Finished Emperor's Soul. It was good, but not mind blowing. Typical Sanderson -- new magic system, etc. Felt short. Started Abercrombie's Red Country, and while I like his writing, the faux-Western-in-not-the-West is kind of grating to me. Everyone speaks with a drawl and it's driving me nuts.
I finished The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow by Cory Doctorow. It was a free pdf on his website, so I sent it to my kindle with the "convert" command. This was a bad idea. I read about half of the opening novella while thinking it was weirdly disjointed, but I was in first person from an immortal transhuman, so maybe this was his way of writing this character's crazy thought processes. Nope. The pdf was originally in two columns, and the conversion process interpolated some of the text into the middle of other text, and just dropped some text altogether. I put the pdf on my kindle and dealt with dragging and zooming, and the story made much more sense. Then an essay about copyright that made me feel bad for using the kindle, and an interview that made me wish I was Cory Doctorow.
The only way I've ever seen to semi-effectively convert a pdf into a mobi file is to convert the pdf to html, then turn the html into a mobi. And even with that method the results aren't worth the trouble.
Kindle will actually accept html files, and Doctorow has all of his novels as html, epub, or pdf. I just figured it would be easier not to convert it the second time.
Apparently he writes these "short" stories as palette cleansers inbetween monster novels. It must be good to be the King of young fantasy authors... here's what he has on deck for the next few years (!): The Rithmatist (new setting) Way of Kings book 2 Elantris 2 Another Mistborn Trilogy (with modern day tech) Alloy of Law sequel Warbreaker sequel
Ok so I am 700 pages in to The Terror by Simmons now. OMG it goes on and on and on...I am still enjoying it though. While it can be a slog, it is not necessarily a bad slog- certainly not for everyone but I am still powering through it. Now, I have a question and if you know me personally this would be a rather odd question- what are or where do I start with GOOD Star Wars books. Oddly I have never read one. (In the summer of 1977, my friends and I went to see it every Friday night for 10 weeks straight) And there are just so many and I know from what I have heard that some are just fantastic while some are just meh. A couple of points in the right direction would be great. All this talk about new Star Wars has me thinking that I need to read some.
Here is a complete list of good Star Wars novels: For decent ones? I'd stick with the Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn. Avoid like the plague anything by Kevin J. Anderson.
I'm in the mood to read some Stephen King. However, I haven't read any of his books since It back in the mid-80s. Which of his novels and short fiction collections would you recommend most highly to someone who hasn't read any of his books in a long while?
And not just Star Wars related, avoid ANYTHING by Kevin J. Anderson. Still can't believe they attempted to do Dune.
I just re-read IT. What a great book. I really enjoy King and I like his long rambling style mostly enough to allow me to not blame him too much for his continually crappy endings. That said, The Stand just never gets old for me. The Shining obviously. But I also really liked Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist. Don't skip Salem's Lot either. I won't let on here that I have never read any Dark Tower books :/
I finished Seeds of Earth by Michael Cobley. The story is pretty much Mass Effect meets Avatar. A bit lighter than my usual preferences in SF but it was entertaining and ultimately that's not a bad thing.
Quick notes on recently-read stuff: Leviathan Wakes by James A. Corey was entertaining space opera. There are nits to pick--I don't think the viewpoint characters alternated between were dissimilar enough in practice to really make doing so worthwhile, and I don't think it earned its ending overall--but they were only nits, I'll probably pick up the next book in the series. For a while there, I was wondering how in the world the book was as long as it appeared to be, especially as it clearly entered the final act. Then I found it was because of... The Dragon's Path by Daniel Abraham (who turns out to be one-half of the conjoined pseudonym above), as the kindle edition actually included the full text for free. Likewise, entertaining fantasy. Including it as a freebie was a shrewd move based on data sample of one, as I'm likely to pick up the next book as well, and it probably otherwise wouldn't have crossed my radar. My Work is Not Yet Done by Thomas Ligotti. I'm not sure I'd even classify Ligotti as horror--it's cosmically bleak, but a bleakness there's no fight against. Denial and anger and whatnot are far, far away in the rearview mirror, and the nihilism has been completely peacefully accepted. Of the titular novella and the two short stories ("I Have a Special Plan for This World" and "The Nightmare Network") in the collection, I overall liked the Nightmare Network the most, as it plunges right into grim and surreal, with the absolute best ending line of any of them. But all three were good stuff.
Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, his first two short story collections, contain some of the best horror ever written. Speaking of which, I need to reread those...
Duma Key is probably his best from the past ten years or so that isn't part of the whole Dark Tower thing. It's a good ghost story. I liked Bag of Bones too, but a lot of people didn't.
I didn't read that into it all. Just the use of "How do" 3 times, which was 3 too many, but not that much overall.
The dialog -- hell, the narrative even -- is highly stylized. Lots of "Reckon", "'em", and what not. Specifically with Shy, not so much with Cosca. Just feels like Abercrombie is trying to channel Cormac McCarthy mixed with some Deadwood.
Fair enough (though I've never read McCarthy). An aside on Cosca: I don't normally picture famous actors in roles in novels while I'm reading them, but at some point, I started picturing Christopher Plummer as Cosca. And since then, I really want to see that happen.
New Dresden is out today. Naturally, I got the James Marsters narrated audio version. Looking forward to it.
Okay, I picked up Stephen King's Duma Key and Nightmares & Dreamscapes from the library today. I was a King junkie growing up in the late 70s, early 80s and read everything he published - It was the first hardcover book I bought on the day it was released - so I've already read all of his earlier work.
I finished The Naked God. I think this book finally distilled a problem I have with epic length novels. Authors with multiple point of view characters often fall in love with the smell of their own farts writing about a character that isn't entertaining, just because they like writing them. Al Capone literally added nothing to the plot of any of the Night's Dawn books. His Organization did nothing, had no effect, on anything. Yeah there was the slight amount of terror they sewed. Yeah, it gave a kind-of-sort-of-maybe reason for one of the Hellhawks to follow Captain Marvelous and Rapey McVoidhawk, but these things could have been done without any lengthy subplots about how Al Capone is a dick to everyone. I am not sure I've read any long novel that had multiple characters wherein I enjoyed every minute. I remember back to many times in Song of Ice and Fire, especially, where I would skim through chapters because I wanted to get to more of the parts I liked the most. To me,it feels like these novels are several in one. One or two good novels, one or two amazing novels, and one or two really shitty ones. I resolve to read more single character and first person perspective books from now on. On that note, I picked up and started Rivers of London. At 30% the way through, I'm already in love.
I agree about Hamilton's early work. He seems to have reined it in with his later work considerably -- I really enjoyed Fallen Dragon quite a lot. Rivers of London was fun, but if you haven't read the Night Watch series yet I'd definitely give that a try.
I finished Ken Dryden's The Game, which probably should be required reading for anyone who is a fan of hockey, or even sports in general. Really great read, basically a week in the life of a player, but delves into the history of the game as well. There's an update written in 2003 (the original book was written in the 80s) that added a little bit of extra goodness, as a lot of the things he talks about in the epilogue are starkly relevant, particularly with the lockout. On to Flame of Sevenwaters, the latest entry in a sorta longish but decent celtic fantasy series I've been reading.
