Amph What book are you reading right now?

PFIN5

Finance class

 

Fiction - Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride.
Nonfiction - Nail Your Novel: Plots With Drama, Depth, and Heart by Roz Morris.

 

I read some of those, but lost interest after a while. Same with his Honor Harrington books. If he doesn't get an editor to sort the wheat from the chaff, I wish Reader's Digest would have a go at his books. There's good stuff in there, but you have to wade through so much exposition and description and painfully unsubtle character building, after a while I just decide it's not worth it.

 

Yeah, I went off Honor Harrington when it seemed she was getting captured in every book. I just lost patience with the series.

 

Currently I'm reading David Drake's Lord of the Isles book 1 in paperback. Pretty good book

 

Vision of the Future

 

Thrawn+everything=better.

 

Yep. I can't wait for the Thrawn novel. Hopefully, it will be artistically done.

 

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

 

Same! I started screaming (and really irritated my husband) when I heard.

 

That is going to be the ultimate test for me. I'm not interested in getting any of the new stuff. My last SW bk is PROB going to have been Crucible. It's Thrawn though by none other then Tim himself so it ll be tuff on me. I just wonder how much old EU will make it in this? Will Outbound Flight in Chiss space till be his intro or something new? Decisions...

 

I made it just a bit past page 120, and dropped this boring ass book. It had a couple of interesting moments, but not enough to make me keep going.

Moving on to THE EXPANSE!

Babylon's Ashes by James Corey. I think I'm gonna need to review the previous books via a wiki since it's been awhile.

 

The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson

 

Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth by Max McCoy. 80 pages in and I have some quibbles, but it more or less feels like an Indy tale.

 

^ I keep hearing good things about that book; it's on my list.

 

Just finished Excession by Iain M. Banks. Excellent book, my favourite of the four Culture novels I've read. I did have to go back and re-read several chapters at various points, even making notes in some cases to remind myself which Mind belonged to which faction, but it was all worth it.

 

Excession was my first Culture book though when I got it I knew nothing of the Culture. Then I got a computer and happened upon Culture hooplah and starting reading the rest.

 

The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down, by Colin Woodard. An entertaining chronicle of the Nassau-based pirates of the Golden Age of Piracy, though I'm not convinced that Woodard's scholarship is particularly reliable. He also doesn't do a great job of making it easy for the reader to keep track of all the pirates, distinguishing which one Jennings and Hornigold and Vane and Bellamy are, again. It's okay, it's always fun reading about pirates, and it has some interesting insights, but it doesn't quite live up to its reputation.

 

That's a shame. It sounds like there's a lot of potential. When the history goes kaput in those types of books, it really ruins everything.
Hopefully you can find a better source!

 

I've been reading Anthony Horowitz' Alex Rider series. Great stuff, as usual, but I'm getting a little weary of his use of the SCORPIA organization. I stumbled across a listing on Amazon yesterday for a new AR novel set after Scorpia Rising (which was taglined "The Final Mission" on the HC dust jacket) that not only brings the organization back, but appears to undo the ending of SR. While I will be checking Never Say Die out once it's released (out of curiosity), I will do so through the library instead of buying it. SCORPIA was the central antagonist of two (now three) books and secondary antagonist of a fourth (Snakehead's villain was a member of SCORPIA's executive board.) As far as I'm concerned, Alex's days with MI6 ended after Scorpia Rising.

 

Marvel's Darth Vader: Shadows and Secrets trade paperback

 

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. Alternate reality shenanigans ahoy. Decent so far.

 

The Love of the Last Tycoon. F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished final novel, it was edited and published under the title The Last Tycoon after his death. This edition restores not only Fitzgerald's intended title at the time of his death, but, as edited by Matthew Bruccoli, is supposedly more representative of the unfinished state of the novel than the version Edmund Wilson polished for publication. It was a book in the middle of being written, with what was on the page set to undergo revision, so Bruccoli does a good job of underlining that unfinished nature through the presentation of working notes and outlines of how the novel was intended to play out (including the ways that vision changed over time). But none of that takes away from the fact that the prose on the page still sparkles and the structure never feels haphazard or provisional. It is, in short, a tremendously readable text. Better than that, it's a good story. It takes a little bit to get going, but Monroe Stahr, the intensely driven wunderkind movie studio boss, is a fascinating protagonist, a brilliant businessman and leader with a self-taught artistic sensibility who finds himself caught up in love with a woman who looks like his deceased wife. The dichotomy between Stahr's businesslike drive and pragmatism and his romanticism, both as a man and a creative professional, is striking and helps create a really memorable character, a truly heroic, though not flawless, titan of business. It also makes for a great insider's take on the studio system; behind the scenes takes on the studios are always fun, and this is no exception. I also liked the device of delivering the story through the perspective of Cecilia, the daughter of Stahr's rival bigshot within the studio who has a crush on Stahr, writing years after the events. It allows an interesting voice, while also playing with the idea that most of the details are obtained secondhand by Cecilia or simply interpolated, as she's very much on the sidelines of the actual story, moreso than Nick Carraway. I really like what Fitzgerald was going for. It's not quite on the level of his best work, but it's a great read. A real pity he wasn't able to finish it.

 

Got that one on my "To read" list. Heard nothing but good things about it. Unfortunately I hear Roland Emmerich is in talks to direct to movie adaptation.