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What'cha Reading?

I also read the first two Murderbot books recently (ish, within the past couple of months) because my partner insisted I do that before we could watch the TV show. Like John, they haven't been super engaging to me, but they're fun enough little snack-sized books. I kinda feel like they should've maybe just been combined into a single novel rather than two novellas, but that's just me. I'll read more of these when I need to fill some holes between other library holds.
 
Honestly you could have lumped the first four novellas all into one book, but I don't really mind; splitting individual stories into their own books gives it a nice old-fashioned serial vibe.
 
I loved the character Murderbot and its extremely vivid inner life, but I found the action sequences in those books very hard to follow. Though to be fair, that's a reading comprehension problem I have in general with fiction, so ymmv.
 
King Sorrow was very good. Few nitpicky problems. There's a section where a character goes to AA, and I thought Joe was getting a bit preachy, also thought the last section could have been trimmed down a bit. Other than that, well worth your time. Now, reading Deathstalker: Destiny by Simon R. Green. I was originally going to hold off to the start of November, but it's a fairly short read, compared to the other four
 
So, Destiny is the end of the first arc of the Deathstalker saga and I thought it stuck the landing fairly well. I'm going to take a break and start Legacy in January. Now, working on Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman
 
I’ve since picked them up as ebooks in a bundle but I read all of the existing murderbots through the library over the course of a couple of months last year. Pleasant little ritual to go grab one as my hold came through and burn through it in two days.
 
Reread A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens for my classics book club. Lots of details I'd forgotten, happy to revisit it. Also finished prior to the book club meeting next week so always nice not to be scrambling to finish a book.

I started How to Not Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz yesterday. It's a short novel with a fascinating format: It's the employment office interviews with a Dominican woman who was laid off after working in a factory for years and is now trying to find a new job. But the interviews veer off track and it is covering social and economic issues and tough family stories. I'm about halfway through and absolutely fascinated by it.
 
Between Two Fires was good, a bit strange at times, especially at times, but I really enjoyed Thomas' character arc. I'll most definitely be reading more Buelhman in the future. As to what I'm currently working on: Tom's Crossing by Mark Z. Danielwski (which will be my longest book read this year, by word count, at over 500,000 words) and The Will of the Many by James Islington. Also, started reading the web-toon Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint
 
Finished Murderbot 2, was a little bit deeper than the first one, but still extremely light popcorn.

Too Like the Lightning and Nausicaa are still in progress. The former has a whole lotta depth, especially on gender issues but also with political science and humanities. Nausicaa's great as a palate cleanser change of pace.

Needed a new ebook for bedtime reading, and started up Treasure Island by Stevenson. Never read it as a kid, only experience is with Muppets. It's very readable which isn't always the case from 1800's writing, though I guess it's end of the century instead of earlier, makes a difference. Just what I need when I'm winding down to doze off.
masterthes said:
Between Two Fires was good, a bit strange at times, especially at times, but I really enjoyed Thomas' character arc. I'll most definitely be reading more Buelhman in the future. As to what I'm currently working on: Tom's Crossing by Mark Z. Danielwski (which will be my longest book read this year, by word count, at over 500,000 words) and The Will of the Many by James Islington. Also, started reading the web-toon Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint
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Very curious about Tom's Crossing. I saw that in the store the other day but didn't read the slipcover, so wondering what tricks he's laid in that doorstop.
 
I'm also interested in hearing about Tom's Crossing. I finished House of Leaves a while ago, how does Tom compare?
 
I'm like 4 chapters in and so far, it's just straight up lit fiction. No gimmicks thus far, and there's not supposed to from a review I watched of it
 
Unfortunately, I got 200 something pages in and got incredibly bored with TC, so here's an update on what I've read/been reading:

In my Stephen King reread, I finished The Gunslinger. When I first read it over twenty years ago, I was very meh about it, but now that I have finished the series many moons ago, it's great. I also finished Cold Silver for Souls by Tori Tecken: a western with a necromancer for a lead. Good stuff. I also finished my reread of Empire of the Vampire by Jay Kristoff, and now I'm working on book 2
 
Empire of the Damned was awesome. I'm going to take a bit of a break though and go back to finishing Comanche Moon before working on Dawn. I'm also working on:
Meet Your Maker, Vol. 1 by Seth McDuffee - seems like this will be some entertaining progression fantasy
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - after watching the del Toro version, I decided to finally reread this (I'm reading the annotated version by Leslie Klinger)
Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Haven't read anything by him in a while
Greatest Hits by Harlan Ellison - I keep telling myself to try to read more short story collections, and I've never read any Ellison, so I thought this would be a good place to start (I do own The Essential Ellison, and if I like those stories, I'll work my way through that collection)
 
Tchaikovsky is really prolific! I've only read one book by him, Guns of the Dawn (liked it!), but he's got so many series alone that picking up something else seems daunting. Doesn't help that the books are usually really thick. But I'll get back to his work sooner or later...
 
Yeah, Tchaikovsky puts out a seriously unhealthy number of books every year. IMO, by far the best of them are Children of Time/Children of Ruin, which I would recommend to anyone...unless they are afraid of spiders. Beyond that, I also quite enjoyed the Final Architecture series, starting with Shards of Earth. Unfortunately, I've found a lot of his other stuff to be a little half-baked, like the guy doesn't have the attention span to dedicate more than four months to any given book.
 
John said:
Needed a new ebook for bedtime reading, and started up Treasure Island by Stevenson. Never read it as a kid, only experience is with Muppets. It's very readable which isn't always the case from 1800's writing, though I guess it's end of the century instead of earlier, makes a difference. Just what I need when I'm winding down to doze off.
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Finally sat down and finished the last half of Treasure Island in 2 days, instead of just reading a few paragraphs each night. Overall I liked it but didn't think it merited its full reputation. It did a weird kinda interesting perspective shift to explain what was happening when Jim wasn't around to tell his story in the middle, but it all felt kinda artificial. Fine enough story though.

Too Like the Lightning I finished a week or so ago. Like what it was doing, though it's part 1 of 4 and nothing really resolves yet. The sequel's in the Christmas Jail box, so I'll start that next year.

In the meantime I went back to the ebook well and started Nostrilia by Cordwainer Smith. This copy includes a small short story that sorta acts like a prequel, but it's really just a piece of the puzzle. Smith was doing the Culture thing before its time, or I guess was the stepping stone between Foundation and Culture (says the person who has only seen Boss Baby). Interesting so far.
 
I picked up John Scalzi's follow-up to Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades. It's been a while since I read the first book (which was Scalzi's debut novel), but the second one feels much more in line with his latter work; I think the comedy factor has been kicked up a notch. Given the potential darkness of the topic - genetically engineered supersoldiers, defenders of humanity who are barely human themselves and viewed as such - it's been surprisingly light reading, not too invested in its own importance.

At the same time I'm working my way through Paul Murray's The Bee Sting. So far, it's been an engaging tragi-comedic view of an Irish family's inevitable collapse. The viewpoint changes between different family members, and one affectation is that the third viewpoint character's text doesn't use any punctuation. It's making the text hard to process for me; I'm thinking I may have some light form of dyslexia? I hope the next viewpoint comes soon and I can make faster progress. I got it from the library and someone else wants it soon, so I need to power through.
 
Olli said:
Tchaikovsky is really prolific! I've only read one book by him, Guns of the Dawn (liked it!), but he's got so many series alone that picking up something else seems daunting. Doesn't help that the books are usually really thick. But I'll get back to his work sooner or later...
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MCBanjoMike said:
Yeah, Tchaikovsky puts out a seriously unhealthy number of books every year. IMO, by far the best of them are Children of Time/Children of Ruin, which I would recommend to anyone...unless they are afraid of spiders. Beyond that, I also quite enjoyed the Final Architecture series, starting with Shards of Earth. Unfortunately, I've found a lot of his other stuff to be a little half-baked, like the guy doesn't have the attention span to dedicate more than four months to any given book.
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Yeah, I really liked Children of Time and its sequels (but Time the best), so I've kept my eye on him kinda. I saw a book of his on sale so I looked into it and turns out it was the first in a series of ten?! Not for me, thanks. But if he has more standalones or even trilogies I could easily be persuaded to check them out. Although if CoT is already the best of them, it's all downhill from here!
 
As someone who's only read a few of Adrian Tchaikovsky's standalone novels...I haven't really been that impressed, honestly. The one I liked the most was last year's Service Model.

Speaking of not impressed, I recently read but was ultimately cool on R.F. Kuang's new one, Katabasis. The only other book of hers I've read was Yellowface, which was very good, but I felt like this book never really gelled together. It had a lot of neat ideas and images but didn't really cohere into a whole for me.

Currently I'm in the middle of Karen Russell's The Antidote and this one is firing on all cylinders. It might be her most polished and impressive novel to date.
 
Put the book I was reading on hold because it felt a little too real/hit too close to home for a bit, picked up Absolution. The last couple Vandermeer books I tried to read I ended up DNFing out of general boredom, but so far Absolution has me engaged. Makes sense, I was/am a big fan of the original trilogy too.
 
Finished up Nostrilia, it was good, and makes me want to get the collection of all his short fiction. I read one from an Archive.org scan (Scanners Live in Vain), good stuff.

My new physical books are wrapped and under the tree, so I'm dipping back to the ebook well. I picked up that recent humble bundle of all the translated Vampire Hunter D books, and am halfway through the first title. It's not a very well written localization, and the misogyny is rampant, but there are seeds of fun in there. I like the little nods to Dying Earth of a society that has forgotten how it made itself, but still has some of the tools remaining. Future tech is magic to people who don't understand it, and this setting is all about that.

It's been a very long time since I've seen the first movie so I don't know how closely they tell the same story, but it'd be interesting to compare afterwards. I think I last watched it on VHS, it's been that long.
 
lincolnic said:
I'm curious about this one, let us know how it is!
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I haven't gotten far yet but I'm enjoying it. This passage from chapter 3 especially struck me:

Nevertheless, I found work that allowed me to process the fear or isolation I felt as a child, and put it to sleep. Everybody has a well of hurt and darkness somewhere. Many people never find a means to channel it, whereas I've flushed it out often, for a living. People are often terrorized by family members but don't get the opportunity to use that for their own creativity. I, on the other hand, was able to turn moment of having been frightened into being frightening - but in my own way. And my own way was to sprinkle a bit of mischief onto even my most villainous roles, just as I brought a little mischief into my encounters with my mother: doing whatever I could to make the darkness sparkle.
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Finished it, very good and highly recommended. I also like that he has some snark about random things which keeps the tone realistic (usually other actors who were rude) but still is very polite about it all, and clearly appreciates all his fan's responses to just about anything. He is (in his words) especially mystified by video games but still happy people enjoy the Red Alert 3 memes and I thought that aside would be appreciated here.
 
Finished Absolution; recommend it to anyone who likes the original trilogy. Absolution expands on it in interesting and, of course, extremely convoluted ways. The narrator shift in the last third was a bit jarring, especially at first, but it smoothed out before toooo long.

One book needed to finish 12 this year, my original goal; I picked The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers off the shelf, which should be a relatively light and quick read. Let's do thisssss
 
man, i read more books this year than any since my kid was born. feeling pretty good about that!
 
Haven't updated in a while. Gave up on Shroud. Got too sciency for my taste.
Did rereads of both A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and The Long Walk. I think The Running Man is still my favorite of the early Bachman books.
To get in the holiday spirit, I read the novella A War of Gifts by Orson Scott Card. Really good
Finally, finished The Keep by F. Paul Wilson. Black Winds was better, but Keep was still very solid
Currently reading Empire of the Dawn by Jay Kristoff. Hope it sticks the landing
 
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