Whatcha reading?

[perth]

Originally posted by Jakeline
THE trilogy? Okay, I'm new to posting here and now I'm going to make some folks hate me...

...

I hated reading THE trilogy.

yep, i hate you. seriously though, give it another chance.

honestly, i had a hard time getting through it the first time. thats not to say you should keep trying, because i know people who are the same way. they love the story, but cant stand the writing. and thats fine. i heard they made a movie of it, so watch that instead.

are you into fantasy much in general? if so, what do you like? myself, i always liked terry brooks' shannara series (but hated magic kingdom) and the wheel of time. i read lotr every once in a while and i love it, but as far as the writing goes, i agree it can be dry and *gasp* even boring.

~james

[jaguar]

THe third LOTR is the really boring one, i was fine up till then but damn if i read something to the effect of "...terrain was boring...he'd never felt so lonely in his life...." i was going to use the damn thing for archery practice...

Diamond age was fantastic, remarkably different to cryptonomicon, the style seemed closer to Gibson, certainly drew me in, some facinating concepts and ideas. Stepherson has a certain....raw? way of writing that really drags me in, i only discovered his books recently but damn, they're good. I haven't managed to track down a copy of Zodiac yet, working on it at the moment (though most of my waking hours involved one screen or another and page after page of code )

[jeni]

i am a HUGE fan of neil gaiman.

jakeline, i thought american gods was really good. a little eccentric, maybe, but very well thought out and more of an "and the moral of the story is..." book than a story itself. i think it was written to provoke thought.

i find that neil gaiman, being the incredibly intelligent and well-written individual that he obviously is, is a wonderful read.

that is why i recommend all of his books. as perth said, i recommended neverwhere, which still remains one of my favorite and most memorable books. coraline was very good (even as a children's book, it leaves a big impression on the adult mind), as was stardust (a sort of fairytale. called by some a "girl's book", even the author himself. still worth reading if you've been impressed so far by gaiman's style).

i am currently reading good omens, a collaboration of gaiman and terry pratchett (of discworld fame). it's a tale of the apocalypse, written in a humorous manner.

and it's REALLY, REALLY funny.

i'm going to give you an excerpt, here. right now we're reading about this guy's car, an obsolete ancient little japanese car called the wasabi.

Newt had never actually seen another one on the road, despite his best efforts. For years, and without much conviction, he'd enthused to his friends about its economy and efficiency in the desperate hope that one of them might buy one, because misery loves company.

In vain did he point out its 823cc engine, its three-speed gearbox, its incredible safety devices like the balloons which inflated on dangerous occasions such as when you were doing 45 mph on a straight dry road but were about to crash because a huge safety balloon had just obscured the view.

BUY THIS BOOK.

[Griff]

Lets see, just finished Prey and Dracula, still nibbling on Nocks Jefferson,(yummy) started Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence haven't opened Crockers Triumph lately, should finish Rothbards little pamphet Education Free and Compulsory when I'm in the mood. Just started Paul Goodman's Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals and have no idea what I'm in for. If it sounds messy its because it is. I need to rationalize this pile.

[wolf]

LOTR also left me cold.

I know a lot of Tolkien Freaks. (Totally big capital "F" Freaks).

You know, the kind of people who read everything 15 times or more ... the kind of people who try to learn Elvish, fergodsakes ... THOSE kind of people.

I don't get it. I don't get them.

I'm a BIG fantasy and SF fan. I read a lot from both genres. I should be RIPE to be a huge Tolkien fan.

Can't stand LOTR. (Yes I did read it more than once. It did not get any better. Even tried the 'let a few years pass and you'll like it better' thing. NOPE. Read it in high school, college, and after. Still sucks.)

Frankly, I think the ONLY thing it was truly good for was to serve as a basis for satire for the Harvard Lampoon in their most excellent, but slim, volume, Bored of the Rings.

[jaguar]

Pratchett rocks! Good omens is great along with the discworld series, huge fan =).

[wolf]

Agreeing with Jaguar again (I must be feeling ill. it's the stress of the upcoming surgery.)

Terry Pratchett is easily the funniest, most consistently entertaining writer I have encountered. (and he doesn't seem to fall into the fits of depression that kept Douglas Adams from writing more, although I do love every bit of Hitchhiker's Guide, et. al. ... the BBC TV series is available on DVD incidentally)

It says a lot when the later books in the series fail to suck wind. (Piers Anthony for example ... good out of the gate, falls flat by book 3, doesn't give a damn but has to finish out the sequence ...)

I've got a good sized Pratchett backlog ... I have the books, just haven't made it to the top of the reading pile. I keep going back and forth on who the most favored character is ... DEATH, certainly, and The Librarian (ook).

[Jakeline]

Wolf, Jaguar: Word.

I love Good Omens, but I have a huge problem with it. I can't keep a copy for myself. I keep loaning my copy to a friend, who invariably says, "This was SO funny, I had to loan it to a friend. I promise you'll get it back." A few months elapse, then I buy a new copy, and start the whole cycle again. Right now, I've decided not to buy another copy, and feign ignorance when a friend tells me about it.. so I can steal someone else's copy. Karma be damned!

I also liked Stardust a lot. Girl book or not, it was a very high quality "beach book" for me.

[Jakeline]

Yay.. another Sandman fan! Have you ever seen Cages by Dave McKean (the guy who did all of the cover art)? It's the most amazing book I own. Need a forklift to move it, though.

[wolf]

Good Omens was definitely a treat! (Incidentally, if you don't think that you'll be able to scam a copy off a friend soon enough, amazon.com used has it for 3.99, and half.com has copies for 3.49 ... all +S/H, of course, but you'll have one for yourself then ...)

One book that I thought was delightful, and no longer have for the same reasons is Snow in August by Pete Hamill.

Absolutely magical book, with descriptions and characters that create awesome sensory images of the places and times decribed. (I gave the book to a friend who was only slightly older than the child described in the book during the same time period, and was resident in that part of NY and he said that the author had totally nailed the places and feelings of the time)

[CodeBlue40]

Right now, it's The Modern Gentleman : A Guide to Essential Manners, Savvy & Vice.

Just doing a little fine tuning. As I'm reading this, I'm waiting for a few more books to come in. I work in a bookstore as a part time job and I've got some stuff coming in.

[wolf]

The Getaway Man - Andrew Vachss

I've been reading his Burke books since he started writing, as well as the short story collections.

Really compelling writer, with interesting characters, if you like crime/mystery kind of stuff.

[Torrere]

I recently started reading The Faded Sun Trilogy by C.J. Cherryh, but luckily I managed to stop about halfway through. I disliked the characters and I disliked how Cherryh had done the book. I have a difficult time trying to stop reading books that I don't like -- this might be the fourth time that I've actually succeeded.

Speaking of which, the first time was The Return of the King. After they destroyed the Ring, I couldn't figure out why they had what felt like Aragorn's fifty page walk through the garden, so I just stopped reading.

I've also stopped reading The Wheel of Time, because it has become sessile. I've come to hate reading about Perrin, not because Perrin is all that bad but because I hate everything that has to do with Berelain or Faile. I detest reading about them for hundreds of pages. That's the reason that I use now, but I think that the original reason that I stopped reading the Wheel of Time was that I found The Path of Daggers to be terribly anticlimatic. It felt like things were going to happen, it felt like the Daughter of the Nine Moons thing would come into play -- but there was nothing. It was just about Rand's neurotic problems. Argh!

[wolf]

I have the same problem with Cherryh. I read the Chanur books because a friend made me, but can't voluntarily make it through any of her other stuff.

[Elspode]

Um...er...I'm a little embarassed to say that I'm reading The Puppet Masters by Heinlein. I never actually got around to reading that one before, and I found what must be a nearly first paperback printing laying around in a box of old books we picked up when my wife's grandparents' neighbors died, so I thought, "What the hell?"

I love Heinlein. He would have made a damn fine tabloid writer...plus, he was a local boy.