SF/F Books: Chapter Two - What Are You Reading?

[Steve Roby]

Currently reading Steven Brust's Firefly/Serenity novel My Own Kind of Freedom. I think it may have originally been intended as part of a line of novels that were supposed to follow the Serenity novelization, but Brust went ahead and wrote the whole thing and gave it away free online. I've read a lot of Brust's early novels and liked them, and I liked Firefly, so I was curious.

So far, not bad. I don't know what the hardcore Browncoats think of it, but it's entertaining me well enough. It's set at some point pre-Serenity, so certain characters are still alive, but neither Shepherd Book nor Inara is traveling on Serenity any more.

 

[John Clark]

Just finished the Stargate Novel "Do No Harm".

Overall, I enjoyed it

 

[Maestro]

I finished Ratzinger's mini-tome and then I took a break from anything serious, fiction or otherwise, and read Grisham's Playing for Pizza. I hope this is a light-weight Grisham book. I remember reading The Client and The Firm in high school and finding them to be tougher reading. I read Pizza in about 5 hours, and found it to be very simple. A good tale, but nothing complex or difficult.

I'm back into SFF now with Tom Kratman's Caliphate, a Starship Troopers-esque (I even imagine Dina Meyer as the female solier) story of a future where radical/fundamentalist (read EVIL) Islam has overrun Europe, the US is an Empire spanning all of North America (There are no Canadians, just rebels), and the world has been at war since the US invaded Iraq. Good stuff so far.

 

[AdAstra]

^ That sounds an interesting book, Maestro. Let me know what your final thoughts are!

I'm currently reading Sandworms of Dune. It's ok. Nothing great like Frank Herbert's books, but good enough.

 

[Venardhi]

Just finished Red Seas under Red Skies by Scott Lynch, which is the follow-up to The Lies of Locke Lamora. The series is about a group of thieves/confidence men in a fantasy world. Quite charming, though this second book wasn't quite as good IMO, due to a rushed ending.

Next up I'm either going to give another shot to The Darkness that Comes Before by uhh. . . some dude, or maybe The Magician and the Fool by Barth Anderson, who wrote the surprisingly good The Patrion saint of Plagues (which I was handed for free at comic-con 2 years ago). I also have a stack of books in my car a friend gave me I need to sort out.

 

[S. Gomez]

Has anyone read any books by Neal Stephenson? I've heard about one he wrote called The Diamond Age, and it's piqued my curiosity. What's he like?

 

[Mistral]

This is the second post-it follows the quote below-oops.

Finished The Plague Year by Jeff Carlson. It was ok for a debut novel. Good premise, lots of gross descriptions(well, look at the title) and so-so characters. As for The Caliphate by Kratman that I mentioned last, I am upping its importance. About a week after I finished it I read a terrifying news article about a court in France that upheld the right of a Muslim man to beat his wife because "the cultural context requires it". This freaked me out because such a happening (and others like it) formed the premise of Kratman's nihilistic Arabic Europe society. What I had first dismissed as implausible became all too real. Read the book-and take a look around the world.

This is actually my first post-put it up 10 minutes after I finished the book.

I just finished Caliphate by Tom Kratzman. It was a chilling and all too possible setting for a story, although his explanation for how that came about was a tad implausible. If you can stomach right-wing preaching its a good book that looks at how our own near future might go.
I'm starting on The Plague Year next by Carlson(?). I'll let you know.

I finished Ratzinger's mini-tome and then I took a break from anything serious, fiction or otherwise, and read Grisham's Playing for Pizza. I hope this is a light-weight Grisham book. I remember reading The Client and The Firm in high school and finding them to be tougher reading. I read Pizza in about 5 hours, and found it to be very simple. A good tale, but nothing complex or difficult.

I'm back into SFF now with Tom Kratman's Caliphate, a Starship Troopers-esque (I even imagine Dina Meyer as the female solier) story of a future where radical/fundamentalist (read EVIL) Islam has overrun Europe, the US is an Empire spanning all of North America (There are no Canadians, just rebels), and the world has been at war since the US invaded Iraq. Good stuff so far.

Maestro, Ad Astra-dug through this thread-here's my earlier posts on Caliphate. I sent that news story to the author and he wrote back that he wasn't the slightest bit surprised by it.

 

[Stevil2001]

Has anyone read any books by Neal Stephenson? I've heard about one he wrote called The Diamond Age, and it's piqued my curiosity. What's he like?

I read Snow Crash last year and enjoyed it. Not the greatest, but entertaining enough and some really neat ideas. The Diamond Age is loosely linked, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

 

[Skywalker]

Dead Beat by Jim Butcher.

 

[Steve Roby]

Has anyone read any books by Neal Stephenson? I've heard about one he wrote called The Diamond Age, and it's piqued my curiosity. What's he like?

I read Snow Crash last year and enjoyed it. Not the greatest, but entertaining enough and some really neat ideas. The Diamond Age is loosely linked, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Snow Crash was one of the last big cyberpunk novels, before the web explosion made going online as exciting and exotic as using a telephone. (You don't even have to know any Unix shell commands to use the Internet these days!) I remember liking it a lot. I have The Diamond Age, which got generally very good reviews, but I haven't read it yet. (I have hundreds of books I haven't read yet.)

I'm currently reading Philip K. Dick's UBIK: A Screenplay. I missed the first printing of this back in 1985, but fortunately there's a new edition out. UBIK was the first PKD novel I read back around 1979-80, and reading Dick's rewrite of the story as a screenplay (for a proposed 1974 film) is interesting. I may have to reread the novel to pick up on the differences, but so far the screenplay feels pretty faithful to the novel.

 

[Klagg]

Dead Beat by Jim Butcher.

This is definitely my favorite in the series. Have you found the short stories and comic?

 

[Bob The Skutter]

Dead Beat by Jim Butcher.

This is definitely my favorite in the series. Have you found the short stories and comic?

I can't say for certain which is my favourite, I've loved all of them. I can't wait for Backup, it'll be interesting to see a Dresden story from someone else's point of view.
I haven't got the comics, I'm waiting for the TPB, and I've only got the one in My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding, and I'm not willing to pay £22 for Many Bloody Returns.

 

[Klagg]

Backup was moved up to early October instead of Halloween. There are a number of Dresden short stories. I understand your reluctance to buy an anthology for a single story but I broke down on bought them. Mean Streets comes out in January. It contains four novellas, one of which is Dresden.

If you haven't seen them yet, Jim Butcher's website contains two VERY short stories.

http://www.jim-butcher.com/books/dresden/restoration/

http://www.jim-butcher.com/books/dresden/vignette/

 

[S. Gomez]

So I've decided I'm going to try something that's only slightly new: reading everything I can about Tolkien, his writing, and his world. I'm calling it "A Journey Through Middle-earth" and it involves reading not just The Hobbit, The Lord of The Rings, and The Silmarillion but also books about Tolkien and his life. So obviously that includes Humphrey Carpenter's biography to kick things off, as well as taking a look at John Garth's Tolkien And The Great War and also the Letters, which I've certainly read in parts but never in whole. The History of 'The Hobbit' is also up to bat, and I'm extremely looking forward to it. If I'm not completely worn out by the time I get there, I'll try and dive into The History of Middle-earth; I've started "The Book of Lost Tales" twice now and haven't got near to finishing.

I say slightly new, because of course most of this is re-reading. But for some reason, while I have clear recollection of The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings, I'm hard-pressed to give any sort of synopsis of the stories from the First Age. I know titles and characters, but I can never remember what happens in them. Hopefully after this it'll stick and I'll be something of an amateur expert.

It'll be a long haul, but I know it will also be fun and rewarding. I'll let you all know how it goes.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

Backup was moved up to early October instead of Halloween. There are a number of Dresden short stories. I understand your reluctance to buy an anthology for a single story but I broke down on bought them. Mean Streets comes out in January. It contains four novellas, one of which is Dresden.

If you haven't seen them yet, Jim Butcher's website contains two VERY short stories.

http://www.jim-butcher.com/books/dresden/restoration/

http://www.jim-butcher.com/books/dresden/vignette/

Yeah, I've had Backup, and the Welcome to the Jungle TPB ordered for a while, and I ordered Mean Streets when I noticed it was available to order. It's not so much that fact it's an anthology that bothers me, it's the price £22 (~ $40) on Amazon.co.uk.

 

[Skywalker]

Dead Beat by Jim Butcher.

This is definitely my favorite in the series. Have you found the short stories and comic?

I can't say for certain which is my favourite, I've loved all of them. I can't wait for Backup, it'll be interesting to see a Dresden story from someone else's point of view.
I haven't got the comics, I'm waiting for the TPB, and I've only got the one in My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding, and I'm not willing to pay £22 for Many Bloody Returns.

I haven't read the short stories or the comic, no. When in the storyline do they take place? I was planning on finishing the books that are out right now before reading those. Since I've been spacing the books out to make them last longer (which has been really hard, mind you, they're so damn good), it might take me a while to get to the other stuff.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

This is definitely my favorite in the series. Have you found the short stories and comic?

I can't say for certain which is my favourite, I've loved all of them. I can't wait for Backup, it'll be interesting to see a Dresden story from someone else's point of view.
I haven't got the comics, I'm waiting for the TPB, and I've only got the one in My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding, and I'm not willing to pay £22 for Many Bloody Returns.

I haven't read the short stories or the comic, no. When in the storyline do they take place? I was planning on finishing the books that are out right now before reading those. Since I've been spacing the books out to make them last longer (which has been really hard, mind you, they're so damn good), it might take me a while to get to the other stuff.

If I remember correctly, The comic is set before Storm Front, the story in My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding comes after Dead Beat, and before Proven Guilty, the one in Supernatural Honeymoon and Many Bloody Returns comes between White Night and Small Favour... Not sure about upcoming ones.

 

[Skywalker]

Gah, I hope I didn't just spoil myself by thinking that the title "My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding" might be connected to the discussion between Thomas and Harry at the beginning of Dead Beat.

Don't confirm my suspicion either way, please.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

Gah, I hope I didn't just spoil myself by thinking that the title "My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding" might be connected to the discussion between Thomas and Harry at the beginning of Dead Beat.

Don't confirm my suspicion either way, please.

Which conversation? It's been a while since I read Dead Beat...
My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding is just the name of the anthology. The actual story is called Something Borrowed...

 

[Skywalker]

Their conversation about a certain police person.