Favorite books / What are you reading?

GreyViper said:
Ah yes the Hyperion saga, its so epic. Pitty the Illium trilogy great as Hyperion. If you like Hyperion saga try Peter F Hamiltons "The Night's Dawn Trilogy", its almost as good.
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Cool, I'll check into them.

Thanks!
 
Reading Franz Kafka's "the Trial" these days.

Once in a while I have to dig out some old classics and try to elevate myself to the intellectual level of something more advanced than regular fiction, but I have to say that several of the so-called classics fail to deliver what I have led myself to believe was promised ...

"The Trial" is no exception so far, but it shows potential from time to time.
 
ya hyperion rocked. i had some very low quality paperbacks of the series, i cant find them anymore. damn. perhaps they simply disintegrated.

i read "ausloeschung" from thomas bernhard right now. for the umpteenth time. i dont know if this guy was ever translated into other languages, hes one of the greatest german writers. he was austrian, but what gives.
 
horst said:
ya hyperion rocked. i had some very low quality paperbacks of the series, i cant find them anymore. damn. perhaps they simply disintegrated.

i read "ausloeschung" from thomas bernhard right now. for the umpteenth time. i dont know if this guy was ever translated into other languages, hes one of the greatest german writers. he was austrian, but what gives.
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What did you the of Endymion? It was ok, but I thought it focused a bit too much on the whole "Savior" thing.
 
Pope Viper said:
horst said:
ya hyperion rocked. i had some very low quality paperbacks of the series, i cant find them anymore. damn. perhaps they simply disintegrated.

i read "ausloeschung" from thomas bernhard right now. for the umpteenth time. i dont know if this guy was ever translated into other languages, hes one of the greatest german writers. he was austrian, but what gives.
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What did you the of Endymion? It was ok, but I thought it focused a bit too much on the whole "Savior" thing.
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ive read so much... well, i always read a lot, and some things just stick, others dont. ive read the hyperion and endymion thingie a few years ago and was very entertained. what stuck in my mind were the transitions between worlds and the very well-written fights.and the shrike. you gotta love the shrike. the torture tree where his victims are caught in time bubbles or sth is a strong idea. the saviour thing was in a way necessary - such a saga needs a climax. tho you might be right... i like sf a lot when you get to see only a fraction of the whole world, as stanislav lem wrote them. still one of my favorite authors. or, in more recent times, (damn i forgot the authors name! - story is about a mercenary, who, in fact, is a so-called face-changer; a blown up orbital ring, and an escaped electronic brain-AI. half of this authors oeuvre is sf, the other are very well-written, say, "normal" writings. one i recall is about the daughter of a sect leader, excellent book. i lent all his books from the duesseldorfer library, which has quite a good collection of english books, so i cant look at the books. the authors first name was iain, iirc.).

edit: found him: iain m. banks, the story is "consider phlebas"
edit2: the story about the sect leader`s daughter might be "complicity"

http://www.amazon.com/Consider-Phle...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219757662&sr=1-1
 
Ciaphas Cain for some humor (if you like the warhammer 40k that is)
And Temeraire series by Naomi Novik as my dose of fiction.
Edit: I would like to gently bash your heads in with the name; John Scalzi, by the way. Read it!
 
cronicler said:
Edit: I would like to gently bash your heads in with the name; John Scalzi, by the way. Read it!
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i'd actually first suggest Heinlein, then Aldeman and then only Scalzi. in that order, you get the best effect.
 
I'm about halfway into A Year At the Movies, by Kevin Murphy-- a very enjoyable tongue-in-cheek (and at times laugh-out-loud) true-life chronicle of one man's quest to watch a movie a day for 365 consecutive days. Simultaneously a love letter to the magic of film and a skillful poke at the current state of Hollywood slickness, overblown film festivals, and the degraded nature of the theatergoing experience in America (though this is hardly a work for Americans only), A Year At the Movies is probably one of the most enjoyable and unpretentious reads I've ever had on the subject of film.

Each week gets its own chapter, so it's not too hefty to tackle, either-- you can make it bathroom reading, if nothing else. It's worth a look.

(If it sways you at all, Kevin Murphy was the Minnesota high-brow voice of Tom Servo on Mystery Science Theater 3000.)
 
But SuAside, if they started with reading the big H they will be still be reading his stories sometime in the xx.09.09 date. :D

Jokes aside i feel a person with perceptions shaped by 90s and the millenium needs to go from Scalzi to Alderman to the big H to truly get the nuances and the subtle digs.

Personally i went a bit H. then a bit A. then the current genre authors. But when i returned back to Heinlein and Aldeman books (and old Pern/Brainship stories, and the like ), i started to find the nuances that had missed.
Edit: Argh, no Pern, etc is not Heinlen's or Alderman's. i was trying to mean all stories written in the 50s to 80s.

The Science Fiction has its roots in as early as 30s but i think the Sf as we think of it was born in late 50s and 60s with Pern Dragonriders and Space Empires/Federations and the neverending colonists in the sky. A lot of us lack the knowledge about the "real world" that shaped these stories. I feel going backwards is sometimes more enlighting and more satisfying for the grey box than reading oldies and missing half of the subtle needles.
 
Been diving back into reading lately. Read Brown on Brown which is a detective murder mystery. Now I'm reading Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. Plus a buncha short stories for a lit class I thought I'd take.
 
@Pope- finished the Descent. YOu're right that the last 200 pages got interesting. Sadly, you had to get past the first few hundred to get there.

I also just finished Alan Furst's The Polish Officer- A polish intelligence officer gets involved in covert ops as Germany invades Poland and then goes to France and back to Poland. Good stuff. I like Furst. I enjoyed The Night Soldiers (the first of of his 1930-1940s spy books- Bulgarian is recruited into the NKVD and has second thoughts as he travels from the Spanish Civil War to France and then tries to rescue a Russian agent as World War 2 ends), and World at Night (French Film producer is inducted into the espionage business).

Currently between books. I am thinking of reading Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Plum Island or an Eric Ambler spy book. Not sure.
 
Just started reading Dune: The Buterland Jihad

I can't get enough of the series, but it has gone WAY down hill from the originals. Brian Herbert has a very blase` and non-imaginative take on the universe. The last decent novel I've read was God Emperor, I should be reading these in order.

Ahh well, I'm not an avid book collector.


*Edit*

Which makes me ask a question. Do you guys know of a decent series to immerse myself into after just coming out of my Dune fetish? Preferable criteria would be preferably sci-fi, I'm not to big on fantasy unless it's structure isn't corny and cliche`. Also, underlying elements of social commentary and theology mixed in.

If I were to put into an image, I'm looking for something like an H.R. Giger rendering with deep grooves that I could immerse myself into for weeks, that isn't Phillip K. Dick.
 
Dopemine Cleric: With the danger of being typical i may direct your attantion to Honor Harrington series. Similarly The Fall of Dread Empire (a bit meh) , Kris Longknife (too many plot holes) and Vorkosiverse saga. On a smaller scale you might want to look at Scalzi's Old Man's War sage and The Lost Fleet aand Moon's Vatta saga :P
 
Decent SF saga? Better than decent, if you haven't read it, is Dan Simmons' "Hyperion" series. If you're not too turned off by a slower pace, you could read Olaf Stapleton's "Star Maker" and "First and Last Men." They're not exactly sequential, but are set in the same universe and about the same events.
 
Favorite set of books:
Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny
(my name is Korwin, by the way)

What are you reading right now:
Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny
Sun Tzu's The Art of War
Twighlight by Stephanie Meyer (my wife wanted me to read it)
 
Chronicles of Amber was good. I wish I could remember more of it, it's been so long since I went through all of them.

I recently finished C.S. Lewis Til We Have Faces. Great book if you're looking for insightful quotes. So much of that book had me nodding saying amen!

Right now, I'm reading... Jeffrey Archer's As The Crow Flies (A lot of his stories seem to be the same, but they're all enjoyable) and The Odyssey for class (in prose though).

To give a favorite books list... here's my "Level above the rest" list:

Ken Grimwood - Replay
Jeffrey Archer - Kane and Abel
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
Megan Lindholm - Wizard of the Pigeons
Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveler's Wife
Alfredo Vea - Gods Go Begging
 
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