So What Are you Reading?: Generations
- Thread starter captcalhoun
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Sci...I suggest either Le Carre (the novels you list are all excellent) or Game Change, which is definitely the best overall picture of the 2008 election I've read (and I should know...I've read them all!)
Just concluded the Avatar novels! Amazing!
I'm working through Proud Helios right now as part of my pocket novel reread. Not bad. I like the idea of the cobbled together Helios ship.
Finished Last to die by Tess Gerritsen earlier. Now I've moved on to Allegiance in Exile by DRG3
Reading the new DRGIII, Allegiance in Exile
I want to get Allegiance In Exile! But for now, I'm reading Section 31: Abyss. It's pretty awesome, and I love the slightly dark mood threaded throughout.
P.S. I passed your comments onto my coauthor, Kij Johnson, who thought that was high praise indeed!
I started reading Tng Captain's Honor by David &Daniel this isn't one of the most interesting Tng books I've read recently I want to finish reading this book.but I haven't liked book very much it's been kind of a boring storybetween Picard and a rival starfleet captain.I started reading Leviathans of Jupiter By Ben Bova.
I'm just starting Allegiance in Exile.
I'm interested in hearing what you thought of it when you're done. I enjoyed the book a lot, though not quite as much as the original stories. The solution to the mystery is very, very different from anything Doyle would have written, yet the book still somehow remains convincingly in-universe. I found there was a touch of melancholy in Watson's narration at some points, as he realizes this is the last tale he'll ever tell about his friend.To the point where I am (seventy-five pages), I have mixed feelings.
It's very well written. The characterizations ring true (though I keep hearing Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke behind the dialogue). But it's so derivative in places that it feels more like a caricature of a Sherlock Holmes story than the genuine article. That said, something happened about ten pages back of where I am that I suspect is going to spin the novel off in a new direction, which leads me to think that the derivativeness of the first third of the book was deliberate, to ground the reader in the sense that they're firmly in Holmes' world so that Horowitz can do something original with it. Yes, that's optimism speaking.
I'm on something of an Agatha Christie phase at the moment; not only am I watching Poirot again, I've also listened to several audiobooks. So far I've gone through: Five Little Pigs, Murder On The Orient Express, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, and I'm halfway through Murder In Mesopotamia. All are very good audiobooks.
I just finished Death Star and really, really enjoyed it.
Tomorrow I ring in Patrick Troughton Month with Doctor Who: World Game by Terrance Dicks.
Up on deck after that is the original novelization of Star Wars (supposedly by George Lucas, but wasn't it really ghost written by Alan Dean Foster?). Technically I've already read it, but I don't think I've ever actually read it cover to cover. When I was ten years old I used to constantly pick it up and read bits of it, either going to my favorite scenes or just randomly opening it up and reading wherever it fell. Ahh, the days before home video.
Tomorrow I ring in Patrick Troughton Month with Doctor Who: World Game by Terrance Dicks.
Up on deck after that is the original novelization of Star Wars (supposedly by George Lucas, but wasn't it really ghost written by Alan Dean Foster?). Technically I've already read it, but I don't think I've ever actually read it cover to cover. When I was ten years old I used to constantly pick it up and read bits of it, either going to my favorite scenes or just randomly opening it up and reading wherever it fell. Ahh, the days before home video.
Yes, it was, and later editions acknowledge that openly, apparently. As it happens, Tor.com did a piece about it just recently:
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/01/we...tar-wars-movie-and-its-preceding-novelization
Thanks! That's what I thought. I had been under the impression that he was the ghost writer for a lot of novelizations credited to their filmmaker counterparts at the time-- Star Wars as George Lucas, Close Encounters of the Third Kind as Steven Spielberg, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture as Gene Roddenberry. But I recall seeing a discussion on these boards that Roddenberry actually did write his, so I wasn't sure anymore.
I look forward to reading the article, but I think I'm going to wait until after I've reread the novel myself. Finding out all the differences is half the fun!
Roddenberry definitely did write the TMP novel. Its style is nothing like Foster's, and a lot like that of a screenwriter who's never written prose before, and it reflects Roddenberry's attitudes and interests. As I said in the comments of that Tor.com post, the reasons for the myth of Foster ghostwriting it are 1) that people confuse it with the Star Wars novelization and 2) that a French translation of the novelization mistakenly credited Foster as the author (because he wrote the film's story but they omitted the credits for screenwriter Harold Livingston and novelizer Roddenberry).
The CE3K novelization was ghostwritten, but by Leslie Waller, not Foster. If people are crediting Foster with that one, it's probably another case of confusion with the Star Wars novel.
Foster's done plenty of novelizations under his own name, such as The Black Hole, the first three Alien movies, Dark Star, Outland, Clash of the Titans, The Thing, Krull, The Last Starfighter, Starman, Alien Nation, and more recent films like The Chronicles of Riddick, Terminator: Salvation, the first couple of Transformers movies, and of course the Abrams Trek movies. But as far as I can determine, Star Wars is the only novelization he ghostwrote.
Death Star was pretty well-good. I hope you like the ANH novelization, too. I quite enjoyed Alan Dean Foster's take on the film, along with the deleted scenes. Sure, you can view them now, but I imagine they were quite rare back then.
I did find some of the differences interesting, like how Palpatine was a puppet, rather than the puppet master, as established now.
Thanks! I just finished The Spy Who Came in From the Cold today and I loved it. I'm going to read American Gods first, but Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is definitely in my near future.
I finished it on Sunday after Downton Abbey, and I posted some thoughts on my blog.
Here's a key sentence from that: "Silk reads as if Horowitz decided to write a “Sherlock Holmes greatest hits” novel, and he decided to pack in so many of the iconic scenes and passages from the Canon as he could that, by the end, I was half expecting an appearance by Irene Adler."
By and large I thought the writing felt like Watson's, though there were some moments when it really didn't like when Watson comments from his future vantage point on the events in the story's present.
"The Adventure of the Flat-Cap Gang" was, I thought, a little mundane, but it also felt more authentically Canonical. "The Adventure of the House of Silk" had more in common with some of the more lurid Jack-the-Ripper theories and didn't feel very Canonical at all. Ironically, it was the House of Silk mystery that I solved (except for where it was) before it was solved in the book, and I didn't suss out the Flat-Cap Gang solution at all.
I admired the book more than I liked it. It's well-written, it's certainly evocative and gripping, but I also didn't find it to be anything special -- or worthy of the critical notice it received for being authorized by the Doyle estate. It's nothing more than another Sherlock Holmes pastiche.
