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I just finished re-reading Dragon's Path by Daniel Abraham. I really enjoy it, particularly because of the characterization of three of the main characters. One of them has Tyrion Lannister-like moral ambiguity, another exemplifies "smart but inexperienced", and the third manages to make what is otherwise an arrogant, reactionary nobleman seem like a sympathetic character ("everybody is the hero of their own story" and such).

The e-book for that came with another Abraham novel, Leviathan Wakes. It's a "semi-soft"* SF space opera story set in the solar system a couple of hundred years from now, and particularly in the "Belt" (the colonies built into asteroids in the asteroid belt). The "space politics" and "cop drama" parts of the storyline are great stuff (I haven't read a good Interplanetary Space Opera in forever), but the twist/storyline in the second half of the novel didn't appeal to me.

I'm about 20 pages into Middlemarch by George Eliot, and taking it slowly. Same goes for my re-read of Bakker's White Luck Warrior (which has been frustrating on re-read - all of the things that annoyed me on the first read really stand out now).

* By "semi-soft", I mean that the technology is in the "laws-of-physics possible but practically very difficult" category, and there are some full-blown "soft" elements in the second half. The main propulsion around the Solar System is with fusion torch drives, but it still takes a fair amount of time to get around (which Abraham uses to make the scale of the situation seem appropriately space opera large).

Stofsk wrote:

I want to finish that collection, but I loaned to somebody and she fled the country.

That sounds like a story and a bit.

The events were unrelated. She just wanted to borrow some good fantasy books, so I gave them to her. She actually left the country for business, but where's the dramatic flair in telling it like that?

It's OK, though. I still have the Gene Wolf fantasy books based on a dying Earth. I should probably finish them.

Is Gene Wolfe any good? I've heard about Book of the New Sun being a classic, but I've never read it.

Stofsk wrote:Is Gene Wolfe any good? I've heard about Book of the New Sun being a classic, but I've never read it.

I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but I ended up putting it down to read something more compelling and never picked it up again. I still plan to return to it at some point.

It felt like a more literary book than I'm used to, or at least it was attempting to be literary. There was a lot of development of the main character and his relationship with his world and sometimes other characters, but exposition only dribbled out in drabs enough to let me realize how much was being left out of every scene to build up atmosphere/mystery/ambiguity, and the effect was tedious at times. It reminds me a lot of how genre books were written in the 70's, especially when they had aspirations to literature. There were strengths and weaknesses to the approach, but one of the big drawbacks for me was the feeling that the story wasn't going anywhere and that I needed to put more effort into the book than I would normally want for my 'escapism.' Modern prose techniques tend to ditch a lot of the flavor for the sake of pacing, I find, so it is difficult to read older works without feeling the drag. That said, the world is very evocative, and I do want to know more about what the main character has to say. I fully intend to pick it up and read again when I get to a point where I'm mentally prepared for that kind of a read.

I hope that helps.

I read The Knight and have The Wizard in my to read pile. They're a struggle. Dense, very different and obtuse in the way that the story is told.

That said, there's some cool ideas and good characters.

Currently reading the following:

Lindsey Davis A Body in the Bathhouse which is part of her Falco series. I will own up to having a love of historical whodunnits and detective novels. I heartily recommend the first six or so books in the series, after that the quality becomes rather uneven. On a similar note I also greatly enjoyed the Judge Dee series by Robert van Gulik.

Apollodorus The Library of Greek Mythology which is sort of an ancient cliffnotes of Greek Mythology and the great cycle about the Trojan War. Quite interesting if you're interested in that.

Anna Bertha Miller's Roman Etiquette of the Late Republic as Revealed by the Correspondence of Cicero which is pretty much what it sounds like, combining my interesting in the Victorian era with that of the classical era.

I'm also slowly rereading The Uprising by Liviu Rebreanu, now he is considered one of the finest novelists in Romanian history and to be honest... This guy is right up there with Guy de Maupassant and Zola. The book is remarkable for how it portrays the entirity of Romanian society, from the high to the low, without any real venom even though it recounts a massive peasant rebellion. I have to say that I would need quite a few pages to explain why this is so great.

Dalton wrote:The Nook edition of American Gods is on sale for 1.99 today only. Maybe I'll make use of this B&N card burning a hole in my wallet, even though I have a Kindle (and an iPhone).

Hehe. I got the Nook version anyway ($2 for a Neil Gaiman classic is hard to pass up, even though it cost $1.50 more than my hardcover copy...). And hey, wouldn't ya know, there's a way to get the Nook for Android app on a Kindle Fire...

Or just use Calibre to unify all your eBook libraries.

*edit* And btw, does the Aldiko reader app work on the fire?

Just finished The Concubine's Tattoo, the fourth installment in Laura Joh Rowland's Sano Ichiro mystery series. Again, I've fallen behind and I'm trying to get through the series; still have 10 books to go now before I'm caught up. Still enjoying this brand of historical fiction in the Tokugawa era of Japan -- especially with both Sano's character development and the introduction of his fiery wife, Reiko.

Swastika Night, by Katharine Burdekin, a sadly forgotten novel from the 30s set in the year 700 of the Thousand Year Reich.

As a woman is above a worm,
So is a man above a woman.
As a woman is above a worm,
So is a worm above a Christian.
So, my comrades, the lowest thing,
The meanest, filthiest thing
That crawls on the face of the earth
Is a Christian woman.
To touch her is the uttermost defilement
For a German man.
To speak to her only is a shame.
They are all outcast, the man, the woman and the child.
My sons, forget it not!
On pain of death or torture
Or being cut off from the blood. Heil Hitler.
As a man is above a woman,
So is a Nazi above any foreign Hitlerian.
As a Nazi is above a foreign Hitlerian,
So is a Knight above a Nazi.
As a Knight is above a Nazi,
So is Der Fuehrer (whom may Hitler bless)
Above all Knights,
Even above the Inner Ring of Ten.
And as Der Fuehrer is above all Knights,
So is God, our Lord Hitler, above Der Fuehrer.
But of God the Thunderer and our Lord Hitler
Neither is pre-eminent,
Neither commands,
Neither obeys.
They are equal in this holy mystery.
They are God.
Heil Hitler.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Sovereigns of the Sea; The quest to build the perfect renaisance battleship by Angus Konstam.

Not the best writing I've ever encountered, and he flubs quite a bit on things he shouldn't; tons burden cannot be a measure of the weight of a ship as it is a straitforward measure of volume, his relationship between cogs, hulks, nefs, naos and cochas does not jibe with what I've read, etc., but there's a lot of information I haven't found anywhere else, and there's precious little else available on the subject.

Just finished Deborah Harkness' A Discovery of Witches. Not a bad blend of magic, history, and science. Looking forward to the sequel in July.

Up next is my most anticipated book so far for 2012, Star Wars: Darth Plagueis.

Finished Makers by Doctorow. Great book with noble dreams and intent. But Little Brother was still better, probably because it was much more emotive.

Wow. Amazon apparently has the original edition of The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle as a free eBook. I'll chalk it up to being a product of the times (1920s England), but the n-word being a part of a children's novel is quite shocking, to say the least. This is not the book I remember reading when I was younger.

prior to the 1940s you could be quite liberal and still use that language quite liberially and not think of it as racist....

Godel, Escher, Bach. For at least the last semester, and it's looking like it might stretch out to most of the next, as well. The book is just really hard to read for extended stretches without going all "wait... what is this about, again?".

When I do recall what it's about, however, it's fascinating.

Faqa wrote:Godel, Escher, Bach. For at least the last semester, and it's looking like it might stretch out to most of the next, as well. The book is just really hard to read for extended stretches without going all "wait... what is this about, again?".

When I do recall what it's about, however, it's fascinating.

Hey, i also started reading it a few days ago. And like you said: a fascinating read indeed with a very broad scope of subjects that are all related to each other in some way which i find especially interesting. Or the different dialogues the author uses to illustrate certain points.

I just finished J.M. McDermott's When We Were Executioners, the second in a trilogy. I strongly recommend them. They're short books (both are shy of 300 pages), and the story has an almost dream-like prose at times which is still very readable.

I'm now reading Michael Lewis's Moneyball. The book was written in 2003, so it's interesting to think about what has happened since then. Unfortunately for the Oakland A's, the advantages of Sabermetrics disappeared once everybody started doing it - they haven't had a winning season in the past 4 years.

Just finishing up Return of The King. Do I get to say I've read Lord of The Rings if I skip the appendices? Because third of the book or no. It's not happening.

Most of the appendices consist of backstory, family trees, history, linguistics et cetera. You can skip 'em unless you're way interested in that sort of thing.

Depending on which edition you got, the ancient one I have crumbling away in my collection had the timeline following the events in the trilogy telling of the eventual fate of the remaining members of the fellowship. And the rest of the appendices are sweet wine compared to the dry dust of The Silmarillion. Don't even start that one.

Just read Peter F Hamiltons Commonwealth duology Pandoras Star and Judas Unchained, started on the Void trilogy, finished The Dreaming Void and now about halfway through The Temporal Void (borrowed Dreaming Void from my local library, liked it a lot, took it back without finishing and got the two sets for my kindle & started from the beginning)

Darth Nostril wrote:Depending on which edition you got, the ancient one I have crumbling away in my collection had the timeline following the events in the trilogy telling of the eventual fate of the remaining members of the fellowship. And the rest of the appendices are sweet wine compared to the dry dust of The Silmarillion. Don't even start that one.

Oh holy fuck yes. Yeah, read only the history past the events of LOTR if anything, but don't even touch the Silmarillion unless you're a Tolkien scholar or something.

or a masochist, or just read Turin....

The Children of Hurin is at least a coherent story.

Which isn't saying much given the bone dry style in which it's written.
As for the rest of it - epic battle in a benighted Middle Earth with dozens of dragons and legions of Balrogs ... I fell asleep reading it. The badly translated instructions for my new cheap kettle were more interesting "Much danger inputting the power!"