Amph What book are you reading right now?

All kidding aside, I'm reading two books right now, one serious literature and one genre fiction. The literature is Don Quixote. I'm only 50 pages into it, but I'm already floored by how laugh-out-loud funny this book is, both the narrative and the prologue about fake epigraphs adding an air of erudition.

The genre fiction is Orson Scott Card's 5th book in the Shadow series, Shadows in Flight. I've always been fascinated by books about a small coterie of people on a vessel and the dynamics that emerge when people unmoored from the norms of civilization. Usually, of course, that vessel is a boat (or an island, as it were) but this is on a spaceship, so the sci-fi twist is intriguing.

 

Rereading Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban

 

Me too. It's my top favorite in the series, too bad that the movie does not do it justice in my opinion.

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Flunk. Start.: Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology (2018) – Sands Hall

In this memoir, the author attempts to delve into her time as a Scientologist and tease out what made her fall under the religion’s sway and what it was that made her awaken to its negative elements and escape it. I’m kind of fascinated by Scientology, but I think it might be time to just accept that Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear is the final word on the subject as far as I’m concerned. At least, I can say that this book failed to deliver. I didn’t particularly care for Halls’ writing; it’s not bad, but it’s also not particularly good, fairly flat. The book meanders quite a bit, spending a lot of time on things like the author’s childhood and her relationship with her brother. It seems like Hall feels that all of these detours somehow connect thematically to the themes surrounding Scientology, but she’s never really able to make those connections and so the detours mainly feel random. Her material on Scientology is interesting to a degree, but, despite spending almost ten years in the organization, she never really got beyond the most superficial level. Devastatingly, she now realizes it’s because she was too poor. Still, this book was diverting, but nothing I’d recommend. 2 ½ stars.

tl;dr – memoir is scattered and workmanlike in its prose; it’s not awful, but neither is it particularly good and certainly not insightful. 2 ½ stars.

 

Just finished; Sandstorm by James Rollins. Starts off a fun read but eventually gets a tad bogged down in its excessive (for the story it's telling) length and some eye-rolling twists and contrivances. - 6/10

About to begin; Had planned to follow up w/Rollins' 2ns Sigma Force novel Map of Bones, but my experience w/Sandstorm kinda killed that mojo. Now I'm trying to decide between now long forgotten mid 90s hit Vertical Run by Joseph Garber, Prodigal Son by Dean Koontz or see if I'm finally in the mood for some fantasy w/either The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks or Ranger's Apprentice: The Ruins of Gorlan by John Flanagan.

 

I remember buying Vertical Run on a trip to the US. It had probably just come out in pb. I took it in carry-on as one of my airplane books for the flight from JFK-LHR and devoured it during the trip, with timeouts for eating and bathroom breaks. It made the 8 hour flight feel like about 30 minutes. I still have it in one of my bookcases.

 

I've just started on Starship Troopers by Robert Heinelein. It's obvious from the first page that the author had a military background. The action is superb.

 

That is a very interesting book. I had difficulty knowing what was serious and what was satirical.

 

Heinlein would've read The Iron Dream and not understood that the joke was on him.

 

Soft Come the Dragons (1970) – Dean Koontz

This book of short stories was one of the first books published by Koontz, a guy who has kind of ascended to master of the suspense genre over the decades. These stories had all been published in magazines before, but this was one of his very first books. The stories are extremely variable; some of them are quite good, others quite bad. It’s interesting to see just how psychedelic and weird Koontz’ early writing was, very unlike the more straightforward genre fiction he moved into later. A Darkness In My Soul is so abstract as to kind of be incomprehensible; I had no idea what was even really happening. The best stories in the book are The Twelfth Bed and A Third Hand. In the former, a young man in his twenties accidentally gets locked in an automated ward where the elderly are sequestered by a future society; it’s very bleak and angry. A Third Hand is one of the most straight-forward stories in the book. It’s the story of a man so deformed and crippled that he can’t leave his house and must travel even within the house in an automated chair; when a close friend is murdered, he sets out to solve the murder and see the killers punished using only the power of his mind. The main character is really wonderful; he’s horribly disabled, but it’s almost irrelevant to what he thinks he can do, so confident is he in the power of the mind to control one’s existence. It’s just a really great sci-fi suspense and the climactic sequence of him being stalked by the killer himself is just a knockout. But of the eight stories in the book, those are the only two that really worked for me. Some others, like The Psychedelic Children, were passable, but, even at just a couple of hundred pages, it’s hardly worth taking the time for this one. 2 stars.

tl;dr – collection of early Koontz stories is undistinguished and strange, with only a couple of good stories. 2 stars.

 

I loved Outer Dark and would rank it in the top half of McCarthy’s work, certainly as one of his most beautifully written. I may have an unusual interpretation of it though.


Reading The Reivers by William Faulkner.

 

I remember ACE Doubles - I have a few in the bookcases. Been a long time since you could buy a book for 75 cents.

 

Jack Reacher Night School Reacher is part of a small task force sent to Germany to help track down someone unknown whos offering $100m for something unkown. This put me in mind of the film The Peacemaker as Reacher and his cohorts are trying to, first of all find out whos offering it to terrorists, then to find out what it is and stop it. Its a typcial Reacher novel, I knew what to expect and to be honest I wasn't disappointed. I really enjoyed this one and it had the feel of a movie plot about it.

 

I read that awhile back. It was pretty good. I just started The Gathering Dark by James Oswald. It just came out in paper here and the supermarket had it for half price on Sunday. I like Oswald's books so buying it was a no-brainer.

 

In preparation for Thrawn: Alliances, I'm going to read all of the novels Thrawn has been directly in, starting with Outbound Flight, before finishing with Thrawn.

 

Side Life by Steve Toutonghi

Vin, a down-on-his-luck young tech entrepreneur forced out of the software company he started, takes a job house-sitting an ultra-modern Seattle mansion whose owner has gone missing. There he discovers a secret basement lab with an array of computers and three large, smooth caskets. Inside one he finds a woman in a state of suspended animation. There is also a dog-eared notebook filled with circuit diagrams, beautiful and intricate drawings of body parts, and pages of code.

When Vin decides to enter one of the caskets himself, his reality begins to unravel, and he finds himself on a terrifying journey that raises fundamental questions about reality, free will, and the meaning of a human life.

 

Will Wilder 2: The Lost Staff of Wonders by Raymond Arroyo

 

Doubled back to finish On Target by Mark Greaney. I'd bailed earlier when an extremely annoying character was introduced 1/3 of the way in. They exit about the half way point and once again it rockets into awesome gear. Loving the Gray Man series. Definitely going to be returning soon (already have book #3, Ballistic sitting here).

Now reading; Vertical Run by Joseph Garber. It really wastes little time sucking you right in.

 

Glad to hear you like The Gray Man.

 

Thanks, I do. Glad I gave 'em a shot (thanks to seeing your reviews).

 

I want to read that but will probably wait til it's out in pb.

 

Star Wars Complete Locations
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace novel

 

Artemis by Andy Weir. It was pretty good.

 

Reading again, The Order of the Phoenix. I'm finding I'm liking the books better than the films.

 

Depending on the films and books: for example, I think the books "Prisoner of Azkaban" and "Half Blood Prince" are far superior to the films. The others, at worst, are on par with the films, IMO.