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What are you reading? (December 2016)

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Deleted member 1235

Unconfirmed Member
Wafflecakes said:
I need a good fantasy coming of age story. Any suggestions? I require the protagonist to have some level of magic (sick of assassin stories).

Already read Sanderson, Rothfus, and Dawn of Wonder.
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the fifth season by nk jemisin. 2 books out already i couldnt put them down, great magic system
 
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Bazza

Member
December has been a slightly slower reading month for me I think. First half of the month I read the first 3 Majipoor books by Robert Silverberg, World of the Five gods series by Lois McMaster Bujold and The Altreian Enigma by Richard Phillips.

The Majipoor books were OK, I was expecting a bit more from these books as the series seems to pop up regularly on best scifi book series list, (I have not read the prequels yet so perhaps they are the better books in the series).

World of the Five gods was alright, not quite as engrossing as her Vorkosigan series but still a solid fantasy series.

The books by Richard Phillips are turning into a really interesting scifi series, I brought the 1st trilogy for £1 each in an amazon sale a few years ago, took me a while to get round to them but after they were finished I jumped straight into the 2nd trilogy. Book 3 of the 3rd trilogy is out some when next year and I'm hoping the series is continued beyond a 3rd trilogy.


As for the 2nd half of the month I decided it was time for some classic scifi and stumbled across the SF Masterworks list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks so this is my reading list for the next few months I would assume, from the first 5 on the list I think Forever War (read the series last year) or The Stars my Destination are my favorites so far, currently on Babel-17.
 
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Tugatrix

Member
east-of-eden1.jpg
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First Cormoran Strike book read, now a classic
 
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Ravensmash

Member
Right, today is going to be reading day (as opposed to the days recently where I've got distracted).

Still on The Lies of Locke Lamora, around 220 pages in.

Definitely heating up a fair bit.
 
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ekimneems

Neo Member
Finishing up Rise of Endymion, the 4th book of the Hyperion Cantos. Whereas the first two are some of the best books I've ever read, these are just "okay" in comparison but that still puts them well ahead of most sci-fi (and I've read a lot of sci-fi).

Highly recommend this entire series, but the first two (their own separate story) are an absolute must for anyone that likes sci-fi/fantasy/horror/speculative fiction
 
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Maklershed

Member
I haven't read the book yet but the show was fantastic and since books > movie/shows logic dictates that the book is incredible. :b
 
BossLackey

BossLackey

Gold Member
About to finish up A Scanner Darkly, then going to start Animal Farm and 1984. Never read it before.

On the comics side, I'm reaaaaaaally behind on my stack, but I'm going to catch up on Deadly Class and Batman (Rebirth).
 
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Easystride

Member
Okay, you guys sold me on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Thanks! I always like to have a book in the queue.

I shall start it after I finish Prince of Tides.
 
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Cyan

Banned
Wafflecakes said:
I need a good fantasy coming of age story. Any suggestions? I require the protagonist to have some level of magic (sick of assassin stories).

Already read Sanderson, Rothfus, and Dawn of Wonder.
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Hmm. You might try Inda by Sherwood Smith. It ends up being a four book series, but the first is largely coming of age. The protagonist doesn't have magic, but he's more of an Ender, not an assassin so maybe you'll like it anyway. :p I highly recommend it.

Mumei said:
Have you read The Riddle-Master trilogy? It's available in a single volume.
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This is a very good suggestion as well, which perfectly meets your requirement.
 
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BrokenFiction

Member
I recommend hitting up the Jan 2017 issue of WIRED. It's their SciFi issue. They got authors like Charlie Jane Anders, James S. A. Corey, NJ Jemisin, and Malka Older. Good stuff.
 
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Servbot #42

Unconfirmed Member
I have been reading The Day of the Triffids, it starts with a bang and it doesn't let up, i like it so far. I think i like books where the concept of society gets turned on its head.

kevin1025 said:
I messed up, man, have to be honest :(

I will catch up incredibly fast, but Christmas and games and movies ate my time up! I will be done super early in the new year, even though I broke the pledge! I'm getting there, though!
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There are still 2 days left in the year, you can do this! You just gotta take some time aside. from those damn videogames.
 
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Wensih

Member
Currently I'm switching between three:

Java Illuminated
Underworld by DeLillo
Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter
 
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Magus1234

Member
A poster in this thread at one time talked about an upcoming Documentary about Charlotte Bronte airing on the BBC sometime in late December. If anyone has some info on it can you help me out? I was trying to check it out but do not have a T.V.

Also reading: Metamorphoses by Ovid. Classic Greek mythology as told By Ovid in his Epic. The stories use transformation or metamorphosis as a main theme. What the characters change into may be important but often the most interesting and compelling moments of the story are right before it takes place. Not finished yet but my favorite so far is the tale of Callisto and her son, which describe the creation of Ursa Major and Minor constellation.

Edit: Oh yeah, hi Gaf. Only been lurking for like 5 years or so and forgot I had an account.
 
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kevin1025

Banned
Servbot #42 said:
There are still 2 days left in the year, you can do this! You just gotta take some time aside. from those damn videogames.
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I'm getting there, I dedicated a good chunk of today to reading and have some time tonight. I'll certainly be halfway by the end of the year, maybe a tad bit more.
 
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Rug Monkey

Member
Wafflecakes said:
I need a good fantasy coming of age story. Any suggestions? I require the protagonist to have some level of magic (sick of assassin stories).

Already read Sanderson, Rothfus, and Dawn of Wonder.
Click to expand...

Earthsea books by Ursula K. Le Guin
Imager or Recluse series by L. E. Modesitt
 
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Mumei

Member
Magus1234 said:
A poster in this thread at one time talked about an upcoming Documentary about Charlotte Bronte airing on the BBC sometime in late December. If anyone has some info on it can you help me out? I was trying to check it out but do not have a T.V.

Also reading: Metamorphoses by Ovid. Classic Greek mythology as told By Ovid in his Epic. The stories use transformation or metamorphosis as a main theme. What the characters change into may be important but often the most interesting and compelling moments of the story are right before it takes place. Not finished yet but my favorite so far is the tale of Callisto and her son, which describe the creation of Ursa Major and Minor constellation.

Edit: Oh yeah, hi Gaf. Only been lurking for like 5 years or so and forgot I had an account.
Click to expand...

Metamorphoses!

I read it at least a year after I read Metamorphoses, but I still got a lot out of Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Botticelli to Picasso. It's an examination of Ovid's Metamorphoses in art, with a lot of interesting analysis of the stories as they are told in the original epic, and of how the artists chose to portray, interpret, and reimagine those stories in paintings or sculptures.

71WW2FmtSyL.jpg
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Magus1234

Member
Mumei said:
Metamorphoses!

I read it at least a year after I read Metamorphoses, but I still got a lot out of Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Botticelli to Picasso. It's an examination of Ovid's Metamorphoses in art, with a lot of interesting analysis of the stories as they are told in the original epic, and of how the artists chose to portray, interpret, and reimagine those stories in paintings or sculptures.
Click to expand...

That is pretty interesting. I'll have to check that out after I finish, I am more of a 19th century guy as far as literature goes but I kept seeing references in neoclassical art pieces that I liked so I just decided to make the dive. Once you start with the Greeks it is really hard to just stop at The Odyssey.

@Besada: That is actually not the one, it is what came up when I searched as well but there is one that has aired (or is going to) fairly recently I think. Thanks though.
 
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Mumei

Member
Magus1234 said:
That is pretty interesting. I'll have to check that out after I finish, I am more of a 19th century guy as far as literature goes but I kept seeing references in neoclassical art pieces that I liked so I just decided to make the dive. Once you start with the Greeks it is really hard to just stop at The Odyssey.

@Besada: That is actually not the one, it is what came up when I searched as well but there is one that has aired (or is going to) fairly recently I think. Thanks though.
Click to expand...

Then that is right up your alley!
 
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mu cephei

Member
Magus1234 said:
@Besada: That is actually not the one, it is what came up when I searched as well but there is one that has aired (or is going to) fairly recently I think. Thanks though.
Click to expand...

The only post I think you can be referring to is this, from Peru (of course!). It's not a documentary, though, it's a drama.
 
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Sean C

Member
Long%20Goodbye_zpsihkeauvx.jpg


The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss's daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich -- small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.
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Well, there's Philip Marlowe's philosophy of life, in its most perfect form. It's, in some ways, an oddly romantic view of life in the big city, given author Raymond Chandler's dislike of what he perceived as the superficiality of Los Angeles (as well-reflected in, well, his various novels). Having now all of Chandler's seven Marlowe novels, I would rate The Long Goodbye as the best of them to date -- not an uncommon attitude, I'm given to understand, as this was the novel that finally earned him the attention of New York's literary critics, whose attentions he had long desired. The plot has thematic echoes of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, an author Chandler greatly admired and who is explicitly referenced by one of Chandler's stand-ins within the novel. Chandler's prose is exceptionally readable and brings a great deadpan comic flare to many exchanges, as well as, in places, an aching pathos.

Playback, Raymond Chandler's farewell to his most famous literary creation is intermittently entertaining, and his prose is as lively as ever, but the plot and cast of characters never moves beyond feeling inconsequential. As well, this is probably the most dubious book in the series in terms of gender politics (granted, it's been a while since I've read some of the earlier ones).

The%20Underground%20Railroad_zpspui81asr.png


The first great twist in Colson Whitehead's newest novel is fairly freely advertised on the jacket and in press materials and discussions of the book; I would have been interested in knowing how a person unaware of this would experience
the sharp turn things take after the first 80 pages or so
, which are vividly and effectively set in what appears to be a completely ordinary antebellum Georgia slave plantation.

The Underground Railroad is nothing if not imaginative (indeed, from Whitehead's comments
the initial notion arose from his own childhood imagination at first hearing the term, which he was disappointed at the time was not actually literal), proceeding from there to unspool a picaresque narrative journeying around the United States that moves beyond the subject of runaway slaves to embrace much later developments in black history in America, such as the Tuskegee syphilis study and controversies around Eugenics
. My instinct while reading this was to compare it to Salman Rushdie's magical realist accounts of Indo-Pakistani history in his novels Midnight's Children and Shame, but, again based on comments from the author, it would appear his great influence here was Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

It does feel like, for all its imagination, this falls a bit short of true greatness. The climax, especially, feels a bit underwhelming in how it resolves characters' narratives, and the jumble of perspectives added in short bursts in addition to the main one centered on Cora sometimes don't feel like they add all that much to the proceedings. But there are definitely moments of true greatness here, and Whitehead's prose is never less than very readable (if not infrequently challenging to read, given the sad and gruesome subject slavery poses for any writer to tackle).
 
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theapg

Member
Has anyone read Undermajordomo Minor by deWitt? It's on sale for $1.99 and I really enjoyed The Sisters Brothers, but can't tell from the description wether it would be a similar book.
 
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kevin1025

Banned
theapg said:
Has anyone read Undermajordomo Minor by deWitt? It's on sale for $1.99 and I really enjoyed The Sisters Brothers, but can't tell from the description wether it would be a similar book.
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I haven't read it yet, but the few reviews I've read said it's like deWitt crossed his writing style over into a Wes Anderson style of movie. The chapters are super short and quick, but for that price I think it'd likely be worth it. I was a big fan of The Sisters Brothers as well!
 
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fakefaker

Member
Just thought I'd share my top five fave books for 2016. What are yours?

In random order:

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin
The Bees by Laline Paull
A True Novel by Minae Mizumura
Congratulations on Everything by Nathan Whitlock
Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama
 
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TTG

Member
fakefaker said:
Just thought I'd share my top five fave books for 2016. What are yours?
Click to expand...

It's been a bit of a rough year, looking at my Goodreads:

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet -- David Mitchell
A Hologram for the King -- Dave Eggers
The Making of the Atomic Bomb -- Richard Rhodes
Robert Langdon series -- Dan Brown
Hard Rain Falling -- Don Carpenter

The best though had to be a second reading of Infinite Jest and finally getting around to The Pale King, both by David Foster Wallace. The first isn't new and the latter is not a complete novel however.

No sci fi on the list either, which is a shame. I feel almost as if I've run out of great sci fi, which is probably a dumb thing to say.
 
A

AngmarsKing701

Member
fakefaker said:
Just thought I'd share my top five fave books for 2016. What are yours?

In random order:

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin
The Bees by Laline Paull
A True Novel by Minae Mizumura
Congratulations on Everything by Nathan Whitlock
Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama
Click to expand...

TTG said:
It's been a bit of a rough year, looking at my Goodreads:

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet -- David Mitchell
A Hologram for the King -- Dave Eggers
The Making of the Atomic Bomb -- Richard Rhodes
Robert Langdon series -- Dan Brown
Hard Rain Falling -- Don Carpenter

The best though had to be a second reading of Infinite Jest and finally getting around to The Pale King, both by David Foster Wallace. The first isn't new and the latter is not a complete novel however.

No sci fi on the list either, which is a shame. I feel almost as if I've run out of great sci fi, which is probably a dumb thing to say.
Click to expand...

Do we typically have a top books of the year thread?
 
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thomaser

Member
A good way into Gregory David Roberts' "Shantaram". It's breathtaking! Extraordinary things happen a bit too often to be totally believable, given that it's partially built on real events in the author's life, but it makes for great reading.
 
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norm9

Member
Just picked up a copy of Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. I'm a conspiracy nut but not a tin foil hat wearer, so this book should be fun.
 
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