Amph What book are you reading right now?

I think I read Q-Squared too. "I told God not to make you."--Q to Picard.

 

Persuasion. The narcissistic and unappreciative relatives, the seemingly appealing suitor who turns out to thoroughly lack character, the comically superficial ladies and disengaged husbands, the extremely late-breaking romance -- much of it is quite typical Austen. But something does feel new in this one, as it follows a mature woman, one who, in her late twenties, is intelligent and self-possessed despite the indifferent treatment of her noxious father and sister, but who is struggling with regret and heartache for the fact that she's aging out of the likelihood of marriage and still finds herself uninterested in any man except her first love -- whom she turned down eight years ago on the advice of her family and a well-meaning but conservative family friend. Anne is a more mature, centered character than usual for Austen's protagonists, which offers a new insight that feels very personal for Austen, who was by this time an even older unmarried woman (who in fact died before it was published). There's a lot to like in the novel, which is fairly short, though I do wish we'd had more time spent developing the romance between Anne and Captain Wentworth, rather than leaving it all for a sudden wrap-up at the end. The cast of supporting characters is excellent, from Wentworth's warm naval friends (Austen's brother was a naval officer, and it's clear she feels quite strongly in favor of the profession), to the endlessly self-pitying younger sister, to the in-laws of that sister who treat Anne better than her own family, to her impossibly vain father, there are a lot of great personalities Austen gets to play with. It's a good note for Austen to go out on.

 

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. Now that I have the portfolio and DVD, I understand the psychological elements of these techniques a bit better.

 

Survivor's Quest by Timothy Zahn

 

Got two on the go - Hive 2 by Tim Curran and Insomnia by Stephen King. The latter is from around 2010-2011 but I missed it first time around. Note - you might not want to read this if you have insomnia. (I do and this will definitely be a daytime read). For the former, think The Thing with Lovecraftian entities. Hive is the first in the series and they should be read in order.

 

Legacy of the Force: Fury

 

Reading Thrawn by Timothy Zahn. And duh! Major duh! It's brill! If I wasn't a Thrawn fan before, LOL I would be now!

 

I never understood what people saw in those Thrawn books.

 

Lady Susan. Finishing up my run through Austen with this epistolary novella, an early work that appears last because the collection I'm reading is in publication order, and it was only published decades after her death. It's radically unlike any of her other work, not only because of the epistolary structure, but because it doesn't feature a successful romance. Rather, it's a viciously funny portrayal of a wicked, unscrupulous woman's machinations as they ensnare a man but ultimately fail. The closest thing to a heroine is Mrs. Vernon, the title character's sister-in-law and the sister of the seduced man, but she's largely a passive observer whose main role is to see through Lady Susan's efforts and report on them to her mother (and thereby the reader). The predominant character is a real villain. Lady Susan is a wonderfully evil character, a narcissistic, shameless, manipulative woman who seduces a married man, treats her daughter like garbage, boasts of her schemes to dupe others to her similarly shallow and wicked friend, openly hopes for others to die, and always considers herself a victim. She's gleefully selfish and immoral, boasting to her friend of how easily she's able to fool others with a virtuous act. She, of course, isn't allowed to succeed in her schemes against the credulous Reginald, but she gets pretty far and it takes a lot to finally break her spell. It's interesting to see Austen's evolution; she has a keen understanding of character but her voice is still developing. The epistolary format allows her to show off her strong understanding of how people communicate and the hypocrisies within our manners, but somewhat less well than her arch narrator's voice eventually did, as the letter format allows people to be almost too honest for her sarcastic, hypocrisy-exposing wit to really shine. What it does show off, though, is Austen's talent for irony and reverses, as characters' outlooks shift rapidly from one letter to another. You can see Austen growing increasingly constrained by the format over the course of the novella, with her eventually allowing her letter-writers to recount scenes full of dialogue to allow her to really develop scenes and get her characters across, and finally her detached, withering narrator appears at the end to wrap up the story when correspondence between the various parties ceases. It's a really fun work, a quick romp through a world of villainy that lets Austen indulge herself in a way totally unlike her other work while still showing many of the same concerns.

 

Lost a bet?


The Tombs of Anak (1987) – Frank E. Peretti

This is the third book in Peretti’s series about the Cooper family and it’s the best, at least of the first four; there was a long break after the first four and then Peretti ended up coming back quite a long time later with three more and one of those three is a possible contender for best of the series as well. In this book, an archaeological dig goes south when a young member of the expedition ventures deep into a hidden tomb and then disappears. The Coopers arrive to investigate and find themselves in a strange world. What happened to the man who disappeared? What makes that strange wailing sound at night? What of the tales of a six-fingered god that wreaks vengeance on all who disturb his tomb? This book is just pure pulp adventure-horror. It scared me so badly when I was a kid that I couldn’t finish it. I put it away and didn’t finish it for years when I first tried to read it. There are still a couple of sequences that work well even as an adult for the scares and this book is, on the whole, just the hardest and edgiest of the entire series. People actually die in this book in quite gruesome ways; two significant characters die at different points in this book and while the book is vague on the details, it hints well enough that things are pretty gruesome. There’s also a disturbing scene where the main characters discover a farm where the villain of the book has slaughtered an entire herd of goats by disemboweling them. There are still a few clunky moments, but this is Peretti’s most intense writing for children and the book has real energy, real suspense and, while it’s still present, the overt Christianity of the main characters is rendered in a less preachy way. This one’s just great fun. 4 stars.

tl;dr – third book in Cooper adventure series frightened me intensely as a child; as an adult, it’s still a high-energy, surprisingly dark & violent entry in the series and a load of fun. 4 stars.

 

Star Trek: New Frontier by Peter David.

Turns out the man who made me an Aquaman fan can write a pretty swell Trek book! It's not great literature or anything (the writing is competent but you get the feeling PAD wishes this were just a comic book) but it's a lot of soap opera fun, every character has a pretty distinctive personality, David's competent enough he doesn't need to reintroduce a character to me every five pages, it's a thoroughly enjoyable little read. That said, boy, he sure is working overtime to convince me Mackenzie Calhoun is extremely cool, and also a badass rebel, and also extremely cool and not like that square Picard, man, he's a total cowboy, in your face to the extreme! A half Joe Camel and a third Fonzarelli! It's a little tedious and/or 90s, but in the grand scheme of things I can forgive it.

This collection covers the first four novels, which are basically a complete story arc, and I might check out the rest some day, but once I finish this I'm probably taking a break to read... I dunno, something not Star Trek.

 

It's been mannnnny a year since I read a Trek. Maybe since TNG ended in 94 actually so I can't be sure but I THINK I had and read 3,4 & 10. I know I read Here There Be Dragons and really enjoyed that one. I think that was book 26? Damn that was long ago.

 

No, why? I wasn't aware that book was kind of on par with the Jedi Prince books or Black Fleet trilogy

 

You mean other than a great Star Wars villain?

 

I agree. It's a very good book, with almost a mystery feel to it during the first part of it (kind of like Murder on the Orient Express/Clue type of feel).

 

It could have been. But instead of showing me he is supposed to be better/smarter than Vader the author should have shown me and he didn't. I'd have to go look it up but there is a paragraph in there somewhere where the narration says Thrawn is way better than that silly old Vader. Then there's Luke lacking confidence to lift a thing with the Force to block a door 5 years after facing off against the 2 most powerful people in the galaxy, "Luuke", and so on.

 

It's kind of the book that broke the EU for me. It's essentially a long advertisement for Outbound Flight, Zahn's next book. It sets you up with, like you say, an interesting mystery and then it just ends without accomplishing anything and basically says, "Read Outbound Flight for the solution." It just perfectly encapsulated everything wrong with the EU: self-referential, endlessly eating its own tail with each new book mainly a marketing push for the next book. I stopped reading the EU altogether after that book and didn't go back for years. I did like the scene of Luke & Mara taking on the destroyer droid and basically almost getting beaten by it. I like my Jedi limited, not all-powerful, and that was a great sequence.

Now Black Fleet Crisis is a great trilogy, one of the most underappreciated of the entire EU. It's easily the most morally & emotionally complicated of the Bantam Era. Back when EU authors were encouraged to bring their own personality to the GFFA. This backfired a lot too; Hambly, anyone? But when it paid off, it was great.

 

Ah. Since I've read OF fairly recently, that this sets up for it doesn't bother me at all.

I liked maybe half of the personality of the boooks that came out between 1994 and 1996. A lot of Black Fleet grated on me, and I agree completely about Hambly. "New Rebellion" was one of the best from that era for me.

 

It

 

Agreed. Overall, I liked the Black Fleet Crisis. I re-read that one several times, as I recall. The part of that trilogy that I don't like in retrospect was Luke searching for his mother. The BFC was published in 1996/97, while Lucasfilm was producing Ep. I. There was no way that Luke was going to be allowed to learn anything about Padme before the PT came out. It was a good idea for a Luke-centred Star Wars trilogy, but I think they should have saved that idea for after the PT, when we actually could have had Luke and Leia standing in front of Padme's grave.

 

Exactly, and knowing that, the Luke stuff was incredibly frustrating.
Your plotline would have been super-mega-awesome.

I found the Lando stuff to be most tedious since it didn't seem to go anywhere and just dropped off the face of the EU save for a few mentions here and there. That, and the fact that each book was set up completely different threw me off. I found myself bored half the time while reading.

 

Yeah, the Lando subplot was the weakest part for me. Regarding Leia and the Yevetha, I was disappointed that the real traitor (Senator Praget, I believe) wasn't identified and "dealt" with.

 

Netherspace had interesting items but overall sucked.

Long ago I read Prelude to Foundation, then later Foundation and Earth. Despite it's impact on scifi and SW I never got around to reading the rest. Not sure I'll read them all, but I now start with the original Foundation.

 

Legacy of the Force: Revelation

 

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor

Story about a guy who's killed in a traffic accident and resurrected hundreds of years later as the A.I. for a space probe.

I listened to the audiobook read by Ray Porter, whom I think is one of the best audiobook narrators I've listened to. I'll recommend this with a few provisos: it's a bit anti-religion, it has no major female characters or romance, and it doesn't really end in a satisfying way, the story being continued in at least two sequels. If you can cope with those things it's a lot of fun.