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Printheads: The Book Club 2012
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CommentAuthorcurb
- CommentTimeMay 17th 2012
See, I've not read The City and The City yet, sbut now I know which Mieville I'll be trying next. Thank you, sir. -
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CommentAuthorWaxPoetic
- CommentTimeMay 17th 2012
yeah. Embassytown has been whispering at me from the shelves for a while, and of course Railsea was just released, so Mieville is one everyone's mind.
I've got a Christopher Moore thing going on right now. Which is mad fun. Coyote Blue I'm almost done with, got a few pages of Dirty Job left (hearts to Minty Fresh) and Bloodsucking Fiends on the bed just waiting for me to curl up with it and a pot of tea and the cat for the entirety of tomorrow.
Also Books on Fire. Because we are in another book burning age and information is good. -
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CommentAuthorVornaskotti
- CommentTimeMay 19th 2012
Just finished A Serpent Uncoiled from the current motherfucker-in-charge of Whitechapel and dayum, liked it a whole lot. Whipped up a review on Goodreads. Made me add Contract to my Kindle's "to read" pile. -
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CommentAuthornigredo
- CommentTimeMay 19th 2012
Started 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson -
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CommentAuthoroddbill
- CommentTimeMay 19th 2012
@nigredo holy shit is it released? If so I'll be starting it tonight! -
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CommentAuthornigredo
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2012 edited
Got me an advance copy, it's officially released on Thursday. The perks of working at a bookshop :) -
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CommentAuthornigredo
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2012
Pretty much the only perk of working at a bookshop... -
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- CommentAuthor256
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2012
OH MAN I had no idea there was a new Kim Stanley Robinson book coming out. Cheers for the heads up, Mr N. Will be scrabbling at the doors of the bookshop later this week.
That said, did anyone read his last (Galileo's Dream) and what did they think of it? I struggled with it, to be honest, which is a first for me vis-à-vis Robinson. -
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CommentAuthorFoamhead
- CommentTimeMay 22nd 2012 edited
Another as-yet unreleased one which could be really interesting.
The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter1916: the Western Front. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong, and the wind in the leaves in the trees. Where have the mud, blood and blasted landscape of No Man's Land gone?
2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Cop Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive - some said mad, others dangerous - scientist when she finds a curious gadget - a box containing some wiring, a three-way switch and a...potato. It is the prototype of an invention that will change the way Mankind views his world for ever.
And that's an understatement if ever there was one...The 'Long Earth' is a (possibly infinite) series of parallel worlds, similar to Earth. The "close" worlds are almost identical to 'our' Earth, others differ in greater and greater details, but all share one similarity: on none are there, or have there ever been, human beings. The books will explore the theme of how humanity might develop when freed from resource constraints: one example Pratchett has cited is that wars result from lack of land - what would happen if no shortage of land (or gold or oil or food) existed?
Release dates: US 19/06/12, UK 21/06/12 -
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- CommentAuthorMercer Finn
- CommentTimeMay 23rd 2012
^^wow that sounds amazing -
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CommentAuthoroddbill
- CommentTimeMay 23rd 2012
@256 I read Galileo's Dream and liked it. It's definitely minor Robinson, not on par with the Mars books, or some of Three Californias, or the better parts of Memory of Whiteness or the Science in the Capital books. But I liked it as much as I did, say, Years of Rice and Salt or Antarctica.
The whole book was worth it for the point a bit past halfway through when he lays out a theory of the dimensions of time which, while utter science fiction, also is remarkably plausible. -
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CommentAuthorFauxhammer
- CommentTimeMay 25th 2012
Speaking of Mieville, I started Railsea today. Very strange, but very immersive. -
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CommentAuthorOsmosis
- CommentTimeMay 26th 2012 edited
I've been breaking away from final exam revision to read Distrust That Particular Flavor. I've found it quite a breeze through. I've found it more satisfying to read when I've been able to do that trick you sometimes had to do with the Bigend books, which was to read them as sf even though they describe present-day. When you're reading the articles as simple reportage, they can sometimes seem a little 'quotidian' (a word WG seems very keen on).
Edited to add: I discovered this rather nice adjective the other day: Bigendian. -
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- CommentAuthorflecky
- CommentTimeMay 28th 2012
I picked up a copy of This Day All Gods Die by Stephen Donaldson, part of The Gap Series. I read the first book nearly twenty years ago, and I remember it being brilliant.
Also just read one of them Vertigo graphic mysteries: Filthy Rich by Brian Azzarello. Good stuff. -
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CommentAuthorWaxPoetic
- CommentTimeMay 28th 2012
@Fauxhammer - I love the word "immersive" for Mieville. Truth.
It is Game of Thrones season in my world, so I'll start that tonight.
Read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by Jemisin yesterday. I read it for a reading group that I've never been to before. I am a bit afraid of the conversation about it. A good read, though. And now I'm curious about the sequels.
Found a gorgeous bit of esoteric crack yesterday: The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades. Cue the brain droolz.
Oh! I almost forgot!
The Hare with the Amber Eyes! Holy cats! It was marvelous - family biography, wars and wealth and social positions and loss and living and loving and there were tears! I cried and laughed and was annoyed and bored and engaged and deeply satisfied. I am going to put this one on my pile of books to reread whenever I have the chance. -
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CommentAuthorRicochet
- CommentTimeJun 2nd 2012
I'm pretty sure I've forgotten to post all year so I'm just going to post them all here now. There are depressingly few of them this year, I'm going to pull my finger out for the second half of the year.
Novels Read
Mastiff by Tamora Pierce - The last in the Beka Cooper trilogy - set in the police force of a magical medieval city - and a decent read for the most part but right at the end one character does something so out of type that it's thrown me off and has essentially coloured the whole series for me. I probably won't be re-reading this one the way I have the other series.
Jane Goes Batty by Michael Thomas Ford - Jane Austen is alive(-ish) and well in the modern day as a vampire. A vampire bookstore owner. Yep. It sounds ridiculous but this series has been a lot of fun so far, nice playful tone and decent plotting and suspense. I think it's going to be a trilogy so I have at least one more to go.
Tortall And Other Lands by Tamora Pierce - Short stories showing events and lives of lesser or completely unknown characters predominantly based in the world that includes Tortall. Nice little snapshots, some of which leave you annoyed that you aren't going to ever hear any more about what happens to these characters.
Lost In A Good Book by Jasper Fforde
The Well Of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde - I am loving these books. So wonderfully inventive and playful with language. A strong female lead who is obviously a competent person who just happens to be a woman, it isn't played up or down, she's just great.
Snuff by Terry Pratchett - If this is the last Sam Vimes book that Terry Pratchett writes, he'll have left him in a good place. The dynamics between Sam and Lady Sybil, the expansion on characters and some of the touches at the end made it really lovely. There is less layering than some of the previous City Watch books but the social issues and the explorations of morality remain. God, do I love the City Watch books.
La Bella Lingua by Dianne Hales - An American lady charts the development of modern Italian using her own study of and passion for the language. There’s a bit of name dropping but it the personal anecdotes aren’t too self-indulgent and whilst enthusiastic, her descriptions of Italian society aren’t too overly romanticised.
Skin And Bone by Kathryn Fox - A body is found in a torched house and the investigation moves from sexual predators to missing persons to allegations of child abuse and back to fire again with more in between. A decent enough detective drama but it didn't really grab me.
Non-Fiction Read
Australian Politics For Dummies by Nick Economou and Zareh Ghazarian- I picked this up because I am woefully ignorant on the politics of my country. Unfortunately my brain went 'argh, this is like high school/university' and I had to drag it kicking and screaming through the book over a period of months after which it quickly dumped most of the details overboard again :-/ I'll find out how politics in Australia works eventually! -
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- CommentAuthorflecky
- CommentTimeJun 2nd 2012 edited
Sigh...I've chosen to stop reading This Day All Gods Die, as it's the last book in the five-part Gap series, and it felt like I was going to see a really good film at the cinema, only to arrive late to catch the last twenty-minutes. I'm going to have to hunt down the rest...charity shops, pity me!
I've started reading Dixie City Jam by James Lee Burke: A troubled alcoholic detective, a Nazi submarine, a psycho-stalker...I like stuff like that. I've ordered Warren's Crooked Little Vein, and Simon's A Serpent Uncoiled; I'll probably save them for when I'm going insane in The Max Glatt Unit For Fidgeting Fiends (Ealing Hospital).
I've got a book about Syd Barrett by Rob Chapman, called A Very Irregular Head. Fuck, whenever I think about that genius, something breaks inside of me. When I was sixteen, me and a mate went to Cambridge, where he was meant to be living at the time. We "pretended" to be students at Kings College, so we could eat in the posh canteen, and we pitched a tent in Grantchester Meadows. Idiots that we were, we'd put our tent in some rich politicians massive back garden. The fucker's "help" only ended up throwing some sort of firework bangers at us to get us off his land. Anyway, I like to think I may have seen Syd travelling around on a bike.
Has anyone read London by Edward Rutherford? It's a thick entity, and I may give that a shot soon.
I NEED MY NEW GLASSES! -
- CommentAuthorMercer Finn
- CommentTimeJun 3rd 2012 edited
Finished reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which is pretty much as good as everyone says – ably written, wryly funny, eminently sane. It is about stuff (more here), but ultimately its a journey over destination kinda deal.
I like a bit more madness in my storytelling, so going back to H.P. Lovecraft. I'm skipping the shorter stories now and going for the longer heavyweights mentioned previously on this thread. After that, I might go on to tackle Moby Dick, which I hope will exorcise my bias against American literature. -
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CommentAuthorFoamhead
- CommentTimeJun 3rd 2012 edited
Indulging myself by re-reading the whole Frank Herbert Dune series at the mo. It might be more to do with my limited literary horizons but none of them ever feels dated or of its time, which always amazes me considering they started out in 1965 (even longer if you take the years of research for the idea into account).
Up next: can't choose between Dan Wells' "Partials" or Drew Magary's "The Postmortal." Decisions decisions. (Thanks to those who previously mentioned them here.) -
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- CommentAuthorSteve Toase
- CommentTimeJun 3rd 2012
Just started re-reading Michael Marshall Smith's One Of Us. Very well written but reading it this time more to understand what it works for me as a novel.