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Just bought Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies and the goon-written The Hunt for Atlantis by Andy McDermott. I still have a bunch of books I got for Christmas, though, so I think I'm going to save those for after I finish my Xmas gifts and start either Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes or Q&A by Vikas Swarup.
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Dec 31, 2010 00:38
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Started seriously reading Sarita Mandanna's Tiger Hills today. I kind of took a risk buying it since this is her first book and it was just published a little over a week ago but I'm really enjoying it so far. It's about the relationship between two young people in late-1800s South India, from when they were inseparable best friends as little kids to when the boy falls in love with the girl, even though she swore to marry a famous hunter when she was just ten and stands by that even when she grows up. It's not usually my kind of story, but the prose is really good so far. I'm still not too far into it, but I'm really liking this so far
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Mar 18, 2011 05:53
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Square Pair posted:"Lone Survivor" by Marcus Luttrell
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Apr 10, 2011 05:31
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I just started River of Gods by Ian McDonald. I'm not a sci-fi fan at all, but I'm enjoying this one so far. It's a speculative fiction of what India will be like on the 100th anniversary of its founding in 2047, told through several different character's perspectives, including a policeman tasked with hunting rogue AIs and a journalist hoping that her interview with a holographic AI soap actor will be her big break. Like I said, despite my distaste for sci-fi as a whole, this one's really grabbed me so far, unless the quality takes a nosedive at some point I'll probably end up buying The Dervish House, by the same author--same concept, but in Turkey.
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Sep 1, 2011 04:17
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Just made a purchase on Amazon: Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky. I'm pretty excited for this one, I bought both the movie and book Miral, more because  Frieda Pinto than any other reason, and that re-sparked my interest in I/P issues. This will be the first non-fiction I read about it, but it seems pretty highly regarded. Shantaram by Gregory Davis Roberts: a semi-autobiographical fiction novel about an Australian criminal who flees to India and starts a new life there. I had been flirting with the idea of buying this book for years and kept putting it off because of the length, but nate fisher recently posted about it in the SA lit thread and that motivated me to actually pick it up. Pumped to start it, even though I won't be able to due to it's length for another week or two. The War After Armaggedon by Ralph Peters. Military fiction in the near-future where Israel is basically nuked off the face of the earth and America becomes a fascist Christian fundamentalist state in response to Islamic terrorists setting off devastating dirty bombs in several major US cities. The National Guard is reorganized as the Military Order of the Brothers in Christ and invades the ruins of Israel to try and take the Holy Land from both Jews and Muslims alike, and from what I've read in reviews and such it sounds like the MOBIC comes into conflict with the non-fascist regular Army troops as well. Sounds kinda crazy the way I typed it up, but I trust Peters to make it work, he's a very insightful author when it comes to things like this.
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Sep 21, 2011 21:54
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Octy posted:A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin. Is it weird that I'm 400 pages in and still enjoying it? I've heard it's meant to be the most boring one in the series and I dreaded starting it, but I've found it to be quite the opposite. Yeah, A Feast For Crows was actually my favorite one after the first, I don't really get the complaints. Of course, for me it might just be that a good chunk of the book was in Dorne and I've always liked Middle-Eastern and North African based settings like that. Also, as much as I don't like Brienne as a character, I liked that her chapters brought her into contact with the common folk, where the rest of the series focuses near-exclusively on royalty.
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Oct 26, 2011 15:15
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Tahirovic posted:Re-watched my The Pacific BluRay so decided to give the books it's based on a go. All in all, I think you'll really enjoy that one, at least. 
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Nov 1, 2011 15:23
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Yesterday, I bought Aravind Adiga's latest, Last Man in Tower. Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, was absolutely fantastic, but it was followed up with Between the Assassinations, a short story collection, which had a few stories that were as amazing as The White Tiger, but most were just forgettable (not bad, just not anything special, either). Now that he's returned to novel format, I have high hopes for this one!
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Dec 1, 2011 18:58
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Just started Flashman and the Mountain of Light, my third Flashman novel. In this one, the cowardly, self-absorbed Flashman, after blundering his way into being viewed as a hero in Afghanistan in the first book, is sent to fight in the first Anglo-Sikh War, and according to the first chapter will apparently end up with possession of the Koh-i-Noor by the end. I love these books, and I was already laughing out loud on the first page, so I'm seeing good things ahead for this one.
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May 20, 2012 16:00
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Mister Kingdom posted:Just started Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson. Do you plan on posting your thoughts in What Did You Just Finish? This sounds interesting, but it also sounds like the kind of thing that will be really good or really bad depending on the author's skills, so I'd be interested to hear your thoughts when you finish.
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Jun 13, 2012 23:28
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I just got Halo Evolutions, a collection of short stories in the Halo universe by a variety of authors, from authors who have worked on the novels like Eric Nylund and Karen Traviss, to the creative minds at Bungie and 343 Industries, to some people I've never heard of before, centered around characters and events that didn't get center stage in the games and novels. I'm a little embarrassed about how much I love the Halo novels, but they're much better than you'd think a series of novels based on a space marine shooter game would be. I originally picked it up because I was stalling on Neuromancer, which I love when it's moving but in between the plot there's always several pages in a row where I feel like I may as well be reading another language, so I intended to break up chapters of Neuromancer with a short story or two of easy-to-read fluff before heading back in. Of course, as soon as I paid for it, Neuromancer picked up and hasn't stopped since so it might be a while before I actually start Evolutions. 
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Jul 8, 2012 15:21
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Bawjaws posted:Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith. Personally I really liked the book and I didn't have any issues with the ending. I thought it wasn't particularly good in the sense that it wasn't a mind-blowing twist or anything, but I didn't think it was bad either, and certainly not worth giving up on a really good book for. As for me, I just started Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege by Antony Beevor and We, The Drowned by Carsten Jensen, and am switching between the two. I'm really liking both of them, Beevor is great at writing approachable, enjoyable history, and Jensen's novel of the citizens of a Danish port town in the 1800s and beyond and their seafaring adventures has a great lyrical quality to the prose that reminds me of the greats of nineteenth-century literature that both Mr. Jensen and the translator who managed to preserve that quality should really be commended for. I'm looking forward to continuing in both of them.
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Aug 9, 2012 15:30
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Syrinxx posted:Isn't that guy a goon? I know there's some goon that writes bad airport fiction to pay the bills. No, that's Andy McDermott, who posts here as Payndz. I really like Lincoln Child's work with Douglas Preston, any book the two of them collaborate on is pretty much guaranteed to be entertaining, shame to hear Child's solo stuff isn't any good.
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Aug 17, 2012 17:20
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barkingclam posted:Isn't he the guy who wrote a novel about a steampunk circus or something? Or was that someone else. That's someone else, who I can't remember. McDermott/Payndz writes the Eddie Chase/Nina Wilde adventure stories, which are Indiana Jones or Uncharted-style adventures. I really enjoyed the first one but have yet to continue in the series. As for me, I grabbed Johannes Cabal the Detective, sequel to Johannes Cabal the Necromancer. I adored the first book but this one's not grabbing me as much as the first one did. I've still got a few good laughs out of the dark humor and Cabal is still the same likable bastard though, and I'm not real far into it anyway, the actual plot is still being set up, so I'll keep with it. It's not bad, it's just good but not as good as the first, so far.
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Aug 17, 2012 18:37
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Started reading Kim by Rudyard Kipling. It's kind of alternating between really dragging at some points and being impossible to put down at others, but it seems more of the latter than the former so far. It's obvious that Kipling really poured all his experiences in colonial India into the book, it's got the most immersive description of Indian life, both for the British and the Indians, that I've ever read. I'm really loving it so far.
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Sep 22, 2012 20:10
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This is one of the reasons I'm glad to have a Kindle. When I finally get around to reading Lolita all people will see is
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Sep 28, 2012 19:43
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Saw a church having a garage sale today while driving and pulled in. I ended up buying a copy of Dan Brown's Angels and Demons and Stephen Harrigan's The Gates of the Alamo, a novel of the battle of...well, the Alamo, for a dollar total. Not a bad deal. I may start Angels and Demons tomorrow because I think I need a brainless thriller to relax for a bit. I also saw them selling a copy of The Ghurkas: The Inside Story of the World's Most Feared Soldiers by John Parker for another 50 cents but then my roommate snatched it out from under me.  Picked up a copy of it off of Amazon when I got home.
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Oct 7, 2012 05:53
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Got an Amazon gift card as an early Christmas gift and went on a Kindle eBook buying spree. 1. A Time to Kill by John Grisham - I'm a little less than halfway through this one already, and I'm really liking it. The main character Jake is a young lawyer representing a black man who murdered the two white men who had raped his ten-year-old daughter, a crime that tears apart the small Mississippi town of Clanton. Grisham seems to have a lot of extraneous detail--at one point, his characters go into a barbeque and the narration tells us about what kind of food is served every day of the week at that restaurant--but I'm still hooked. I think I may even like the extra details, while I kinda roll my eyes at them as they happen, a big part of the book is the effect of the trial on the town of Clanton, so having as much as possible helps get a feel for the town. 2. The Last Kashmiri Rose (Joe Sandilands #1) by Barbara Cleverly - Scotland Yard detective Joe Sandilands is dispatched to British Calcutta in the 1920s to investigate the death of an Englishwoman, the wife of an officer in the Bengal Greys cavalry regiment who died in a suicide that doesn't quite add up, only to discover that a Bengal Grey officer's wife dies in March of every year in seemingly unrelated accidents, the only connection being a Kashmiri rose placed on each grave by an unknown person. 3. Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan - Gravy Jones recommended this one to me when I asked for cyberpunk stuff in the recommendation thread and I just now got around to getting it. I downloaded the sample back when he originally suggested it and while I gave the biggest  at the random vitriolic anti-Catholic rant that had nothing to do with anything and was very obviously Morgan screaming directly at you, I still really liked the writing style and the mystery intrigued me, so I'm looking forward to this one.4. Equal of the Sun by Anita Amirrezvani - a historical fiction novel about Princess Pari Khan Khanoom Safavi, daughter of the Shah of Persia in the sixteenth century. When her father dies without naming an heir, she and her eunuch adviser try to navigate the political intrigue and schemes in order to restore order. 5. Rooftops of Tehran by Mahbod Seraji - Another novel of Iran as part of my effort to read more Middle-Eastern stuff, especially Persian. A teenage boy comes of age in an Iran on the cusp of revolution in the mid-1970s. 6. Out of India: A Raj Childhood by Michael Foss - Foss's memoir of growing up as a child in British India. Born in 1937, he grows up among World War II and the Indian independence movement. 7. The Emerald Storm (Ethan Gage, #6) by William Dietrich - This series is basically historical Indiana Jones, or maybe Assassin's Creed without the Animus. Ethan Gage, American expatriate and charming rogue, and his Egyptian wife Astiza, race to prevent the Egyptian Rite of the Freemason Order from capturing ancient treasures of great power, getting mixed up in historical events and rubbing shoulders with historical figures from the late 18th and early 19th centuries along the way--this time getting caught up in the Haitian Revolution. Pretty good haul, I think. I think I'm going to start with either The Last Kashmiri Rose or Equal of the Sun once I finish A Time To Kill.
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Dec 19, 2012 02:55
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I just started reading The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief by Ben MacIntyre, and while I'm only about 25 pages in I'm pretty hooked and can't wait to get these drat end-of-semester assignments out of the way so I can devote some real time to it. It's a work of non-fiction about a thief who seems to have stepped out of a movie during the late nineteenth century (for an example of how larger-than-life he is, in just those 25 pages, he has repeatedly fleeced both the Union and Confederate Armies by signing up for the North for their enlistment bonus then crossing the lines to collect the cash reward offered to deserting Union soldiers before crossing the line again to re-enlist under a new name for a new enlistment bonus and starting the cycle again, and broken out of Sing Sing. This is the prelude to his real criminal career) and the Pinkerton agent obsessed with catching him. I also just purchased Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo, her account of spending three years living in one of Mumbai's infamous slums, and In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire by Tom Holland, the story of...well, I guess the subtitle says it all, eh? I'll probably start one of these two after I finish MacIntyre's but I can't decide which one. Boo's book sounds fascinating, but I'm already a huge fan of Holland after I read his Persian Fire... Either way, I'm just glad to be reading non-fiction again after a too-long fiction break.
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Apr 22, 2013 07:48
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I just bought and started both Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade by James Reston, Jr., and The Stranger by Albert Camus, and so far I'm loving both of them. I'm much farther into Warriors of God (158 pages vs. 9% into the Kindle version of The Stranger) and it's everything I want in a history book: well-written, fun, and engaging without sacrificing veracity or completeness of information. My only complaint is that I wish there was more detail put into the initial stages of the war and the capture of Jerusalem, but Richard wasn't a part of the war until after Jerusalem fell so I understand why Reston did that, since that's not the story he's trying to tell. It's also remarkably unbiased, showing both the flaws and virtues of both sides. Just absolutely in love with it so far. I'm only in the part of The Stranger where Meursault is visiting his mother's body at the nursing home, so it's harder for me to judge it since the main plot hasn't even really started yet. I really like Meursault, though, he has a unique voice and I just sort of immediately started sympathizing with him. I'm really looking forward to getting further into both these works.
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May 20, 2013 00:25
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appropriatemetaphor posted:I just started reading The Stranger for my French reading group, and yeah it's kinda weird because I see a lot of myself in the main character, while everyone keeps saying he's being a weirdo. Yeah, I finished it in like two sittings because it's so short, and I empathized way more with Meursault than is probably healthy. Absolutely great book, it's definitely one of my new favorites.
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May 22, 2013 05:02
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After starting a bunch of books and setting them aside after just a few pages because none of the 100+ unread books I own seemed like something I wanted to read, I finally had my interest captured by Equal of the Sun by Anita Amirrezvani. A work of historical fiction set in 16th-century Persia, it focuses around Pari Khan Khanum Safavi, favorite daughter of the Shah who is forced to navigate the treacherous court politics after her father dies without naming an heir. So far the two primary characters (Princess Pari and the narrator, her advisor Javaher) are likable and the political intrigue is fascinating and tense. I can't wait to get further into it!
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Jul 6, 2013 03:18
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I got Tom Holland's new book Dynasty, about the first five Roman emperors, for Christmas. His previous work, Rubicon, starts with Sulla's rise to power and ends with the man who would be Augustus defeating Marc Antony and seizing ultimate power in Rome, while this one starts with Augustus's reign and continues through the death of Nero, so in that sense it's as much a sequel as one history book can be to another. I really enjoyed Rubicon and Holland's other works, he has a way of injecting his writing with enough excitement that you almost feel like you're reading a novel, while at the same time not skipping over any of the depth you'd expect from a good history book. I'm really looking forward to starting it.
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Dec 26, 2015 04:51
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Just started up Rob Bell's What Is The Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Change the Way You Think and Feel About Everything. I've been an atheist for almost half my life but the last few months I've been kinda rethinking things and coming back to religion and Rob Bell's fresh, unique take on Christianity has been a big part of that, between his podcast and the previous books of his that I've read, What We Talk About When We Talk About God and Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (the guy loves his subtitles). This one's about the context of the Bible that gets missed a lot, between historical/cultural context that would have been obvious to the original audience that would be lost today or nuances in the Hebrew/Greek languages that don't survive translation perfectly intact, etc, a subject that's always fascinated me even when I wasn't religious, so I'm excited to dig in to this one.
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Aug 26, 2017 18:35
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Lampsacus posted:yeah lol if i'm ever going to go back to believing in some monotheistic god, rejoin organized religion or shuffle back into a church. I just finished it and while Love Wins is still my favorite of what I've read of his so far, this one was really good. He has a really interesting take on the Bible in which he acknowledges that the Bible is a human work, not a divine one, and that the important thing to think about when reading it is not the actual words on the page so much as "what message where the authors trying to get across with this?" and "why does this still resonate today?" Probably my favorite bit that will stick with me the longest is his recontextualizing some Old Testament stories as deliberate appropriation of contemporary mythology in order to show how different God is from the pagan gods of the time--audiences in the time these stories were first being told would have been familiar with stories of the gods demanding someone sacrifice their son or flooding the earth in their rage at humanity, but a God calling off the sacrifice and reaffirming a promise to bless all mankind or promising humanity that such destruction would never happen again would have been a radically new understanding of divinity compared to the familiar pagan gods. soylon posted:You might also be interested in A History of God by Karen Armstrong, though fyi I own it but have not gotten around to reading it so I couldn't tell you if it was worthwhile. I actually also own that one but haven't gotten around to reading it yet either. I'll have to bump it up higher on my list.
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Sep 1, 2017 05:06
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After reading nothing but religion/spirituality stuff for two or three months now, I succumbed to an itch I've had for the last year or so to read a bunch of Tolkien and started The Silmarillion. I tried reading this one like a decade ago in early/mid-high school after reading LOTR but bounced off. I'm finding it a lot more engaging now, though, between no longer having a 15-year-old's taste in books anymore, greater familiarity with the epic/mythic/biblical style he's invoking, and the Kindle's X-Ray feature helping me keep the Finwës and Fingolfins and Finrods straight. I've also got Children of Húrin, The Hobbit, and the LOTR cycle loaded up on my Kindle but I don't know if I'll dive straight into them afterwards or take breaks for other stuff in between.
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Oct 23, 2017 00:16
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