Books.

[NINJAFORCE]

I would like to see Witch Buster on the Nook, Kindle, and Ipad. That would be amazing if that happends.

[Miss Vavavavoom]

I just read the latest And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini and now, I am in a depression because nothing I ever write will compare to the sheer god like quality that Khaled Hosseini writes! Damnit, why was is he such a friggen awesome person? It's not fair!

[Weertangel]

Just be yourself vava, then it will all work out
Try to be(like) someone else and u just set yourself up for failure.

[Dirty n Evil]

It's been years since I read Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, so I decided a couple of weeks ago to re-read them.

AUGH, that ending. It actually makes me ticked off at Mr. Pullman, if that makes sense. I can see from the moment he introduces Will along with the Specters, it was his idea that Will & Lyra could never be together. To have two young people so perfectly in love, who just proclaimed to one another that they knew they could never love anyone else because of the experiences the two of them shared. Experiences that they could never reveal to another soul... and then force them apart? I just have to wonder why he felt it was necessary. How that ending made it a better book than allowing them to finally know happiness, dammit. Too many people know sadness - but we need hope that two people can be truly happy together. GAH, this anti-romanticism trend in storytelling is pissing me off.

But I should have known better, I've already read the books as I've said. It's just... it's hitting me worse at this time of year, reading something so depressing.

[yiraheerai]

Started on the Sherlock Holmes series by reading A Letter in Scarlet (which is part of one big book which is a two-parter on the entire Sherlock Holmes series, if that makes any sense) and I got the Hyperbole and a Half book.

Most of the stories in the H&1/2 book are new and actually pretty funny. There's a few I should ask my mom to read because it's a good way to explain how I am about certain things. The last story in it gave me mixed feelings, which actually makes me want to go on the website and read one of the funnier stories. (Great work on that end, Allie)

A Letter in Scarlet was an interesting read, to be sure. It seemed like it was made up out of two different stories with no connection to them at all. I spent a lot longer than I'd like to admit going "Did he.. did he just.. write two different stories and put them together in a book? Do they do that?" I blame my inability to keep track of names. I am HORRIBLE with them.

I dunno when I'll pick up the Sherlock Holmes book again. I'd hate to get right in the middle of it (I am a SLOW reader) and then get too woozy via surgery to continue for a week or two.

[Artemisia]

Yira,

The majority of the Sherlock Holmes stories written by Doyle are short stories. There are only four novels- A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear. Beyond that, there are 56 original short stories starting with A Scandal In Bohemia and ending with The Adventure at Schoscombe Old Place.

Overall, they're fairly quick reads. I own reproductions of the Strand Magazine editions of the first two anthologies and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

[TellusEidolon]

"A fairly quick read" is a relative term depending on how slow/fast the individual reader read though. ;)

Anyway to be on topic, i haven't really read much these past years. I have started reading several books, but haven't really finished anything because of getting distracted or not being in the right mood much. :/ Whenever i tried to start read my mind just began wandering to other things instead of focusing on the book, which has been really irritating because i actually find the books themselves interesting - just can't concentrate on it.

[Weertangel]

I got nostalic and have been reading the Forgotten Realms Campaign setting book and the forgotten realms player guide ever since i played Baldur's gate 2 EE again, hell, even installed Neverwinter nights 2 again to get completely immersed in this great D&D setting

[Don Alexander]

Well, guess what, this vacation, after one and a half years of nothing, I've finally returned to reading books!!!

That Anne rice book I started reading in spring 2010?? Still not continued.

Instead, I brought the three Larry Niven novels I had taken with me to La Silla with me, and not I've read two of them already and am on the third!

Ringworld's Children is the fourth and newest Ringworld novel, and I guess it' symptomatic of many writers who just lose it in their later years... The style is very telegraphic, I felt like I was reading a "the studio forced the director to cut his movie down to 90 minutes for the stupid American mass market", the whole book is measly 280 pages long... The first 50 or so are really fast and confusing, later it gets better, but it still could easily have been expanded to 400 without seeming long-winded. Still decent fun.

The Mote in God's Eye: And now for something completely different!! This book has been lauded as just about the best first contact novel ever written, and yeah, it comes close to it. FAN-TAS-TIC book, very engrossing read. The only thing that I am critical of was how the interpersonal relationships between some people were handled, romance that was not...

The Gripping Hand: This is the sequel to Mote written 18 years later and set 25 years afterward. So far I'm a quarter through. Clearly not as good as the first novel, but still a lot of fun. Was not well received by critics, though. Let's see.

Wellll, this thread has been pretty dead, people!! This post of mine that I cite for reference is just four pages back and it's from early 2012!! And here's that even earlier moment where my regular reading just ground to a stop.

Since these three Niven books almost 30 months ago, I had not read any books. Even the newspapers are just piling up around me, though I've made at least some progress with catching up with Scientific Americans and Astronomys.

But for my recent just-over-a-week Easter vacation at home, I decided, fuck y'all, I'm going to read some BOOKS!!! Several years back, I'd written about a large purchase of books to complete a lot of trilogies and series. Back then I estimated that my reading for the next two years was mapped out, but instead, almost nothing happened except for the three Niven books cited above.

Now, I had the choice between Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga or Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy. I choose the latter. After like 20 YEARS, I would reread Neuromancer!!! It took me all of two days. HOLY CRAP, is that book good!!!! It's highly interesting to read it now, considering the power the Internet is today - whereas we have experienced hardly any progress toward "jacking in" and actual Cyberspace. It's also illuminating just how fundamentally this book has influenced things from the Matrix movie trilogy over the Shadowrun RPG to the Netrunner card game...
I quickly followed up with Count Zero, which was also good, but still something of a letdown. It features an entire new set of characters, and you need to get like 3/4 through the book to start seeing the connections back to Neuromancer and the merging and "unchaining" of Wintermute and Neuromancer.
Finally, then Mona Lisa Overdrive, which has a much more direct connection to Count Zero and features (though the reader is kept in the dark about this for a while, but I immediately realized who it had to be) the return of one of Neuromancer's main protagonists. I had started reading this book right after Easter and bekame seriously worried about running out of reading material, so I made a book order on Amazon - see below. But I needn't have worried, my last few days were pretty busy and I finally finished the book up a week ago. Which brings me to...

I always lag behind several years with Stephen king... Well, with ALL my authors. But King is my fave!
I think the newest I've read is Lisey's Story.

THANK YOU, SELF, for this message!! I recently had this vague suspicion that I might have read Lisey's Story, but pretty much dismissed it, being sure Cell was the last King book I read. Turns out I was wrong, so one less I need to buy whenever I catch up.

Because I have started to! Next to Game of Thrones Season 3 on BluRay (which a friend of mine would pay for as my birthday gift), I ordered two fat Stephen King novels: Under the Dome and 11.22.63, and then another book which has been mentioned often in this thread, George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire Volume 5: A Dance With Dragons!!! (Ironic that I gnashed my teeth for years waiting for it to finally come out, and then it does and it takes several more years until I finally buy it...)

I started Under the Dome immediately after finishing Mona Lisa Overdrive pretty much exactly a week ago - and the next four days, I performed basic life-sustaining measures and otherwise was completely lost in Chester's Mills. The sheer joy of reading another King epic can't be put in words. It's a freaking awesome page-turner, I pretty much stayed up until dawn each night (my reading speed seems to have decreased, though ). I finished it on Friday morning and immediately switched to 11.22.63. That book, while very interesting, has so far not utterly gripped me, and I have only managed the first 150 pages or so.

I'm seriously thinking of ordering the last three Wheel of Time books to read after Dance with Dragons, and before I read Gibson/Sterling's The Difference Engine, which Bear mentioned getting seemingly in another age way earlier in the thread...

I also found out that Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga, while generally a stand-alone duology, has a prequel, a trilogy sequel (Void Trilogy), and he is right now finishing up a new duology which is set between Commonwealth and Void, one book appearing in the next months, the other planned for next year. So I'll have to wait at least two more years, then I can read all EIGHT in one likely-not-so-fell swoop. And Gibson's Pattern Recognition turns out to just be the first volume of the by-now-completed Blue Ant Trilogy, so I'll wait until I have two others before starting off on that.

And, you know, one day, I just might actually restart and finally finish Anne Rice's Exit to Eden...

[Dirty n Evil]

You're right, DA - I should contribute to this thread more often. Especially considering I read all the friggin' time, and it's a slow week if I haven't read at least one book.

Recently found out that I live just two miles from the local library... it was just around a turn at a major intersection I never had a reason to turn down before. I had put several items on hold there (you can not only check out books, but also CD's and even DVD's) and when I showed up this morning to pick up all the items I'd reserved earlier in the week, the (rather cute) young lady behind the counter chuckled and said, "Oh, so you're the person who put all of these on hold!"

I read Under the Dome as well, DA, and it was a very engrossing read. Have to agree with you there. There were several nights when I knew I was staying up a little too late, but I wasn't quite ready to leave Chester's Mills. I did think the ecological subtext was a bit... overt, however. It's been a while since I re-read my William Gibson either... Neuromancer was so ahead of its time. *thinks* Yeah, I haven't read those three books in about 20 years.

I'd say over this last year the best book I've read has been Jane Eyre. Just fantastic. Also read The Prisoner of Zenda, and because I'd finally read Jane Eyre I re-read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde... fun in its own right, but I definitely benefited from finally getting several of the in-jokes relating to the source material. I've been re-reading several books that I haven't read since I was young such as the Madeleine L'Engle Time Quartet, Tom Holt's Portable Door, In Your Dreams, and Earth, Fire, Air, and Custard.

Whenever I'm uncertain what to read, what I most often do is just load up my audiobook of Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind & The Wise Man's Fears. I adore these two books, and I'm chomping at the bit for the third and (according to Mr. Rothfuss) final book in the series to come out. Every time I listen to them I catch an extra little clue to the bigger mystery, and I keep trying to drag my friend Zeus into talking about them. I recently lent my copy of Name of the Wind to my co-worker Morgan, and I'm hoping his likes it. Every time I listen to it, though, I dislike Denna even more.

Most recently, I finished Brent Weeks' second book in the 'Lightbringer' series, called The Blinding Knife. *sighs* Here's the thing. I think Mr. Weeks is an amazing storyteller. He's great at capturing flawed people that are still "heroes". He shows that often times no matter how much you plan, things are going to go wrong - and it's how you react when everything is falling apart around you that defines what it means to be a hero. However, there is one element of Mr. Week's books that bothers me to an equal degree to his storytelling.

I've noticed that in both this series and his previous 'Night Angel Trilogy', there isn't a single female character that hasn't been brutalized by the violence of men except for one or two, and the majority of the violence was of a sexual nature. That really upsets me. And often, this violence happens in such a way as no one of a good nature is available to prevent it or immediately punish the guilty parties in question for it. Some times, it's actually permitted by the law of the land. It makes me think of the classic Women in Refridgerators problem in many comic books where female characters were killed, maimed, or depowered and reduced to little more than a plot device. I really wish that I could encourage Mr. Weeks to create a female character that was strong, kicked butt, and hadn't been the victim of such violence.

Y'see, this is perhaps why I don't post too much in this thread. I love books, and I go ranting when I talk about them.

[Retiarius]

Please, rant away. It'll be interesting to see what you rant about if you read any of mine.

[Don Alexander]

Finished up 11.22.63 this morning in another "read until it's daylight outside" session. As stated, the beginning is a bit draggy, and the first "mission" was good but nothing extraordinary. The middle part of the book became better, though I have to admit the "spy on Oswald" main plot was not terribly interesting, whereas I totally adored "George" and Sadie's romance. The last part of the book, when the main mission culminates, and everything that happens thereafter, was just fucking brilliant. I was damned tired but I could not stop. End was kind of soppy, like in the dome, but very well done, I think.

And now, to do a certain ex-girlfriend (ye olde forum geezers will know who I'm talking about) a favor, I've switched my schedule and started with Gibson's/Sterling's The Difference Engine, since she seemed to be really excited about the prospect of me reading it. Just a few pages in, but the translator-inside has already thrown up his hands in defeat at the language.

[Dirty n Evil]

Because it's been years since I read his original trio of books, I was curious again about what I liked about Brent Weeks' earlier writing. So, I checked out from the library the audiobook versions of them to download onto my iPod and listen to while at work. Only... they're not audiobooks. They're "Graphic Audio" - much like the old radio teleplays where they have different actors voicing each role, sound effects, and even some light musical scores of classical pieces in a few scenes. Which sounds like a nifty idea - but the way it's layered in such a way that sometimes the voices are a bit muddy and it's tricky to understand what the lines being spoken are. Some of that might be their accents, because it's clearly a British cast of actors.

Although honestly, the biggest mistake in my opinion they made was the casting of the main character (Azoth) and his best friend (Logan). Azoth is supposed to be of average height, Logan is supposed to be a giant of a man, and they're both supposed to be about 21 when the true action of the story gets going. Only, the voice actor they have for Azoth sounds to be in his late 40's-early 50's with an excessive amount of stage training for an "over refined" acting voice and he's a fairly deep baritone. But Logan, the bigger of the two, is voiced by an actor with a high nasally voice. They're just so poorly cast. I'd do better if it were one narrator doing his interpretation of all of the voices.

[GothPoet]

I was derping around on a search engine and found this.

Fifty Shames of Earl Grey: A Parody

[Don Alexander]

Hello, threadness, my old friend,
I've come to write in you again...

So, seems my report on The Difference Engine was sent only to my Sithling. The book was a mixed bag. The first part (70 pages) was rather boring, but then we switch protagonists to "Leviathan" Mallory, and it becomes awesome!! I absolutely loved his dashing adventure in London during the Great Stink. So this goes until about page 330, and then it switches perspective again, and turns boring again too. And the end of the book was pretty weird and unsatisfactory, I must say.

Considering the book was written by two authors, I do wonder if the great middle part was penned by Gibson and the rest by Sterling...

Anyway, I finished it up in early June, after a leisurely month of reading, and then stopped again with the books.

Until a week ago, when I decided to go into hermit-mode once again and totally gobble up George R. R. Martin's A Dance With Dragons!!

Now, getting into the book was somewhat difficult. Considering it's "geographically split" and parallels A Feast for Crows for the most part, the beginning directly connects to A Storm of Swords, and I finished that in the first days of 2008... Verily, before this whole forum even came into existence!! And I read A Feast for Crows in the following months. On the other hand, I've so far seen the first three seasons of Game of Thrones, and those only cover the first two books and roughly half of A Storm of Swords - it seems the fourth season then covers the second half as well as the beginnings of AFfC and ADwD. So I was missing half a book and had quite a few "What do you mean, X is dead???" moments... (Tywin, Shae, though I kind of remembered Ygritte dying.) But I was really happy to find out that one of my favorite characters, Davos "The Onion Knight" Seaworth, whos death had been absentmindedly mentioned in AFfC, is still alive, and his death was just feigned for political reasons...

I really liked the book, but it still lagged a bit behind things like Neuromancer and Under the Dome. My main impression though was that it was LONG! It has 1100 pages in pretty small print. While I could not find a direct word count, the unabridged audio book is 48 hours long, to be compared to about 42 for the very longest Wheel of Time books... It took my five whole days to read it, I finished it Thursday near dawn...

The ending is evil and cliffhangerish to the extreme! Did they really kill Jon?? Probably not, but ending his last chapter with "daggers in the dark" cutting him down was just vile and perfect GRRM!! Has the Bastard of Bolton really crushed Stannis' army, killed him and taken Lightbringer, along with caging up Mance Raider, or was his letter just a bunch of lies? Mereen is about to go to all-out war, and Daenerys is out in the Dothraki sea with her biggest dragon, about to meet one of the chieftains of her former khalasar...

I read on Wikipedia that about 100 pages, including "two big battles as well as a chapter on Arya" were cut from the book and will be featured at the beginning of The Winds of Winter. Also, that there is not even a vague publication date, at the very very earliest something like a year from now... wow wait so long much frustrate

Immediately afterward, I launched into the first volume of William Gibson's Bridge Trilogy, Virtual Light. It was a wrenching change of style, from Martin's clear, straightforward writing to a thick fog of metaphoric descriptiveness... I just read a few pages but will continue on this evening. Let's see how it turns out.