Amph What book are you reading right now?

From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming. So far it's been great, my first foray into the Bond books and so far I have not been disappointed.

 

Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons by Bill Watterson. Pretty heavy stuff.

 

Book 2 of the Black Company



I am addicted to this series all of a sudden. Cook's writing style is very easy to sink into. Curt and direct, and while the overall plot might not be so completely original, the characters and their interactions and plights keep me turning pages.

 

The Red Knight by Miles Cameron. Good take on classical fantasy in a post-grimdark world.

 

John Adams, by David McCullough. I enjoyed it, but thought it was a bit overrated. McCullough isn't the best at organizing and presenting his information, and the whole giant first chapter, which covers everything up to the Second Continental Congress, is needlessly jumbled. But the prose is good, and it's generally a pretty good biography. It's easy to see why it got such attention, despite its shortcomings, because McCullough notably helped rehabilitate a Founding Father who's never had that great a reputation. McCullough paints a great portrait of Adams as a crucial statesman, principled intellectual, and loving husband, but it does feel like he helps his rehabilitation job by writing around the criticism more than tackling it. He touches on stuff like the Alien and Sedition Acts without really digging into it, and acknowledges Adams's ambition and vanity without really addressing it directly in Adams's conflicts with others. I can understand admiring Adams's accomplishments and virtues and accentuating them, but it feels a bit hollow and one-sided when McCullough repeatedly skips by opportunities to offer any serious criticism.

It's a good, solidly informative biography about a remarkable historical figure, and it's a real pleasure to learn about Adams, but it's short of being a great biography, and I find myself mostly unimpressed with McCullough.

 

in the grimdark of the far future, there is only singapore

realtalk tho lemme know about that myles cameron. he's "on my list" and i need to know if he's worth moving up to "collecting dust on my bookshelf" status

 

So far, I'll say these points:

* Cameron is a re-enactment enthusiast and marital historian so there's lots of detail in the combat and armour
* If GRRM has an American view of aristocracy, Cameron has a British one (though unlike Joe Abercrombie, who's got a working class British take)
* It's more toff than ASOIAF

 

Well, as someone said, it's safer on a battlefield than at weddings these days...

 

That was the very last C&H book that I purchased.

 

Finished Revenge of the Dwarves and now onto Fate of the Dwarves the last book in the Dwarves series. These books are great so I'm sad that I'm nearly done with the series.

 

I Are The Internets
It's the very first one I've bought (£1 in a charity shop). I never read C&H before, it's not as bad as I was expecting! It does actually get quite deep in a few frames. I'm about halfway through, no sign of winter yet.

 

The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes was the first collection I bought waaaay back in 1998 when I was only 6 years old. I own all of the collections now. It was basically my childhood along with Dilbert.

 

I was a Beano, Eagle and Transformers kid. Oh and Asterix and Tintin.

 

"Secret Weapons of WW2" by William Breuer. Not impressed with this one. It's basically a string of vignettes that mention codes, A-bombs, spies, radar, and rockets, with no details, explanations, or analysis of their affects. I'll sum it up as "shallow."

 

I kinda picked you for a 2000 AD kid, V...

 

Calvin and Hobbes always a good choice

 

Sounds like the kind of history book you find towards the front of a B&N, worth it for the low price but stays at a coffee table book level throughout.

 

Good sir, nerdom is achieved when you've read Consider Phlebas, not Player of Games.

 

There. Fixed.

 

Going to be re-reading Paradise Lost and Regained many times since I'm writing my thesis on it.

 

The Pat Hobby Stories. F. Scott Fitzgerald, his literary triumphs of the twenties long-forgotten, now a washed-up screenwriter living paycheck to paycheck, wrote a series of stories at the start of the 1940s about Pat Hobby, a washed-up screenwriter living paycheck to paycheck, his screenwriting credits of the twenties silent era long forgotten. As is common, Fitzgerald's work tends toward pseudo-autobiographical self-loathing, but here he puts his experience to use not for grave literature, but for entertainment, summoning his sense of humor about the situation to make Hobby's pathetic situation and constant desperation a thing of humor, a comic schemer whose bad luck is always the punchline. The stories are funny, and show off Fitzgerald's sharp wit, and though they don't have his accustomed depth they're not wholly shallow. It's also great fun to see the glory days of the Hollywood studio system parodied by an insider. A great collection.

 

Going to start "Up, Back, and Away" by K. Velk today

 

On to another Ethshar novel. I hit used book stores on occasion just to try and find more.

 

Up, Back, and Away by K. Velk

 

I'm going to start giving Marx's Capital a go in an attempt to embrace more fully my inner Marxist.