to read him) it is just tough for me to say. Both of them do have problems with writing endings.
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May 28, 2010 17:50
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nate fisher posted:Speaking of Stephen King and talent... Simmons might not be able to end a book to save his life but at least he can write a good beginning and middle which gives him two points over King.
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May 28, 2010 18:02
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dokmo posted:Lee Child's Bad Luck and Trouble. I have no idea why I keep reading these things. I know, they're so formulaic and belief-beggaring, but yet somehow compelling. I can't even remember which is which any more (not helped by the Kindle, where I don't even really associate with the cover art). Love it! I just finished 61 Hours, and also the latest Sandford, Storm Prey. Read them in two days combined, such an indulgence.
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May 28, 2010 21:35
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Just finished Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It was brilliant and I really regret giving it up back when I was in high school. I'm still not sure how to take the punch-to-the-gut ending. The most fascinating aspect of this novel is the fact that it was written in the early '30s. Up next, I'm going to try to get my hands on We to see how it compares. If anyone has read both of these, which one did you prefer?
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May 28, 2010 22:42
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Oncogene posted:Up next, I'm going to try to get my hands on We to see how it compares. If anyone has read both of these, which one did you prefer? I liked We by a slim margin, and really need to read it again.
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May 28, 2010 22:45
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Oncogene posted:Just finished Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It was brilliant and I really regret giving it up back when I was in high school. I'm still not sure how to take the punch-to-the-gut ending. The most fascinating aspect of this novel is the fact that it was written in the early '30s. I read We earlier this year and really enjoyed it. It was a quick read (I finished it in a day), but I love the diary-like narrative and the story in general is gripping. It's sort of hard to compare to Brave New World, but I probably liked BNW a little better, if only because I enjoyed the idea of creating people in vats.
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May 29, 2010 04:57
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LooseChanj posted:
You probably read a good deal of sci-fi. How does Lewis compare?
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May 29, 2010 05:39
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The Mantis posted:You probably read a good deal of sci-fi. How does Lewis compare? Lewis is interesting doing sci-fi because he hated science and the Space Trilogy is basically a condemnation of progress. I liked Out of the Silent Planet, found the religious bullshit irritating as hell in Perelandra and don't remember what I thought of That Hideous Strength other than the name is pretty sweet.
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May 29, 2010 07:35
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Zamboni Jesus posted:found the religious bullshit irritating as hell in Perelandra That was the best stuff. Everything else was boring fluff.
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May 29, 2010 11:44
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Last chance to see by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. The book describes Adams' experiences while travelling with the co-author and zoologist to have a last chance to see severely endangered animals around the world. I was afraid that Adams' humour would be misplaced in a book with such a depressing topic, but he manages to make you laugh even while reminding you of the horrible things we are doing to our environment. What struck me the most besides his horrifying description of Komodo Island was the chapter about the Yangtze River Dolphin. -> This might spoil your enjoyment slightly so I put it in tags <- Its the last endangered animal described in the book and obviously meant to cheer you up since it describes the surprising efforts by pretty much everyone to save it. It really gives you a hopeful feeling that maybe humanity isn't quite that hosed and if we put a modicum of care into how we treat other species, we can coexist. But BLAMMO, nearly 20 years later, the dolphins are extinct. . The book really manages to convey Adams surprisingly deep sense of love for nature and it contains one of the most beautiful one-sentence justification for preserving it that I've ever read. Highly, HIGHLY recommended. My edition of the book had a foreword by Richard Dawkins and of course it spoiled both the funniest and most touching parts of the book. gently caress forewords. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. It's been described to me as The Name of the Rose in medieval Turkey with paintings instead of books. When it comes to the story itself this is spot on, and you can also find lots of Ecoesque/postmodern touches in his writing style. The overall structure is rather unique though, with several unreliable narrators taking turns in telling the story while -> here comes a real final paragraph in the book spoiler <- behind the narrators themselves is an unreliable narrator, who is both a character in the story (coincidentally named Orhan) and also the author himself. It's a rather entertaining murder-mystery but it also gives a fascinating insight into the tradition of islamic illustration. Definitely not for everyone though, it's very slow moving and the subject matter might bore lots of people.
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May 29, 2010 15:34
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Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman. I had previously read his book "Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs", a stellar collection of series of essays on pop culture which I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with. I really enjoyed his style of prose and dry sense of humor which is why I picked up this novel, and I was not disappointed. It's the story of several residents of a small North Dakota town, Owl, their existential crises, and the months of their boring lives leading up to a deadly freak blizzard. I put down the book for a few months halfway through, and totally forgot all about the initial foreshadowing of the storm, so final chapters were riveting, nail-biting, and delightfully saddening. Still, it managed to stay darkly funny cover to cover, and somehow make a small town where nothing of any significance every happens seem like the most important place in the world.
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May 29, 2010 19:43
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I just finished The Goal: A process of ongoing improvement for one of my MAcc classes. It's a business theory book in novel form. A pretty quick read and it's the framework for how most production facilities are run today so it's pretty interesting.
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May 30, 2010 07:40
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Just finished Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland. Not impressed with it at all, actually -- seems like it was two separate novels with a hashed-together 'peace and love' ending to get them to mesh. Just picked up Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami though, so good times ahead.
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May 31, 2010 01:41
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Daniel Okrent's Last Call, a history of the US Prohibition that lasted from 1920 to 1933, brought into being by a strange alliance of evangelical Christians, xenophobes, Ku Klux Klanners, and feminists. The author focuses most of his energy on the latter group, who paired prohibition with women's suffrage as their twin goals from the latter years of the 19th century, and who formed the base of the largest political pressure group (the author claims) in the history of the USA, the Anti-Saloon League. I was completely unaware of the feminist angle to prohibition, but it makes sense in retrospect: drunk husbands couldn't have been much fun to put up with, and if they got violent or pissed their money away on booze wives had little recourse. Prohibition was defeated by the naiveté of its advocates, who imagined that people's appetite for drinking alcohol could be diverted to other drinks. The cluelessness of these people (the "drys") is a major theme in the book, but the author also discusses the inventive folks who found a million ways to get around the laws and the giant criminal organisations that emerged from bootlegging operations.
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May 31, 2010 03:42
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Tailored Sauce posted:Finished The Postman by David Brin. A really good post-apocalyptic novel. I enjoyed the whole going from town to town storyline and meeting different types of communities. The battle with the Holnists especially towards the end of the novel really led to a satisfying end. Expect to be disappointed as all the most interesting stuff (supercomputers, the supersoldier stuff) from the book doesn't make it.
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May 31, 2010 04:47
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Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen. The first half was painful to read as the plot pieces were set up because I despised all the characters except Peter and Bob. The second half was basically just standard pot-boiler stuff only bogged down by uninteresting family drama. The main romantic relationship in the book didn't feel even remotely realistic. I have The Corrections in my reading queue but I'm not feeling overly inclined towards it at the moment.
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May 31, 2010 07:13
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Oncogene posted:Just finished Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It was brilliant and I really regret giving it up back when I was in high school. I'm still not sure how to take the punch-to-the-gut ending. The most fascinating aspect of this novel is the fact that it was written in the early '30s. Facial Fracture turned me onto The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh after finishing Huxley's After Many a Summer. They both tell good tales of early Hollywood and California lifestyles from a british perspective and the edition that came from the library was filled with some great illustration. I also just finished Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. It has a lot of history about the mormon faith but focuses on the development of fundamentalist polygamists. It has some pretty creepy stuff about a modern day double murder done by two brothers who believed they were called upon from god to murder their brothers wife and baby.
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May 31, 2010 07:52
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I was ordering some books of Amazon and decided to get Sh*t My Dad Says to put me over the super saver shipping threshold. I wasn't expecting much, but it was a quick and entertaining read. Quotes from the twitter feed are interspersed with tales from the author's childhood. The manchild in me loved all the profanity and vulgarity. I'd say it was worth the $9.
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Jun 1, 2010 01:16
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I was finally convinced by my SO to read Oryx and Crake after a stubborn refusal based on the description on the back of the book. Whoever wrote said description should be fired. The book is an incredible post apocalyptic distopia story that keeps you on your toes, and has well-rounded characters that both disgust you and endear you to them. There are elements of love, jealousy, and self-discovery intertwined with a need for basic survival and dealing with extreme loneliness. Hell, the "chickienobs" alone are worth reading the book for. On an even nerdier note I just finished the Ravenor omnibus and loved it. And I'm going to begin re-reading Barry Hugharts books about the mishaps and misadventures of Master Li and Number Ten Ox again this summer. Highly recommend Bridge of Birds
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Jun 1, 2010 07:26
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Autarch_Severian posted:Hell, the "chickienobs" alone are worth reading the book for. This is one of the few times I've actually said "Oh god gross" aloud while reading a book. And I've read AM Homes.  Just got done with Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy. Realized I didn't even post my readings for May in the "52 books this year"-thread, so I'll have to update later. It was good reading. Gibson does some solid characterization, and you actually can tell he became a better writer from Neuromancer, through Count Zero, to Mona Lisa Overdrive (which I think is the best one). Now it's time to finish Clash of Kings 
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Jun 1, 2010 16:38
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Well, I wouldn't call it "just", but I recently finished Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card. I honestly had to force my way through it. A few months ago I realized I was seriously lacking in having read many "classics" of science fiction, so I picked up Ender's game and loved it. I even gave it to my dad who loved it as well (and my dad is REALLY picky about his sci-fi, so I considered that good validation). Then I went on to Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide. I was okay with everything, up to the end of Xenocide, when he totally lost me. Speaker kept me interested enough, but in Xenocide, Card takes a sudden turn to some pretty sketchy metaphysics that makes me want punch someone. I won't go into spoilers, but I just don't know where it came from. The whole series started out pretty hard sci-fi and then ... ugh. Children of the Mind just kept heaping on the metaphysics crap and characters that made me want to gouge my eyes out. It was also poorly written - I'm not sure what happened to him. Maybe all his stuff was like this and I was too engrossed to notice. Way too much mental exposition, way too much passive voice, characters would explain what was happening and what they were thinking and then events would take place that explained all the same stuff, so the mental exposition could all be cut out without harm. Xenocide and Children could *easily* have been one book. I guess he got paid by the word or something. Anyway, now I'm catching up on my Jack McDevitt. I loves me some McDevitt.
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Jun 1, 2010 17:34
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I just finished the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman. I bought The Golden Compass at the local B&N because I was wanting something to read, and had already run through the entire works of my usual authors. The next day I ordered a whole bunch of books by various authors that were recommended to me here. I got a bit busy, and was planning on skipping Pullman due to the Y/A stigma. I started reading The Golden Compass the day before all my other books arrived, and I was amazed. The entire series was an extremely enjoyable read, with a little bit of actual depth behind the plot, and even plot twists that I didn't see coming. Once I got past the inherent goofiness in daemons and armored bears, this was a fast, enjoyable read I'd recommend to anyone that doesn't go to church three times a week. Now onto my new China Mieville book, Perdido Street Station - read the first few chapters and it looks like I'm in for a hell of a change of pace.
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Jun 1, 2010 19:32
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I tried to read Gravity's Rainbow and got to around page 500 before being completely stonewalled and just not reading anything for a few months. I decided to get back on track with something easy, so I read The Chamber by John Grisham. It had a pretty compelling plot and it was pretty much what I read it for - a quick, easy read. I thought it was a bit odd that The whole Rollie Wedge plotline ended up being fairly pointless, he hangs around the book for suspense but then never actually does anything.
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Jun 2, 2010 03:44
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I just finished Simon Winder's Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History and it's basically the book I would write about German history if I were British and twice as old. It's sort of a Dave Barry Does Germany but traipsing through history, interspersed with anecdotal stuff from the author's travels. It also reaffirms my understanding that there is nothing universally uplifting in German history whatsoever 
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Jun 2, 2010 05:06
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Madame Bovary. I'm getting bored of this kind of novel (adulterous woman in high society -- or trying to live in high society). I'm halfway through Anna Karenina and probably won't finish it for awhile because I'm so bored of them.
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Jun 2, 2010 18:01
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muscles like this? posted:Expect to be disappointed as all the most interesting stuff (supercomputers, the supersoldier stuff) from the book doesn't make it. I couldn't get past the first 10 minutes. Instead, I moved on to and finished Bad Astronomy and Flash Forward. I loved the amount of physics involved in the novel and how, aside from the flash forward event itself, it was very different from the TV series.
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Jun 3, 2010 01:04
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Just finished The Infernal City. I love the Elder Scrolls series, so I figured it could hold my attention. Except for some awkwardly written dialogue and the fact that's a two-parter so it ended on a cliffhanger, it wasn't bad, though I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't give a poo poo about the series' backstory. Moving on to Feed by Mira Grant now, and halfway through it. Everyone likes zombies right?
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Jun 3, 2010 14:32
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I just finished Storm Front and really liked it. It was fast paced and funny and just good entertainment. I immediately picked up the second book in the Dresden files and I suppose I'll probably read them all.
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Jun 3, 2010 16:28
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Just finished Everything Matters by Ron Currie Jr. It's pretty rough and you can see that Currie's still figuring out his style. There's a lot of deus ex machina and the story doesn't go the way the synopses make you believe it will. The world ending is just a backdrop- the book is more about the importance of family. Eh.
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Jun 3, 2010 17:09
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I finished Balzac's Cousin Bette, Ian McEwan's Amsterdam, and a reread of Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, but not all at once. Cousin Bette was really enjoyable. I've read more English than French lit so I kept coming back to thinking of Trollope, based mostly on the dual focus (in both Cousin Bette and Trollope's Barchester books) on money and morality. I'll certainly read more Balzac in the future. Amsterdam was the first McEwan novel I've read. It was a good, quick read; I finished it in an afternoon. I think something in the blurb called it a satire, and fair enough, but the humour of it seemed more like that of a cruel-spirited parlour comedy. If I have a favourite book it's probably A Sentimental Journey. I tend to read it when I'm avoiding things I don't want to read, such as anything concerning the exam I've got on Monday. It's not better than Tristram Shandy, but it's quite short and it's wonderful.
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Jun 4, 2010 03:44
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I finally finished Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It's the first book by this author that I've managed to finish, and I absolutely am smitten! Now I get to read the big thread at last and try to figure out what other people think was actually happening. I really liked the philosophy and theoretical physics parts -- it had been too many years since I thought seriously about either topic. I can't wait to read more by this guy... I'm trying to figure out which of his many other books might be best to start with next. I hear either Cryptonomicon, or perhaps the Baroque Cycle. I actually own Snow Crash though, so maybe I'll try that one again (I never could get into it, the other time I tried to read it). Or maybe I'll just go back to reading The Blade Itself since I got about 30 pages in before Anathem took all my attention.
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Jun 4, 2010 20:41
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Just finished Triple Zero by Karen Traviss, accidentally reading the 2nd book before finishing Hard Contact. I don't feel like I missed that much. It was really good however I thought, so I bought True Colors and Order 66. Is 501st worth it at all?
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Jun 4, 2010 21:06
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Argenterie posted:I finally finished Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It's the first book by this author that I've managed to finish, and I absolutely am smitten! We seem to be on kind of the same wavelength (e.g. really enjoyed Hyperion), so let me enthusiastically push you towards Cryptonomicon, which I just finished. It's a book half set in the last decade, half during WWII. It would work and is enjoyable for the characters and clever plot alone, but offers much more. Stephenson's geeky obsessiveness here is pointed at cryptography, cryptanalysis and coding. So if you like any of the three, or just mathematics and mathematics theory, there is a lot there, though an understanding of these things is not necessary for an enjoyment of the book. In addition to characters that spend their time puzzling over theory and technical subjects, Stephenson is also kind enough to create a few grittier types, characters which push along the action in the book (the one set in WWII reminded me unfailingly of Brock Sampson). This is starting to read like a review, so I'll just say I enjoyed it, despite the size (900+ pages) and the underwritten female characters.
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Jun 4, 2010 21:59
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O Rapture posted:the underwritten female characters. Yeah, no kidding. "Oh, you're a nerdy hacker who's out of shape? I'm a beautiful badass scavenger woman who's been living a rough life since her childhood. Let's gently caress." At least he blew his load in the first 30 seconds... I laughed at that. It's been a while since I read that book, but I seem to remember most women in that book existing to have sex with the male characters.
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Jun 4, 2010 22:20
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Just finished Norwegian Wood. Very very very good, actually.
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Jun 5, 2010 02:14
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Just finished Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks (writing as Ian Fleming). After I finished it I was surprised to find out it was the thirty-sixth novel involving Bond but obviously not all of them were by Fleming. I enjoyed the ride, the action sequences were well written. There was a significant lack of detail in a majority of the scenes though probably sufficient for what it was meant to be, an action book. I thought the villain of the piece was the shining light and made the book for me.
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Jun 5, 2010 03:18
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Just finished How To Build A Dinosaur -- pretty good pop-science stuff, I learned a bunch about gene expression and paleontology. Writing is not super crisp, but it zips along pretty well, and it made me feel a little smarter. I know I read some other things recently, but my brain is mush after this week -- will have to check the Kindle.
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Jun 5, 2010 05:12
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I'm on the last pages of House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. It has been pretty good. The problem with Reynolds is that he always repeats the same pattern: there is something ominous in the beginning, an ancient evil arises to threaten the planet/solar system/galaxy/creation and the last couple of hundreds of pages are spent racing desperately against time and enemies. A parallel story of the main character's childhood trauma is also involved and someone usually suffers from amnesia, more often self-inflicted than not. House of Suns is good with its setting in six million years in the future. It gives Reynolds the possibility to explore whatever he wants, which he does, but too much is spent on the plot structure seen in his earlier novels. That's why I like Pushing Ice the most: the story is really different than in most of his books. Reynolds' strength lies in the details anyway. I don't care about the chase across the galaxy, how's life on that ship?
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Jun 5, 2010 13:28
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