Which book are you reading currently? #7

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Okay - finally, holidays! I'm finally free from textbooks!
Reading Nabokov: Pale Fire. This guy is such a genius. Yes, he may have written about weird subjects like pedophilia and incest, but you can't deny that he's a damned genius. Just read the first page of Lolita...
For those that don't know, Pale Fire is a poem in four cantos, and the story unfolds in the commentaries and the forewords of that poem, by way of footnotes. It's a very interesting idea.

 

just finished The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson. Not bad but not great imo.

 

Blart The boy who didn't want to save the world

 

Finished Pale Fire. Very good. Highly recommended.

Don't know what to read now, but I got Ulysses out of the libary. But it's so darn big...

 

Just took a plunge in the dragonlance world. Got a few from the library, bought a few, mostly the ones by Hickman and Weis.

 

THe House Of Paper by Carlos Maria Dominguez

 

Knife of Dreams, by Robert Jordan (R.I.P). Actually I just finished it, so I am not actually reading it at the moment. Silly me. I am going to read the David Eddings stuff next. Heard good things about his books, so I am quite eager to get started.

 

If you are more than 16 years old you might find some fault with Eddings work. I do not want to rag on it as I love it with all of my heart but I read it in my teens. I read some of his newer work and started to re-read but stopped his earlier work as I simply did not want to tar my memories. That said, please start with the earlier versions of Eddings' work as it is both the best and that he has a tendency to write the same story over and over again just changing the names of hte characters and not always even that.

I am currently reading the third book in Jim Butcher's "Furies of Calderon" series and although falling just short of his Dresden books I would still claim them to be very worthwhile fantasy books. Apparently they are a result of a bet where Butcher was dared to write a series of books combining epic fantasy and pokemon. It is working out quite good.

 

Gestures: The Do's and Taboos of Body Language Around the World by Roger E. Axtell

 

I decided to reread 'A feast for Crows' by George RR Martin.

With work and all reading is being placed on the background. I figure that Martin will finish the next book around the same time I reread this one. Maybe not

 

Just finished Smax by Alan Moore (a comic book) and

currently reading Tai Chi by Paul Crompton

 

About halfway through Terry Pratchett's The Bromeliad, think I'm up to Diggers now.

I've pretty much read every other Prachett book out there, so I thought I'd give it a shot. For a children's book (which it actually is), it's pretty good. It deals quite naturally with death and all that stuff, no covering it up.

Been slow reading though, I go through massive amounts of books on the daily commute to school (about an hour up and one back), but school's out for summer...

 

No Logo by Naomi Klein

So far there's been nothing that'd make me think that multinational brands are eeevill. The beginning at least can be read as a light-weight marketing guide...

 

Just finished reading Forsaken House by Richard Baker. FR books really haven't improved that much since I last read one. I only read this for a piece of realmslore that I'm geeking out over (which the novel/3E+ butchered from its original state anyway).

(spoilers)
Anyway, it was rather lame. The bad guys are, of course, entirely unsympathetic and just plain eeeeeeeeeeeeevil. They also get owned all the time by the amazing and wonderful good guys, despite that the bad guys should by rights have every advantage. It's mostly cheese and the author beating mistakes into the bad guys and sudden amazing strength, bravery, etc. into the good guys that makes everything turn out dandy.

So, yes, I am not impressed. This was yet another grand failure to handle good and evil in an interesting manner - a failure which WotC excels at.

 

"To your scattered bodys go" Philip J. Farmer

I like the scenario Farmer constructed in this book. All people ever lived on earth, are brought back to live on a seperate planet by a higher species. Who knows, maybe he even is right

 

The Sherlock Holmes short stories (I read all the novels several months ago). Quite fun but a bit too formulaic. The quality of the individual stories varies sometimes dramatically.

 

"Last argument of Kings" by Joe Abercrombie, the final book in the First Law trilogy. I feel I have not pushed this enough. It is absolutely awesome, it is a finished trilogy and it right up there with Martin, Erikson and Hobb. Pick it up, you will not be disapointed.

 

Just finished Lord of The Silver Bow and just started Shield of Thunder both of David Gemmel's Troy trilogy. It's been a while since I read anything I hadn't read before by him so I was glad to see them in the library. It's a shame he never got to finish the third book because they are really quite good.

I really want to get my hands on Watchmen just now though, considering they are making a movie.

 

Michael Crichton's Timeline. It's mildly entertaining, but each and every character is afflicted with terminal idiocy (usually fatal). The quantum mechanics lecture is maddening - Crichton spends around 50 pages giving a textbook explanation of quantum theory as a justification for his time travel plot, then when one character points out it's all BS his objections are hand waved in one line. It makes the previous 50 pages nothing more than "I did all this research and I wanted to show it off!" The actual adventure is good but it's not Crichton's best.

 

"Toll the hounds" the latest Malazan book by Steven Erikson. Too early to have much of an opinion of the book but yet again Stevie sets up a more or less completely new setting although with characters from previous books.