What are You Reading Right now?

I guess they can't call the book "Ten little Africans" anymore.

 

Or "Ten Little Indians", although I imagine that's less offensive than dropping the N-Bomb. I think "And Then There Were None" is a much cooler title than either of those (even if they weren't offensive) anyway.

I enjoyed the book a lot but for some reason they felt the need to include a forward by Christie that was spoiler city. It didn't tell you who the killer was but it told you that

Spoiler: Old TImey Spoiler Alert

everybody dies and one of the guests was the killer.

 

so i have been loping through Catalyst in a rather glacial fashion, but i have to say i am enjoying the heck out of it.
the smugglers and whatnot (Obitt and Matese): they're boring, whatever.
but Krennic is a delight; his sparring with Tarkin is the best thing ever.
and i really like Galen a lot.

Luceno is a steady consistent writer and he makes all the tech accessible and he does all the characters justice.
it's especially fun to read the characters aloud. XD
i'm only about halfway through it, but i recommend it so far.

 

I'm reading Inferno Squad right now. I've had the book since Christmas, but haven't been able to read it until now. It's good so far; the characterizations of Iden, Del, and Gideon seem pretty on point from what I remember playing the Battlefront 2 campaign. It's neat that they're tying up the loose ends of Saw's partisians, since we saw some escape during Rogue One. I'd recomend it.

 

Funnily, when I was reading this, I didn't know Dressellians = Prune Face, so I was imagining Obitt completely different. Then, when I found out, my mind was blown and my whole read felt like a lie.

 

hahaha ~ i finally looked it up about halfway through because i wasn't sure and kept forgetting he wasn't human.

finished the book this morning ~ really liked it! glad i gave it second chance. : D

 

Glad you liked it!

By the way - is it just me or are the Disney era books overlong? Perhaps readers like the extra fluff, but I would appreciate something more dynamic and to the point.

 

i do feel like some of them are too dense for my tastes.
Lost Stars was good, but i think wildly overwrriten. the first Thrawn book was just thicc with blah blah blah.
i also think Twilight Company and Most Wanted were too dense for the story they had to tell.
Phasma was both bloated and bad. Thrawn: Alliances was surprisingly light in its loafers compared to the first one.

Inferno Squad, Last Shot, Catalyst, and the Aftermath books have all felt less bloated to me (Empire's End was maybe a bit fat toward the end).
Bloodline was better in terms of bloat compared to Lost Stars, and Leia of Alderaan maybe even better, so i feel like Claudia Gray is easing up on the clutch.
also, Guardians of the Whills remains one of my favorites and i wish they did more books in this size/format. just quick, fun adventure reads. i would love that!

for now, having enjoyed Catalyst, i think i will give Tarkin another try.

 

Making my way through the final chapters of Star Wars NJO: Dark Tide - Ruin. I still can't believe how good this new story arc is, and how detailed the authors have made the conflict. The minute that the Imperials showed up to assist the New Republic, and the lasting tension felt by their presence even as an ally, is one of the most interesting places they could've taken the post-ROTJ era. And that's not even getting how entertaining the Vong are as villains, and the feuds unfurling within their ranks.

The amount of thought and creativity on display here is truly something to behold. Bravo to Michael Stackpole and the rest of the stalwart EU authors.

I also wish we could've gotten the awesome Japanese cover art for these older books.

​

 

Started Iron Gold a few weeks ago, and then put it down last week to start The Eye of the World. Am currently on The Dragon Reborn, but will take a break afterwards to finish the giant pile of books on my desk.

 

Finally finished Under The Dome, one of the worst books I've ever read. Unfortunately it was also very long at 1000+ pages and since I could only stomach 2-3 chapters a week (although it's one of those King books where chapters can be 100 or so pages with 30 or so sub-chapters) it took me the better part of a month. A month that I spent with a headache from slapping myself in the forehead so much and almost rolling my eyes out of my head. I read a handful of other novels during the time so that all my reading wasn't spent on a book I couldn't stand. Somehow the fact that a small town is suddenly surrounded and cut off from the rest of the world by an impenetrable dome is the most believable thing in the book, the stupidity comes from the characters who are constantly doing the stupidest things imaginable because they apparently got a memo from Stephen that they needed to drive the story along. There are so many stupid coincidences (much like the actions of the characters they always make things worse and worse) that I half expected there to be some sort of Force with a will for evil to be behind the whole thing but no.

Here's an example...

Spoiler: Spoilers for book you shouldn't read anyway

A lot of the book focuses on the "VADER File", a file the chief of police had as a result of an investigation against the main antagonist (Jim Rennie, a cartoonishly evil character who is insanely religious yet also runs the biggest Meth lab in the country while serving in the town government) but the chief conveniently dies at the very beginning of the book. This leads to Rennie becoming the town's dictator. The chief's wife discovers the file on his computer but even though Rennie has managed to turn the town into a Nazi police state with a police force almost entirely made up of rapists and murderers in about 24 hours... she keeps quiet. Eventually she decides to tell the protagonist about it (but only vaguely, not telling him what the dirt is exactly) and he tells her to make ONLY ONE COPY (he doesn't give any reason for this that I can remember) and then lock the computer up in a safe (which becomes inaccessible when the power dies LITERALLY the very second she locks it up) and to go confront the guy with it... but obviously to take somebody with her for security. Well, she goes to find the two people she considers trustworthy enough to tell where she's going and what she has but she can't find either of them after 2 minutes of looking so she just decides she's going to go by herself. She reasons that the guy won't do anything to her, because obviously a power mad politician when confronted with proof of crimes that could lock him up for the rest of his natural life is just going to do nothing. Here is where I got one of many concussions by slapping my forehead full force. By the way, Rennie just so happened to see her try to find the two people and not find them, because he was conveniently standing on that street, so he's going to go ahead and kill her using some very shaky reasoning. So he thinks nobody else knows about the file, and he's almost right. The one not-idiotic concession the chief's wife makes is to drop the file off with a woman on the city council and tell her not to open it. But of course this woman just so happens to be going through withdrawals from painkillers and immediately upon taking the folder she goes into DTs and throws the file (which conveniently lands in a little alcove by her couch where she won't be able to see it) then goes into her bathroom to puke her guts out and then pass out, forgetting the woman had ever been there with a file and thus ensuring the protagonist will get locked up for the murder of this woman instead of the antagonist. And naturally that's what happens, she confronts the guy who quickly murders her. By the way she's the second person to stupidly go to his house alone and threaten to spill the beans only to get murdered. Two people could have exposed this guy and both thought it smarter to go to his house alone to confront him first. And both of these murders (as well as two others committed by Rennie's son) are pinned on the protagonist and he spends the better part of the book in jail.

Later in the book a newspaper reporter who is a friend of the protagonist and enemy of the antagonist comes to stay with the woman who has the file in her house. The woman's dog finds the file and the ghostly voice of the dead chief's dead wife tells him to take the file to his master... but another convenient attack of DTs from the other woman distracts the dog who soon forgets about it. Finally later in the book the dog again finds the file and with the help of the ghost takes it to the pillhead lady... who tells nobody about it. Not even the reporter staying in her house who is the OBVIOUS choice of somebody to tell. She decides she's going to unveil the thing at a big town hall meeting where all the Nazi cops are going to be protecting Rennie, but she also puts a gun in her bag so she can kill him if things don't go the way she wants. I think you can see where this is going. At the meeting she starts her speech but another convenient attack of the DTs takes her over (they only seem to come when it is convenient to the plot) and she drops her bag spilling out the gun leading to her getting blown away by the Nazi cops, one of which takes the file. He gives it to Rennie who burns it and thus ends the story of the VADER file and any chance of him getting exposed. Three people who could have done so have stupidly and predictably gotten themselves killed. Four if you count the sheriff in the beginning but that was a little different. All that crap, spanning the majority of the book, and it never amounts to anything except a lot of stupidity and getting multiple people killed. It might not sound so bad when summarized in this way but it's some of the stupidest crap I've ever read. The conveniences that always take place and the stupidity of the characters combining together into a perfect storm at all times. And when you see it expanded into chapter after chapter where you can see these things coming from miles and miles away it's much worse. And this is just one example, the entire book is wall to wall stuff like this. I guess King meant these types of things to add to the tension but they're so poorly written and staged that it doesn't feel like a series of events, just the will of the author to keep the story going forever.

 

Pretty good so far, slow but interesting start.

 

I thought I could stop after The Dragon Reborn, or maybe The Shadow Rising. Then I thought I could stop after Lord of Chaos. I was wrong. So wrong. The Wheel of Time has my mind and my soul right now, and no other book will stop it. I can't stop now, not until I've read the rest of the series. I finished Lord of Chaos last week, and Crown of Swords arrives tomorrow (I went out and bought books 9-11 this weekend, so all I need now is book 8).

...soon...soon...

 

The Purging of Kadillus (2011). Pure simple Space Marine xenos purging stuff. Just what I need in the current state of mind.

 

"Nemesis" wasn't bad but a little disappointing, it's the only Asimov book I've read that was just kind of meh. I said when I started it that it got off to a slow but interesting start and that was pretty much how the rest of the book went. Actually the first first 1/3 was the most entertaining/interesting and after that it kind of dragged. It felt like it was building up to something that just never happened and it sort of wound to a close.

Since then I've been reading a Ray Bradbury short story collection (I finished the last one I was reading, The October Country)...



Actually it's a combination of two short story collections (The Golden Apples Of The Sun and R Is For Rocket) with a few omissions and joined into one book. I'm liking it, unlike The October Country there's a little more variety in the stories and some science fiction.

 

i bought one of those topps trading cards books the other day... the one with photoscans of all the old Star Wars cards we bought from the sweet shop as a kid.
i never really had loads of them, just a few packets here and there which i stuck on my bedroom door, but looking at the pictures does bring back a few memories.

looking back at them now i'm thinking that we were easily pleased in those days.
our parents didnt have to buy us computer games (no computers) or dvds (i don't think we even had VHS recorders when Star Wars came out). they just got us a packet of cards with photos on the front... and a pink stick of gum.
those were the days!

 

I never had any of the cards for ANH but I had almost all of the RotJ cards. I'm not sure maybe I did collect all of them, I had a whole box. Still have them in an album somewhere.

 

The Three-Body Problem (2008) by Liu Cixin. I've never read anything Chinese before, so wish me luck.

 

Finished Crown of Swords and Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds today. Probably starting The Path of Daggers soon.