Amph What book are you reading right now?

^^^ That is such a painful exercise.

 

'Tis.

 

Thank God for e-readers.

 

**** E-readers. BOOKS. If there is one thing that I shall have to be dragged into kicking and screaming it is a non-book society.

 

But with an e-reader you never have to prune your library ever again. Assuming that you actually manage to fill the memory in the first place, all you have to do is download your e-books onto an external hard drive.

 

H.M.S. Surprise. Another delight. O'Brian continues the plotlines from Post Captain, but pushes the action back toward the sea. Maturin gets tremendous development as he goes through both physical and emotional torments; he's a character who just gets more complex and interesting with each novel. Aubrey is a character who in some ways resists development, but O'Brian is working subtly under the surface with him, I think, and he's figuring out how to write Aubrey as a fun, outgoing bloke who's all sort of right there on the surface while also imbuing him with depth, and, critically, avoiding making him too comically, jovially dim in the process. The action is very good, with O'Brian working in several excellent setpieces while never losing the languid, internally-focused, literary feel that elevates his stories from simple sea adventures to stuff with tremendous power.

 

SW: Aftermath. Pretty good so far.

 

The Watched Pot (1924) – Saki, Charles Maude

This is one of the few plays Saki wrote, or actually co-wrote. It was published posthumously, but it doesn’t suffer at all from the problems that his other posthumous works did. It’s the story of a tyrannical old woman that runs an English estate with an iron hand. Friends and family are eager for her son to marry so that his new wife will take over at the estate, but the son seems to be in no hurry to settle down. He’s the “watched pot” of the title, a young man being pushed into marriage on all sides and yielding to none. It’s a very funny play and it also proves my theory that Saki didn’t intend for all of his unpublished stories to be published after his death, because he reuses a ton of jokes in this play. Obviously, those stories were indeed first drafts that Saki set aside in order to recycle the jokes later. I’d love to see this one performed live; it has a lot of Saki’s dry, biting humor, but none of the underlying dark misanthropy of most of his works. It’s not unlike Wodehouse, really. Anyway, really entertaining. 3 ½ stars.

tl;dr – Saki co-writes witty, acerbic play about young man being pushed into marriage; typically funny and surprisingly, for Saki, light-hearted and joyous. 3 ½ stars.

More Book Reviews!

 

In The Ocean Of Night, Gregory Benford. Sounds like a form of berserker series. Not sure I'll read beyond the first book or not.

 

Star Wars Jedi Apprentice 7

 

How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found by Doug Richmond.

 

Back to Legends-verse for me:

Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter

 

Nice

I'm getting there. I'm on Jedi Apprentice 8 now

 

Nearing the end of The Knight of the Swords (Corum, Book 1). It's been pretty good, and a damn sight better than Queen of the Tearling. I'm also reading Press Start to Play and The Merchant of Venice.

 

Court of Owls
Batman graphic novel dealing with crisis in Gotham.
Engaging so far. Great art. Kind of violent. Nightwing impersonating Joker was novel.

 

Saki: The Complete Saki (1988) – Saki

Well, just a word about the omnibus where I found all the Saki stuff I’ve been talking about recently. It’s a Penguin edition and those are always good, but due to the sheer volume of the author’s text, this edition doesn’t feature the kind of extras Penguin Books usually feature, like lengthy introductions of notes on the texts. It’s almost 1,000 pages with just Saki’s material. And there’s a lot of super-super-good stuff here. I definitely recommend The Unbearable Bassington, The Chronicles of Clovis and The Watched Pot. Beyond that, I found the book to be mostly trivial. His first couple of books aren’t any good and the books published posthumously are just as bad. Track down the great Saki stuff elsewhere and don’t waste your time plowing through his entire bibliography. There’s really no point. Warned against. 1 star.

tl;dr – the complete bibliography of Saki just isn’t worth reading; grab the two or three really essential books on their own and skip the bulk of this trivia. 1 star.

More Book Reviews!

 

In the process of (finally) finishing Michener's Alaska and starting The Honor of the Queen by David Weber.

 

The Silmarillion by Tolkien

 

Celidore, is this your first time reading the Sil? It's a strange book, with a long slow build up to the interesting stuff. If you get bogged down, you can persevere, or you can skip around and read cool stories out of order and later you can come back and put all the pieces together. That's what I had to do years ago, but now it's one of my favorite books.

 

Maul: Lockdown

 

In The Ocean Of Night sucked. A few great parts but it is not well written. Not sure what I shall read next.

 

Yes, it's my first time reading it. I find it's very complex with many stories, names and characters. But it's a wonderful masterpiece I like so much as LOTR and The Hobbit which I've already read.

 

Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice 10 by Jude Watson

 

Finally finished Michener's Alaska. Really good read. On to The Martian,