Amph What book are you reading right now?

Actually I may be piggy-backing off of you. Someone had mentioned it a few pages back and after doing a little research I thought it sounded up my alley (and just the type of story I was in the mood for). I'm a little over a 1/3 of the way through and I'm probably going to follow it up w/Fearless, but then take a break from the series love or hate it. I think there's a level of diminishing returns when you binge-read a series straight through. A little time away from a fictional universe is a good thing IMO.

I'm just the opposite. I tend to zone out when I'm listening to an audiobook and it just becomes so much white noise. When I go the audio route it's non-fiction 9 times out of 10. For whatever reason I tend to stay more engaged with it when it's NF. Maybe because it feels more like talk radio or a podcast to me.

 

I'm on the final disc of Bloodline!

 

The Silent Service Virginia Class by H. Jay Riker.

The U.S.S. Virginia -- the first in the most technologically advanced new class of U.S. attack submarines -- sets sail, even as the Navy's high-tech submarine program falls under attack from a Congress that believes it unneeded. But a threat no one anticipated is gliding silently through dangerous waters. A rogue Kilo-class submarine built by a shadowy and powerful ally has become the latest weapon in al Qaeda's terrorist arsenal. The submarine's brutal strikes have created an explosive hostage situation in the Pacific ... and have left hundreds of people dead.
This new and stealthy terrorist threat must be eliminated before more innocent lives are lost. But the officers, crew, and Navy SEALs aboard the Virginia will face more than they anticipated in the turbulent waters of the South China Sea -- as one untried American sub races toward an explosive confrontation with an old, cunning, and ruthless enemy.

 

The Rainbow Comes and Goes by Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt. Started it while I was waiting in the doctor's office.

 

Underworld (1988) – Reginald Hill

Finally hit a pretty bad Dalziel & Pascoe novel. This is the tenth novel, I think, in the series and so far the series has never gotten down to average in my opinion. They’ve always been at least above average; some of them have been great novels. In this one, an old case gets raked up when a young man returns to his small mining community; years before his father committed suicide after being accused of murdering a young girl. He’s back to find out the truth. The mystery here is, I have to say, the simplest one of the entire series. And Pascoe’s crusading wife, Ellie, has a large part to play here, but I thought she was utterly mischaracterized. She’s always in the books, if only in a supporting role, and I appreciate the effort to have her take more of a leading role, but she was butchered beyond recognition; not in a thousand years could I believe that she’d do and say the things she does here. The best thing about the book is a side character who was also in Child’s Play, the previous novel, a police officer who’s retired after being passed up for a big promotion at the end of Child’s Play; he’s bitter, weary and cynical here and I really liked the way he was developed from being the pompous, often comic relief character in Child’s Play into a really sympathetic character in this one. But on the whole, I was really disappointed with this one. 1 ½ stars.

tl;dr – disappointing entry in typically solid detective series is marred by predictable plot & inconsistent characterization. 1 ½ stars.

More Book Reviews!

 

I just started(this morning) Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. It was alluded for a good look at the social history of that time period beyond the usual elites and big events, instead offering a nice on the ground floor look at how people lived, what childhood was like, what people thought of courtship, marriage, etc.

The late Tuchman was a great popular historian perhaps best known for her Pulitzer Prize winning narrative about WWI, The Guns Of August.

 

X-Wing: Starfighters of Adumar

 

Star Wars Galaxies: The Ruins of Dantooine

 

You don't need to read Ruins of Dantooine.

 

I started it yesterday and have 120 pages left. So yes

 

Almost certainly my least favorite SW novel. Makes me long for the days when I thought Children of the Jedi was as bad as it got. On the other hand, sometimes a mediocre book can be improved by stunning cover art!

 

Hm. I don't mind it much at all. I'd reread it anyway since I'm going through all my SW books in chronological order. I can't stand Jedi Trial and I dealt with that. I feel that JT was poorly written and RoD isn't. It's annoying how obvious the events of Dantooine are but the writing style itself doesn't grate on me.

The cover art is pretty great!

 

For Whom the Bell Tolls

 

ArchEnemy by Frank Beddor

I barely made it through the final book in The Looking-Glass Wars Trilogy. The first book was fairly interesting but the quality dropped considerably in the next two installments.


The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

This is one of the best mystery novels I have read. I believed Raymond Chandler was in a class by himself but Hammett deserves a place there, too.


Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis

The title character recounts his life story and his love for the childhood sweetheart who becomes his wife.

 

Out of the Silent Planet, by CS Lewis. This one has been on my ought-to-read-it list for ages, and now I can finally cross it off. Through out most of the book, I was struggling to stay awake; it seemed very much a product of 30's era scifi, more of a travelogue of an ordinary man stuck in a weird world than a real story. Then, close to the end, things started happening and it got a lot more interesting for me. I suspect this one was written mainly to set up the conflict to come in the rest of the trilogy. So, Perelandra, here I come!

 

OMG. That puts the stock art of many iconic characters they used for EU novels to shame.

 

Just started that myself the other day. At least I know it picks up eventually.

Amazing.

 

Just finished a re-read of God is not Great: How religion poisons everything by Christopher Hitchens. Nice takedown of the idiocy of religion.

Started on The Man With the Golden Typewriter - Ian Fleming's James Bond letters.

 

Room by Emma Donoghue. Interesting because the entire story is from the POV of a five year old boy.

 

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño. Short, intertwining biographical vinettes presented in a pseudo-encyclopedic fashion, centered around... well, Nazi literature in the Americas. The basic DNA of Savage Detectives would seem to originate here, at least in part, and like that book I'm enjoying both the narratives and the quirks of the presentation. This is considerably shorter than SD was, which is nice; I needed something brief for a change. My decision to read this book is going to seem odd in two paragraphs. That's the Bolaño difference, I guess.

Audiobooks:
Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris by Ian Kershaw. Fascinating, if necessarily a bit unpleasant, the first volume of Kershaw's two volume currently-definitive biography puts forward a structuralist case for the dictator's ascent (i.e. that it was sort of a perfect storm of man, moments, and ideological predispositions). Actually he posits a tremendous number of theories, probably too many to attempt listing, as is your ability when you're working on two thousand page volumes, I guess. A peculiar note on the audiobook presentation in particular - the narrator, Graeme Malcolm, sounds rather like Graham Chapman's "serious authority" voice, and consequently I found myself being continually disarmed such that each new description of stomach churning bigotry was... well, actually stomach churning.

The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams. For some reason I wanted a break before tackling another 40 ****ing hours of Hitlerpalooza so I opted for this influential if potentially boiler-plate fantasy book I've had my eye on, which has apparently gotten a new audiobook version. Not much to say at the moment save that there's kind of a Sword in the Stone vibe that, based on the foreword's repeated mentions about not making assumptions, probably won't stick.

 

Star Wars: Shattered Empire (Marvel TPB) by Greg Rucka
Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

 

Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Stover
Knights of the Old Republic by John Jackson Miller (again)
The Swords Trilogy (Corum #1-3) by Michael Moorcock
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alghieiri

 

MEG Nightstalkers by Steve Alten. This is the 5th MEG book. All of them are decent though the 2nd is the least of them complete with a James Bond villain.

 

Any good? I have the paperback on my Amazon list.

 

Well with this 5th book "reading right now" means I just read the blurb.

The first MEG book is pretty good.