brainee

Finished:

"Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space" indeed! Very original blend of fantasy, gothic horror, science-fiction, and YA-drama. The world-building is intriguing, and I'm guessing the next two books in this trilogy (one of which, Harrow the Ninth, is already published) fill in more. Thankfully this tells a complete story, as opposed to those "first of a trilogy" books that just stop before anything gets resolved. Odd names and lots of techno/fantasy babble terminology bog down the writing at times for me. Though the story itself is a fairly straight-forward variation on a classic mystery/horror staple: a group of people isolated at a creepy mansion, where there's a great treasure on the line and they start being murdered one-by-one.

thematahara

Finished:

Great book

Noonan

Just Started:

PAG

Just finished:

Goonies85

Regardless of whether or not you've watched the show (I think it's on Amazon), there's a book of scripts from the show Fleabag that was released and it is an awesome read. I finished it in a day. It's the first two seasons and is incredibly readable and enthralling. That writer (I can't recall her name but remember Daniel Craig brought her on to do a rewrite on the latest Bond film) is just incredibly talented. And funny. I usually don't laugh out loud reading a book, but this really had me in stitches at times. So much better than crap like Sex and the City...This is a much more realistic look at females and relationships...I also really like how, despite all of these books you'll read about what to do and not to do in a screenplay, she just kind of tosses that out the window and does her own thing. It was refreshing to read something like that. I'd obviously also recommend checking out the show, but I honestly only saw the first season before reading this book, so the second season was already kind of spoiled for me, but I still wanna watch it. And that says something about the quality of the writing.

thematahara

Finished

asianxcore

Finished

asianxcore

Started

asianxcore

Finished

thematahara

Finished:


This was tough to finish. The writing was clever and at times, very funny, but that was really all the book had to offer imo. The more time I spent with it, the less the verbose humor held my attention and there was very little plot to be found. Amusing, but not very fun to read in the end.

thematahara

Finished:


Sad to admit it took me this long to read this one. Loved it. How are the rest of the books in the series?

Nick Danger

^ I read the first four Hitchhiker books as they came out. At the time, I thought that the first one was the funniest.

Finished Davy by Edgar Pangborn. A few hundred years after World War III, a depopulated society has stabilized at a medieval level. The Holy Murican Church has banned prewar knowledge, suppresses technology, and enforces devout ignorance. Davy is a coming of age book, about how a ignorant and superstitious slave boy took the first steps to become the sophisticated man who is telling the story. The man also tells what he's doing in the present between his reminiscences. I almost gave up early in the book, because I got tired of reading about the young idiot. He got smarter, and I'm glad I stuck with it. I understand why the book had such a high reputation.

Davy was an important science fiction book back in 1964. It was an early book that had sex scenes and used four-letter words that were only made legal in 1959. It had a nonlinear plot. It's a whole lot more mature than the leering and lecturing in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). It was driven by character instead of technology, which made it the book that inspired Ursula K. LeGuin to write SF.

brainee

Finished:



All three books are relatively short (>300 pages) and Scalzi has an easy writing style, so this was a fast trilogy to get through. I can see a good argument to be made for this just being a single book, since there's a significant amount of recapping in the 2nd and 3rd books. I've enjoyed everything I've read from Scalzi (besides this, Redshirts, Old Man's War, Locked In, Fuzzy Nation) and this is consistent with the others: a fun breezy style, snarky humor, colorful characters, and plot twists.

rbrown498

Just finished:



While it's not the best-written book that I've ever read, and while the plot contrivances got awfully melodramatic and piled up rapidly in the book's final 100 pages, I liked it anyway. I particularly liked its quietly emotional ending.

Up next:

PAG

Just finished:

asianxcore

Started

thematahara

Finished:

Pointyskull

Just started:

mndtrp

I have a handful of Scalzi's books that I haven't started yet. Based on your recommendation, I'll move them to next in line after I finish the Wheel of Time series. If I can remember to anyway. I imagine it'll take me the better part of a year to finish the series.

Noonan

Starting:

thematahara

Finished

rbrown498

Finished:




I was pleasantly surprised by how well-written this book was.

Up next:

brainee

Finished:

I grew up on these kinds of books, so this was a blast to go through. I read a number of the ones mentioned in this book, and still have a number of them. Although reading this makes me regret all the books that I had, but got lost over the years for various reasons (resold to used book stores, loaned to friends and never returned, thrown out by my parents, or just lost into the void during my various moves over the 35 years of my adult life). I remember in the 90s how used bookstores were just packed with this stuff ... but now if you want the original paperbacks you probably have to pay a fortune through specialty online dealers. To be fair, a lot of these were crap (outside of cool-looking covers). Watching a crap cheesy 80s horror movie is a low time investment, so I can get enjoyment out of them. But reading a crap cheesy horror novel takes hours (even though they tend to be short). And I wonder how well the books I loved as a kid would hold up today.

This did have me go through my personal collection. Some of the things I remember buying for a couple of dollars is being charged hundreds of dollars for online Makes me sorry I didn't buy more stuff in the 90s when it was plentiful (and I lived in an area with tons of great used bookstores). Something I saw on my shelves that was mentioned in the book, and I have no memory of reading, was:

So I had to read it now! Monteleone is a familiar name, both for his writing and editing. It's a little unclear going in exactly what sort of horror book this would be. It ended up being a little of everything, and ultimately Lovecraftian cosmic horror. NYC subways are a great setting. It was a fun read, if a little clunky and rushed at times, and above-average for the "Paperbacks from Hell" era.

PAG

Just finished:

JayDerek

Just started...