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Just finished up Blood Oath by Christopher Farnsworth. Surprising pretty damned good. It's about a vampire who works for the president, and as weird as it sounds, the premise works pretty well. Someone finally wrote a book that doesn't involve super good looking vampires that spend all their time either gaying it up or sleeping with tons of chicks while feeling sparkly or horrible. This guy is a predator, he eats people, and the book never really lets you forget that. Damned good book.
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Jun 28, 2010 01:35
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Ornamented Death posted:I'll probably read The Darkly Splendid Realm by Richard Gavin next, if for no other reason than it's closest to me. Finished that. I don't know why, but I went in expecting a bunch of mediocre stories, but it's actually a very solid collection of good to excellent stories.
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Jun 28, 2010 02:45
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Just finished up Blood Oath by Christopher Farnsworth. If you want another vampire as predator genre book try out David Wellington's vampire series starting with 13 Bullets. His vampires go even farther in that they can't co-exist with humans at all and there's no such thing as a "good" vampire in his stories. In an interesting twist on the genre he doesn't really have any older vampire characters (the oldest is something like 300 years old) since in his stories the older a vampire gets the more blood they need every day just to function.
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Jun 28, 2010 12:22
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Motored through Iain Levison's The Working Stiff's Manifesto yesterday. Quick, light, "oh woe is the life of the artsy in the work-a-day world" memoir of an English major's fruitless search for a life-affirming job, bouncing around several entry-level and seasonal positions. About half of the book recounts his experiences working on a fish processing ship in outport Alaska alongside ruffians, criminals, derelicts, and powder-puff fratboys. Some funny moments, but nothing that's really going to stick.
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Jun 28, 2010 19:30
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muscles like this? posted:If you want another vampire as predator genre book try out David Wellington's vampire series starting with 13 Bullets. His vampires go even farther in that they can't co-exist with humans at all and there's no such thing as a "good" vampire in his stories. In an interesting twist on the genre he doesn't really have any older vampire characters (the oldest is something like 300 years old) since in his stories the older a vampire gets the more blood they need every day just to function. I read the first one (13 Bullets) but I was kind of put off by the very abrupt ending. I had asked about the series in another thread and got told pretty much all of them have that same "slam to a halt" ending like the first one had. Still, I am going to work my way through em. Another thing his vampires had were the shark teeth instead of just fangs.  and tells you right off the bat what kind of monsters you are dealing with.
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Jun 29, 2010 05:38
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Yeah, pretty much all of his books just kind of sudden stop end. His Monster ____ series was bad because the first book kind of ends in a cliffhanger and you don't find out what happened to those characters until the third book as the second was a prequel that dealt with how the zombie apocalypse happened. Yeah they have the shark teeth instead of fangs since they aren't out to just drink a little blood, they want ALL of your blood and they want it NOW.
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Jun 30, 2010 03:39
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Yesterday I finished The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, a collection of short stories. I hadn't read of any his work since reading Fahrenheit 451 in middle school, and I picked it up at random browsing through the library a week ago. I'm not really a fan of science fiction or short stories, so I didn't have high hopes going into it, but man, was I ever wrong. It was a completely solid collection of stories with even the weakest ones being immensely enjoyable. I've been inspired to pick up more of his writing, so hopefully it wasn't just a fluke.
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Jun 30, 2010 07:23
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I didn't really like Wellington's vampire novels, but his zombie series was fantastic (except the third one, which went downhill a bit). I was reading them like 5 years ago when he was serialising them online. Monster Nation is one of the best apocalyptic novels I've ever read.
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Jun 30, 2010 13:11
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I just finished Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I enjoyed it, probably more so because I had no idea what it was about before I read it. Interesting issues brought up, but not too complex.
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Jun 30, 2010 21:11
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Finished Spin by Robert Wilson. Pretty awesome sci-fi book about a shield put around the Earth that speeds up time and acts like a filter. The stars disappear out of the night sky, and a month on earth ends up being like a million years in the universe. Storyline is great and it's worth a read.
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Jun 30, 2010 21:27
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The Brothers Karamazov. Powerful stuff, amazing character development. Can't really say anything about it that hasn't already been said better. Highly recommended.
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Jul 1, 2010 04:31
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Last night, I finished Chindi by Jack McDevitt. I had read it before but it's been a while, and since I finished Deepsix (the book previous) I wanted to re-read it to see what I missed last time. While I love McDevitt, now that I've read two of his books in a row I am noticing that they are a little samey. Things build up, poo poo hits the fan and keeps hitting the fan through to the end. It's not that it's badly written, and it's not that it isn't a page turner but I was getting to the point where I could predict that someone would want to do something dangerous, Hutch would object, they would ignore her, bad poo poo would happen, they'd come up with some skin of the teeth way to come out of it. Rinse, repeat. I'm also beginning to notice little quirks of his (he loves the word "duly"). Having said that, it's a great book and really captures the feeling of mystery well in that Rendezvous With Rama kind of way. I want to go on to Omega, but I think I need to read something else first. I have A Game of Thrones because goons, but I also got the two Mass Effect novels and I'm looking forward to reading those in a strange, sickly fascinating way. Almost like I've been reading too much good stuff, I need to read something bad to cleanse the palette. Doctor Zero fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Jul 1, 2010 |
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Jul 1, 2010 16:05
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Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. Obviously I've watched five billion film/TV/radio/smoke signal adaptations, but I never quite got around to Looking Glass. Both of them are marvelously dreamlike, which is an element that often gets lost in the movies' rush to put big stars in funny costumes. The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs. Another one of those "I did something weird, then I wrote a book about it" books that seem to have become popular in recent years, and another one which has been shelf-sitting for a few years. In his quest to become a megabrain, Jacobs read the Encyclopedia Britannica from end to end, and this is basically a journal of his year. It wasn't that bad overall--his reactions to some of the things the EB is telling him are entertaining, and his brainiac-related side trips are fascinating--but there are places he comes across as just plain insufferable. I read somewhere that they were turning this into a movie. Either they're taking their sweet drat time about it or somebody realized that reading an encyclopedia isn't very cinematic.
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Jul 2, 2010 01:41
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A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin: reads just like a good TV series. The political intrigue is really well written, the plot is pretty compelling, and it's definitely got a way of making you keep reading for hours after you were supposed to go to bed. I mean, he does that by ending every chapter with "...and then she realized who the real killer was!!" or something to leave you in suspense but whatever. Gonna try to grab the next book in the series soon. Dead-Eye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut: I love Kurt's books, they're like candy in the sense that they're always really really fun to read, but they're also really thought-provoking. The only weird thing with this one is that it doesn't really follow the normal flow of a novel, there's no real build with the plot to a climax or anything, the excitement level and tension is pretty much level throughout the book, which is pretty unusual. Still, this was a great book.
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Jul 2, 2010 04:05
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Bonk by Mary Roach Most would assume (hope!) that a book about the science of sex would be 'steamy'. But it's not. It's information about sexual studies more than anything else. "Oh *snore*" would be your next assumption, but no! This chick is a highly amusing writer. She's not just good for a giggle, but witty and quick to indentify with the reader. I'm off to get her next two today, Stiff and Spook.
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Jul 2, 2010 17:17
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For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway I picked up this book because I liked the previous Hemingway book I read (The Old Man and the Sea) and because I heard it dealt with the Spanish Civil War, which I was curious to learn more about. I really enjoyed the book. For the majority of the book the characters speak in Spanish, but the novel is written in English. Hemingway handled this in a very clever way, in my opinion. All of the portions that were spoken in Spanish are translated into English very literally - completely word-for-word. Even certain false friends are preserved, like "rare" for strange and others. This made the book really fun for me to read; since I speak Spanish, I found it interesting to think to myself how the characters would have said everything in their language. Also, there were some agonizingly brutal moments in the book that I found difficult to stomach but ultimately fulfilling. In one particular case, a guerrilla gives an account of how her village began their revolt against the Fascists - absolutely gut-wrenchingly absorbing. If anyone is curious about Spanish culture, about the civil war, or about poignant and candid portrayals of characters and their thoughts/motivations, I highly recommend this book.
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Jul 3, 2010 02:41
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I just finished David Foster Wallace's essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. I had been picking Infinite Jest up in bookstores and weighing it in my hand for about a year when my girlfriend bought it (Jest) for me for Christmas. I wanted to get a handle on DFW's style before tackling that behemoth, so I picked this up as an appetizer. The essay on television, irony, and modern fiction is a bit of a slog, as it's close to the longest thing in the book (and rather dry too). And the short piece "Greatly Exaggerated" shouldn't have been included at all; it's a review of / counterpoint to another author's work of literary criticism, and it holds little insight as a standalone piece. Everything else, though, is pretty terrific.
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Jul 4, 2010 10:58
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I just went and reverted to my precious young adult literature. I am working through Patricia C Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, and just finished Dealing with Dragons and Searching for Dragons. Not epic heavy reading, but sometimes all I want is a mindless read that takes just a day. Next on the queue is The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.
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Jul 4, 2010 21:54
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Patricia Highsmith's second Ripley book, Ripley Under Ground. Reminded me of Donald Westlake's 361, with an amoral protagonist whose propensity to violence seemingly comes out of nowhere.
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Jul 5, 2010 05:09
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A Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart. Hot  Thank you very much, underrated fantasy thread.
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Jul 5, 2010 20:19
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Evfedu posted:A Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart. You're welcome =) Hughart did write two more Master Li & Number Ten Ox books. The only problem with them is they aren't Bridge of Birds -- they're not bad, but they aren't *perfect*, so people get disappointed by the inevitable comparison. If you go in not expecting too much they're ok.
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Jul 5, 2010 20:23
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The Pirate Coast by Richard Zacks Pretty good book on the U.S. Covert mission in 1805 to overthrow the ruling Bashaw of Tripoli due to the capture of the USS Philadelphia's crew the previous year. Know that line in the Marine Corps Hymn refering to the "shores of Tripoli"? This is the story behind it. Well researched and Zacks goes to great lengths to give you background on why the various players acted the way they did. My only complaint is at times, certain chapters seemed to drag on and on. Moving on to finally finishing Crucible of War by Fred Anderson.
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Jul 6, 2010 03:23
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Just finished Roald Dahl - Tales of the Unexpected, It was enjoyable overall but with the majority of the stories I had guessed the ending halfway through. The last story left a sour taste in my mouth...It wasn't unexpected, the bastard just threw a cat in a bonfire because his wife was obsessed over it, it was just plain old mean.
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Jul 6, 2010 04:37
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SilverSliver posted:Bonk by Mary Roach Start with Stiff. It's a much, MUCH better book. Also, I saw Mary Roach speak about Bonk and she is absolutely hysterical. She gave everyone small toothbrushes that said something about filling your cavities on them. She said ordered them small so they'd be easier to travel with but she didn't realize until later that it might not have been appropriate to order childrens brushes! Anyway, I just finished the autobiography Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis. That is one strange but interesting book. There is absolutely no reason that he should be alive let alone the singer for one of the most famous bands. Can anyone recommend other good, similar biographies?
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Jul 6, 2010 08:07
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I just finished Pimp by Iceberg Slim (also known as Robert Beck) I liked it. Supposedly there is going to be a movie made of it soon, and I'd really like to see how well the adaptation goes.
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Jul 6, 2010 15:51
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I just finished Infinite Jest and I really really liked it. It took me like 2 months to read, but I didn't want it to end. It was my first DFW, what is his non fiction like?
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Jul 6, 2010 19:16
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David Morrell's Scavenger (2007) and The Shimmer (2009). I always wonder why Morrell is not more successful -- his books are reminiscent of Michael Crichton's less SFish efforts, thrillers with decently-written action sequences and paper-thin characters, with a different technology "hook" for each book.
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Jul 6, 2010 19:25
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Gregory McDonald - Fletch & The Widow Bradley Fletch quotes a dead guy, gets fired, finds out the truth which gets him his job back. The twist at the end is pretty hilarious. Sadegh Hedeyat - The Blind Owl Short, fast and engrossing read. Somewhat disjointed narrative, but it comes together and the ending really works. Marcel Proust - Swann's Way For the Big rear end Summer, this first volume in In Search of Lost Time seems to be the shortest. The first half didn't hold my interest as well as the second pair of stories which I enjoyed despite their insane lack of brevity. Deb Olin Unferth - Vacation Looking back now, I can't say I really liked the characters in this book. Not as people I'd want to associate with. The novel is well written and entertaining, and the ending was quite sad. Gregory McDonald - Flynn From the writer of the Fletch series, Flynn is some sort of secret agent pretending to be a Boston police inspector for cover. Bit funnier character than Fletch. Phillip K. Dick - The Transmigration of Timothy Archer The least sci-fi'ish of Dick novels I've read to date, and the final volume in the "VALIS" trilogy. Based a bit more than loosely on Dick's friend the controversial Bishop James Pike, the novel is the story of what happens when the foundations of one's faith are outright disproved. Peter O'Donnell - Modesty Blaise The book Vincent Vega was reading on the toilet in Pulp Fiction. It's kind of a female James Bond thing, only not quite so good. She's a little too eye-rollingly perfect a girl, especially if you like your girls beating you up. Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman - Good Omens The adventures of a demon, angel, the antichrist, a witch and a witch hunter, and the four horsemen as the apocalypse unfolds. As silly as it sounds, and twice as much fun to read. And that's it for June!
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Jul 6, 2010 19:37
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Millow posted:I just finished Infinite Jest and I really really liked it. It took me like 2 months to read, but I didn't want it to end. It was my first DFW, what is his non fiction like? His non fiction is really meandering and nice and interesting; I could probably read his writing on tennis all day. Here's a sampling from Harper's they have up for free if you want to see whats up: http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557
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Jul 6, 2010 22:49
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Recently finished: The Sacrifice - Kristine Kathryn Rusch (I liked her Sci-Fi, now I like her Fantasy) I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class President - Josh Lieb (Light and fun, nothing to write home about) Freedom(tm) - Daniel Suarez (Awesome follow-up to Daemon) The Knight: Book One of The Wizard Knight - Gene Wolfe (Classic Wolfe: dense and beautiful) Bonk - Mary Roach (Very interesting and entertaining)
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Jul 7, 2010 01:19
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Lackadaisical posted:Start with Stiff. It's a much, MUCH better book. Also, I saw Mary Roach speak about Bonk and she is absolutely hysterical. She gave everyone small toothbrushes that said something about filling your cavities on them. She said ordered them small so they'd be easier to travel with but she didn't realize until later that it might not have been appropriate to order childrens brushes! Yep I'm currently on Stiff. Liking it so far. Just finished How to make love like a porn star, the Jenna Jameson biography. Pretty good. An easy read, but interesting and eye opening.
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Jul 7, 2010 03:16
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I finished the Devil in the White City this weekend. It's a good narrative history book that tells a great story, but in the end I didn't feel that the two parts (the story of the architects of the fair and of the serial killer) really had anything to do with eachother. H.H. Holmes brought one of his victims to the fair once. He kind of liked it. Other than that I thought it was fine.
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Jul 7, 2010 03:54
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SilverSliver posted:Bonk by Mary Roach Just watched a talk by her on TED.com - Bonk has definitely made my list of something to pick up - may do that tonight since I have a few other books to pick up.
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Jul 7, 2010 20:26
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I finally finished reading Underworld by Don DeLillo. Long novel, but definitely one of the better one's I've read. It took me longer to read it than expected. On to my next book, The Lost City of Z, by David Grann.
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Jul 7, 2010 21:03
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Just finished The Passage by Justin Cronin. Picked it up based on positive reviews and Stephen King raving about it. Absolutely incredible, sprawling apocalyptic epic. Definitely one of the best "vampire" novels I've read, although they function a lot more like fast, super-strong zombies in the novel. A lot of similarities to 'The Stand', but also a blend of a half-dozen other genres, including the western. My only two minor quibbles are that the author likes to sometimes go off on long, marginally relevant tangents, some of which work as nice character development but some of which is just incredibly tedious. There's an entire chapter devoted to the dreams of a dozen minor characters that was quite the chore to get through. The other complaint I had was that the story seems to 'reset' itself maybe one or two too many times, so that it sometimes feels more like a series of episodes rather than a cohesive whole narrative, but I let it slide because they're each usually interesting and I'm pretty impressed with the ambition and scope of the novel as a whole. I hope I don't have to wait forever to read the 2nd part of this planned trilogy, like some other authors...
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Jul 8, 2010 00:20
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It might be personal preference but I really feel like Mary Roach's best book is Stiff. Bonk was definitely interesting, but I think Stiff was a little more engaging and it flowed a little better. I'm extremely curious to see what her next topics are going to be though.
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Jul 8, 2010 01:36
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I just finished Swann's Way as part of the BIG rear end summer. I didn't really care for it at first, but starting in the second half, it really grew on me. Maybe because I got used to Proust's style - he has a great way of describing things, but it really seemed verbose at first.
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Jul 8, 2010 01:54
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Lackadaisical posted:It might be personal preference but I really feel like Mary Roach's best book is Stiff. Bonk was definitely interesting, but I think Stiff was a little more engaging and it flowed a little better. I'm extremely curious to see what her next topics are going to be though. Have you checked Spook out yet? I'm definitely trying it out sometime after finishing Stiff.
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Jul 8, 2010 05:43
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I just finished a book called Autobiography of an Execution by David Dow, and I really disliked it. It's purportedly about capital punishment, but it's actually just a bunch of anecdotes about alcohol and his family clumsily intercut with "true accounts" of death-row inmates that sound suspiciously exaggerated (and in fact, in the introduction he admits that he blurs details, mashes cases together, stretches and compresses timelines). There's more about drinking in bars or swimming or jogging than there is about the death penalty. His writing style is annoying, and it reads exactly like you would expect: a left-brained lawyer type read enough Hemingway in college to know which jaded narrator tropes to rip off, but doesn't have the artistic sensibility to make it unique, genuine or worthwhile. It's terribly unsubtle -- hope you like the ol' "domestic innocence juxtaposed with heinous acts of murder" motif, because it gets use on every other page. It's also filled with dumb aphorisms that make the author sound like he's hitching up his jeans and spitting tobacco. He's from Texas, by the way, so you know he's saying this poo poo with a straight face -- no self-effacing humor here. I couldn't agree with the author more on the death penalty itself, and he's done incredible work towards abolishing it, but he should stick to court briefs. nous_ fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Jul 8, 2010 |
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Jul 8, 2010 15:23
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qbert posted:Just finished The Passage by Justin Cronin. Picked it up based on positive reviews and Stephen King raving about it. Just finished this as well. For me it fell short of the "absolutely incredible" you gave it, but it was still pretty good though. The comparison to the Stand is very apt (I would go with "The Stand meets World War Z" over "The Stand meets The Road" that I've seen thrown around a few times). There's also a lot of similarities to Stephen Kings style in general beyond the plot. The overall tone, especially with regards to characters and atmosphere was very similar in places. quote:There's an entire chapter devoted to the dreams of a dozen minor characters that was quite the chore to get through. This was actually one of my favourite parts of the book. I thought it worked well as a change in gears and a fairly effective device. I won't go into details here as I suspect the book will get it's own thread at some point when it's out in paperback (Kindle version here) because as a doorstop epic post-apocalyptic fantasy with prententions it strikes me as a particularly goony book (and I'm sure there will be plenty of haters as well!). I'll save more in-depth stuff for that.
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