What books are you reading now?

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Maxus
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Post by Maxus »

Nope. In fact, I recommend reading them in disorder.

But I skipped around a lot, picking up books as I saw them at the store/library (Interesting Times was the first Rincewind I read, and The Fifth Elephant was the first Vimes/City Watch).
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

--The horror of Mario

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Post by Maxus »

I'm reading the Percy Jackson books. I'd read the first couple...a couple of years ago.

And, really, they're not bad, despite being part of that hidden magical world bandwagon started by Harry Potter. They have occasional lapses in quality (The second book introduced a Snape-like character, just to try to have one. To be fair, he deserves it all.)

And the premise works like this:

The Greek deities and creatures are still around, still responsible for their stuff...and still getting it on with mortals.

Their demigod children tend to attract monsters, and have a low survival rate on their own. For that reason, they're sought out, and brought to a sanctuary to learn what they need to know to defend themselves. Yeah, total Harry Potter ripoff in that respect...

...Except it's funnier, and it's very honest about it: The gods are assholes, usually. At the sanctuary, there's a lot of demigod children who aren't claimed by their divine parent--for a lot of reasons, many of them very unflattering to the gods (like just not caring).

Despite that, it's amusing how the mythological things have moved with the times. Or been changed because of them. Hades, for example, bitches about how much he's had to expand the Underworld in the last century alone. The fee for the boat ride to the Underworld is discreetly tacked onto your last credit card or phone bill. Zeus wears a pimp suit (well, okay, a very sharp dark blue pinstriped suit). Dionysus considers the three greatest human entertainments to be gladiator sports, pinocle, and Pac-Man...

And the mythology really is important. Someone will explain the history, sometimes, but not in a big rant. And it actually makes me want to go pick up a book on the Greek mythology and read it in more detail.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

--The horror of Mario

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Post by Maxus »

Huh. Saw this essay on my favorite's list. I can't remember where I found it, but, hey, I'll share.

http://www.concatenation.org/articles/pratchett.html

Terry Pratchett discussing fantasy and sci-fi.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

--The horror of Mario

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Post by Maxus »

Okay, I finished the Percy Jackson books.

And the verdict is: They're pretty damn good. They're entertaining (Percy is a snarky narrator), and they have some good drama and cool scenes going.

The first two books are kinda silly, but the third book (five in all) is where the series grows a serious beard.

Also, the villain of the books kicks Voldemort's ass; he doesn't let egotism cloud his judgment (as much) and he's definitely not some lost little kid on the inside. He also does some kick-ass multi-layered planning (seriously, he arranges things so you can't just find out his flaw and counter; he doesn't leave it like that. Usually, trying to beat his plan and his back-up plans means shit gets wrecked or people get killed. He might not get what he wants, but you'll lose something, too.)

The Greek mythology kinda makes me want to grab a book and refresh my memory on it (I remember learning about it in Elementary school).
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

--The horror of Mario

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Post by Absentminded_Wizard »

Having read the 5th, 6th, and 7th books in Steven Erikson's Malzan Book of the Fallen, I'm finally starting on the first one.
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Post by zeruslord »

How good is Maus? I'm lucky enough to have gotten into the "Are Comics Art?" section of the freshman English course at CMU, and it's one of the textbooks.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Maus is super good.
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Post by Cynic »

zeruslord wrote:How good is Maus? I'm lucky enough to have gotten into the "Are Comics Art?" section of the freshman English course at CMU, and it's one of the textbooks.
MAUS has good pacing, good ole' yiddish humor and rats, dogs, and cats. yeesh. What more do you want? Oh, yeah, History in a comic book. Awesome.

I've been a bit remiss about posting in one of my favorite topics in MPSIMS.

Let's see if I remember the long list in over the few months.

Wizard of Oz (Great Illustratred version) by Frank L Baum editted by ? - for the kid. the the GI books are one of my fave series as they condense the classic novels of today and yesterday into 100-200 pages but with largetype and a picture every twopage. But the book itself brought back memories from a long time ago.

Dead Man's boots by Mike Carey - latest series of Castor the exorcist novels. errm it was the least of the series. it was good as being part of a series. But yeah. even a good author can write a very bad story or have a bad editor or fall prey to popular cliches when he didn't before.

Lucky Everyday by Bapsy Jain - I normally don't pick up books just because they are by Indian authors but the cover and the name pulled me in at the library. I'm a simple man sometimes. Think of it like "Zen and the art of motorocycle maintenance" but more quirky, a little censored (only on the F-BOMB F-BOMB F-BOMB, which was funny, when mayhap rape scenes where described in exquisite details), and it tries a little too hard to find out what it is. I picked it up thinking it was a book on rehabilitation programs in prisons with Yoga as the focus but that was just background... ~_~

R.E. Howard and his Stories - From Conan to Cormac Mac Art to everything else. I enjoyed it. Conan for some odd reason took me some time to get back into again.

Mystery of Grace by Charles De Lint - One of Lint's novels that are not in his famed Newford universe. It's a wonderful book set somewhere near the Mexico border. It's not really explained. If it is, then I didn't catch it. CDL just made me angry because I now want to listen to all the rockabilly music that's listed in the novel and my headaches mitigate that. But fuck the man, I'll forgive him. he tells a good story. He does have ink in his fingernails and his pores and his hands that won't come out. he writes too much.

The first three Lemony SNicket books by LS (Daniel Handler I think, I have this curious need to research this shiite first before I read a book) - It is very good and very cute and very awesome as a book of all ages methinks. Of course, that depends on what you call a book of all ages.

Eyes Like Stars by Lisa Mantchev is a very good first novel and awesome for it's mixing of play and novel elements. few people try shit like this. the plot might be a bit think in a few places but the style of writing is awesome. the characters include all of the Bard's characters and all characters from many plays. Overall - AWESOME

In the Fog by Seabury Quinn - reading old pulp fiction authors somehow became a pastime somewhere along the line. Don't ask me how. It's fun and boring at the same time. He is the original urban fantasy creator rather than all these people such as Mike Cary/Jim Butcher/Twilight-Chick/Anita Blake/whatever. "Jules de Grandin is a fictional occult detective created by Seabury Quinn for Weird Tales. Assisted by Dr. Trowbridge (a Dr Watson-like figure), de Grandin fought ghosts, werewolves, satanists, etc. in over ninety stories between 1925 and 1951. Jules de Grandin and Dr. Trowbridge lived in Harrisonville, New Jersey. De Grandin was a French physician and expert on the occult, and member of the French Sûreté. Often, the supernatural entities in the mysteries are revealed not to be supernatural, but the actions of insane, evil, depraved human beings."-Wiki
Overall good.

51 storys - Lord Dunsany - really short flash fiction that was good for that day and probably good for a beginning writer. start with this then go to tolkien, I'd say.
Last edited by Cynic on Mon Aug 17, 2009 8:50 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Neeeek »

I'm not reading it now, but I was curious if anyone had an idea about what age The Phantom Tollbooth is appropriate for.
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Post by traverse »

Neeeek wrote:I'm not reading it now, but I was curious if anyone had an idea about what age The Phantom Tollbooth is appropriate for.
Appropriate? It's light on anything requiring a certain level of maturity, but the understanding required is a might higher than average for a child of 8-12, which I always assumed it to be written for. It's definitely a 'walk them through' book, a la Alice in Wonderland, as it's a hodge-podge of parodies of ideas popular when it was written, which means you need to first understand the basis for any specific parody to get the joke.
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Post by Cynic »

So I've been thinking of trying out the Kushiel's dart series of novels by Jacqueline Carey. Any word on how these are? I need to have the library ILL them and my library's ILL is notoriously slow on anything.
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Post by tzor »

"A Public Betrayed" "An inside look at Japanese Media Atrocities and Their Warnings to the West." by Adam Gamble and Takesato Watanabe. I'm about to start reading Chapter Five - Anti-Semitism in a country without Jews.
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Post by erik »

I have been enjoying my ipod touch as a reading tool, downloading free books onto Stanza (one of the many free ebook apps out there).

I just went through everything of Robert E Howard's they had for download, mostly his Conan stuff, they certainly don't have all his works, and none of the Solomon Kane jazz, alas (I have it all in print anyway tho). I was surprised to find that many of the Conan stories were a lot like Lovecraft stuff. I know they were contemporaries and friends, but still. I expected Conan to be chopping stuff up and being badass, not finding elder races and horrors from ancient human and non-human civilizations.

Anywho, so that was cool.

I found a Firefly fanfic, essentially, written by Steven Brust, My Own Kind of Freedom. It was arright.

I read Accelerando by Charles Stross, and decided I am not ready to accept the future he suggested.

Also I stumbled upon a book by Greg Keyes, The Briar King. I ruther liked it and intend to get at least the next 2 out of the 4 book series (though I will have to purchase those since they are not free downloads). I've heard the 4th book ends the series rather poorly so I will see how I feel about it by then.

My only real complaint would be that sometimes it would jump between character point of views/settings without anything more than a space between paragraphs. I dunno if there were visible breaks in the actual books that didn't get transcribed to the ebook format there. Certainly some of the hyphenations done to keep things in block format were misplaced since they would sometimes appear in the middle of a line instead of the end causing pointless hyphenations. Also, whoever transcribed books for download apparently didn't run a spellchecker since typoes do rear their head somewhat often, in many of the books and stories I read.

I read more stuff, of course, but those gems stood out.
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Post by CatharzGodfoot »

tzor wrote:"A Public Betrayed" "An inside look at Japanese Media Atrocities and Their Warnings to the West." by Adam Gamble and Takesato Watanabe. I'm about to start reading Chapter Five - Anti-Semitism in a country without Jews.
Yeah, that's an interesting one. I read as much as was available on Google books.
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clikml wrote:Also I stumbled upon a book by Greg Keyes, The Briar King.
I've read the first three books in that series. I kinda liked one and two, but three really falls prey to the "middle-book-where-nothing-really-happens" syndrome. As such, I haven't really even considered getting ahold of the last book. The books are never really anything other than Martin-lite, but they can be fun (and I kinda like how Keyes tries to track how all the various names get distorted and stuff).

He wrote another series, The Age of Unreason, primarily about magic in the time of Newton, that I thought was a bit more creative and interesting (though, again, I haven't gotten a chance to read the fourth and final volume).

I'm currently reading Eco's Baudolino, and I have to say that it's pretty fun.
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Post by Cynic »

I've discovered Gene Wolfe late but I think I have a very new favorite as far as it comes to good writing and amazingly detailed fantasy.

i'm reading The WIzard Knight two volume series right now.

The first book is The Knight and the second The Wizard and it's seriously one of the most detailed and complete worlds out there. He mixes the Arthurian knight code of conduct with the Norse and Christian mythos into one set seven leveled world that is absolutely gorgeous. His writing style leaves me at awe.

I also picked up two other books that I haven't started yet but they are the Chronicles of the Raven series by James Barclay. Dawnthief is the first one and the second one is Noonshade. The description blurb called it The Magnificent Seven done into fantasy.

I just want to see what that's going to be like.

I think I'll also pick up the Greg keyes books everyone is taking about.
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Post by Blicero »

Yeah, Gene Wolfe is really, really good. I've read the Wizard-Knight and the Book of the New Sun, and am reading the "Soldier" books right now. In terms of style and theme and literary technique and all that fun stuff English professors like to go on about, he's extraordinarily talented.

The only main problem I have with his stuff is that his characters tend to be really sexist or even misogynistic, which can get kinda tedious after a while. That and what I see as the apparently Catholic (though it could really have come from any main religion) major theme in Book of the New Sun has some unpleasant connotations about free will and stuff, but that's kinda to be expected.
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Post by Maxus »

What can people here tell me about Jack Vance?

I've got a friend who's religiously recommending the first book of the Demon Princes or something, but his taste is questionable. I thought I'd check in around here before I used my head to inflict holes in nearby walls.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

--The horror of Mario

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I've read the Dying Earth stuff by Vance, and it was hilarious. Characterization wasn't great, but hijinks and phantasmagoria galore.
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Post by Meikle641 »

Kinda late, but I read all of "The Night Angel" trilogy in October. It was pretty damn good, and the magic in it was interesting.

I'll admit, I cried at the end. I saw the ending coming a mile away, but still.
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Post by Prak »

last night I started reading Carpe Jugulum, continuing my seeming tradition of reading a discworld book a week, as I've read Monstrous Regiment and Guards, Guards over the past two.
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Post by Maxus »

Prak_Anima wrote:last night I started reading Carpe Jugulum, continuing my seeming tradition of reading a Discworld book a week, as I've read Monstrous Regiment and Guards, Guards over the past two.
Carpe Jugulum's a good one, but it's one of the few I recommend some background reading for.

http://www.ie.lspace.org/books/reading- ... de-1-5.jpg

Personally, I find the Witch series is best when it's read in order (or at least from Wyrd Sisters.)

The others, well, you can bounce around a bit more.

Small Gods is still one of my favorite books to get people with.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

--The horror of Mario

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Post by Maxus »

I'm reading the Dresden books.

They're okay--in some cases, pretty good--but the first few were pretty much adhering to a formula defined by the first book.

Harry Dresden gets a case, gets called in on something else. Things try to kill him, supernatural forces kill an innocent bystander, he pisses people off, people misunderstand and assume the worst of him, by the end he's between a rock and a hard place, with the law and usually at least two supernatural sides aiming to kill him--tired, injured, and manages to borrow this book's Team Evil trick and turn it back on them.

I won't deny the fun, though. I'm enjoying the characters, the dialogue, and some of the stuff is pretty damn neat.

Speaking of characters, certain parts of Grave Peril and Death Masks should be required reading for people who want to play Paladins. It's really, really refreshing to see characters who are described as being amazingly noble and good people--and then have that shown to us as well. Refreshed my soul after a bout of trying to slog through Eragon.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

--The horror of Mario

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Post by Prak »

So Barnes and Nobles is doing their annual holiday book drive for needy kids. And of course the male 10-15 group usually gets a bit shafted in these kinds of things, and for some reason I figure the nerd male 10-15 group even more so.

So I want to give nerdy book or two that the kids might enjoy and am thinking of something from the Discworld series, but I'm not sure what.

Apparently one of the books that came to mind from reputation, Wee Free Men, is actually a young adult novel, so it might be good, but I was also thinking of the few I've read: Monstrous Regiment, Guards Guards, and Carpe Jugulum.

I'm thinking of those three that Guards Guards would probably be the safest bet, but can anyone suggest anything else that'd be good for young under privledged nerdlings?
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Post by RobbyPants »

I just got the Watchmen hardcover for my birthday. So far I'm enjoying it.
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