Amph What book are you reading right now?

Anarchy State and Utopia by Bobby Nozick

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Browsing through Walden by HDThoreau when I'm bored

Most interesting right now: Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard

 

Okinawa- The Last Battle Of WWII

 

Paradise Lost Book X

 

Fiction - The Killing Game by J.A. Kerley.
Nonfiction - The Lazarus Effect by Dr. Sam Parnia. It's pretty interesting so far - looks at resuscitation medicine, what happens when someone dies, and the idea of Near Death Experiences..

 

Lighter Than Air, An Illustrated History of the Airship by Lee Payne. There are some fun stories about early balloonists, but I'm kind of skimming through those to get to the zeppelins. Zepps rule.

 

Abandoning Lonesome Dove. Nineteen pages in. I simply could. Not. Take. Any. More.

There has to be some cultural disconnect I'm having with this book. Surely. Because I am trying for the life of me to figure out exactly why the hell this book got the Pulitzer Prize. If I were brutally cynical I can only think that it's the equivalent of the Return of the King Academy Awards, a sort of consolation prize to the entire Western genre and/or some sort of Academy award to the entire genre.

I went in with a good feeling: this was meant to be a Western, and I love the genre. I haven't attacked many novels of this kind before, but I've read enough Louis L'Amour to like the setting at least. I wanted to like it. I swear I did. But I think honestly the authorial voice on this one just annoyed the snot out of me. It insists on telling, not showing. It seems to delight in cliche in order to bore you to sleep. You can just about eat the American drawl and accent:

"A strange little wind had whipped over from Mexico and blown the roof off clean as a whistle, three years before. Fortunately it only rained in Lonesome Dove once or twice a year, so the loss of the roof didn't result in much suffering for the stock, when there was stock. It mostly meant suffering for Call, who had never been able to locate enough decent lumber to build a new roof. Unfortunately a rare downpour had occurred only about a week after the wind dropped the old roof in the middle of Hat Creek. It had been a real turd-floater, and also a lumber-floater, washing much of the roof straight into the Rio Grande."

And that was about the most interesting thing I could detect in 19 pages. The author freely dips inside people's heads to tell us what they're feeling - no brainpower required, no activity shown, no implication left to the imagination. It strikes me as a Western epic for someone who wants to read something longer and (I'm guessing) slightly more pretentious than a Louis L'Amour. I don't know, maybe my tastes are changing or something, but this thing just had no balls to it.

Next up: embarking on what I suspect most people would term a leisurely cruise up Nathaniel Hawthorne's ass--




Onward and upward.

 

Phoenix in Obsidian - Michael Moorcock

 

Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. Pretty awesome stuff. It'll probably overtake Warbreaker as my favourite Sanderson book. Shallan is still kind of annoying though.

 

Green by Ted Dekker
Star Wars Omnibus: A Long Time Ago…Volume 1

 

Fiction - Original Skin by David Mark. It's the second in his series with DS Aector McAvoy.

Nonfiction - When the Money Runs Out by Stephen D. King. (No, not that Stephen King. This one is a UK economist.)

 

Just got my copy, but I plan to reread Way of Kings first (and theoretically finish WoT before that ...). I'm glad it's good!

 

Taking a sci fi break and reading The fell Sword by Miles Cameron which is a sequel to The Red Knight.

Something in this that was missing fromt he first book: MAPS!

 

The cover of that reminds me of Demon's Souls.

 

I'm about to start the epic re-read of WoT Volumes 1-11, followed by the new stuff that is Brandon's finale.

At some point before Stormlight Archive Volume 3 is released, I might have read Words of Radiance!
(Do love the US edition too.)

 

To The Last Man: Spring 1918 by Lyn MacDonald.

The Fate of the Romonovs by Penny King

 

So Cool Long Live Lake Constance Sarge!

 

Ben!

I'm still in the middle of that WoT reread. I did 12 books in 12 months and then stopped reading when I ran out of paperbacks to haul around ... so I'm still working on Towers of Midnight And I still haven't read AMOL!

Last I heard, he's going to try to get the Words of Radiance sequel out in something amounting to short order (within the next year or two?).

 

You know NYC, if anyone else claimed that I'd say it was bollocks, but it's Sanderson.

The man can stick to a timetable and write like no one else - so another 1000 page monster in 2 years? Yeah, I could buy that - and I'd certainly buy it!

By the by, do appreciate the extra artwork in the US hardback, those front and back inside cover illustrations in full colour? They're not in the UK one!

 

The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 4) by Robert A. Caro

Finally finishing up the whole series (this is my second time on this particular volume). Caro is a master.

 

Almost jumped into a Drizzt book and its new sequel but decided upon an omnibus by Mike Wild called Theif of the Ancients starring some sort of Tomb Raider type female fantasy character. It holds 4 books, but there are actually 9 books by 4 different authors.

So, the first in this collection is the Clockwork King Of Orl.

 

About 300 pages away from finishing A Dance with Dragons.

 

That one awful essay that TOSCHESTATION posted in the Derp thread.

 

Insurgent

 

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, by H.W. Brands. An absolutely fantastic biography. Brands has a great, engaging, clever voice, and the book is packed with detail. Brands also does a great job of including a lot of context for the world around Franklin, helping to give a sense of the times in which he lived. It's a pleasure to read, and about a truly fascinating, impressive figure. Highly recommended.

 

'A Clash of Kings', continuing those wacky Westeros adventures