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I finished Terry Pratchett's Moving Pictures, and loved it. Very funny book, with a lot of references to classic cinema that made me giggle. Currently reading it to my mother.
In the Swedish translation, the troll known as "Rock" in the original has gotten the name "Bergman," which I'd say was one of the translator's better moments.
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In with a quick update from FIRES OF HEAVEN:
Had to vent this somewhere.
About to start The Dark Defiles by Richard K. Morgan.
Far-future fantasy where the moon is now a band of moondust, the drow were good guys from an incorporeal gravity-based space armada, and the AIs are really weird.
Drove nails into the coffins of The Many Deaths of the Black Company, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Adventures of Master Li and Number Ten Ox tonight. I've started on Anne of Green Gables but really need to reread a few books and do promised reviews.
I'm very bad about those. :(
Flipped the Tor Double over and am now reading No Truce with Kings.
Flipped the burger and am now reading What We Can Stand For by Geir Lippestad abiut his experiences defending Behring Breivik in the trial after the 22 July attack.
Tomorrow I'll hopefully flip open the mailbox and start on Karen Memory by thejeff's pal Elizabeth. I've been promised steam-powered sewing machines doubling as Pacific Rim style robots, so anticipation is high.
Dual wielding - Counseling Encylopedia (studying for the CPCE), and Walking Dead Hardcover book 11.
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About to start The Dark Defiles by Richard K. Morgan.
Far-future fantasy where the moon is now a band of moondust, the drow were good guys from an incorporeal gravity-based space armada, and the AIs are really weird.
I loved those books, but didn't care for the last quarter of that book. I'll be curious to know what you think of the ending.
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I am reading Stalking Darkness, book 2 of the Nightrunner series by Lynn Flewelling. I am having a lot of fun with this series. And while it's pretty light reading (for me, coming off all the pretentious shiznit I read), the writing is pretty decent. Some fantasy novels I have to put down because I just can't stomach the prose. These books are reasonably well-written.
Finished I Don't Want to Kill You a few days ago, wherein Our Hero concludes the character arc of his first three books and is set up for an ongoing series.
After reading three of these, I'm pretty confident that about half of each one is a really solid book. Usually either the middle part or the beginning, however, is very repetitive. I suppose it's because they're meant as mysteries, but I tend not to like the legwork portions of mystery stories either.
I think part of the generic problem there, since I had this with early Dresden Files books too, is that most mysteries I've read seem to amount to the investigator going around and interviewing obvious people to put together details which are available to anybody doing the interviews. Since that's the case, and the police are often very much involved, it raises the question of how they haven't done the work. It might also be that I can only really tolerate noir conventions in parody.
So, between my Kushiel re-read and Karen Memory, 2/3rds of the books I'm reading currently are 1st person narratives told from the perspective of a female prostitute... No-one tell Grandma!
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So, between my Kushiel re-read and Karen Memory, 2/3rds of the books I'm reading currently are 1st person narratives told from the perspective of a female prostitute... No-one tell Grandma!
What happened to the other third of your books???? :-O ;-)
'Wrath of the Lemming Men' by Toby Frost. Very silly indeed and I like it a lot.
Added to the stack today:
'Power of the Serpent' by Peter Valentine Timlett. A terrifying novel of the occult.
'High Couch of Silistra' by Janet E. Morris. At the twilight of time, she could refuse no man her body but she governed the world.
'A Quest for Simblis' by Michael Shea. Cugel the Clever novel by the creator of Nifft the Lean.
'Jewels of Aptor' by Samuel R. Delaney. 'Gorgeously Implausible'
Finished Karen Memory which was a Damn Good Book©. If I were to describe it, I guess I'd say it's sheer entertainment all the way through, and while it hasn't got a pretentious word in it, that's fine, because it's not shallow or stupid. The prose is excellent, and Bear even manages to get in a bit of feminism and social commentary amidst all the fun.
5 Oars out of 5 from me.
I'm reading The Romance of Lust/A Classic Victorian Erotic Novel. I downloaded it from Gutenberg on a lark and was surprised and amused to find that it is indeed the book I read when I was 13 or 14. It's terrible and is an excellent book for skipping through and leaving unfinished.
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"I gasped, I shuddered with the agony of intense pleasure, and at the moment when the rapturous finale approached, I actually brayed like a donkey"
'Classic' is definitely overstating things, but I didn't think it was that bad, which probably says more about me than the book ;)
Hee-haw!
All right finished three books this week...
The first is The Diabolical Miss Hyde by Viola Carr...Which was a very good book.
The second was the Pathfinder Novel Pirate's Promise which I enjoyed very much.
The third was Pathfinder Novel Nightsword which just good...I liked but the main character just annoys me at times.
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"I gasped, I shuddered with the agony of intense pleasure, and at the moment when the rapturous finale approached, I actually brayed like a donkey"
'Classic' is definitely overstating things, but I didn't think it was that bad, which probably says more about me than the book ;)
Sounds kind of like "Fifty Shades of Grey". Only classier.
By the way, if you are ever looking for a good laugh, Google "Gilbert Gottfried reads Fifty Shades of Grey". You will be glad you did. (Very NSFW, though.)
The Romance of Lust simply gets boring after a while. Even the author begins skipping a lot. "The five of us spent the stolen afternoon in the usual raptures of lust." At one point he lists the acts they perform, ending with "&tc". I cracked up.
Sounds familiar.
Sounds kind of like "Fifty Shades of Grey". Only classier.By the way, if you are ever looking for a good laugh, Google "Gilbert Gottfried reads Fifty Shades of Grey". You will be glad you did. (Very NSFW, though.)
I did, and I am. NSFW, but PSFL.
I think I'm going to re-read 'The Romance of Lust'. Maybe I'll steal Kajehase's idea and start a thread on the subject. Maybe I won't.
That might be fun. We could discuss new words we learn, like gamahuche, and talk about how chapped that chap must be and what percentage of the English population would now be descended from *Charles of the Giant Schlong.
* No relation to James and the Giant Peach.
Just finished the fifth book of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, One of our Thursdays is Missing, and will be starting the sixth (and as far as I know, final) book, The Woman who Died a Lot, tonight.
After that will be reading Queen of Roses by Elizabeth McCoy, then picking back up The Hollows series by Kim Harrison, which I read the first three or four a few years back but remember very little of.
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Sounds kind of like "Fifty Shades of Grey". Only classier.By the way, if you are ever looking for a good laugh, Google "Gilbert Gottfried reads Fifty Shades of Grey". You will be glad you did. (Very NSFW, though.)
I did, and I am. NSFW, but PSFL.
If they could somehow convince Morgan Freeman to read those same passages, my life would be complete.
I finally finished the most recent volume of Ellen Datlow's Year's Best Horror. Can't remember the specific volume. Overall I enjoy her anthologies, although I am hard-pressed to recall from memory most of the stories (I had a 4 month gap or so between finishing off the book on a flight yesterday and starting the anthology back in the fall. Since restarting the book the other day, I would say my favorite of the remaining stories was the "Internment camp for Innismouth prisoners"
Just started the G.R.R.M and Gardner Doiz Anthology Old Venus, which is an anthology of new space fantasy/science fiction set on the pulp version of Mars. Figured it would be a fun read and give me more of a feel for what Castrovel is based on.
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Flipped the Tor Double over and re-re-started The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, but for real this time.
Consanguinity, panaluan families, and Iroquois gentes, oh my!
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I just started Don Quixote. He was knighted and is on his way to get two clean shirts, ointment, some cash, and a squire.
My best friend has been reading Don Quixote since I met him. :-P
Down with Don Quixote!
Vive le Sancho Panza!!!
'Stopping Napoleon Yrkoon - War and Intrigue in the Mediterranean Melnibonean' by Tom Pocock
And a modern adaptation of I.33 - . A 13th century sword & buckler manual rather than something that makes the 'Book of Skelos' look like a My Little Pony comic, so cool, but not that cool.
Paris After the Liberation by Anthony Beevor and Artemisia Cooper.
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Some fantasy novels I have to put down because I just can't stomach the prose. These books are reasonably well-written.
If you want some good prose, check out Gene Wolfe. The man is an artist. His fiction can be rather heavy and sometimes confusing (you have to, like, interpret stuff), but the prose is outstanding.
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I finally finished Don Quixote. I liked it, and in some ways Comrade Anklebiter is correct -- Cervantes does dig at the bourgeois in the story. But Don Q & Sancho are besties 4ever, and neither would ever betray the other, at least not in any major way.
Sancho preys on Don Q's madness a bit, and gets some $$$ out of him in the end, but still admires the guy.
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Part that always stands out in my mind when I laud Sancho: when he dreams of being a governor and running a slave empire.
[Shrugs]
I have a weak spot for amusing, amoral libertines. At least in art; in real life they tend to be a++@!&+s.
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Seven Altars of Dusarra by Lawrence Watt-Evans, which was pretty neat.
I also tried reading 'The Romance of Lust' again, but Treppa was right - it's rubbish.
Finished Old Venus yesterday
Pretty good anthology, although the book would have benefited from reading a few stories at a time in between other books and anthologies, since unsurprisingly a book of short fiction set on pulp Venus is bound to be a bit repetitive.
As with any anthology, there is a bit of range in quality as well. There are some straight up pastiches which...err...don't read that well, especially compared to some stories which subvert those cliches while still providing a solid story.
At any rate, might take a look at Old Mars next, not sure...
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I started a re-reading of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books in January and have been interspersing his books with other authors. After the sad news of his passing I have finished up the forgettable military thriller I had been reading and am now reading Guards, Guards. It's the first book with the Night Watch characters, and having read all of them, it's pretty amazing to go back and realize just how much some of the characters developed over the series, while others (Sgt. Colon and Cpl. Nobby) remain familiar and somehow comforting constants of the Disc.
Almost done with Origin. Kinda skimmed through the boring sections about punaluan families and pairing marriages (the various intro writers say those parts are pretty riddled with out-datedness anyway), but the bit about the monogamous family was pretty fun.
The following sections about the gentes and/or states of the Iroquois, Greeks, Romans, Celts and Germans were also interesting. One last chapter and then the appended "The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man"--which, IIRC, mentions Engels's belief in Lemuria--and I'll be all done and ready for more genre fiction. Can't wait.
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Reading currently:
"Guards! Guards!" by T.Pratchett.
"the unadultered cat" by T.Pratchett.
"Wit and Wisdom of Discworld", by T.Prattchett.
and will follow with
"the Folklore of Discworld", by T.Pratchett.
Wonder if there is a pattern...^^
My last Pathfinder PbP character is a 6'6" dwarf.
He was adopted. ;-)
I am currently reading A Soul for Tsing by Chris A Jackson (the guy who wrote the Pathfinder Tales:Pirate's Honor and Pirate's Promise). I am only 50 or so pages in, It is about the crafting of a intelligent magical weapon for a Emperor...with something going wrong(I am guessing as I have not got that far yet).
Finished up "The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man," read a short Filmguide to The Battle of Algiers by one Joan Mellen, retrieved E. Nesbit's The Magic World from the Love Basement and had a jolly good time with it, less so Virginia Hamilton's In the Beginning: Creation Stories from Around the World and am looking forward to finishing No Truce With Kings on the next bus ride to Brooklyn.