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Just finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman. This is the first Gaiman book I've read, and I now I understand why he is such a well-liked author. All of the mythology allusions mixed in with pop culture references hit a perfect note with me. It was an entertaining read, and I'll definitely be looking into some of his other stuff.
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Dec 15, 2012 23:50
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Just finished Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon. It was great, although I understand why he's a little strange.
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Dec 16, 2012 03:12
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I tore through No Easy Day by "Mark Owen" in about a day and a half. It was a decent military memoir, although it was clearly cashing in on being a recent event. One thing that stuck out with me was that despite being a "kill or capture" mission, they didn't even try to hide that they blew Bin Laden away as soon as they saw him, then ran up to his body and shot him until he stopped twitching. Owen says words to the effect of "kept shooting until he wasn't a threat" but then three paragraphs later says Bin Laden's weapons were across the room and not loaded..
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Dec 16, 2012 14:22
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Finished Extras in the Uglies series. I liked it overall. Got to see what the old characters where doing.
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Dec 17, 2012 03:41
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Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Yoyage. This was a gigantic loving slog. Several hundred pages of "we're stranded and it's cold!" combined with spergtastic nautical descriptions made for a read as painful and prolonged as their ordeal. Fascinating heroism from Shackleton and a lovely novel from Lansing. By the time it picks up at the VERY end, I had already long since lost interest.
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Dec 17, 2012 17:51
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IT BURNS posted:Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Yoyage. This was a gigantic loving slog. Several hundred pages of "we're stranded and it's cold!" combined with spergtastic nautical descriptions made for a read as painful and prolonged as their ordeal. Fascinating heroism from Shackleton and a lovely novel from Lansing. By the time it picks up at the VERY end, I had already long since lost interest. Definitely DO NOT READ The Terror by Dan Simmons. It was basically this, but in a partially fictionalized form. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of "We're still stuck in the ice! It's so cold, and we're running out of supplies!" I can't believe I finished it. I can't imagine reading a non-fiction account of the trip, as Simmons at least spiced it up with some magical killer bear and eskimo nonsense.
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Dec 17, 2012 18:39
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Nerd Do Well by Simon Pegg. 2.5 stars. After reading this, all I can think is that Pegg really is a bit of a wanker. This book is mostly self-reflecting and waxing philosophical about childhood and connections and whatever else, with hardly any content about the genesis and making of his projects. All of his actual film & TV work is glanced over in the last 50 or so pages. And, it turns out that Pegg is most interesting when he's talking about other people's work (such as Star Wars, or George Romero's films). The worst part of this book is the achingly tedious, fictional serial adventure that comes in chunks between memoir chapters. It stretches one joke out for about a fifth of the book's total content, and it's not funny. Not in the slightest. Despite all this, I watched Shaun of the Dead again when I was nearly finished the book, and I found that my enjoyment of his work hasn't been diminished at all. So thank god for that. He still does funny work, but I get the feeling that the Simon Pegg behind that work just takes the humour business far too seriously.
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Dec 18, 2012 14:44
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I am 15 pages from the end of Felix Gilman's The Half-Made World, and I have enjoyed every moment of it. This might smack of blasphemy to some, but it reminded me a little of Deadwood and Blood Meridian in that "Order vs. Chaos in the inexorable march of civilization pushing ever farther West in American History" sense. Plus demons and a little steampunk. The steampunk bit put me off reading it for a while, but it's been very gripping -- I've read it in 3 days. The world Gilman created was so interesting I wish he had spent a little more on the exposition, especially regarding the "made" part of the world and the history of the Engines, but that's my only complaint.
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Dec 18, 2012 20:22
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gohmak posted:Hyperion by Dan Simmons. The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 19, 2012 20:49
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gohmak posted:The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons Gohmak delivers a second stunning, trenchant review! We are all eagerly anticipating the third!
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Dec 19, 2012 21:25
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Thesaurus posted:Gohmak delivers a second stunning, trenchant review! We are all eagerly anticipating the third! I reported the first post the first time, but nothing came out of it. 
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Dec 19, 2012 22:54
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IUG posted:I reported the first post the first time, but nothing came out of it. I thought the thread was called "what did you just finish," not "review what you just finished". I see no thread rules in the OP. Thesaurus posted:Gohmak delivers a second stunning, trenchant review! We are all eagerly anticipating the third! I thoroughly enjoyed reading Dan Simmons Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. The characters where very unique and had interesting stories. I liked how the second book tied the stories together for a climactic conclusion. For "soft" science fiction, Dan Simmons does a great job explaining and rationalizing the technologies used in the series and ties them into the plot without becoming a cheap device. I'd rank it up there with Asimov's Foundation.
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Dec 20, 2012 03:59
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gohmak posted:I thought the thread was called "what did you just finish," not "review what you just finished". I see no thread rules in the OP. I didn't know it wasn't in the OP, and now that you mention it, the last person hit for it was back in September: Tailored Sauce posted:Finished The Fountains of Paradise. PROBATION 09/03/12 07:06pm Tailored Sauce This is not PYF. User loses posting privileges for 3 days. LooseChanj angerbot Maybe they don't care anymore.
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Dec 20, 2012 04:40
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Awkward Davies posted:Stephenson does have a bad habit of going on somewhat rambly tangents (the book doesn't clock in at almost 1000 pages for nothing) but they're usually pretty enjoyable. Hell, I think the digressions are the best part of any Stephenson book. And the other parts are usually quite good as well. Me, I just finished Rajaniemi's The Fractal Prince, about which I can only say that it was awesome but not a particularly easy read. Author does not believe in excessive infodumps and plays with his cards held pretty close. I've seen people complain about viewpoint confusion but if ever there was a book where this must be considered intentional and thematically relevant....
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Dec 20, 2012 08:44
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I just finished Jam by Yahtzee Croshaw. I felt that this was a pretty terrible, pointless book. I enjoyed MogWorld to some degree, but with this book there was nobody to root for. He made his protagonist a 20-something slacker with no personality or desire, his other characters were petulant and grating at best, and he had characters literally named "Princess Ravenhair", "Lord Awesomo", "X", and "Y". Try reading that for 400 pages. It would have been a lot more interesting with one, dynamic, interesting character with a clear goal making discoveries and meeting characters over the course of the whole book, but I knew about all of these characters by page 50 and hated them every step of the way. I almost feel like this book was a trick played by Yahtzee to see how absurd he could go before killing his fiction career.
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Dec 21, 2012 16:04
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Just finished This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz. I normally don't care for short story collections, because of the fact that they normally don't have anything in common. However in this collection, all the stories had one thing in common and it is the narrator loses multiple girlfriends in each story. Over all I enjoyed every single story in the collection.
screenwritersblues fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Dec 22, 2012 |
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Dec 22, 2012 03:59
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screenwritersblues posted:Just finished This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz. Fix your spoiler tag, dude
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Dec 22, 2012 04:02
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funkybottoms posted:Fix your spoiler tag, dude Thanks... add one s by accident and it messes every thing up.
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Dec 22, 2012 04:23
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I just finished "Emil and his clever pig" by Astrid Lindgren (author of the Pippi Longstocking books) I'll be reading it again to my daughter in the new year, such a great, funny, weird little book.
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Dec 22, 2012 20:58
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Finding out about the C.J. Cherry thread put me on a bit of a CJC kick, but I haven't really been reporting on it. Hestia - a first contact story. Despite that, not one of her stronger books, I think. It's not bad, but it suffers badly by comparison with the Faded Sun or Chanur books. Voyager in Night - this is the closest I've ever seen Cherryh get to horror. I've noticed before that she is very good at evoking terror and confusion, and she uses this to full effect here, especially in the climax - which leaves you with the feeling that you've just witnessed(?experienced) something that the human mind isn't really well-equipped to comprehend. I think she could actually do very well writing horror with a Lovecraftian bent, but it doesn't seem to be a genre that interests her. Sunfall - a short story collection. This is the edition included in Collected Short Fiction and thus contains a new, seventh story, Masks (Venice). I liked all of the stories except Ice, and they were an interesting assortment of the political and the mystical, but in general I feel that short stories aren't really where Cherryh shines, and this didn't really change my opinion. Visible Light - another short story collection (also part of Collected Short Fiction). Where Sunfall was written around the common theme of the cities of a dying Earth, Visible Light is more eclectic (the common theme, such as it is, is the frame story of Cherryh - or rather, a future version of her - and the reader both taking passage from Earth on the same ship, and sharing stories). One of these, The Last Tower, I loved, and I liked Cassandra and Companions. Threads of Time I also enjoyed, but I'm not sure I would have as much if I weren't also on a time travel kick at the moment, and it does rather feel like it should be part of a larger work (unsurprising, as it was originally written as part of one of the Morgaine books). The last two stories - A Thief in Korianth and The Brothers - didn't appeal. The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh - ok, this is a book that contains the previous two, but I'm listing it separately because it also contains fifteen stories not in either of those. One (Scapegoat) I'd read before, but the others were new to me. Like Visible Light, these were a mixed bag for me - and a mixed bag in general, ranging from another retelling of Greek myth (The Dark King - the first being Cassandra) to an Alliance/Union ghost story. By far my favourite story of the entire collection, however, is Pots, about an archaeological dig on long-dead Earth, by a people who found Voyager millions of years from now and built a religion around it. Overall, I'd have to say that none of these are Cherryh at the top of her game, but Voyager in Night is definitely worth a read if you want something completely different, and Collected Short Fiction covers such a breadth of stories and subject matter that there's bound to be at least a few stories in there that you really like. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Dec 23, 2012 |
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Dec 23, 2012 01:30
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I just read the Wool omnibus by Hugh Howey, and it was really, really good. I was very impressed by it, and I believe he's just about to bring out the third book/novella of another series set in the same universe which I will have to scoop up after he collects all three in one volume like he did for Wool. Edit: thanks for the info  vvvvvEdit2: it's a real paper book! hollylolly fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Dec 23, 2012 |
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Dec 23, 2012 10:32
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hollylolly posted:I just read the Wool omnibus by Hugh Howey, and it was really, really good. I believe it's only available as an ebook right now. The omnibus is a paperback in the UK and commonwealth territories.
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Dec 23, 2012 10:42
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Awkward Davies posted:I just finished Cryptonomicon, which was so loving good. When recommending Stephenson I always warn people about his tangents by citing the 3 pages in this book in which he explains the proper way to eat cereal.
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Dec 23, 2012 15:55
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I just finished Caliban's War. Meh. I know a lot of people really liked it and are eagerly awaiting the third book, but meh. This one seemed to drag after the first couple of chapters and didn't pick up again until close to the end. Really specific things I disliked: Uneven pacing. I have no problem with changing viewpoints, but there were sections that it seemed they spent too much time on and sections where they just blipped by. There also seemed to be a lot of extraneous stuff, like maybe the authors had intended to do something with it but ended up losing it. For example, it was remarked several times that Prax wanted to call Naomi "Cassandra" because she looked like an intern he used to work with, but then nothing happened with it. At first I wondered if Naomi had come to the crew under an assumed name and I wondered why, but the whole thread seemed to be dropped. While overall I liked Bobbi (Gunner), there were several instances where her character seemed more like a man with boobs. Anybody who has ever played a role-playing game where one of the guys played a female character knows what I'm talking about -- these pseudo females think and act in a way that would be unremarkable in a man but is completely out of character for a woman. My final gripe was at the end when Holden was on the King with Larson. First, he unilaterally shoots Nguyen. Now, we just spend the ENTIRE drat book with him angsting about how he had changed and how the old Holden would NEVER have committed cold blooded murder and that Naomi had LEFT HIM over this change, and then he shoots Nguyen without warning... and Naomi basically says "that's okay, honey, he was a bad guy and I know you'll regret cold-bloodedly murdering him later..." which negates everything that went before. And then Larsen? I went back to the description to see if he was wearing a red shirt, because how CONVENIENT that instead of Holden having to stick around to see to it that the ship blows up, Larsen got a tiny tear in his environmental suit and is about to turn into a vomit-zombie... I am sure that plenty of people will disagree with me, and admittedly, this had a lot more Space Marine Pew Pew Pew and that's not a favored genre, but PuhLease... the things I mentioned kept making my mind wander when I wanted to be absorbed in the story. Thus, meh. Certainly I don't regret buying it, and no doubt I'll buy the third when it comes out, but it is no longer a must-have on my list.
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Dec 23, 2012 18:42
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ukiyo e posted:When recommending Stephenson I always warn people about his tangents by citing the 3 pages in this book in which he explains the proper way to eat cereal. Best three pages in the book if you ask me.
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Dec 23, 2012 18:44
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Hedrigall posted:The omnibus is a paperback in the UK and commonwealth territories. I found an omnibus edition at my local library, actually, and I'm in the Atlanta suburbs.
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Dec 23, 2012 19:28
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Chamberk posted:I found an omnibus edition at my local library, actually, and I'm in the Atlanta suburbs. Well, that's awesome. I knew it was published as an ebook originally I wasn't aware it had gotten all the way to real book status.
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Dec 23, 2012 20:48
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The Memory of Blood: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery by Christopher Fowler. I had just finished reading a few Agatha Christie novels and was on the mood for a mystery, and saw this on the library recent release shelf. It's the 9th book in a crime mystery series but reading the previous books was not necessary to follow along. It was enjoyable, an easy read. The two main detectives are a quirky older duo and they have a team of minor characters who help solve a murder mystery. I didn't find myself trying to solve the mystery, just going with the flow. I'd give it a 4 outta 5 as something relatively mindless to read before bed.
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Dec 24, 2012 00:18
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I just finished Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. I absolutely loved this book. Anderson seemed to take all existential human nature and weave it through the lives of one insignificant town. I think the reason I enjoyed it so much was because it was impossible to find any character with whom I did not share at least one minor idiosyncrasy. I felt as if so many of my hopes and fears were like that of George Willard, so that ultimately I was incredibly moved by the final few chapters. For a relatively short book I felt as if it had magnificent scope and I can certainly picture myself rereading it throughout my life. This is easily one of the greatest novels I've ever read.
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Dec 24, 2012 00:53
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I just finished Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The Tarkovsky film is undoubtedly my favorite film of all time, and I've played two of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games and enjoyed them quite a bit, so this was next on the list. I have to say, I really loved it. It was definitely a lot different than science fiction I've read in the past, but in a good way. The setting and background of the novel is just fantastic, and I think even if you can't dig the rest of the novel you can at least appreciate that much. The plot went just fast enough for my tastes to keep me entertained and anxiously awaiting what would happen next, but it also left a lot of room for complex themes and commentary. It's an intense and grim piece of literature, probably one of the most honest novels I've ever read in how it handles human motivation and actions.
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Dec 24, 2012 01:59
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I just finished Children of God by Mary Doria Russell. This book was just as compelling as The Sparrow. It's one of the few books that handles jumping around time and space in a way that I could follow without getting frustrated. I would definitely recommend the series.
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Dec 24, 2012 17:09
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ukiyo e posted:I just finished Children of God by Mary Doria Russell. This book was just as compelling as The Sparrow. It's one of the few books that handles jumping around time and space in a way that I could follow without getting frustrated. I would definitely recommend the series. Is it a sci fi story? I'm wondering if you meant jumping around time and space in a sci fi Doctor Who kind of way, or telling a story in non linear fashion.
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Dec 25, 2012 01:46
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AlternatePFG posted:Just finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman. This is the first Gaiman book I've read, and I now I understand why he is such a well-liked author. All of the mythology allusions mixed in with pop culture references hit a perfect note with me. It was an entertaining read, and I'll definitely be looking into some of his other stuff. Great book. Try Neverwhere; another great book by him. ToxicFrog posted:Finding out about the C.J. Cherry thread put me on a bit of a CJC kick, but I haven't really been reporting on it. If you like her work, try the Faded Sun trilogy. Aside from being an awesome SciFi read, it gave me some things to think about with regards to humanity and our strengths as a species. The dichotomy between the non-human races provides some distinct food for thought. Sacrilage fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Dec 25, 2012 |
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Dec 25, 2012 10:29
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Just finished the first two books of the Kingkiller chronicles. Very, very awesome series. While nothing extremely deep or mind-pushing, it was a very engrossing read. Perfect for deployment. Can't wait for the third book!
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Dec 25, 2012 10:33
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Sacrilage posted:Great book. Try Neverwhere; another great book by him. I second Neverwhere, it's my favorite Gaiman. Then you can watch the BBC special too!
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Dec 25, 2012 11:12
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Sacrilage posted:If you like her work, try the Faded Sun trilogy. Aside from being an awesome SciFi read, it gave me some things to think about with regards to humanity and our strengths as a species. The dichotomy between the non-human races provides some distinct food for thought. I did mention the Faded Sun books in my post. CJC is probably my favourite SF author, I haven't read everything by her but I've read most of it.Sacrilage posted:Just finished the first two books of the Kingkiller chronicles. Very, very awesome series. While nothing extremely deep or mind-pushing, it was a very engrossing read. Perfect for deployment. I'm holding off on the second one for now, because after reading the first one I was seriously jonesing for more and at this point I'd rather just wait for the third book and read the whole trilogy in one go.
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Dec 25, 2012 16:40
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Finally finished the House of Leaves. I enjoyed the main story, but Johnny Truants seemed to drag at the end. I also really enjoyed the way the text was moved all around, really helped the feeling that you were there in the house with the people exploring it.
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Dec 25, 2012 17:54
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frenchnewwave posted:I second Neverwhere, it's my favorite Gaiman. Then you can watch the BBC special too! BBC special? I never realized they had one, thanks. I'll go check it out. Also, another I finished last month was In Her Name. The first half of the trilogy is a very good "child growing up amongst aliens" story. The rest wasn't too shabby either, so definitely worth a read.
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Dec 25, 2012 23:21
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Yes if memory serves me, I believe Neverwhere was a TV series first, and then adapted into a novel. It's low budget of course but I liked it.
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Dec 26, 2012 01:21
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Just finished Red and Me by Bill Russell. I'm a big basketball guy, so I had high hopes for a memoir about Russell's experiences with Red Auerbach: they were one of the best players and coaches in NBA history. But in that sense, it's disappointing: it's more of Russell explaining why their friendship worked and reads occasionally like a textbook on how to be a good friend. I'm still glad I read it, though. There's a few parts about Red's coaching style which I found interesting (he was very hands-off and knew how to adapt to each player) and it does offer a small glimpse inside those 1960's Celtics teams.
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Dec 26, 2012 15:41
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