What Are You Reading Right Now 2.0

[Broomstick]

The Martian by Andy Weir. Synopsis: a six-man crew on Mars has to abandon their mission and get back to their ship (and Earth) but in the mad dash for the launch vehicle one of them has an accident. The rest of the crew, thinking him dead and being a bit desperate, leave him behind. Turns out he survives anyway, at least to the extent he wakes up to find himself alone on Mars with no way to let anyone know he's alive and no way to get back home.

This is hard science fiction. There is no FTL or magic tech. It's all based on what science we know, it's all physical possible (though perhaps a bit improbable in spots).

I really enjoyed it.

[Raesene]

The Martian by Andy Weir. Synopsis: a six-man crew on Mars has to abandon their mission and get back to their ship (and Earth) but in the mad dash for the launch vehicle one of them has an accident. The rest of the crew, thinking him dead and being a bit desperate, leave him behind. Turns out he survives anyway, at least to the extent he wakes up to find himself alone on Mars with no way to let anyone know he's alive and no way to get back home.

This is hard science fiction. There is no FTL or magic tech. It's all based on what science we know, it's all physical possible (though perhaps a bit improbable in spots).

I really enjoyed it.

The Martian is among the most enthralling books I've read recently - loved every page of it. I hope the author publishes more books.

I'm now in the (so far) last book of the Cato/Macro series by Simon Scarrow, Blood Eagles. Nice to find a book series where the heroes do bad things (for modern eyes) that are perfectly acceptable and justified for them. But I think I'll never read a whole series of 12 books in one go - need something else inbetween. The next one book will probably be First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong by James R. Hansen, My Beloved Brontosaurus by Brian Smitek or Mirage by Matt Ruff, with a strong tendency towards the last one.

[Argosh]

"The Long War" by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter. I just can't get into it, I think I'll have to reread the first book in the series again.

[Highlord Laan]

"Cauldron of Ghosts" by David Weber/Eric Flint. Fun spy-fi romp. The others in the series were great, and this new installment is even better. Victor Cachat is goddamned hilarious.

Case in point/itty bitty mico spoiler: Cachat vs attempted carjacking. His solution involves a sports car, a bus, and a grenade launcher.

[Ahriman238]

The Builder, also by Powers. Again he has clever ideas but his writing falls a bit short. In particular it's hard not to see the new protagonist, Tor Baker, as anything but a duplicate of the last series protagonist, Brian Yi. Both are geeks and loners, and unreliable narrators who bring their own prejudices (which are remarkably similar) into the narrative.

[mr friendly guy]

Just finished an older fantasy "Red Magic" by Crawford Killian. I had to get or else I would never know how the story continued after I had read his first book in the series "Green Magic" back when I was in high school. Not really a great story.

Currently reading "The shining girls" and a book on the Imjin War.

[Ahriman238]

Just finished an older fantasy "Red Magic" by Crawford Killian. I had to get or else I would never know how the story continued after I had read his first book in the series "Green Magic" back when I was in high school. Not really a great story.

Currently reading "The shining girls" and a book on the Imjin War.

I read Red Magic, years and years ago. Never read the first book though.

[mr friendly guy]

Red magic was hard to get these days. I had to get it off Ebay. I remember the first book being better. The second book Red Magic had too much deus ex machina.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Rereading, and just about finished "The Wise man's fear" . (Rereading good books is what I do as a pick me up).
Delightful book.

Prior to that, the newest Simon Singh book - "The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets" was delightful. I proselytized about it greatly, even to a mathematics professor I know. (Who was familiar with a fair bit of it already, the mathematical proof from Futurama for example).

Next up will be to finally finish "Black Man/13" and/or Skin Games (as soon as it comes out). Eventually.

[Broomstick]

Commedia della Morte by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro which, despite the French title, is entirely in English. It's yet another St. Germain the Vampire novel, which makes it a vampire romance, but it predates the likes of Twilight by decades. I've been reading the series since the first book came out in 1978. By now it's a bit formulaic and while they're historical the author will alter things for the sake of the plot so don't treat them as real history. They're also adult, not filled with angsty teenagers (the main character is, by our time, 4,000 years old, his manservant around 2,000, and St. Germain gets a lot of middle-aged women into bed along with a few young ones), not everyone is beautiful and no goddamned sparkling bullshit! Oh, and the sex scenes are not poorly down fanfic porn, though I've had some men comment they don't understand them and find them puzzling (that's because it's steamy sex by and for women and not seen through a male lens). So, kind of like comfort food - you know what you're getting, it's a bit predictable, but you keep coming back for more as much for the familiar factor as anything else.

[Spekio]

Commedia della Morte by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro which, despite the French title, is entirely in English. It's yet another St. Germain the Vampire novel, which makes it a vampire romance, but it predates the likes of Twilight by decades. I've been reading the series since the first book came out in 1978. By now it's a bit formulaic and while they're historical the author will alter things for the sake of the plot so don't treat them as real history. They're also adult, not filled with angsty teenagers (the main character is, by our time, 4,000 years old, his manservant around 2,000, and St. Germain gets a lot of middle-aged women into bed along with a few young ones), not everyone is beautiful and no goddamned sparkling bullshit! Oh, and the sex scenes are not poorly down fanfic porn, though I've had some men comment they don't understand them and find them puzzling (that's because it's steamy sex by and for women and not seen through a male lens). So, kind of like comfort food - you know what you're getting, it's a bit predictable, but you keep coming back for more as much for the familiar factor as anything else.

So, mommy porn?

I jest.

So, found my old copy of Capitães da Areia by Jorge Amado. It's a good read, but I did not remember the anal rape scene. Caught me by surprise.

[Crazedwraith]

I finished Honor Among Enemies and went back to Desolation Island by Patrick O'Brien, an Aubrey-Maturin Adventure, which though probably 'better' is a far tougher, denser read.

As to HAE, I definitely preferred it to the preceding book. Mainly for its lack of vile fundamentalist villains and there points of view. In this book Honor commands a Squadron of Q-Ships to stop out-of-control piracy on the trade routes and finds full scale commerce raiding going on. Sacrificing her Q-Ship to save a passenger liner by the end. I say she commands a Squadron all four of ships split up as soon as they reach their hunting grounds and barely appear after. So basically its Honor in the role of a single ship captain for one last time.

It's good fun and has a good portion of the book devoted to a lower decks character. Which I feel was okay as it was but really a missed opportunity to do a bit of compare and contrast the brand spanking new enlisted guy with the experienced captain.

[Broomstick]

Commedia della Morte by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro which, despite the French title, is entirely in English. It's yet another St. Germain the Vampire novel, which makes it a vampire romance, but it predates the likes of Twilight by decades. I've been reading the series since the first book came out in 1978. By now it's a bit formulaic and while they're historical the author will alter things for the sake of the plot so don't treat them as real history. They're also adult, not filled with angsty teenagers (the main character is, by our time, 4,000 years old, his manservant around 2,000, and St. Germain gets a lot of middle-aged women into bed along with a few young ones), not everyone is beautiful and no goddamned sparkling bullshit! Oh, and the sex scenes are not poorly down fanfic porn, though I've had some men comment they don't understand them and find them puzzling (that's because it's steamy sex by and for women and not seen through a male lens). So, kind of like comfort food - you know what you're getting, it's a bit predictable, but you keep coming back for more as much for the familiar factor as anything else.

So, mommy porn?

I jest.

Well... actually to some extent, yes, porn for adult mothers (as opposed to aging teenagers). I introduced my mom to it and she rather enjoyed the series, as did the mother of my best friend.

There's also a recurring element of battered wives, desperate widows, rape, women victimized by powerful men and other variations of damsel in distress that needs rescue that appeals to women's concerns. Again, while some of them are young there are an equal number of middle-aged women in that role. Which is not to say the women are helpless, they aren't. A lot of them are quite accomplished and a few of them wind up rescuing the vampire here and there. Basically, the women have their knight in shining armor to rescue them without the strings attached that they have to marry the prince/hero, which is treating the woman as a prize for the man. This is literature for women, they're rescued/help the vampire and then get to choose what they do with their lives instead of being the living prize.

[dragon]

Reading The Dreaming Void by Peter Hamilton. A Scifi book set in the 35th century and people are capable living for thousands of years but after a few hundred they tend to make a choice to be downloaded into a interstellar computer network.
edit come tomorrow I'll be reading the new Dresden book

[Black Admiral]

Halo: The Thursday War, which I'm really having a hard time finishing. Traviss's prose is just never graduating above workmanlike, and all the supposedly heroic characters (at least on the human side) are just utter fucking scumbags - I don't know what else I can call someone who's more torn up over not murdering a helpless prisoner than he is over leaving a bunch of women and kids to die.

[The Grim Squeaker]

"Skin Games" (Dresden Files) was bloody AWESOME.
Highly recommended

[Darth Nostril]

Reading The Dreaming Void by Peter Hamilton. A Scifi book set in the 35th century and people are capable living for thousands of years but after a few hundred they tend to make a choice to be downloaded into a interstellar computer network.

Have you read Pandoras Star & Judas Unchained by the same author? They're set a thousand years before the Void trilogy, but feature many of the same characters.

Borrowed a bunch of Shadowrun books and working my way through from the beginning. Really wondering why so many people like and want to help Sam Verner in the first three books, the guy is an unmitigated knobhead.

[SilverDragonRed]

I finished reading 'The Forever War' by Joe Haldeman just a couple of days ago.

[Guardsman Bass]

I was reading Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, but put it down. I think I probably already get the jist of the argument from all the reviews and blog posts I've read about it anyways, and I was starting to lose interest.

I also just finished The Idealist by Nina Munk, which is a very good book about Jeffrey Sachs' Millenium Village Project efforts in Africa to end poverty. Sachs does not come across well in that book, nor the projects he started in east Africa. In fact, it sounds like his efforts may have undermined better projects going on at the same time, particularly the efforts to build a mosquito net business and culture of use that could actually sustain itself as opposed to depending on massive donations of mosquito nets every 4-5 years by foreign donors.

Next up is the book Piece of the Sun, about nuclear fusion efforts today. I also might re-read Charles Morris's Dawn of Innovation again, which is an extremely good and accessible book about industrialization in Great Britain and America in the 19th century (and particularly about the rise of mass production). I'd recommend it for anyone, although you should skip the first section about how the War of 1812 proceeded on the Great Lakes - it's dull as tar to me.

[FaxModem1]

Just finished Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Anansi Boys. Those were some rather enjoyable reads. If nothing else, I kind of want to explore America's tourist traps and see what all they have to offer.

[dragon]

Reading The Dreaming Void by Peter Hamilton. A Scifi book set in the 35th century and people are capable living for thousands of years but after a few hundred they tend to make a choice to be downloaded into a interstellar computer network.

Have you read Pandoras Star & Judas Unchained by the same author? They're set a thousand years before the Void trilogy, but feature many of the same characters.

Borrowed a bunch of Shadowrun books and working my way through from the beginning. Really wondering why so many people like and want to help Sam Verner in the first three books, the guy is an unmitigated knobhead.

Yeah I read them good read but by the end of the book was like just get on with it. Long books can be a drag sometimes.

[Broomstick]

Reading two books at the same time right now:

American on Purpose by Craig Ferguson and Skin Game by Jim Butcher

[Panzersharkcat]

The Secret World of Slugs and Snails. Just curious about them since I find them kind ugly cute.

[Ahriman238]

Getting further along with the Builder, well no, it's an obscure series called the Young Ancients, and I'm now on the third book. This guy keeps confusing homophones, and it's really distracting.

So far we have a fantasy kingdom of Noram, known to the Ancients as North America. It seems after the cataclysm, according to bedtime stories there were six immortals who each took a continent and founded a society based on what they considered worth preserving. So you have magical Noram, technologically advanced (we've seen nanotech and clones, and heard a lot about their warplanes) Austra, Soam is based on 'universal love,' Tellerand (Europe) on philosophy.

There are nobles, I'm guessing some sort of super-soldier, who are all 6-8 feet tall, faster and stronger than others and sometimes fly into a berserker rage where they manifest effects like shielding, hovering and repelling objects and people.

Mages are called builders here, though people keep using wizard specifically for Tor. They can build fields that instruct matter or energy to behave certain ways, like shifting all heat away or separating around the field for a cutting effect. It take a trance state and several minutes, sometimes half an hour for a one-shot direct effect field. Or if they burn an hour or two they can work a field into an object, activated by pressing a distinctive sigil. Fields in wood tend to last a year or so, metal (copper and silver preferred) holds a field for two or three depending on the skill of the builder. Stone and glass are hardest to work in, but a master builder can create a field lasting decades with them. Most builders can create a batch of ten field devices every hour or two, by my point in the book Tor has figured out how to do batches of fifty.

Anyone can learn building if they can develop the skills in meditation and mental discipline. Creating novel builds is extremely difficult because of the complexities involved, a personal shield (the most demanded device at the beginning of the series) must cover a variety of attacks but still let, say, air through. Creating a new build can often take months of work, give or take a few hours depending on whether you want to create a template allowing your work to be easily copied. Copying builds seems to be the occupation of most builders, though we've seen less and less as the series progresses.

More later when I have the time.

[Enigma]

Finished reading Greg Bear's Forge of God. A much better Earth doomed\few survivors story than that Nicolas Cage movie.

Now I'm reading Tony Daniel's Guardian of Night.