What have you been reading?

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Rated Aargh said:
Since the Shōgun TV series started last night, it was an excellent time to dive back into the book. I started a discussion group on my Discord server to ensure that I stick with it. We plan to meet once a month and discuss each section in turn. The first meeting is Monday. :thumbsup:
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Shogun, I haven't read that since I was a boy. I loved the old TV series too.
 
Big fan of all of Clavell's works, read Shogun while snow skiing back in the late seventies in Jackson Hole Wyoming. The brick of a book sucked me and sold me on brick sized books back then. heh. Ripped through Noble House, King Rat etc. Loved those books, they just painted such a vibrant picture of a time and place I'd never been. Probably helped set me up for the decade I spent overseas, a longing to see other places.
 
So I've stumbled onto a couple of Charles Dickens books I had no idea existed. One is a collection of haunted house stories which includes a couple of his, another is a collection of his detective stories.

My only interaction with Dickens are his "classics" that get inflicted on students. Let's just leave it as I'm not his biggest fan. However I am intrigued by these and the claim that his detective stories are among the greatest written. Other than the ghosts in A Christmas Carol I wasn't aware that he even dabbled in detective or horror stories. I didn't really care for John Steinbeck based on the ones schools choose to push, but quite like many of his short stories and even some of his other (less bleak) novels.

Any Dickens fans willing to out themselves to try and sell me on either of these?

The Haunted House

Inspector Bucket's Job
 
Teyrnon said:
It's time to reread both series of the Chronicles of Amber. I'd like to read all the short stories, too, if I can find them.
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If you mean the Amber short stories, you can find them in "Manna from Heaven" (yes, that's the spelling of Manna, it was intentional.) A quick search shows its still available from Amazon, both digital and hardback...
 
bleys21 said:
If you mean the Amber short stories, you can find them in "Manna from Heaven" (yes, that's the spelling of Manna, it was intentional.) A quick search shows its still available from Amazon, both digital and hardback...
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Thanks, they're also in Volume Six of The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: The Road to Amber. Nice to see these stories collected.
 
bleys21 said:
If you mean the Amber short stories, you can find them in "Manna from Heaven" (yes, that's the spelling of Manna, it was intentional.) A quick search shows its still available from Amazon, both digital and hardback...
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Yeah, that's the normal spelling for the miraculous bread that sustained the Hebrews (as opposed to the Polynesian term for supernatural power).
 
Mankcam said:
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Maybe its some weird USA censorship thing - not sure why you were unable to download an image of the cover, but there you go
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Thanks Mankcam Mankcam!

Burned through this and I'm almost done. Very good, I keep up on the news and have read a few books on the Middle East and this covered a lot of things I wasn't aware of in the modern era.
 
I’ve not had much time for pleasure reading lately, but I did read Algis Budrys’ “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night,” from the Martian Super-Pack. It’s only somewhat tangentially related to Mars; really it’s a story about dueling broadcast technologies for an SF TV-equivalent, with a bit of ‘Assassination Bureau’ thrown in. There are some scenes on Mars, though, and the Martians supply some of the tech. I found it an intriguing read, more successful than The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn.

I also re-read Alan Nourse’s “Brightside Crossing,” which is available via Project Gutenberg. It’s one of my favorite ‘Old Mercury’ stories.
 
I've read The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette).
Good book that has some flaws, notably what I feel is an over-usage of a complicated fictional language/words.
Like you better get good at saying "Untheilenieise" in your head because it's talked about a lot.
Also there's a weird usage of the old English informal pronouns such as "Thou", "Thy" and "That's what's toward" that is mercifully only used occasionally (Mostly there's a liberal usage of the Royal We").
Overall aside from the aforementioned oddities I liked it. The main character is the unwanted youngest son of the Emperor of Elfland, who suddenly becomes emperor after both his father and older brothers die in a airship crash.
Lots of good court politicking and because the main character was previously relegated away from court, all the world building and info dumps feel natural.
There's an appendix at the back of the book ala Dune, that lists a bunch of characters, places and such that are mentioned, but I found it very lacking as several times I would go to it to look up a word only to find it wasn't there.
Wikipedia calls the genre a "Fantasy of Manners". Court convention and manners style books aren't normally my thing, but this one was engaging enough that I've ordered the sequels from the library.

While I wait for those I'm going to be reading "How About Demons? Possession and Exorcism in the Modern World" by Felicitas Goodman. It's a book I got ages ago when I was an anthropology student, but never got around to reading.
 
Giganotosaurus said:
I've read The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette).
Wikipedia calls the genre a "Fantasy of Manners". Court convention and manners style books aren't normally my thing, but this one was engaging enough that I've ordered the sequels from the library.
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There are sequels? I wasn't aware of that.
 
I have been reading Just Stab Me Now, which is the first novel of Jill Bearup, who is a YouTuber whom I follow. She is a stage combat performer who mostly does reviews of historical and fantasy costume, armour, and weapons, and the novel is based on a series of skits from her channel in which she plays a clueless writer of extruded fantasy and also the long-suffering heroine of one of the novels. It started off pretty rough because of beginning at the wrong moment, and has some clunky exposition of what ought to be narrative, with complicated tenses that ought to be either past or present, and that is a personal bugbear of mine. I can't really recommend it, though I do recommend the channel on YouTube.

I'm about to start Emmanuel Todd's Lineages of Modernity as research for my world-building. Send a search party if I'm not back in a month,
 
Agemegos said:
I have been reading Just Stab Me Now, which is the first novel of Jill Bearup, who is a YouTuber whom I follow. She is a stage combat performer who mostly does reviews of historical and fantasy costume, armour, and weapons, and the novel is based on a series of skits from her channel in which she plays a clueless writer of extruded fantasy and also the long-suffering heroine of one of the novels. It started off pretty rough because of beginning at the wrong moment, and has some clunky exposition of what ought to be narrative, with complicated tenses that ought to be either past or present, and that is a personal bugbear of mine. I can't really recommend it, though I do recommend the channel on YouTube.
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I pre-ordered the Kindle edition but have yet to read it. I'm trepidatious about it because, from what I understand, there are about three layers of meta-narrative in those 309 pages. The whole story within a story within a story is a daunting prospect for me as a reader.
 
Just finished this one. some of this definitely resonated.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show...arch=true&from_srp=true&qid=n6d5RSOHQG&rank=1
The Elfish Gene

Coventry, 1976. For a brief, blazing summer, twelve-year-old Mark Barrowcliffe had the chance to be normal.He blew it.While other teenagers concentrated on being coolly rebellious, Mark - like twenty million other boys in the '70s and '80s - chose to spend his entire adolescence in fart-filled bedrooms pretending to be a wizard or a warrior, an evil priest or a dwarf. Armed only with pen, paper and some funny-shaped dice, this lost generation gave themselves up to the craze of fantasy role-playing games, stopped chatting up girls and started killing dragons.Extremely funny, not a little sad and really quite strange, "The Elfish Gene" is an attempt to understand the true inner nerd of the adolescent male. Last pick at football, spat at by bullies and laughed at by girls, they were the fantasy wargamers, and this is their story.
 
Read "The Witness for the Dead" and "The Grief of Stones", the first 2 books in a sort of sequel series to "The Goblin Emperor" by Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette). Excellent books, with good characters and compelling plots. Basically both are a combination of murder mystery's, supernatural exorcist and slice of life stories that kept me reading late into the night. All three books have gotten me hooked on the "regular people living their lives in a fantasy world" stories, rekindling my love for the genre after getting burned out on the higher stakes stuff that is more common in the genre.
I need more while I wait for the final book in the series to come out.
 
I’m slogging my way through Emmanuel Todd’s Lineages of Modernity. He’s using better information about Africa and South America than he had for The Explanation of Ideology, but this time he’s more interested in the historical development of family structures and their relation to religions, whereas I was really interested in the previous work’s systematics and the relation of family types of political ideology.
 
Oh the curse of a mid-sized library system. After taking a week off from reading I started looking for more books to check out. Unfortunately most of the books on my "to read list" are either digital only (such as Malazan) or simply not in the library at all (such as the Lord of Light). So I just started putting whatever looked interesting on hold and ended up with 8 books on their way. We'll see how things pan out.
 
Checked out the Goblin Slayer light novel volume 1 and the Frieren Manga volume 1. Also requested Delicious in Dungeon Manga vol1 but I'm 20th in line for that one so will have to wait.
 
Giganotosaurus said:
Oh the curse of a mid-sized library system. After taking a week off from reading I started looking for more books to check out. Unfortunately most of the books on my "to read list" are either digital only (such as Malazan) or simply not in the library at all (such as the Lord of Light). So I just started putting whatever looked interesting on hold and ended up with 8 books on their way. We'll see how things pan out.
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I need to read Lord of Light again. Every time I read it, I find new stuff I don't recall from previous readings.
 
Reading Veitch's The One and thanks to Hoopla finally finishing the final arc of Alan Moore's run on Miracle Man. Love the UK underground comic style they're both drawn in and they have that political, psychedelic edge that their many imitators studiously avoided, focusing on the sex and violence content alone. So packed full of weird cosmic ideas in a way that Hickman and Camp have briefly brought back to mainstream superhero comics.

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Voros said:
Reading Veitch's The One and thanks to Hoopla finally finishing the final arc of Alan Moore's run on Miracle Man. Love the UK underground comic style they're both drawn in and they have that political, psychedelic edge that their many imitators studiously avoided, focusing on the sex and violence content alone. So packed full of weird cosmic ideas in a way that Hickman and Camp have briefly brought back to mainstream superhero comics.

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I need to read Miracleman again; one of the thread in the RPG forum reminded me of it recently. Sadly, because of the pressure of work I've had to cut out all pleasure reading for the last several weeks, and probably will for several more.
 
Lofgeornost said:
I need to read Miracleman again; one of the thread in the RPG forum reminded me of it recently. Sadly, because of the pressure of work I've had to cut out all pleasure reading for the last several weeks, and probably will for several more.
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It’s actually also in the process of being completed. Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham have finished the Silver Age. And they’re now working on the final volume, The Dark Age.
 
hawkeyefan said:
It’s actually also in the process of being completed. Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham have finished the Silver Age. And they’re now working on the final volume, The Dark Age.
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Yeah I've heard they've been doing great work on the latest run. Will pick it up after I'm done the classic Moore run any day now.
 
Voros said:
Yeah I've heard they've been doing great work on the latest run. Will pick it up after I'm done the classic Moore run any day now.
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Yeah, you can get the Silver Age collection now. The Dark Age will come out monthly at some point, before being collected. No release date yet, sadly.
 
I just got put onto Alex Pheby and started his first book, Mordew. It's been described as having strong tones of Mervyn Peake mixed with a touch of Moorcock. That tracks so far. I'm only a chapter in but it's marvelous so far.

Edit: its Pheby's first fantasy novel, not first novel period.

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Fenris-77 said:
I just got put onto Alex Pheby and started his first book, Mordew. It's been described as having strong tones of Mervyn Peake mixed with a touch of Moorcock. That tracks so far. I'm only a chapter in but it's marvelous so far.

Edit: its Pheby's first fantasy novel, not first novel period.

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I've seen that in a local bookstore and am quite intrigued. I'll be interested in your reactions once you have finished it.
 
Read Bookshops and Bonedust, the prequel to Legends and Lattes. Pretty good and it was an improvement on Legends and Lattes. L&L was good but the plot felt like a fixup of several short stories. B&B had a more overarching plot involving a necromancer.
I've 6 more books in my to read pile with another on hold from the library.
 
bleys21 said:
I feel like you should have started that series sooner...
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I know, I got the series a while back but I didn't start until over the week end.

I pick it up every year, think I am on book 40 or something (will admit I have not read the early books in the series). It's fascinating though, after all the twists and turns you never know if it s going to turn out with a happy ending or sad one. :smile:
 
xanther said:
I know, I got the series a while back but I didn't start until over the week end.

I pick it up every year, think I am on book 40 or something (will admit I have not read the early books in the series). It's fascinating though, after all the twists and turns you never know if it s going to turn out with a happy ending or sad one. :smile:
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There are a few video game adaptations that I really can't recommend. Mostly because they show you your score while you're reading through. You think you're doing pretty well, then suddenly out of nowhere your score goes negative and then the Game Over screen comes up and you're expected to put in a ton of quarters after you're done.
 
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