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StarTopic Books |ST| Now You're Reading with POWER

Finally, the complete Faust, by Goethe arrived.


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I probably will not read this semester, but since this is a very expensive book and it was 30% off, I could not let this pass.
 
I have read two books so far this year, both by Derek Landy.

Skulduggery Pleasant Until the End (the 15th book in the series) and Hell Breaks Loose, which is a prequel. The series is about a sharply dressed wizard skeleton and his apprentice solving crimes and saving the world. Hell Breaks Loose is set about 300 years before the first book.
 
HelloAll said:
I have read two books so far this year, both by Derek Landy.

Skulduggery Pleasant Until the End (the 15th book in the series) and Hell Breaks Loose, which is a prequel. The series is about a sharply dressed wizard skeleton and his apprentice solving crimes and saving the world. Hell Breaks Loose is set about 300 years before the first book.
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Seems interesting. The type of book that I would like to publish here (if I was a publisher), but most publishing companies are afraid of long series.
 
Phosphorescent Skeleton said:
Finished up Ubik, my first Philip K. Dick book. Absolutely loved it couldn’t but it down. Don't know what took me so long, his surreal jumble of philosophy, humor, and sf is so good to me. Like Vonnegut without the pretension and more genuine weirdness (I like Vonnegut btw).
Also started Toni Morrison's Jazz, and this might be the most beautifully written book I've ever read.
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Ubik was also my first Philip K. Dick book and it sent me down a path where I read nothing but his books all summer that year. Unfortunately someone broke into my Dad's car when I was out running errands with him a few years ago and stole my copy when I was doing a reread.
 
Seven said:
Ubik was also my first Philip K. Dick book and it sent me down a path where I read nothing but his books all summer that year. Unfortunately someone broke into my Dad's car when I was out running errands with him a few years ago and stole my copy when I was doing a reread.
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I loved that Ubik starts with all this set up, teasing characters that seem important, world building, and then becomes a completly different book where none of that really matters. It shouldn't work, but it does.
 
Phosphorescent Skeleton said:
I loved that Ubik starts with all this set up, teasing characters that seem important, world building, and then becomes a completly different book where none of that really matters. It shouldn't work, but it does.
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Yeah, you get all this info on this team, their abilities, and the cutthroat business their involved in then everything shifts into a psychedelic murder mystery; talking about it just a little here makes me want to read it all over again. If you are interested in more PKD I would recommend Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
 
Seven said:
Yeah, you get all this info on this team, their abilities, and the cutthroat business their involved in then everything shifts into a psychedelic murder mystery; talking about it just a little here makes me want to read it all over again. If you are interested in more PKD I would recommend Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
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On my shelf, gonna probably read it soon
 
Finished Anéantir, by Michel Houellebecq.

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The final part of the book was strange. Houellebecq do not make characters with hope. It is also very heavy from the middle. But outstanding book. It is not better than Platform, Elementary Particles or The Map and the Territory, but is better than Submission.

He said that he stopped now, but I hope that he writes at least two more books.
 
I should try and dip in here a little more since I'm trying to reacha healthier balance of reading alongside other hobbies this year. Recently I read two alt history fiction books, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R. F. Kuang, and She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan, I really enjoyed both! Babel introduces a fictional commodity of magical silver (powered by harnessing what is lost when one word is translated to a perceived counterpart in another language) into the 19th century industrial revolution to explore the effects and atrocities of Britain's pursuit of imperialism during period, and also has a lot of fascinating deconstruction of language and how we communicate amongst each other, between cultures and so on. SWBTS covers the fall of the last mongol empire and rise of the Ming Dynasty in China but with the twist that Zhu Congba (the eventual emperor) dies at a young age due to famine and his sister effectively replaces him in the web of fate and assumes his identity in order to first survive and later escape the limits of what women were considered capable of at the time. It explores gender roles, gender fluidity, class disparity and is just a really interesting read with great characters, and is especially good for being the author's first novel.

I'm now reading These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs, which I came to from some recommendations for folks who enjoyed the Teixcalaan duology and seems like it'll be a good scifi political thrillery thing from the opening and a nice change of pace from the last two books.
 
Tonight I begin "The Bone Shard War", which is the third and final installment in the Drowning Empire trilogy. This is easily the heftiest paperback in my collection right now, so it's not one I'm gonna be putting by my bedside in case I need something to read at night to help falling asleep.
 
Until recently the heftiest paperback I owned was Stephen King's It, but my parents bought me The Great Book of Amber by Roger Zelazny as a Christmas gift last year and that thing is a monster.
 
Okay, so I'm reading:

A Dance with Dragons (Book 5 of A Song of Ice and Fire) by George R. R. Martin

Star Wars: The High Republic: Midnight Horizon by Daniel José Older

Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism by Philip J. Stern

Visible Learning: The Sequel by John Hattie
 
I finished Blueprint for Murder by Roger Bax (a pseudonym of Paul Winterton). Was a fun, pulpy murder mystery. I guessed whodunit! But not too far before the end.

Next up, a buncha reading on my other favourite TV show:
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Read thru a book about Oppenheimer that I strongly suspect was written by AI.

Found a copy of A Wrinkle in Time at the free little library at my local pool and am about halfway through that. So far I’m really enjoying its weirdness.

Finished Mistborn and liked it enough that I picked up book 2, The Well of Ascension.
 
GenOneCam said:
Read thru a book about Oppenheimer that I strongly suspect was written by AI.

Found a copy of A Wrinkle in Time at the free little library at my local pool and am about halfway through that. So far I’m really enjoying its weirdness.

Finished Mistborn and liked it enough that I picked up book 2, The Well of Ascension.
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A Wrinkle in Time is a classic, and gets even weirder as it goes. I remember reading a few of the other books in that same series in middle school and they get extra weird. Like... I remember in one of them they literally travel inside someone's mitochondria. And another of the books is a time-travel novel that takes place in the time of Noah's Ark of all things, IIRC.
 
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Finished reading Jack Vance's classic The Dying Earth, a science fiction/fantasy novel that defined and named an entire sub genre. This is the eponymous first book in the series, and us actually a collection of short stories. They vary in quality from good to all timers, each one chock-full of concepts that could power an entire novel. The stories feel like fairy tales set in a distant future where civilization has reverted to medievalism and the sun us burning out. A story about a symbiotic relationship between an eyeball collecting monster and a woman trying to restore a tapestry, a man with insatiable curiosity seeking the lost archives of human knowledge, an artificial woman who can only feel hate falling for a man with the face of a monster. This is most read stuff for fantasy and SF fans, elemental stuff.

Triva: the magic in Vance's world consists of memorizing mathematical equations so complex they bend reality when spoken and have to be rememorized constantly. This is thr direct inspiration for how magic works in Dungeons and Dragons.
 
The last couple of months I’ve been reading Red Rising by Pierce Brown. Currently I am at the 5th Book "Dark Age" and not really sure if I want to continue because everything got even more depressing. The whole series already has a lot of dark themes but this is just another level.
 
lexony said:
The last couple of months I’ve been reading Red Rising by Pierce Brown. Currently I am at the 5th Book "Dark Age" and not really sure if I want to continue because everything got even more depressing. The whole series already has a lot of dark themes but this is just another level.
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Read that a few years ago on a plane trip. Finished the second book, loved it, and vowed not to keep going because the whiplash in the last 10 pages nearly broke my neck.

For my part I'm wrapping up A Desolation Called Peace, the second book in Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series, about linguistics and cultural exchange in a spacefaring future where the local all-consuming space empire is future Aztec instead of Space America or Europe. The first book deservedly won every award it was up for, and the second book keeps most of the same level of quality. After that I'll finally sit down to finish Middlegame, which is about alchemy and draws from classic alchemical traditions of the Renaissance and medieval eras.
 
Elementary said:
Read that a few years ago on a plane trip. Finished the second book, loved it, and vowed not to keep going because the whiplash in the last 10 pages nearly broke my neck.
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Yeah I think it gets a bit better again during the 3th and 4th book, but the way it is written really hits hard. Though I think it is one of the best Sci-Fi Epos I‘ve ever read.

The Premise is so interesting. It starts out as a quite straight forward Si-Fi Adventure on Mars. Though pretty early on an interesting twist happens and, without spoiling too much, the main themes heavily lean into racial/social issues, how to overcome a totalitarian Society and what is morally right/wrong in a war, while the main character being kinda flawed.

Elementary said:
For my part I'm wrapping up A Desolation Called Peace, the second book in Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series, about linguistics and cultural exchange in a spacefaring future where the local all-consuming space empire is future Aztec instead of Space America or Europe. The first book deservedly won every award it was up for, and the second book keeps most of the same level of quality. After that I'll finally sit down to finish Middlegame, which is about alchemy and draws from classic alchemical traditions of the Renaissance and medieval eras.
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Oh this series still is on my Bucket List!
 
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Elementary said:
For my part I'm wrapping up A Desolation Called Peace, the second book in Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series, about linguistics and cultural exchange in a spacefaring future where the local all-consuming space empire is future Aztec instead of Space America or Europe. The first book deservedly won every award it was up for, and the second book keeps most of the same level of quality.
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Absolutely loved these books, I thought the author did a great job of taking the ideas from the first book and interrogating them in a different way with the second book, just really thoughtful stuff about what it actually means to belong or be connected to a culture on a personal and social level and how far the idea of that can be pushed and pulled by eternal forces. It would have been easy to just run the first book again but a little different but it felt quite different and new in a good way.

I'd really like to read her novella she's published since but it doesn't seem to be available on kindle in the UK for some reason
 
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees got me out of a long reading slump, a lovely collection of short stories that is specifically about Viatnamese migrants yet spoke to the universal immigrant experience and the feelings we associate with the lives and people we left behind in really unexpected ways.

After that I read Edgar Rice Burrough’s The Land that Time Forgot and Hollow by B. Catling. TLTT is a pretty dated and shallow pulpy book that I didn’t really care for on a personal level though I can appreciate how influential it must have been. Really bizarre to have the first ~half be about that damn submarine and the Germans. Largely just feels like a lot of prelude to a different, more interesting story which might be in its sequels. My memory might betray me but I think it pales in comparison to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

I really liked Hollow on the other hand. Catling weaves this tapestry of horror and human drama in a world closely resembling 16th century Europe where reality and fiction blend against the backdrop of the religious turmoil of the era. It’s weird, it’s brutal, it’s gross but I couldn’t put it down and it made me really curious about his other books, specifically The Vorrh.

Currently (re)reading Pride & Prejudice and The Last Unicorn, books that I’ve never properly read in their original language but in German. P&P is my girlfriend’s favourite book and I gotta admit that Austen really had the juice. As for Unicorn… I already loved it before (as well as the movie) but I think this might be "favourite book ever" material so far.
 
Dardan Sandiego said:
After that I read Edgar Rice Burrough’s The Land that Time Forgot and Hollow by B. Catling. TLTT is a pretty dated and shallow pulpy book that I didn’t really care for on a personal level though I can appreciate how influential it must have been. Really bizarre to have the first ~half be about that damn submarine and the Germans. Largely just feels like a lot of prelude to a different, more interesting story which might be in its sequels. My memory might betray me but I think it pales in comparison to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.
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ERB is an author I find hard to recommend because of the absolutely busted amount of racism in some (most) of his books, but I don't think there's a purer example of unhinged pulp insanity out there. His hollow earth and mars books in particular feel like stream of conscious fever dreams.
 
Phosphorescent Skeleton said:
ERB is an author I find hard to recommend because of the absolutely busted amount of racism in some (most) of his books, but I don't think there's a purer example of unhinged pulp insanity out there. His hollow earth and mars books in particular feel like stream of conscious fever dreams.
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His legacy is undeniable so I’m not going to dismiss him entirely, just that particular book wasn’t really for me. But I should have Princess of Mars lying around somewhere. Might give that a try eventually.
 
Dardan Sandiego said:
His legacy is undeniable so I’m not going to dismiss him entirely, just that particular book wasn’t really for me. But I should have Princess of Mars lying around somewhere. Might give that a try eventually.
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Oh, he's really not a good writer, don't worry about it. I never got passed the german wwi stuff in that one. But his books have an anything goes accidental surreal sense of wonder.
 
Tarzan got a nice edition but extremely expensive here.

I just found out that A Princess of Mars have a really pretty edition with a very cool cover here. And the price is way more accessible.

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One day I will read, but this year I will not buy any usofan books.
 
I ended up not reading Middlegame after all (am I ever going to actually get past chapter 3??). Instead I've picked up Gideon the Ninth as well as Isaac Steele and the Forever Man as my current audiobook. Both are incredibly fun reads, with Gideon being an absolutely incredible work of imagery and imagination. Isaac Steele is hilarious but wouldn't be as good if I were reading it on the page, the author is the narrator so he knows the exact cadence to take the amusing bits from droll to laugh out loud funny.
 
Phosphorescent Skeleton said:
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Finished reading Jack Vance's classic The Dying Earth, a science fiction/fantasy novel that defined and named an entire sub genre. This is the eponymous first book in the series, and us actually a collection of short stories. They vary in quality from good to all timers, each one chock-full of concepts that could power an entire novel. The stories feel like fairy tales set in a distant future where civilization has reverted to medievalism and the sun us burning out. A story about a symbiotic relationship between an eyeball collecting monster and a woman trying to restore a tapestry, a man with insatiable curiosity seeking the lost archives of human knowledge, an artificial woman who can only feel hate falling for a man with the face of a monster. This is most read stuff for fantasy and SF fans, elemental stuff.

Triva: the magic in Vance's world consists of memorizing mathematical equations so complex they bend reality when spoken and have to be rememorized constantly. This is thr direct inspiration for how magic works in Dungeons and Dragons.
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Haven't been in this thread in a while, but I'm so glad to see Jack Vance's Dying Earth being mentioned here. I have no idea how I first came across this series, but I fondly remember reading these stories while on jury duty and being enthralled by this crumbling world that everyone knows is on the brink of its demise and can't really give a damn. From there I was lead to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and the short stories of Clark Ashton Smith; I also have Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun and M. John Harrison's Viriconium in my book backlog.
 
Seven said:
Haven't been in this thread in a while, but I'm so glad to see Jack Vance's Dying Earth being mentioned here. I have no idea how I first came across this series, but I fondly remember reading these stories while on jury duty and being enthralled by this crumbling world that everyone knows is on the brink of its demise and can't really give a damn. From there I was lead to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and the short stories of Clark Ashton Smith; I also have Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun and M. John Harrison's Viriconium in my book backlog.
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Read Book of the New Sun last year, which is what finally motivated me to check out Vance. Have always been meaning to finally read some Clark Ashton Smith, he's a huge weird fiction blind spot for me.
 
Phosphorescent Skeleton said:
Read Book of the New Sun last year, which is what finally motivated me to check out Vance. Have always been meaning to finally read some Clark Ashton Smith, he's a huge weird fiction blind spot for me.
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I definitely recommend checking him out; I bought The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies on a whim years ago and finally got around to reading it a few months ago but I was hooked. It's too bad Smith never achieved the popularity of contemporaries like Lovecraft and Howard.

The Book of the New Sun was my main pandemic read throughout '20. I would read the book then listen to a podcast that went over the chapters I read during my daily exercise.
 
Seven said:
I definitely recommend checking him out; I bought The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies on a whim years ago and finally got around to reading it a few months ago but I was hooked. It's too bad Smith never achieved the popularity of contemporaries like Lovecraft and Howard.

The Book of the New Sun was my main pandemic read throughout '20. I would read the book then listen to a podcast that went over the chapters I read during my daily exercise.
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Speaking of Howard, I've been reading through his Conan stories and they all rip so hard. Conan rules.
 
Finished Isaac Steel and the Forever Man. Great pastiche of noir and science fiction. By turns it was funny, sad, cruel and fantastical, and always with a cutting criticism of empire and current British politics. I'll be replacing it with John Scalzi's Starter Villain on Audible.

Been meaning to ask, anyone have Audible recommendations? I've got a few credits to burn and there's no Brandon Sanderson monster this year to spend them on, so I'm a bit uncertain about what to get.
 
Elementary said:
Finished Isaac Steel and the Forever Man. Great pastiche of noir and science fiction. By turns it was funny, sad, cruel and fantastical, and always with a cutting criticism of empire and current British politics. I'll be replacing it with John Scalzi's Starter Villain on Audible.

Been meaning to ask, anyone have Audible recommendations? I've got a few credits to burn and there's no Brandon Sanderson monster this year to spend them on, so I'm a bit uncertain about what to get.
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I really enjoyed the reader for Anansi Boys if you haven't read that one yet.
 
Anyone here who has read the The Daevabad Trilogy? I'm currently going through the first one (City of Copper) and I'm really having to force myself to go on. I've never read a book which has this much exposition without any pay off as literally everything is dropped straight away, lacks the basic fundamentals of 'show, don't tell' as everything is spelled out, and it just hops from one thing to the next without much of anything really connecting the two moments. The story went from zero to a hundred in the span of literally just chapter one to chapter two.
I don't hate the idea, but lord, the execution is just dreadful...
 
lexony said:
The last couple of months I’ve been reading Red Rising by Pierce Brown. Currently I am at the 5th Book "Dark Age" and not really sure if I want to continue because everything got even more depressing. The whole series already has a lot of dark themes but this is just another level.
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A pity that the author is a Zionist...

Edit: You kinda think he wouldn't be given the subject matter of the book series.
 
Finished "Soundtrack from Twin Peaks" by Clare Nina Norelli. Really enjoyed it! As someone who is wedged in between "is a musician" and "isn't all that technical about music," I feel confident saying that this book was very well done. Also, the author taped episodes of Twin Peaks when they were a kid to study the music; it's hard to argue she isn't the perfect person to tackle a project like this. If you're a TP fan, it's certainly worth a read.
 
I've been on a non-fiction streak, so now I'm reading the Elvis Costello autobiography, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink.

The man can write. Not that I had many doubts, given the quality of his lyrics. But still...
 
Elementary said:
For my part I'm wrapping up A Desolation Called Peace, the second book in Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series, about linguistics and cultural exchange in a spacefaring future where the local all-consuming space empire is future Aztec instead of Space America or Europe. The first book deservedly won every award it was up for, and the second book keeps most of the same level of quality. After that I'll finally sit down to finish Middlegame, which is about alchemy and draws from classic alchemical traditions of the Renaissance and medieval eras.
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Adored these books. I read A Memory Called Empire in a single day while I was down with a sickness (augh-ah-ah-ah-ah).
 
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