Amph What book are you reading right now?

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

 

X-Wing: Isard's Revenge

 

The Reckoning (1994) – James Byron Huggins

The Reckoning is Huggins’ second novel and it’s very different from A Wolf Story, his first novel. He moves from an allegorical tale of good vs. evil among the animals of the forest to a modern day (well, 1994) urban action/espionage thriller. But he still has his main strength here, a gift for propulsive, edge of your seat, intense action sequences. In this story, ex-mercenary Jonathan Gage returns from his exile in order to keep a mysterious group of super-soldiers from gaining control of an ancient manuscript that reportedly reveals the identity of the antichrist. Huggins’ Christianity is more explicit in this book since it’s not an allegory, but it’s not in a cheesy way, particularly because it’s counter balanced with a lot of realism and expertise in the thriller elements. I particularly like the way Huggins engages with the element of violence and injury in this book. At one point, Gage is involved in an action sequence and things just grind to a halt for over two weeks as he recuperates. In any book like this, the people have to be somewhat super-human, but Huggins makes you well aware that a single knife slash across the inside of your wrist can put your hand out of commission for days and that you can’t easily shrug off the broken bones that can result from being shot in a bullet proof vest. Huggins has created a ton of great archetypal characters here: Father D’oncetta, a corrupt Catholic priest; Sato, a psychopathic Japanese knife-fighter; Robert Milburn, an old comrade of Gage that find himself caught on the wrong side of this fight; Nathaniel Kertzman, a cantankerous FBI agent who stops at nothing to find the truth; Radford, an amoral government bureaucrat. This book is long at nearly 500 pages, and very dense, but it’s a compulsive page-turner. A gunfight at an isolated cabin, an attempted incursion into a cathedral . . . these are brilliant action sequences. Of the confrontations between Gage & Sato, two skilled knife-fighters, well . . . just read it. Is it occasionally, as A Wolf Story was, too talky when it gets into philosophical matters? Yes. But it’s worth it, well worth it, in fact. The Reckoning is an atmospheric, intense action thriller and those don’t come cheap. 3 ½ stars.

tl;dr – action/espionage features memorable archetypes and intense action; occasionally too talky, but its philosophical pretensions are secondary to its thrills. 3 ½ stars.

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R1.5, does the author have any actual training or experience with knife-fighting? Many action sequences are ruined for me because I'm quick to recognize that writers don't know what they're talking about.

 

The Jedi Academy Trilogy I: Jedi Search

 

The Crown Conspiracy by Michael J. Sullivan

 

Well, I don't know a whole lot about all the technical stuff myself, but some of the stuff is very technical in language and such when he describes the fights & strategies. Or doing wilderness tracking or basic training and different types of guns and stuff like that. At one point, one of the characters does talk about different methods of knife fighting and such. The author was in the military in some branch or other and also a cop for a while; he definitely gives the impression that he knows what he's talking about, which is all I can really speak to. I like the knife-fighting aspect of the book because it's different from what you usually get in these kinds of books, though there is certainly plenty of gunplay as well. I think this might be one you'd enjoy if you're into action novels; I know you're not a fan of profanity and the Christian origin of the book means it has very little and only of the fairly mild "hell" or "damn it." And no sexual content at all. All while still having some intense action scenes that are as good as just about anything out there in the "secular" arena. Like I said, even I found that it got pretty talky sometimes and I usually don't mind that, so your mileage may vary on how much of that you can tolerate. If you do check it out, I'd be really interested in your thoughts on how accurate it actually is.

 

You've piqued my interest; I'll look into it. Thanks for the tip.

 

I would quote a passage or two of the more technical stuff, but I've sent the book back to the library already. You can probably get it from the library, but it's also available for just a penny on Amazon. By the time you pay shipping, you're up to about four dollars though and you can get it for five bucks on Kindle if you prefer that way. The Amazon preview has a few small action bits that'll give you a taste for the tone.

 

The Revenant by Michael Punke.

 

After temporarily bouncing off some stuff (The Brothers Karamazov - too much Dostoevsky in too little time, Swann's Way - am I really feeling this commitment right now?, Infinite Jest - DFW I know that you know that I know that you know the word choice here is a bit too precious) and reading some very enjoyable short stories ("Kitchen" and "Moonlight Shadow" by Banana Yoshimoto, "The Strange Library" by Haruki Murakami, "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" by Karen Russell) I have apparently settled on Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D. G. Kelley, a pretty straightforward biography, albeit long. Main problem is I'm spoiled for choice, so I just need to really get my teeth sunk in.

 

"A Moveable Feast" by Hemingway.

 

just started tarkin hoping to have that finished before the new harry potter book comes out grew up reading that serious so will be a day one buy for me

 

I've read the Potter books but I'm not sure on this one - it's supposedly just a script of the play, not a novel. I might take a look at it when I see it in the bookstore.

 

It is indeed in script form. Remember that controversy when a black woman was cast as Hermione? It's the script for that play.

 

I'm aware of the play - it's up in London. And yeah, the black Hermione hit the news here. It's just that reading a script wouldn't be my first choice of reading matter. But I'll take a look if I see it. I might wait for the paperback so it's cheaper.

 

Leviathan (1995) – James Byron Huggins

No pity. No mercy. To the death.

Continuing my spring through Huggins’ bibliography brings me to the book that, back when I read some of his books in college, I thought was his best. And it remains a super-compelling thrill ride. The main character, Jackson Conner, is an electrical engineer who’s taken a super-secret government contracting job on an island off the coast of Iceland. It was a mistake to bring his wife and young child along however; it seems that the mysterious underground complex he’s in charge of handling the power for houses a government experiment in genetic manipulation that’s about to go awry. Now Conner, his family, a batch of scientists and a small group of soldiers find themselves trapped in an underground complex with a creature out of myth: a six-ton, fire-breathing, armor-plated killing machine, bred to do nothing but destroy. And then there’s the failsafe: if this creature isn’t killed or returned to hibernation within twenty-four hours, a nuclear device will vaporize everyone on the island. Huggins is self-consciously doing Beowulf here in some ways. One of the best characters here is an ex-priest in self-imposed exile on the island, struggling to regain his faith; his name is Thor, he’s six-foot-eight and he carries a battle-ax. As ex-priests do. Conner is also a really compelling character, precisely because he isn’t a trained soldier or a hero; he’s just a guy doing his best to keep his family alive in a situation he has no real facility for. What’s even more interesting is the way Huggins is able to use the fact that Conner is an electrical engineer in the story. Huggins once again writes with what seems to be a lot of expertise about Conner’s craft and makes it central in the efforts to defeat the murderous Leviathan. Conner’s wife is also a first for Huggins: a genuinely strong female character. He’s still primarily a guy who writes about guys, but he’s changed a bit. In A Wolf Story, there wasn’t a single female character that I recall; in The Reckoning, the only female character functioned as a damsel in distress. But Conner’s wife here is a computer genius that’s unapologetically presented as being far smarter than her husband and her emotional strength is unflagging. She serves an integral purpose in the story and doesn’t need to be rescued. There’s a lengthy section that deals with the complex’s computer system, which is an AI, of course, and the climax of that plot line is sure to have modern audiences, who know about computers, shrieking with laughter, but that doesn’t detract from the book’s strengths. At the end of the day, it’s visceral with intense action sequences, which get more and more extended as the book progresses until the last quarter of the book or so becomes one long extended chase/battle. It moves like a forest fire and purposely evokes the imagery and symbols of myth. It’s just rollickingly entertaining, a pulp novel that fulfills every goal of the genre: chills, thrills, laughs, pathos, good vs. evil in the form of a Viking priest vs. a fire-breathing dragon. That’s not enough? 4 stars.

tl;dr – battle- ax toting Viking priest vs. a genetically created dragon in a secret underground government complex; what high-octane action novel could ask for more? 4 stars.

 

The Quiet War by Paul McAuley

Twenty-third century Earth, ravaged by climate change, looks backwards to the holy ideal of a pre-industrial Eden. Political power has been grabbed by a few powerful families and their green saints. Millions of people are imprisoned in teeming cities; millions more labour on Pharaonic projects to rebuild ruined ecosystems. On the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the Outers, descendants of refugees from Earth's repressive regimes, have constructed a wild variety of self-sufficient cities and settlements: scientific utopias crammed with exuberant creations of the genetic arts; the last outposts of every kind of democratic tradition.
The fragile detente between the Outer cities and the dynasties of Earth is threatened by the ambitions of the rising generation of Outers, who want to break free of their cosy, inward-looking pocket paradises, colonise the rest of the Solar System, and drive human evolution in a hundred new directions. On Earth, many demand pre-emptive action against the Outers before it's too late; others want to exploit the talents of their scientists and gene wizards. Amid campaigns for peace and reconciliation, political machinations, crude displays of military might, and espionage by cunningly wrought agents, the two branches of humanity edge towards war . . .

 

Finished reading The Dinosaur Lords (boobs and dinosaurs+everything=better ) and started reading Flag in Exile by David Weber.

 

Avempartha by Michael J. Sullivan

 

Maybe it's a sign that my pop culture cord has a short in it now that I'm in my 40s, but I was caught completely off guard by this release. I'd heard about the play (thanks mostly to the casting hullabaloo), but had no idea they were releasing it in book form (a script of the play as you said, not a novelization) until a day or two ago. I became a Potter fanatic for about a minute back in the Summer of '01 when I ended up binge-reading the then four novels in the series. I bought Potter merch, the whole deal. The first movie killed a little of my enthusiasm, and then Order of the Phoenix, which I loathed, kinda put the fire out for good. I still read the final two novels (slight improvements over OOTP in my opinion, but just so), but I never rediscovered the, um, magic. Still want to do a re-read of the saga some day. The books are a pastiche of others works (Not uncommon, right? As the saying goes "It's all been done"), but boy Rowling does an amazing job of world building. No matter how fantastical it gets, that world always felt real to me. The stakes high. Bravo to Ms. Rowling for that, and for doubtlessly helping to instill a love of reading in literally millions of children worldwide.

I work at a grocery store and as I was leaving this morning the Drug/GM guy was getting the copies of "The Cursed Child" out and merchandising them around the store. Be curious to see how this one sells. I'm convinced HP has reached that pantheon like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and that the heart of its fandom still beats strong.

As for me...

Finished reading; Transformers: Exodus by Alexander C. Irvine. An origin story of Optimus Prime, Megatron and the G1 TF's. Basically all the stuff that happens before the TF's strike out for the stars and land on Earth. There's good stuff in there, but Irvine drones on and on about various campaigns at the expense of character and world building; both of which feel short-changed. - 6/10

About to begin; Armada by Ernest Cline. Less favorably reviewed than his Ready Player One. A novel I tried to read no fewer than three times before giving up. Plot synopsis for Armada reads an awful lot of The Last Starfighter, a movie I love. We'll see.

 

I saw the Potter book and leafed through it at the local Sainsburys supermarket this morning when I grocery shopped. Price here in the UK is £20 and I didn't see any extras like photos. There might have been some b&w illustrations but I didn't see any in my quick leafing through. I think I'll wait on the pb (or at least tpb) since I can't see paying that much for it. However, if the local bookstores have it discounted I might reconsider. Sainsburys wanted full price.

On a related note the stage show got very good reviews in today's papers.

 

The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories. Like the Big Book of Pulps, it's a lovingly curated collection of prime detective pulp edited by Otto Penzler. It has a narrower focus, though; while the Big Book of Pulps' unstated aim was to represent the entire sweep of detective pulp, its many subgenres and styles, here Penzler pulls only from Black Mask, the most famous and highest-quality of the pulps, with a goal of highlighting the best of the genre and collecting stories that have not been reprinted or collected elsewhere. There's still a ton of variety, from hardboiled to humorous, and a handful of the stories in the eleven-hundred-page collection stray outside the strict boundaries of detective fiction itself, being more suspense or adventure. You've got a Miami private eye hunting treasure, a doctor in Hawaii called on to foil a wartime Japanese plot, a naval officer solving a murder in the Panama Canal Zone, an old, bloody mystery in rural Tennessee emanating from an abandoned resort, an Armenian oriental rug dealer getting involved with a femme fatale and a bloodstained carpet, an adventure starring the Filipino detective Jo Gar that takes him from Manila to San Francisco in search of diamond thieves, the aerial derring-do of Captain Jerry Frost of the Texas Air Rangers taking on a gang of train thieves, a lawyer investigating the spooky death of his doctor friend that seems to be tied up with a creepy skeleton, a locked-room murder mystery revolving around a valuable antique, the first-ever hardboiled recurring character (in the second story ever from the originator of the hardboiled detective style) taking on the Klan, murder over a boxing fix, a Huck-Finn-esque youth in a horror-tinged story caught up in a small-town murder mystery, the one and only female writer for Black Mask giving us a female Texas Ranger operating across the border, and the original serial version of The Maltese Falcon, before it was edited into book form. There's just so much to like, and the quality level is uniformly high. A top-notch collection.

 

Star Wars: Tales from the Empire

 

Finished Maul Lockdown. It was a fun read and a bit more complex than I expected it to be. I don't really remember much of what happened in Darth Plagueis so I might reread it at some point to see how this tied in with it.

Now reading Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card. After taking a break from the Ender books for a while I started reading this one. Bean is an interesting character so I'm curious about what happens to him.