172 replies to this topic

[BigWigRah]

I'm over halfway through "The Stand" now, but i'm taking a very short break to read the first three "Guardians of Ga'Hoole" books so I can be a little ready for the movie. There fairly short so I should be done in a few days if I'm persistent in reading them amongst doing my course work.

[BigWigRah]

wow, no one has updated here in awhile.

Reading Ayn Rand's "Anthem." I both love and fear that I may have found something very potent. I tried reading "Atlas Shrugged" before, but never finished it. May have to pick that up again now as I struggle with new ideas.

[RedAuthar]

I just finished reading IndianaJones Adventures vol 1 and 2. But those are comic books, not book books.

I am looking for StarWars Force Unleashed 2 in novel format to go with the first one. (I am such a nerd).

[Ratty Randnums]

Trigun volume 2

[Bakuda]

I'm re-reading Harry Potter to get ready for the movie release. However, I just finished reading The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. I absolutely loved it! Dumas knows how to tie action, adventure, romance, and suspense into an excellent piece of art.

[chief]

I'm still reading The Stand by Stephen King. By still I mean its taking me forever because every time I pick up the book something comes up so I only get through a few pages at a time. Normally I could finish this in a weekend. But... no luck on that.

[chalcara]

Wintersmith by Pratchett and intersparsed by Potter from Rowling.

Both about young magic users, but I like Tiffanys no-nonsense style much better than Potter carelessness.

[Bakuda]

Wintersmith by Pratchett and intersparsed by Potter from Rowling.

Both about young magic users, but I like Tiffanys no-nonsense style much better than Potter carelessness.

Never heard of Wintersmith...I'll have to check it out.

[BigWigRah]

I'm still reading The Stand by Stephen King. By still I mean its taking me forever because every time I pick up the book something comes up so I only get through a few pages at a time. Normally I could finish this in a weekend. But... no luck on that.

I'm in the same situation with that very same book. Ayn Rand came up and now i'm reading "For The New Intellectual" AND "The Virtue of Selfishness" at the same time. I'll get back to King eventually, but Objectivism is just too liberating.

[Ratty Randnums]

Ayn Rand came up and now i'm reading "For The New Intellectual" AND "The Virtue of Selfishness" at the same time. ...Objectivism is just too liberating.

Pffffffffffffffffttttttttt, er, I mean. I will have to respectfully disagree.

[Glitcher]

I've been reading through all the albums of the French comic Thorgal recently. It's extremely popular in its native language. Although the story is primarily based in Viking mythology, it manages to combine aspects of adventure, horror, fantasy and even science fiction elements like time travel. Despite being around since the eighties, the books have only recently been translated into english (out of order).

[RedAuthar]

I hate it when things get translated out of order. It is worse when instead of just leaving things out, they just put them in any random order and try to say that is the correct order.

Anyway.....

Rereading Metal Gear Solid by Raymond Benson. A good read for the Metal Gear fans out there. For anyone else... you'd have to tell me.

[Tristan Palmgren]

I'm reading about how the Mongols would've won a Domination Victory in the thirteenth century had real life been like the Civilization games.

[FerrisDaynlum]

The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich and Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan, they have been into The Social Network and The Town.

[BigWigRah]

The new Lee Child novel "Worth Dying For." So nice to get two books by this guy in one year. Jack Reacher kicks @$$

[furrykef]

"And Another Thing...", the new Hitchhiker's book by Eoin Colfer.

For a long time my mind couldn't seem to comprehend the idea of there being six Hitchhiker's books, considering Douglas Adams was already dead before I started to read them. So I kept forgetting the new one existed, so I kept forgetting to order it. Then I ordered it, and I still kept forgetting it existed even though it was right there in a stack of books on my floor. So the other day I started to actually read it, and I think once I'm through with it I'll be happy if I can continue to forget that it exists.

The more I read it, the less I like it. It's not that Colfer isn't Adams... I knew that going in, and I wanted to give him a fair shot. It's not that the writing style is different... I knew that'd be the case too. It's that Eoin Colfer is completely inept. Well, I don't know, I haven't read his other work, but he really did not do a good job on this one. He constantly -- constantly! -- interrupts the story to provide "amusing" anecdotes from the Guide. Now, Adams did this too, but he did it a lot more sparingly, he let the transitions into and out of these digressions flow a lot more naturally, and they were a lot more funny. The way Colfer does it, it's just horribly disjointed.

The characterizations feel all wrong, especially Zaphod. Zaphod is much more like the bumbling idiot of the movie version rather than the zarkin' frood of the first three books. This personality change might be explained by

him severing one of his two heads to integrate it into the ship's computer, and the severed head taking all of Zaphod's intelligence,

but I find Zaphod's new personality almost thoroughly unlikeable, and when you make Zaphod Beeblebrox unlikeable, you've really screwed up. (Yeah, Zaphod wasn't all that great in book three either, but he was still a lot more enjoyable than this guy. Book three's Zaphod was a really cool guy in a really bad mood. Book six's Zaphod is just a really stupid guy, whatever mood he's in.)

Trillian has likewise undergone a personality shift -- namely, into a bitch. When she left Random with Arthur in book five, it may have been questionable parenting, but this book takes that one little aspect of her and suddenly it's almost all she is: Trillian the bad parent. Maybe it's supposed to be character development, but she developed in a direction that I can't really imagine anybody wanting (or needing) her to develop in.

The worst part about the writing, though, is that I often have to go back and re-read something just to understand what it's saying. This manifests most often in the form of it being unclear who is speaking at any given time. I've had at least one occasion where I read several lines of dialogue thinking character A was speaking first and character B was speaking second, then one of them says something that seems outrageously out of character and I have to go back and re-read it with the characters switched around. How can you screw up something so basic as who is saying what?

[furrykef]

An addendum to my above review. I continued reading at the rest of the book was much better than what preceded it -- maybe even on par with Adams' work. (Not on par with Adams' best work, but for the most part it's something Adams could have written.) Zaphod became likeable again, the characterization improved, the jokes were funnier, the confusion about who was speaking didn't happen anymore, and the narrative flowed more smoothly. I still find the idea of a relationship between

Trillian and Wowbagger

to be rather silly, but eh. The ending was a bit of a WTF, but on the whole, the last 1/3 or so of the book was pretty good.

It's just too bad that you have to get through the rest of the book to get there.

[Ratty Randnums]

Ah Kef I still need to read the first one. I started to a while back but then lost the book.

[Ratty Randnums]

I just started reading a comic I was curious about as a kid. "ElfQuest"
I had an issue or two of the Marvel run of the comic as a child but could never find any more of them. When I looked on ebay about 5 years or so ago the prices being demanded for the comics were *outrageous*, and the trades are long out of print.

Thoughtfully of the husband and wife team who created it you can read every single issue for free with a really nice online reader and no ads HERE.
The scans are way better than the one above by the way, which was scanned by a fan and I just grabbed from Google. I suspect rather that the ones you can read on the site are the same digital versions of the pages that were used to make reprint volumes.

Turns out the comic is a cult phenomenon which has been printed by both Marvel AND DC with the creators self-publishing in the spots in-between for a period of almost 30 years! (1978 - 2007) Whatever you think of the comic itself, you really must admire that tenacity and commitment to a dream.

My impressions based on the first issue-
The coloring job* at certain points give it an 80s Saturday morning cartoon feel, but then you have mild gore and a surprisingly bleak story.
Gummi Bears style cutesyness contrast with the darker elements to create a story that, at least in this first issue, remind me of SatAM with a tinge of the Redwall series thrown in. Both of which this story predates by around a decade or more. The art style doesn't exactly hit the spot for me but I'm still looking forward to reading more of this series to see if it's for me. And hey, it's free. Can't beat that.

*The early comics were originally in b/w but later colored by the original artist.

Before this I was reading a big stack of "Conan the Barbarian"/"Conan the King"/"Arak, Son of Thunder" etc. comics I kind of inherited a long time ago but never really read.
They were very, uhhh... classy?

Yeah, classy. We'll go with that.

[BigWigRah]

been awhile since I updated here. During my student teaching, I read quite a lot.

First: Traveller by Richard Adams. This was the last book in my school library written by him. I've read almost everything Adams has written at this point save for "Daniel' and a few non fiction books. This one is a civil war story about Robert E Lee's horse (of course, only Adams would write this). I had started this novel a year ago, but never got into it because I started "Shardik." Having finished it now, I can say it's an interesting story, but all in all not the best of his novels. The plot tends to prattle along, with each battle being similar to all the other ones. True to reality, Lee is portrayed as a great general and horseman, until Pickett's Charge, one of the biggest blunders in military history by my estimates. the Civil War is portrayed well, as being the vision of utter bloody hell as it was. Traveller's perspective on the war keeps the novel interesting, as he's not really sure as to what is happening, but still retains an optimistic attitude throughout the whole experience. In conclusion, it's worth a read if you like Adams, but read his other stories first.

Secondly, read a LOT of Ayn Rand:
Return of the Primitive
Philosophy: Who Needs It
Ayn Rand Q and A
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
The Voice of Reason (partially before I had to return the book).

Currently, reading three books at once

Fairtax Book by Neil Boortz: This was a book I received from a friend who outright hated it. I was interested to know more about what the Fairtax was, but now that I've read it, can't say I agree with everything in it. It's a good system for dealing with federal taxes (at least, way better than the complicated income/embedded/witholding system we have now, but it says NOTHING about how the states would be effected. Furthermore, the rebate idea seems ludicrous and difficult to enforce, and it's a bit too "nanny state". I imagine most of you have fallen asleep, so lets move on.

Ayn Rand's We The Living: Probably will be the last book I read by her for awhile. Getting kind of tired of her at the moment, but it's a good enough story about a young girl trying to live through the horrors of 1920s Russia. The setting itself is described in brilliant grizzly detail, which is enough to pull me in.

HP Lovecraft's Necronomicon Collection: I had started this mammoth of of tomb last year, but for some reason stopped reading it. Now that I've picked it up again, I'm not sure why I faltered. Well written horror is difficult to beat, especially in reading it during the horrible thunderstorms we've had here. Makes the atmosphere stand out all the more.

phew.