What are you reading?

Cordelia

New member
Jun 1, 2007
36
0
0
krysalist said:
@Logan

Mick Foley, my hero. One of only two wrestling luminaries to ever lecture at MIT. The Al Snow jokes never get old either.
What does everybody want?????
 

David Miscavidge

New member
Dec 13, 2006
38
0
0
Ajar said:
it's the hardest of hard SF, written by a PhD in marine biology with a 15-page referenced appendix at the end.

Interesting. There hasn't been enough of that stuff lately---lots of quote/unquote "hard space opera" and stuff of that ilk, but no good hard science extrapolation stuff.

Ever read Greg Egan? I loved Permutation City, though it smacks you in the face with a really intense biochem lesson in the first 15 pages and is interspersed with some really heavy physics stuff. Fantastic book.


Ajar said:
I hear Vinge is writing a sequel to A Fire upon the Deep, too.
Can't wait. It's pretty much guaranteed to be excellent.

Ajar said:
I've also started picking away at Robert Fisk's gigantic The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, but that one's going to take a while.
I've maxed my non-fiction quota for right now. After playing the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game earlier this year I bought a huge stack of books about the Chernobyl accident and tore through them all. Ghastly but fascinating reading. Of all of them I recommend "Chernobyl: Confessions of a Reporter" by Igor Kostin (a photojournalist's memoir,) and an incredible book of collected accounts called "Voices from Chernobyl" edited by Svetlana Alexievich.
 

623S

New member
Aug 22, 2007
67
0
0
I recommend "The Hogfather" by Terry Pratchett. It's fairly amusing, pretty interesting (philosophically), and the characters are pretty fun. Or anything by Terry Pratchett is good to read.

I also think that it'd be a good idea to read "Kafka on the Shore". I can't remember who it's by, but it's very interesting and overall a good book. It's kind of slow at times but if you can get past that it's good.
 
Sep 4, 2007
1
0
0
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By [http://books.google.com/books?id=fY5OAAAACAAJ&dq=isbn:1590171497] by Georges Simenon
The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years [http://books.google.com/books?id=Wy4UKqV5czMC&dq=The+Day+Lasts+More+Than+a+Hundred+Years] by Chingiz Ăitmatov

Both deal with death, life, and the trouble with being human. "The Day Lasts" has full characters and keen insights, but "The Man Who Watched Trains Go By" is lighter reading, and a nice reminder that "you can't fuck the future. The future fucks you".

There's this, too: The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years [http://books.google.com/books?id=ET4KAAAACAAJ&dq=middle+east+history] by Bernard W. Lewis
 

Ajar

New member
Aug 21, 2006
300
0
0
David Miscavidge said:
Ever read Greg Egan? I loved Permutation City, though it smacks you in the face with a really intense biochem lesson in the first 15 pages and is interspersed with some really heavy physics stuff. Fantastic book
He sounded familiar, so I looked him up. In my early teens, I borrowed Distress from the library and just couldn't get into it. I hadn't thought about him since, until just now. I'll add him to my SF reading list after Stross. Thanks!
 

Alex Karls

New member
Aug 27, 2007
84
0
0
Ajar said:
I've never been one to evangelize books, but I've gotten four or five friends to read Blindsight and every one has liked it. One said 'It kicked my ass" -- it's the hardest of hard SF, written by a PhD in marine biology with a 15-page referenced appendix at the end. It's also available free on Watts' website [http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm] (along with much of the rest of his body of work) under a Creative Commons license, in case you can't find a copy at a library or in a store.
I found it hard to start Blindsight, as there was some comment about "now in the future that we've abolished all silly concepts like religion" near the beginning that turned me off of it. I'm eventually going to get back to it though. I just wish I could find more hard sci-fi that actually dealt with the issue of human spirituality instead of dismissing it.
 

TomBeraha

New member
Jul 25, 2006
233
0
0
Alex Karls said:
I just wish I could find more hard sci-fi that actually dealt with the issue of human spirituality instead of dismissing it.
I highly recommend the Ender series by Orson Scott Card then. He certainly doesn't dismiss it. Ender's Game is great fun, and the sequels have an entirely different tone but are amazing stories.
 

Alex Karls

New member
Aug 27, 2007
84
0
0
Yes, I read most of the Ender era stuff (stopped somewhere around Shadow of the Hegemon) and the entire Xenocide series. I often wonder if Card's take on spirituality is a product of his Mormon background. There's also a small amount of Heinlein that actually deals with it, although he takes the view that it's a recessive genetic trait that we should actively be trying to breed out of the populace.
 

Landslide

New member
Jun 13, 2002
613
0
0
Ajar said:
Hey, Landslide, I read The Darkness that Comes Before and didn't love it -- are the second and third books any different? Does at least one sympathetic character emerge from somewhere? :p
The series only improves (in my opinion) from the beginning. I would recommend it to anyone. And yes, Akka remain (by far) the warmest character, and my personal favorite.
 

Archon

New member
Nov 12, 2002
916
0
0
The Prince of Nothing series is possibly my favorite epic fantasy of all time, save George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire. Both blow Wheel of Time out of the water - and I say this as someone who owns every WOT book in hardcover.

As far as sympathetic characters, I found the characterizations in The Prince of Nothing series to be part of the appeal. I'm so tired of books where the protagonist is white as snow. The titans who move the wheels of history are never boy scouts.

Currently reading Fallen Dragon by Peter Hamilton. Then I'll be reading Pandora Star and Judas Unchained. Landslide and I swap books a lot... I turned him on to Prince of Nothing.
 

Russ Pitts

The Boss of You
May 1, 2006
3,240
0
0
Seeing as I'm about to get on a plane, I expect I'll be reading some Tom Clancy book or another. Whichever comes after Debt of Honor.

Haven't read much since I finished the last Harry Potter. Still half way through In Cold Blood, and I just picked up a great collection of 50s era SF short stories.
 

Ajar

New member
Aug 21, 2006
300
0
0
Archon said:
As far as sympathetic characters, I found the characterizations in The Prince of Nothing series to be part of the appeal. I'm so tired of books where the protagonist is white as snow.
I don't need them to be white as snow, but I do like to be able to sympathize at least a little bit with at least one character. I disliked everyone in The Prince of Nothing. But the world was great, so if it gets better as you go I'll probably finish the series at some point.

I read A Game of Thrones, but like The Prince of Nothing I finished the first book and didn't feel particularly compelled to read further -- I enjoyed the prologue and the last few pages more than the intervening 800 combined. If the series gets finished I may read the rest of it. For the last 4-5 years, though, it seems like I've tended more toward standalones or short series than epics: I love Guy Gavriel Kay's The Sarantine Mosaic, which comprises two books, Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors. Actually, they're probably my two favourite fantasy novels, period, unless you count H.P. Lovecraft collections.

I do like Martin, though: his Sandkings short is outstanding. And a buddy of mine is his secretary/note-collator/slave.

Started Accelerando last night, but I'm not even 10 pages in yet.
 
Dec 27, 2005
6
0
0
TomBeraha said:
Alex Karls said:
I just wish I could find more hard sci-fi that actually dealt with the issue of human spirituality instead of dismissing it.
I highly recommend the Ender series by Orson Scott Card then. He certainly doesn't dismiss it. Ender's Game is great fun, and the sequels have an entirely different tone but are amazing stories.
Greg Bear has written some fairly recent hard sci fi (read: science extrapolation). Slant [nanotech] and Darwin's Radio [quantum leap human evolution] come to mind.

I would also recommend History of Ideas: from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson as a real mind improver. Not sure what it says about me that it took 3 months to cram it into my head.
 

Geoffrey42

New member
Aug 22, 2006
862
0
0
bok said:
Anyway I have a stack of Terry Pratchet books lying around, I've read one or two and I enjoy the odd humour but they never feel 'satisfying' to read through.
Good Omens, a collaboration by Neil Gaiman, and Terry Pratchett, is wonderful. To this day, 6 years after reading it, various bits of the book will pop into my head and make me laugh, smile, or ponder. As I understand it, Pratchett's influence is the humor, but Gaiman provides the meat. Since reading that, I've picked up absolutely everything I can get my hands on that Gaiman has written, without touching another Pratchett book. I highly recommend it.

And about Da Vinci Code. All I can say is, I'm terribly sorry for the loss of your innocence, and best wishes to restoring your faith in the world of literature. Having managed to avoid the book, I still get the feeling that the world would be better off without Oprah or Dan Brown and their contributions to "reading" as a popular thing to do. I'm all for literacy, but really. I mean, come on.
 
Dec 27, 2005
6
0
0
Geoffrey42 said:
And about Da Vinci Code. All I can say is, I'm terribly sorry for the loss of your innocence, and best wishes to restoring your faith in the world of literature. Having managed to avoid the book, I still get the feeling that the world would be better off without Oprah or Dan Brown and their contributions to "reading" as a popular thing to do. I'm all for literacy, but really. I mean, come on.
When Da Vinci Code first came out I thought that it was going to be more than a bunch of barely strung together historical baloney. Man, it was hardly more likely than Connections! http://www.amazon.com/Connections-James-Burke/dp/0743299558/ref=pd_bbs_2/105-4349407-3026011?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188949282&sr=8-2 Oh well, maybe it drove a few people to Cryptonomicon. http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0060512806/ref=pd_bbs_1/105-4349407-3026011?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188949319&sr=8-1
 

jt2002tj

New member
Sep 7, 2007
25
0
0
read through the dresden files over the summer, which is much better than the lame tv series. now i'm reading harry potter fan fiction. i know, i know, but some of it is really good!
 
Sep 7, 2007
1
0
0
Check out Joe Haldeman's Worlds, which I actually got from a bargin bin at Chapters for $2. The first half is a bit slow, but then WHAM! does it ever get moving in a hurry. And what an ending! Also, the main character is a woman written by a guy, so it's odd trying to relate to her, but it still works out.

Also from the bargin bin is Steve Grand's Creation: Life and How to Make it. I'm halfway through, but it's an interesting and easy to read take on Artificial Life.
 
Sep 7, 2007
15
0
0
The Plot Against America right now. An easy-to-read before bed what if/alternate history type thing revolving around Lindbergh taking office over FDR in the midst of WWII, and how that affected policy and American public opinion.

It's half decent, I guess.