Amph What book are you reading right now?

On Target, Mark Greaney, A Gray Man Novel.

I am not sure I'll read the whole series. The first book was fun, but it was simply a Rambo book. Literally there are a few scenes where there "Col Troutman" character tells the bad guy "Wait'll Gentry gets here", "There be plenty of bodies when he arrived" and so forth.

 

"Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things" by Ted Naifeh

Surprised Tim Burton hasn't tried to turn this series into a feature yet.

 

The Dark Wing by Walter Hunt. Social-military-political scifi story with a B5 vibe. An interesting alien species and good understanding of military procedures were the strong points, IMO. The characters didn't interest me as much as the plot did. Haven't decided if I want to look for the sequel or not.

 

Think I'll be rereading The Eleventh Son and watching the film adaptation this weekend, while the very last page tripped me up something fierce, I loved the rest of the book and lthe movie too (Saw more of the novel in the film the second time around.)

 

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Once I'm finished with the Harry Potter series, I'm going to start on ALL the Legends novels, beginning with Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void.

 

Master of Middle-earth by Paul H. Kocher -- A literate, insightful, in-depth analysis of Tolkien's Hobbit and LOTR. Highly recommended, although it's worth noting it was published prior to the publication of The Silmarillion, so it has to glean its pre-Third Age facts from the clues in the text of LOTR.

Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings by Lin Carter -- A fantasy novelist studies the ultimate fantasy novel and makes some observations about its sources and origins. More populist than the Kocher book, but not as cogent.

 

Conversations with Danny Boyle .

basically a very long interview covering all his work , I like Danny Boyle a lot , he's smart but he likes pop culture too , however I only really like one of his films Trainspotting , somehow he always goes wrong somewhere in his films . The Olympics was great too , actually it was astonishing .

 

You're in for a really long slog. The EU is a great universe, but its huge. There are something like 150 major novels. I've been collecting Star Wars books for close to 25 years and I've only read about 2/3 of it. It's that big.

 

Just started Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (and Other Lessons From the Crematorium by Caitlin Doughty. As with the afore-mentioned Working Stiff (which I really liked), if discussion of dead bodies bothers you, this isn't the book for you.

 

Edgewood by Courtney Sheinmel

 

I know. I have all of the EU/Legends novels (not counting the Young Jedi Knights): basically all of the Bantam/Del Rey novels. I'm usually a quick reader, depending on my schedule and the length of a book.

 

Sinclair's "The Jungle". My great grandparents and my grandparents both worked in the Yards in Chicago, and my father grew up behind them for the first 5 years of his life, so you could say The Jungle is a bit of family history for me.

 

"The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641." It's a pretty boring book, actually.

 

Ah, yes, 1558, when Elizabeth became queen, and the entire English aristocracy entered 45 panicky, hand-wringing, dreadful years of "WILL SHE OR WON'T SHE?!"

 

Earth Awakens by Orson Scott Card

 

The Light Between Oceans (2012) – M.L. Stedman



World War I has done its work on these characters. Tom Sherbourne has survived the war, but the mental and emotional scars remain; likewise, his young wife, Isabel, lost two brothers to the war. Now the two of them are set up on the tiny island of Janus (symbolism!) to keep the lighthouse there. But when a rowboat washes ashore containing a young baby and a dead man, the ripple effects of this simple event will be tremendous and far-reaching. Is the baby a gift from God, sent to solace Isabel in the pain of her three miscarriages? Or is all of this just a quirk of malicious fate, finally catching up to Tom & Izzy for the wrong they’ve done in their lives? Or is it all ultimately meaningless? As this book spreads out to really encompass a surprisingly large cast of characters, it manages to imbue them all with real life. There’s not a character here that doesn’t feel real and sympathetic. As the situations become more and more bleak as the book goes on, this story becomes ever more emotionally wrenching. The plot has many twists and turns, the characters are all wonderfully deep and layered and Stedman’s writing (this is, amazingly, her debut novel) is luminous, well-crafted, but never precious. It’s ultimately a book about the impossibility of right decisions in a world shattered by the events of the war; it seems every character in this book has, to some degree or other, been unhinged by the events of the war. Personal tragedies pile upon personal tragedies; a single tragedy is sufficient to unhinge the mind far enough to make poor decisions which lead to more tragedies. It’s a vicious cycle and the book is often emotionally brutal, like taking a gut punch. It’s a beautiful, engaging, powerful novel. Highly recommended. 4 stars.

tl;dr – gripping story of lighthouse keepers taking in a mysterious baby is emotionally wrenching, constantly surprising, beautifully characterized and wonderfully written. 4 stars.

More Book Reviews!

 

I witnessed this first hand recently with his Sunshine. Very strong for its first two acts--everything Interstellar should've been IMO (and pre-dating it by nearly a decade)--but then it just falls apart in the last half hour, radically shifting tones and even subgenres without a good setup for it. I also felt that The Beach (Solid at its best in the first two acts) fell apart in the last act. But I won't say that's true of all his work, and the guy is really talented, and very versatile.

I'm currently attempting my first serious re-read of Lord of the Rings. After putting it off for years, I first read it back in the Fall of 2000 and it became my favorite novel of all-time (Or at least on par with Dune). Of course the movies followed shortly thereafter, and in the decade since then I've started to re-read it twice, but bailed out quite early. Re-reading a book is just an entirely different endeavor than re-watching a movie. I won't say that watching a movie is passive necessarily, but it certainly demands less of you in any number of ways.

At the moment I'm knee-deep in Ch. 2. We'll see.

 

I'm now on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

 

Rereading the Eleventh Son by Gu Long.

 

Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void

 

The most interesting part about that book is the non-adversarial and non-lethal encounters between the Jedi and Sith (race, not Force organization).

 

So I guess I am going to read The Gray Man novels. Mostly it is a back story which is mentioned but not explained yet concerning a screw job with the CIA. So right now it's the 3rd book called Ballistic.

 

Black Order-book 3 the Sigma Force series by James Rollins

 

Yes!!! Because it's about diversity, not about dark vs. light.

 

The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land, by Thomas Asbridge. A one-volume history of the Crusades, focusing on the clash in the Near East, it benefits from Asbridge's skeptical approach to traditional narratives of the Crusades (which doesn't mean he dismisses or set out to overturn them, but he's fairly committed to reexamining them critically). However, it's got a ton of history to pack into under seven hundred pages, and the result is often a bit too superficial for someone as hungry for comprehensive detail as me. Asbridge gives a great overview of two hundred years of crusading, but discussion of battles tends to be limited to mentioning that they were won or lost, aside from a very few of the most famous setpieces, and all too often significant developments are breezed over in a single paragraph. I was hoping for a take that would dig into the meat of the subject a little more. It's great for anyone who wants an informative big-picture narrative or to get some solid historical perspective on the Crusades, but the reader hoping for the kind of book that will make you feel like an expert on the subject needs to find more of a brick (I'm probably going to take a look at Tyerman's God's War, eventually).