What Book Are You Reading XV - The Pile Keeps Growing!

[tjs282]

Jemisin, otoh, I love. Have you read anything else of hers? I was thinking about rereading The Fifth Season recently, but haven't steered back around to it yet. The sequel to City is out next month, I believe, if you like this one.

My sister sent me the Broken Earth trilogy for Christmas 2020, so I read that last year. When I was in the UK over Easter earlier this year, I went looking for The 100,000 Kingdoms, but Waterstones didn't have it (any more? Not new enough, I guess?). So I bought The City... instead.

Sequel out next month, you say? Hmm... Looks like a good candidate for this year's Christmas-list, then...

 

[EgonSpengler]

My sister sent me the Broken Earth trilogy for Christmas 2020, so I read that last year. When I was in the UK over Easter earlier this year, I went looking for The 100,000 Kingdoms, but Waterstones didn't have it (any more? Not new enough, I guess?). So I bought The City... instead.

Sequel out next month, you say? Hmm... Looks like a good candidate for this year's Christmas-list, then...

November 1st, in fact. Amazon just sent me an alert this morning.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Starting Memory's Legion by James SA Corey. Stories from the Expanse universe.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Starting Memory's Legion by James SA Corey. Stories from the Expanse universe.

I should look for that. I never read those short stories. I think I read The Butcher of Anderson Station, if that one's in there. Otherwise, that'd be all new material for me.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I just finished Armstrong, an alt-history western...comedy starring George Armstrong Custer, who survived Little Bighorn and is now a gun-for-hire in the west. Absurd but fun. Currently working on America Walks into a Bar, a history of how bars have shaped American history. Cheers!

 

[Takhisis]

Just to honour the thread title, I do have a pile of about ten half-read books. Must get to work on it.

 

[EnglishEdward]

As few as ten; I think I have over thirty half read books.

Some of them are on complex topics: chess end game theory that one can only process in bits.

But some are books I am not sure that I like, but I suppose that I am loathe to admit
my purchase of them was an error and appropriately dispose of them unfinished.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Hey, you've reminded me: Have you ever read the Tom Playfair books?

I haven't heard of those.

Well, we should narrow it further to those of such books which I or my immediate family own.

If you ever write it, give me a heads-up.

Sure. Keep in mind, though, that I get lots of story ideas that don't make it past the initial idea stage. The last ones that did are crossovers of Dune x Peanuts comic strip and Voyager x Bonanza.

 

[Josu]

Ended Gardens of the Moon (Malazan book of the fallen #1) by Steven Erikson
My least favorite book of the year.
I ended it because I do not like giving books up and I had the hope of everything fitting before the end. But it did not.
I am not going to say it is bad book, it has a bunch of interesting ideas.
The plot is fuzzy, leads to disorentation, the author himself says in prologue that he is not guiding the reader took by the hand.
The book goes on in a neverending list of intrigues and characters, which entails the impossibility to connect with them.
The mess is on porpouse, so this is not for me, if I am reading fantasy I do it for leisure, I can accept complexity, but can not accept the need of reading it with a notepad in order to take notes and build schemes. If I would want this, I would have choosen this Rust programming book or this other Cloud Computing Architecture book which are awaiting for me.

Starting Russka by Edward Rutherfurd

 

[IglooDame]

I'm most of the way through David Weber's Safehold series (10 or 11 books total so far, I think). If you've read his Honor Harrington stuff, you know his style (which I do enjoy) and this one has an intriguing story thread of 'what if a new human civilization springs up but there's one individual from the original (now-unknown) civilization that can guide development?' There's a bit of Civ in how it proceeds.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Finished the first part of Don Quixote, the Global Grey eBooks version using John Ormsby's translation. It begins with the translator's notes which contain an overview of previous translations which is quite critical of them and a biography of the author Miguel de Cervantes. This is then followed by some poetry passages about the book, and then Cervantes' note talking about how the book is a "humble" retelling of the titular character's adventures, a self-appointed knight-errant who goes off on fantastical adventures with his beleaguered squire Sancho Panza. Events in the novel date it to the late 16th century, painting a picture of life in rural Renaissance Spain where people often talk in entire pages of text. Adding to the antiquated writing is the seeming lack of an editor with often repetitive writing and entire stories interrupting the narrative.

Despite all these annoyances, the book's treatment of characters and issues means it merits its reputation as a masterpiece of Spanish literature. Quixote is a complex character that can offer intelligent discourse at times while coming off as completely insane in others, and this affliction can come off as noble or evil based on the situation. At the risk of injecting current attitudes into the novel, it seems to treat mental illness as a treatable condition that doesn't condemn its sufferers to perpetual oblivion. Love is a crucial topic, examined in Quixote's obsession with the much-praised peasant girl Dulcinea and other relationships, which may even conflict with Christian piety and the freedom of people. The nature of chivalric, and by extension fantasy, literature is examined through the larger-than-life travails of Quixote as seen through his eyes and that of the companions he picks up.

 

[Gorbles]

Haven't posted here since page 2. Huh.

So for my birthday a while back, a good friend got me an exceptional present. As in, I'm incredibly nerdy, right? So even good friends would struggle picking up something that wasn't tech-related or otherwise novelty-themed, and I completely get it. But he got me Mythos, by Stephen Fry (go figure it has its own Wiki page ). Which means at some point he picked up I was into Greek (and other) myths, as well as being a fan of Fry (the latter was easy to pick up on to be honest, haha, or easily just a good guess). But I was touched at the thought that obviously went into it.

Despite that, I struggle with reading these days, and even Mythos is no exception. So I've been grabbing a few pages here and there whenever I can, and I'm slowly working through it. Just over a third of the way through and I have to say, probably redundantly, but Fry is a great writer. Or at the very least, he writes as well as he speaks. The footnotes are a delight, his modern way of phrasing the various acts of Greek deities is often hilarious, and it's really just a good read. It's also a fun language primer for etymology, and a surprise at just how many things we've brought through from Ancient Greek (and / or Latin, and the overlap with the Roman pantheon of the time) to the modern day.

A great read, and I figure that rating will last all the way through to the end of the book.

 

[Arakhor]

Well, then you can let your friend know that Heroes and Troy are also available, perhaps for Christmas?

 

[Kyriakos]

Read The Second Variety, by Philip K. Dick.
It had been adapted to a nice movie, starring the actor who played Robocop in the original films.

It's a decent story, but iirc the movie's ending is quite more elegant - because in the written story the protagonist is rather thick.

 

[Daniel Boone]

Currently reading The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton, for school. I’ve really liked it so far, but it’s not as fun when you have to answer questions for every chapter.

 

[Synobun]

Currently reading The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton, for school. I’ve really liked it so far, but it’s not as fun when you have to answer questions for every chapter.

How old are you? This book was assigned reading for me when I was... 12? Something like that.

 

[Daniel Boone]

I’m 14, it’s assigned reading in 8th grade ELA.

How old are you? This book was assigned reading for me when I was... 12? Something like that.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Last month I read Someone in Time; that is a paperback anthology of
short stories by different authors involving both time travel and romance.

Predominantly lesbian, some gay, a few straight.

All are copytighted or re-authored in 2022.

The quality varies; some are predictable filler plus, others are quite original.

 

[Arakhor]

This book, Edward? It looks quite intriguing.

 

[Narz]

Listening to audio book of Norwegian Wood, 1987 novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami

Maybe I'll get book from library to finish to the end