Read any good books lately? How about bad ones? Middle of the road? Exit signs?
Let us know!
Audio books count.
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I just finished Don’t Tell Mom I’m a Supervillain, and am working on How to Wreck a Nice Beach a history of the vocoder, which is lots of fun. It jumps around from its use in WWII and origins in the 1930s to it’s use in hip hop, electro, Sun Ra, and other music.
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Currently reading The Scar, having just read Perdido Street Station, both by China Miéville. Before that I read Eutopia by David Nickle, as mentioned here (by @doctorow, I think?).
I’m hoping to start Iain Banks’ The Crow Road soon. I hope it’s better than The Quarry.
Also want to pick up Tad Williams’ final book of his Bobby Dollar trilogy, Sleeping Late On Judgement Day, and get back into Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series - I’ve read the first three, next one is House of Chains.
So basically it’s almost all genre novels.
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Oh man, so scattered so many gutenberg.org books on my nook. Mostly chapters of The Journey to the West in fits and right now The Lost Continent by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
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Currently in the middle of three series. The Walt Longmire Mysteries but Craig Johnson. The Reacher series by Lee Child and the protector of the Small series by Tamora Pierce. But my absolutely favourite author Kerry Greenwood. She’s fantastic.
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Oh yeah I scored on a used book hunt a few weeks ago. I had remembered reading Catspaw by Joan D Vinge and liking it some 20+ years ago and was having trouble finding a copy. Well I scored a copy of that and Psion the book that came before it. Good Sci-Fi fun.
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I should be ashamed of myself. Random Kindling brought me to Robert Bevan’s Critical Failures. It’s kinda terrible, but somehow a bit of a lowbrow pageturner. I blew through it in a busy week, bought the sequel and blew through that in three days, and bought the third volume while sitting on the crapper down the hall from my office this morning. Not nearly as good as Scott Meyer’s Magic 2.0 series, but has more poop and farts.
So there’s that.
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Allan Quatermain. It’s one of those adventure series that was a huge influence on popular culture for decades to come (up to and including the Indiana Jones franchise) but is also an embarrassingly racist product of its own time.
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Haggard’s a step up from Edgar Rice Burroughs, at least.
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One of my other enjoy-but-feel-conflicted-because-it’s-so-racist series is Dr. Fu-Manchu.
He’s pretty much the original supervillain: A ruthless megalomaniacal super-genius who operates out of cool secret lairs, commands legions of minions and creates diabolical traps for his enemies that would put Cesar Romero’s Joker to shame. Unfortunately he’s also the embodiment of every ugly anti-Asian stereotype the early 20th Century had to offer.
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I’m partway through David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, but keep putting it down and reading something else instead. I kind of feel I ought to be liking it (“It’s genre! It’s lit-fic! It’s genre and lit-fic!”) and it’s OK, but it’s not grabbing me that much. Not finding the viewpoint characters very appealing, perhaps. I finished Ancillary Justice a week or so ago - I thought it was a pretty good read, but I don’t get why it’s seen as deserving of either really huge acclaim or huge controversy - and now need to pick up Ancillary Sword and see how that goes.
I got several of the Hugo-nominated graphic novels recently - just read Saga volumes 2 and 3, and finished Sex Criminals volume 1 last night during a bout of insomnia. Saga had me going “Oh hell yeah” repeatedly, while the latter was even weirder than I expected from the premise, and I was expecting weird. I liked it though. Ms. Marvel is up next.
(H. Rider Haggard is a damn good storyteller if you don’t get put off by the period racism. King Solomon’s Mines is a really fun book.)
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I have some Fu-Manchu on my to read pile. I got 2 books recently as I have not read any of them yet and the bookstore had some. Pulp novels are what they are and even the heroes are pretty cardboard cutout stereotypes so I tend just revel in the awfulness of it all. Doc Savage is my guilty pleasure reading.
Haggard though is a lot of fun. I really loved She.
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I just read Vaugn’s Saga (vol 1) and am anxious to read the rest of the series. I HATE WAITING.
Listening to the audio-book of Alastair Reynolds’ House of Suns.
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I will be starting Apex this weekend.
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A week from now, I get to start reading something besides textbooks! Debating on where I should start: Watership Down, The Island of the Day Before, or something else on the never-ending list of books to read. Can’t wait to get Seveneves.
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I’m about to start Thomas Piketty’s Capital, the BB book club’s next choice, and hope others will join us.
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Got two weeks to read The Crow Road before I have to give it back to the library, so going to be reading that and trying to fit in the odd chapter of Piketty.
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It’s been a long time since I read Crow Road but as I recall it’s fairly dark - not as dark as The Wasp Factory, but that’s not saying much.
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I found Rat Queens a disappointment. To me it’s just pandering. “Oh, we’ll create female characters with gigantic boobs and edgy characters.” By gluing on physical and personality traits. “OK, we’ll have a black one, we’ll make the gnome a gay raver, and they’ll talk about how much they like to fuck.” Oh comix, do I expect too much from you?
Yep, it’s Strong Female Characters as per Kate Beaton
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Working my way through the Hugo nominees for this year. Just finished Three Body Problem, just started The Goblin Emperor. Next is Ancillary Sword. I guess I’ll give Skin Game a go, but I haven’t read any Butcher before, let alone the rest of the Dresden books, so I don’t know if I can be fair to it.
I found 3BP to be interesting, perticularly for the insight into the Cultural Revolution, but it’s not exactly an uplifting novel. I’m enjoying GP so far, but I’m only a few pages into it.
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