thematahara

Finished a classic to start the year:


First time reading this, and I was surprised how faithful the movie is to the book.

thematahara

Finished

Nick Danger

Jim Butcher - Grave Peril (Dresden Files #3). I picked it up for fifty cents because I wanted to try a Dresden book. It has a frantic pace and poorly defined rules of what the hero can do. I didn't like it much. But I looked up reviews online and the next book is supposed to be much better. I think I'll give book #4 a try.

thematahara

Finished:


Fantastic coming of age story. Right up there with IT and Boy's Life for me.

Geofferson

Read this last year. It holds up well. Still highly recommended.

Geofferson

mndtrp

Still plugging through the Harry Potter series. Just started The Half-Blood Prince.

brainee

Thanks for starting the thread thematahara! But is there any way to edit the title changing "Your" to "You"? We're readers ... we should be setting a good example to the board for that kind of thing!

Finished a few things since my last post. A couple from Brian Keene:


Just getting around to these, after really enjoying the first book (Earthworm Gods or The Conqueror Worms). And "Leviathan" from these books is clearly a Cthulhu stand-in, and I'm intrigued by scenarios that show what would happen if Cthulhu and its worshippers ever won. These were ... ok. As always, Keene's writing propels things along easily. I just didn't think there were enough new additions to the story to stand out from the first book (and frustratingly, half of Earthworm Gods II has the characters reflecting on what happened in the earlier book, reminding me how much more interesting it was).

Selected Scenes has a fun concept: Keene takes real-world fans and puts them in short scenarios where they die. Though the really short length of these stories (average around 4 pages) means there's not much development as actual stories. Which makes this more like an "extra" than something that can stand on its merits.


The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven. I got through about 75% of this as an unabridged audio book while doing a long drive after New Years. I don't know if it's more a fault of the book or me, but very little of the story "stuck" when I tried to finish a couple of days later. So I went back and reread the whole thing with a print version. This is action-packed for sure, and certainly adds a lot new to the Ringworld (including many new creatures and background mythology). Maybe my trouble with getting through it is that so much happens in so few pages that it's easy to lose track of what's going on. And at a certain point it gets laughable how the main character, Louis Wu, keeps having alien women throw themselves at him to have sex.

Kurt D

Finished The Nineties - Chuck Klosterman
Reading: The Last Book on the Left, If It Bleeds, and Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. (Eric Idle)

thematahara

I tried to fix the misspelling in the title, but dont see a way to change it. Is there a mod in the house that could get rid of that unwanted 'r' in the title?

Nick Danger

Martians Go Home by Fredric Brown, with the classic cover by Kelly Freas.

Martians suddenly appear on Earth. A billion of them. They teleport, they like to expose everyone's most embarrassing secrets, and they really like to watch people having sex. Thus, the keyhole in the picture.



It's short and fun, but don't read it if you demand a full explanation at the ending.

thematahara

Finished:

Finally finished the Lonesome Dove series. The original is still one of my top 5 books of all time and is head and shoulders above the rest, but I'm glad I read them all. I would rank them in the order they were published: Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo, Dead Man's Walk, Comanche Moon. Streets of Laredo was very good, Dead Man's was also very enjoyable. Comanche was definitely the weekest of the series. Still enjoyable, but it was overly long and didnt really wrap up in a satisfying way.

Geofferson

Done.

thematahara

Finished:

thematahara

Finished

brainee

Finished:

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward. Reminded more of psychological dramas like Room than serial killer horror stories ... which was a good thing. And despite some bleak themes, was oddly uplifting by the end. Certainly a story you want to remain as spoiler-free from as possible.

Goonies85

In the past two or three weeks I breezed through the following:

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff - My second time reading this and it's just as powerful as it was the first time. It's lengthy, but reads pretty quick because of the format but also because of just how riveting it is (especially for those that can remember that morning and watching those images live on TV). Covers the political figures, the first responders, those in the towers, and New Yorkers, in general, along with reporters and lots of others. Includes some very difficult to read transcripts from certain events that day. A really touching read, and I'm glad to have this in my collection.

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu - This one was pretty good but I think it could've been better. It really, really focuses on EC Comics (which is understandable, for the most part) but doesn't go much further than the 1950s/1960s era. I've read about Wertham's "Seduction of the Innocent" and it's terrible impact on the industry, but I did learn some new things. I knew there were congressional hearings and whatnot, but this book paints a much more dire picture than I had ever imagined, really showing just how much hysteria there was at the time. I just kind of wish there was a greater focus on how the Comic's Code of Authority eventually evolved and they could've covered certain instances (which were rare) when Marvel or DC printed issues without the code (like that Green Arrow issue where his sidekick does heroin, etc.), and how the code eventually withered away. But, really, Marvel and DC barely feature in this book, but from a historical perspective, if you're interested in the history of comic books, it's worth picking up.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Date Hayes & Dawn Chmielewski - This was merely okay, as certain aspects of it already seem outdated, given how quickly and seemingly never-ending evolving the streaming wars are. It still has it's moments but a lot of the info presented is pretty well-known.

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette and John Koblin - Not as good as Andrew Ross Miller's oral history of HBO, but this is a worthy companion piece. Lots of nice insight, although, as is typical, there's certain shows and movies that get short shrift, while others probably take up a little too much time. The one main issue I have with this is that it discusses an issue that occurred in Vegas (I think) where executive Chris Albrecht got in an argument with his wife and slapped or assaulted her (apparently they both later apologized and said they were both intoxicated)...but then it mentions some episode which is a bit sketchy where Albrecht also got into an altercation with some other female executive in his office like a decade or two before that, so he's presented as an abuser of women, which, hey, if that's the case, then screw him. The issue I have is that pretty much every time they mention his name in the book, the line always reads something like, "Chris Albrecht, serial abuser of women", etc. It's like, I get it, you've made your point, but you don't have to add that every single time you mention his name. Like, you covered both events in pretty great detail, so I doubt the reader is going to suddenly be like, "Oh, who's this guy again? And what did he do?" Like, they literally have that sort of line close to a hundred times in the book, and it just feels like overkill. We get it guys, he's been accused of and even captured on camera committing domestic violence. But have faith that your readers will remember that, instead of beating them over the head with that info every 3-4 pages (it seems)...

The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry by Legs McNeil & Jennifer Osborne with Peter Pavia - One of my favourite books, second time reading. Breezy read, and it's not really raunchy as some might think (although yes, at times, it certainly can be); but it's a very honest portrayal of the industry. It covers the business aspects, the growth of the industry, the various issues with the law, the positives and negatives of porn, the downsides in the industry, and the various scandals. It's just a really fascinating book filled with some pretty harrowing anecdotes, along with some pretty hilarious stories...Highly recommended.

Now back to reading The Sandman: Deluxe Edition - Book Three...I've never read the series before but I'm really loving it...Even when I think there's a storyline/arc that starts off a bit slow, it almost always comes together at the end and oftentimes the ending is pretty powerful...

thematahara

Finished

Kurt D

Heard good things about it. Def on the list.

thematahara

Finished

thematahara

Finished:

thematahara

Finished:

Nick Danger

The Draco Tavern by Larry Niven. It's s bunch of short stories where Niven examines one question against and alien point of view. This book holds a story that I've remembered a long time but didn't know who wrote: it asks what would happen if we didn't use the same word for my arm, my sister, and my credit card. About twenty years after he was done with the stories 9/11 happened, and Niven wrote others.




Summer Knight, Dresden Files #4, by Jim Butcher.

I liked this a lot better than the previous book. The pacing is so much better, and the plot makes sense. Now I'm wondering if I want to go onto book #5.

brainee

What did you think of this? I know it has lots of buzz. Though it's hard to get a sense of how good a "buzzy" book is, since it seems they often get mixed reader reviews.

I finished:

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. I really liked the first book in this series Gideon the Ninth: it had an original mix of fantasy, horror, and science-fiction with an interesting gothic style (that while complicated still remained fun to read). This book ... increases the "complicated" part (to the point of being nearly incomprehensible) and lowers the "fun". I can respect what the author did, and see why some readers loved it. And there were certainly good moments, and major expansions on the world-building from the first book. But I don't know if I'll want to continue on with anything new by the author. This was supposed to be a trilogy, but I see it's been expanded to at least 4 books (with the last one not finished yet). Often that's a bad sign for a series (that the author went off the rails).

thematahara

I enjoyed it overall. The premise of a town living with a witch as part of their daily lives felt very original and leads to some really cool scenes. I wouldnt say it is scary, but there are definitely some creepy moments. YMMV on the ending. I liked it, but it seems to be divisive and was changed from the original Dutch version. I had a fun time with it, and its a pretty easy recommend. If the premise sounds intriguing, then I would be surprised if you didnt enjoy it.