What are You Reading Right now?

I was reading the book on Princess Leia.

 

I just finished my Asimov "Future History" reading project after almost a year. I'm not THAT slow of a reader, I've read lots of other stuff during the time in which I read these novels/collections.



It was a pretty strange reading experience, a roughly 25,000 year story written over a roughly 50 year career. The variety of stories was interesting, while they are all science fiction the sub-genre often varied. The Robot novels for instance are basically old-fashioned detective stories that happen to take place in the future where the Foundation novels deal with the rise and fall of Empires over hundreds and thousands of years. You go from the year 1995 with the introduction of the first robots on Earth to tens of thousands of years in the future where Earth is dead/forgotten and has been forgotten by most everybody the population of the millions of inhabited planets in the galaxy and only considered a myth by those that do remember it. Anyway it was a great reading project, a lot of fun and very interesting.

It's also been over a year since the last time I read a Star Wars book. The Aftermath Trilogy was so terrible that I had no desire to pick up a Star Wars title until the other day when I finally got around to this...




I don't know if it was the best book to come back with but I did enjoy parts of it. It seemed like the guy was very good at writing dialog for the characters, so many people are terrible at Han and Lando but this guy did a good job. I think he got in way over his head with the plotting though. I didn't know what was going on half the time. Some of the time I knew this was on purpose, he was holding back information to reveal later. I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about just basic information to understand scenes and relationships. A good example was when they arrived at the prison planet... I had no idea what faction was running the prison they were breaking into, what the deal was with the two factions in the blockage around it and what was their relationship to the planet... you know stuff you kind of need to know to understand the scene. You eventually do learn everything you need to know but by the time the picture becomes clear it's already over. The number of plotlines didn't really cause me trouble but it did get to be a little over the top I thought. At one point I think you have 3 flashblack plotlines and 3 different plotlines going on in the present. Still, I found it entertaining. It was fun and I found the climax to be pretty exciting.

 

My girlfriend wanted us to "read something together" and this was what we wound up deciding on...



The cover is much cooler than the book itself. It's like a watered down version of Stranger Things which in turn I find to be a watered down version of a lot of stuff. I'm halfway through this book and I feel like I'm still waiting for it to start. So far it's mostly been a lot of 80s teenage girls doing 80s teenage girl stuff.

 

Just finished Michael Chrichton's Andromeda Strain. Great sci-fi.

 

I've buckled to friend pressure and am reading The Black Company. I'm not a huge military & barracks culture guy, but it's all right, and I have fun deconstructing the writing (It's pretty obvious who the reincarnation of the White Rose is in the story... unless there's a big twist coming or a deus ex machina late chapter introduction somehow).

 

I've been meaning to read that one for years, I liked the movie (but it's been a long time since I've seen it) and really enjoyed most of Crichton's stuff. I've just never gotten around to it but I have it on my Kindle. I did read Dragon Teeth about a year ago and it was probably the first time I'd read him in close to 20 years. It's kind of funny just the other day I was reading this Asimov collection "Gold", part of it is his final short stories and part of it are essays by Asimov about science fiction. He was talking about Crichton in one of them, favorably but talking about how he was not exactly welcomed with open arms in the sci-fi community. Most people worked their way up writing short stories to sell to magazines for years and years on end before ever getting a novel and they were a pretty tight group and knew each other from convention appearances and the like. Apparently a lot of writers were mad because Crichton basically just dropped out of nowhere coming out of medical school and releasing a hit debut novel (The Andromeda Strain) without ever submitting a story to a magazine or attending a convention. I found it somewhat interesting, I didn't know that's how he came on the scene.

 

I would be reading E.K. Johnston's "Queen's Shadow" right now, but it hasn't arrived yet.
* sigh *

 

I'm about halfway through Jurassic Park right now and plan to read The Lost World next. I've read JP before, back in like junior high or high school, but have never read TLW. As a big fan of the movies, I thought it was time to read both Crichton novels and see how they compare. I have to say, overall I prefer the JP movie to the book so far; but that might be nostalgia talking.

 

An incorrect bill. Not a book title, its my reaction to an estimated electricity bill which is wrong.

 

After read the Andromeda Strain I'm inclined to buy Jurassic Park.

 

The 33 1/3 series is a pretty decent series of books by various authors that are supposed to be behind the scenes looks at the conception and recording of classic albums. I've read the volumes that cover "The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society", "Exile On Main St." by the Stones, "The Who Sell Out" and "Let It Be" by The Beatles. They were interesting if not the best or most insightful books ever but this one is criminally bad. Apparently the author took "Write a book about NIN's first album" as "write a book about yourself and some of your NIN forum buddies and never, EVER, actually discuss the album". She tells you in the first chapter that this isn't going to be a book about the album, or even the band, but rather the fans. That may sound cool but basically what it became is a chapter after chapter of the author's friends from the NIN boards telling their depressing and not very interesting stories. In fact they're mostly unlikable deadbeats. She includes the chapter for one guy who she's apparently angry with for not staying on the boards 24/7, she outs him with a very catty introduction acting like he's dead to her because he got in a relationship and stopped spending all his time on the forums and makes him sound like a p-whipped moron for having somebody he's actually in a relationship with be the "reason for his existence" as opposed to some musician he's never and will never meet. And my lord is the author insufferable, the opening chapter (or manifesto) is some rambling diatribe where she spends most of her time talking about Columbine and declaring that she's going to reclaim the term "trench coat mafia" from the media, acts like NIN fans are some oppressed minority and how she will restore NINs legacy or something. I had to rig up my Kindle to a revolving stand so I could continue to read through the continuous eye rolling. Luckily after the opening rant and the promise to explore these issues and carry out whatever fan-fantasy crusade she's on... it just never comes up again.

 

Finishing up Winter's Heart, book nine of the Wheel Of Time series.

 

I just started Alphabet Squadron.

 

Which is weird because he published a decent amount of pulp novels under a pseudonym in med school.
5 before Andromeda Strain as John Lange.

Also fun fact: He auditioned for Lord of the Rings and brought his own Hobbits to audition with.

 

The point was that Chricton broke into sci-fi with a novel (all the novels before Andromeda Strain were not science fiction) instead of submitting stories to the sci-fi magazines and becoming part of the fraternity of science fiction writers. You were somewhat expected to claw your way into the field and a novel was apparently seen as a prize to be earned once you had paid your dues and your respect to your elders. Asimov himself was a working writer for over a decade before he got his first novel. The fact that Chricton had published some non-science fiction novels under a pseudonym apparently did nothing for his case with those guys. Even if he had been a famous novelist by that point (and he wasn't) he was still seen as an outsider to the genre and its writers. Not the first or only one, but just the example Asimov used as he apparently ruffled some feathers. It was silly of course, which is the point Asimov was trying to make. If it's good it's good, you don't have to pay some imaginary dues first and a good science fiction book is good for the genre as a whole and the other writers will most likely benefit... or that was Issac's take.

 

The Daniel Faust collection by Craig Schaffer. Enjoying it a lot, reminds of the Joe Pitt case files.

 

The Fall of Gondolin, then next up is The Emerald Mile, and two different Kim Stanley Robinson books.

 

Just wrapping up “Armies of Deliverance, a New History of the Civil War,” by Elizabeth R. Varon. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in 19th Century American History.

 

I prefer the movie too and I read the book back when the movie came out so it wasn't nostalgia. Perhaps my opinion was formed by seeing the movie first though. It's been a while but from what I remember the book had hotter dinosaur action but the characters were much better and likable in the film. I plan to re-read both the books, I read TLW and I don't remember a single thing about it except that I preferred it to the movie. I recently picked up a pretty cool leatherbound from B&N that has both the books in it but I haven't gotten around to re-reading them with so much I haven't read still in the queue.



I'm currently about halfway through reading Starship Troopers. I never cared for the film so I never bothered with the book but finally decided to give it a shot because I've heard so much about it over the years. I'm just not feeling it, feels more like a conservative manifesto thinly disguised as a story.