Books you're reading now

[Hepheastus]

Went out to buy my mom a birthday present last week, ended up in a bookshop and found a book called 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson decided to pick it up as I have a fairly long commute each day.
Turns out it's really good but it's very...dry.
The book is set (surprisingly) in the Year 2312 and involves a wonderful take on the future that's not quite Dystopian and not quite Utopian, inhabiting the void that somehow makes it seem more real. It involves wonderful takes on the solar system like how to terraform Venus but the book is really wordy. Perhaps I'm being pretentious but I think it would be hard for the average person to read
I'm still really enjoying it but it makes it difficult sometimes

[Lord Chrusher]

Finished A Song of Ice and Fire's A Feast for Crows and I am now onto A Dance with Dragons. I have a feeling I will have to go back and reread the series to get everything in my head straight.

[Bebop Man]

Reading Bukowski's "Pulp". I've never been a fan of trashy stuff but the noir parody is cool. Reminds me of Duckman.

[Geoff_B]

Finished A Song of Ice and Fire's A Feast for Crows and I am now onto A Dance with Dragons. I have a feeling I will have to go back and reread the series to get everything in my head straight.

The problem I have there is if you leave it too long between reading you forget who everyone is and what they're doing. At this point Mr Martin could just make names up and I wouldn't know the difference.

I may have to purchase the complete Space Marine Battles collection (thus far at least) from Black Library. My FIF is whispering in my ear and pointing gleefully.

[kamaitachi113]

Just finished Stephen King's "Wind through the Keyhole" which had one good story (out of three, but the good one was really the main one and the other two just served to put the main one in context). If you read and liked King's Dark Tower series you'll probably read this regardless of my recommendation; if you didn't, you probably won't and probably shouldn't. It's a good book, but not great. The second ending (that is, the end of the framing story for the main story, not the ending of the main story or the framing story for the framing story of the main story) was pretty weak to me, I got the feeling that King was just kind of done with the book at that point and ready to move on. I don't think that the book even continues a full fifty pages beyond the conclusion of the story-within-the-story-within-the-story. That's fine too probably, but like I said: it's a book with limited appeal and kind of obligitory if you're in the target audience. King even helpfully says where to shelve it within the series, which may illustrate the nature of the book: a valid addition to the series, but also kind of a way of padding things out. And if I may criticize some more, the suggested order means that the series spends two whole books in nearly constant flashback mode, back to back. It might be proper order chronologically but it's not how I would recommend reading the series.
I know I criticized it kind of harshly, but honestly I did enjoy it. The story, the main story that is, was genuinely good, and probably couldn't be told as well without the two layers of framing story around it. It's not something that will mean much or be easily read or enjoyed by anyone who isn't at least familiar with the Dark Tower series, but if you are, it's more than worth your time.

tl;dr: if you're going to read it, you should. Otherwise, you're not going to read it.


Now I'm about 80 pages into Doctor Sleep (the sequel-ish to The Shining) and it looks pretty great so far. It might be another example of King going back to an old well, like Wind was with the Dark Tower, but for now I'm reserving that judgment. It seems to be nothing at all like The Shining; it's too early to really say that, but from everything I know from the cover and what little I've read it's going in a different direction entirely, just picking at a few threads from one book and seeing where they go some twenty/thirtyish years later. You can tell, since it says "Stephen King" in really big letters on the cover, that it's not going to be such a wonderful, excellent place, but it could be an interesting place. We'll see.

[Ptangmatik]

I bought Neil Gaiman's latest yesterday and I'm already most of the way through it, I won't start discussing particular aspects of it, I'll just say that I really like it.

[Lord Chrusher]

I'm currently reading The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.

[Avistew]

I'm reading Oxygen by John Olson and Randy Ingermanson. It's about an expedition to Mars in 2014 (the book was written before 9/11 and the authors thought that by 2014 a manned expedition would have been planned) but something goes wrong and they dont have enough oxygen for everyone... or so I'm told. I haven't reached that part yet (it starts in 2012 with preparation stuff).

I like it fine. I wouldn't say it's my favourite book ever by I'm enjoying reading it.

[AlexanderDitto]

I'm currently reading "And the Band Played On" by Randy Shilts.

And holy shit, this book.

Everyone needs to read this. Especially queer people, but everybody needs to read it. It's about the AIDS crisis. People have forgotten. People aren't taught this. It's horrifying and rivetting and young gay men definitely don't know that this happened, don't remember. Hundreds of thousands of people died. They died horrible, painful, in many ways preventable deaths. There are just... there's a generation of gay men missing, and this is why. Fuck.

I'm like, 50 pages in and the book is 500 pages long and it's all I can think about.

[Lord Chrusher]

I finished A Dance with Dragons, the most recent book in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series.

[Drecon]

For my birthday I got "A whack to the side of the head" by Roger von Oech. It's a book about creativity and how people limit themselves from fully using it.

It's a great read actually.

[viscomica]

Yesterday I bought "The king in yellow" by Robert W. Chambers
I have high hopes for it! I'll get back to you on that later

[kamaitachi113]

Halfway through "Words of Radiance" by Brandon Sanderson, the sequel to Way of Kings.

It's a good book, but...
I got unbearably curious about some esoteric bit of the magic system and looked something up. Kinda sorta spoiled some big reveals for the second half. Kinda sorta had looked ahead here and there anyway and found out something else before that. I'm such a bad person...

[Bebop Man]

Alright, finished Pulp. Apparently it took me one month and 20 days. Sharpen your game, Belane.

[plummeting_sloth]

My shipmates found out that I've never read any of the Aubrey/Martin books. Considering I portray a sailor in 1813, this was considered unacceptable. Multiple copies of Master and Commander were thrust at my and apparently I'll have immediate access to the whole collection.

[Volafortis]

I bought Neil Gaiman's latest yesterday and I'm already most of the way through it, I won't start discussing particular aspects of it, I'll just say that I really like it.

Oh, I bought that but haven't started it yet, because I also bought all of The Sandman, and have been reading that.

[Avistew]

I finally finished that Oxygen book I was reading. I liked it but there is way too much "oh no, something bad is going to happen.... no it didn't... but something else that's bad is going to happen!"

Makes it difficult to care for any of the characters because you're too busy being annoyed about the authors trying to trick you or something. Then I stopped caring for any of them and I enjoyed the rest of the book a lot more. It's not badly written, I would just have removed at least half of the "oh no!" moments. It reminds me of these old comics that they published one page at a time in magazine, so each page ends with one character going "Oh!" and you wait until next week to realise that what they saw was... say, a cat, with the next panel being "I didn't know you had a cat!"

[elvor]

I bought Neil Gaiman's latest yesterday and I'm already most of the way through it, I won't start discussing particular aspects of it, I'll just say that I really like it.

Oh, I bought that but haven't started it yet, because I also bought all of The Sandman, and have been reading that.

Ocean at the End of the Lane is so good. I can't even really say why, just the whole thing is basically magic.

[Bebop Man]

Reading The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers. I knew him from all the True Detective references and I'd been wanting to read something by him since I read Lovecraft was a fan.

[viscomica]

I've finished Enduring Love a few days ago. I thought it was pretty awesome. More than the actual story, I loved the character's thoughts about life in general and Ian McEwan's prose. I highly recommend it

[Telaril]

My shipmates found out that I've never read any of the Aubrey/Martin books. Considering I portray a sailor in 1813, this was considered unacceptable. Multiple copies of Master and Commander were thrust at my and apparently I'll have immediate access to the whole collection.

I am in the same boat (Ha!) with Aubrey/Maturin. The two guys at my office who love the series got me into it, and now every day when I get to work, one of them messages me with "so what happened to Jack and Steve last night?" So man good lines. Such good characters. The best.

[Lord Chrusher]

Being on vacation is greatly helping my reading.

In the month or so I have read:

A Fortunate Life by Albert Facey
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
The Four-Minute Mile by Roger Bannister
Great Australian Stories: Outback Towns and Pubs by Bill ‘Swampy’ Marsh

I am currently reading A Short History of Progress by Ronald White.

[Pimpin J]

Finished Ender's Game and now on to The Godfather. Although I have seen the movie several times already the book so far contains much more character information. Great read and I recommend it!.

[Bebop Man]

I liked The Godfather a lot, except for a certain pointless subplot involving vaginal surgery that was wisely left out of the movie.

[Lord Chrusher]

I finished A Short History of Progress and I have moved onto On the Road by Jack Kerouac.