This is an actually true story. As a child, around 8 or 9 I think, I spent a day home from school experiencing incredible pain somewhere in my lower abdomen, absolutely excruciating. That evening, my mom decided to take me to the ER. We got in, saw a nurse who asked about what was hurting, and said we'd have to wait a couple hours to see a doctor. So my mom started reading me The Hobbit, since I was in too much pain to nap. And four hours later, mom still reading me The Hobbit, the doctor came in... and the pain was totally gone. Hadn't even noticed it stop. I felt fine. Seeing no reason to stay, we went home, and it never recurred. So apparently that novel is magic, when read to you by a parent...
My father, who was an inveterate ham and loved doing bad-guy voices, really relished playing Gollum. He had this neat way of giving the name a swallowing quality that wasn't too far from how Andy Serkis does it, although less raspy.
Last May I bought a kindle and since then I have been reading on and off the Stargazer series which I never read in dead-tree format. Finished it yesterday with a reread of Reunion and it was an enjoyable series for the most part.
When I was a child I though The Hobbit was a great book up untill bilbo gets knocked out, and weird after that Haven't read it in almost twenty years though. Just finished that the other week myself after that review thread popped up! Reading them back to back is an even better experience then reading them as they came out back in the day. After I finished Klingon Empire I was really pining for a sequel anew.
I just finished Worlds of Deep Space 9, Volume 2 - Trill and Bajor. I thought it was two fairly decent stories, but I thought the two parts were going to be more interconnected. Oh well, I was wrong! They each stand alone just fine and that's all that matters to me. I don't read TrekLit expecting them to be the best books ever written, I read them solely for plain old entertainment and fun.
I started reading The Hobbit shortly before the first movie came out and got about just as far as the film does when I saw the film. I continued on for another 40 or so pages before stopping completely. It wasn't so much bad, but I found it to be too cursory. Whole sequences are just summaries of things that happened. Or in the case of the rock giants, two sentences. I appreciate it as a work of Tolkien's - that cave scene is fantastic - but I don't think it compares to other works, even something reconstructed like Children of Hurin. As Chris says, it's probably best if encountered early in life. There's a very clear divide between my friends over people who read it as a kid and loved it and people who read it later and are more mixed on it. As for the Mission Gamma books, I too found the station stuff more interesting. Cathedral is pretty good though. I will admit, though, that I found the fourth book's Gamma Quadrant portion to be uninteresting. However the station stuff in it is quite good. I just finished out Typhon Pact: Seize the Fire. This was quite a slog. It feels very bloated. There's really no reason for it be a 500 page tome! The unfortunate thing is that there's a decent book buried in it somewhere. It feels like a draft work that should have been edited down. There are some entertaining mistakes throughout. White-Blue is referred to as Blue-White a few times. Several female officers are called Mister, without any precedent of this being something Riker does. In a particularly eyebrow raising typo, Keru thinks back to the time the Gorn killed Sean Hawk! There's also just a lot of repetition: every mention of the Typhon Pact comes linked to a full listing of the members, a question followed "s/he wanted to know," Vale constantly thinking about her time as an ex-police officer using the exact same wording. The book is just a problem from the plot right down to the book assigning four different names to the McGuffin. (Five if you count the one time it's called an ecocaster.) The motivations for the second Gorn ship don't make sense and end up feeling like redundancy. Oddly enough, this was one of the few times Keru didn't feel out of step with the rest of crew, just constantly arguing against everything. This does come at the expense Christine Vale, who ends up coming off as Debbie Downer, just constantly thinking about the worst outcome. It becomes less pragmatism and just morbid after a while. Anyway... Also tore through Doctor Who: Time Trips: Into the Nowhere by Jenny Colgan, one of the new eBook novellas they're putting out. It was pretty enjoyable. Colgan really got the right feel of The Doctor and Clara, but sometimes their individual reactions seemed off. Clara, especially, comes off as kind of meek and afraid which doesn't mesh with her as presented. Not the greatest, but some fun concepts. Oddly enough, it appears to be set between Day of... and Time of the Doctor. Not sure what's up next for me, either Typhon Pact: Rough Beasts of Empire or Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto, the writer of True Detective.
Home early because of a snowstorm, yesterday, I ended up watching "Star Trek: The Motion Picture". Following that, I picked up "Ex Machina" and have started rereading that.
I'd completely forgotten about that. guess THAT ending kinda eclipses everything else in my memory. Will try to dig it out for a reread this weekend. You should know that Bajor stands alone man it's in Raptures 5:10
I almost finished re-reading "A Time to Harvest". After that I'll take a break from "A Time to..." and get to "Distant Shores", which I've had for years and only last week I realised I never read it!
I just finished reading Voyager Protectors By Kirsten Beyer a great book. I'm now reading Farside by Ben Bova.
Just finished reading Ahriman: Exile and now well under way with Ravenwing (both WarHammer 40K) and both are great.
Still reading Colin Wilson but just acquired "The Mind Parasites" (1967, 2005) and am not sure to read this before continuing with "The Philosopher's Stone" (1969). I see that it is written that Colin passed away early in December of 2013. He definitely did not write Trek novels but is interesting to read in a strange sort of way. Still need to finish the middle of "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens (1861). I am rereading "I see satan fall like lightning" by Rene Girard as a guide to nonviolent intervention, not just with individual action and social forces but also in the context of organizations and institutions of a more national and/or international nature. Perhaps I have great expectations here too especially since I first read the book in December 2013.
Started with "It" by Stephen King, I really don't like clowns And I ordered "The Sundered" and "The Buried Age"
Read the first duology of the A Time To series, A Time To Be Born and A Time To Die. I had mixed feelings about these two - some parts of the books had hooked, and other parts just seemed to drag. Annoyingly, the kindle edition of A Time to Be Born is full of formatting errors. Every time a word appears in italics, such as the name of a ship, the remainder of the paragraph is also italicised.
I finished reading the last novel In the A Time for War and a time for Peace by Keith DeCandido an excellent novel to wrap up this miniseries. I really liked Nan Bacco was written in this book.I ordered the followup novel Articles of the Federation.The first 2 novels a Time to be born and a Time to die are really boring when it comes to Wesley Crucher acting like a superhero to save everyone in the first 2 books.
Still on A Dance With Dragons, and after reading all the Song of Ice and Fire novels back to back, am craving some Treklit again in the near future...