Amph What book are you reading right now?

Star Wars From A Certain Point of View

 

I read it years ago, but yes, I loved it too. Even if it’s just a dialogue. I actually posted some fan art of it in the past month:

 

Oh, interesting. Did they actually mention a cat in the story? I don't recall that, but it's been a while since I've read it also.



Shadows on the Rock (1931) – Willa Cather

This book follows the lives of various characters in a French colony in Quebec in the late 1690s. This book is essentially plotless, as a lot of Cather’s books are, but this one feels, in some weird ways, even more plotless than usual. Whereas something like Death Comes for the Archbishop is very much a book without much in the way of narrative drive, it does at least feel that each section has a narrative. In this book, even the individual sections, of which there are six, seem to just be character sketches and random events. I would say that this feels the least finished of all of Cather’s novels. There are no real character arcs in my opinion and this doesn’t even have the visceral beautiful prose of My Antonia, the Cather book this most reminded me of. Like that book, it’s very disconnected and doesn’t seem to have a clear focus. But whereas My Antonia had a masterful sense of time, place and atmosphere, Shadows on the Rock is mostly a bland affair. Only a few of the characters really came to life for me. Count de Frontenac was the most interesting, I’d say; he’s the ruler of the colony, but he’s a man with few of the foibles of nobility. There’s a wonderful section that revolves around the central family of the story spending Christmas together. But, by and large, this one just doesn’t add up to much and I found myself pretty lukewarm on it. 2 ½ stars.

tl;dr – surprisingly bland prose & overly meandering, this Cather novel feels surprisingly unfinished, though there are some nice sections. 2 ½ stars.

 

Just finished SW: Boba Fett, The Fight To Survive.
A friend loaned this book to me and I read it in one session. As a huge fan of Attack of the Clones, I really enjoyed this book. It contains excellent details and insights into Boba's relationship with his father Jango Fett, Zam Wesell, and the library droid on Kamino known as Whrr. Taun-We gets a couple scenes too. The Count Dooku scenes are great and the new characters introduced after the battle of Geonosis are interesting. Bonus points for including Aurra Sing near the end.

 

There is a series of 'young Boba' books - that is the first. They were pretty good but the final one seemed a bit rushed to me.

 

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion-An episode guide to the series.

 

I read that one cover to cover. Lots of great background info and interesting thoughts on might-have-beens.

 

I also have the Next Generation and Voyager companions. I used to have the Original Series one, but I lost that one awhile ago.

 

Forgive me I read this as Madea

 

No, that's unforgivable.

 

I actually do the opposite, so I guess I assume Tyler Perry's movies have lots of weird revenge plots and golden fleece rather than boring moralizing.

 

Tyler Perry movies are way more interesting than I’ve been led to believe?

 

We continue unabated with a triple threat: Tales from the Perilous Realm (which, depending on the edition you buy, may or may not include Roverandom), Beren and Lúthien, and, in a bit of a shift, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, none of which I've read before. I guess I also technically made my traditional post-Silmarillion jaunt through the extremely brief Bilbo's Last Song, but more on that weirdness after the important stuff.

Tales: Being a collection of fairy tales with no real central theme, this is pretty tonally uneven, but generally a pleasant read. It starts off light - Roverandom is about a toy dog having adventures, "Farmer Giles of Ham" is... so self-aware I was actually taken aback, not gonna lie, and of course The Adventures of Tom Bombadil features the triumphant return of everyone's favorite character from The Lord of the Rings, and I guess some other stuff about existentially ruminating dreams and monsters but who gives a hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo! ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow! about that? No one cool, that's who. Tom Bombadil is cool. This is canon.



Canon.

Afterwards we take a bit of a downer note, as the rest of the book consists of sadder short stories, allegories for the creative process ("Leaf by Niggle" is the better of the two, for the record) and an oddly defensive essay about why fairy tales are extremely important, you guys, just the most meaningful things, you don't understand, I didn't waste my life! I didn't!

Overall I'd rate it a collection of interesting curios. I'm not sure I've gained a fascinating new insight into Tolkien's corpus, but it's nice to polish off the stuff he was alive for.

Beren and Lúthien: A disclaimer here (and for the next entry) that I'm not done yet, but currently this is serving me as a warm-up for an Unfinished Tales reread and an unprecedented assault on my part on the History of Middle-Earth, and... well, it's exactly what you'd expect from that clause. A collection of interesting half-finished pieces, rather than a polished book the way Children of Húrin was, I suspect this is CT's attempt to bridge the gap between casual Middle-Earth dorks and hardcore Tolkienaniacs (with the prayers! and the vitamins! and the manuscripts! and the 22 inch pythons of fragmentary extracts! Cling to the largest back catalog in the world, brother, and we'll backstroke to- *ahem*) by giving the former a taste of what they're missing out on. Consequently we get more detail than The Silmarillion (but still less than I actually want), but I actually like this one a bit better than Húrin. The Lay extracts give it more of a feeling of a grand compilation of Eddas in the viking tradition, thus I end up willing to forgive the gaps in description a bit more. I'm left wondering whether the upcoming Fall of Gondolin will look more like this one, or Húrin. Should be fun regardless! Unless it isn't! But that's unlikely because it's got Maeglin! Maeglin!



Maeglin!

The Letters: Did you ever want hot takes from a slightly stuffy Catholic Englishman who wrote some books you like? No? Too bad, the takes are here, my dudes. To assuage the pain he also gives scraps of insight into the creative process, and what he's planning to write, or had planned, or thought he might have planned. One ugly(?) consequence of the insights here is more... shall we say, Platonically minded fans than I tend to quote-mine these suckers for "canonical" insights, which is probably not the intent, folks. Sometimes you say things! And then you change your mind! And you can do that because it's made up! And yet.

Ah well, I enjoy a good correspondence record, since you can gleam a lot about where an author's head was at from them, and this is certainly one of those. It's a nice break from the fiction.

Bilbo's Last Song: Okay, I've read this little story book many times now, so I'm qualified to ask: who the hell is this aimed at? Obviously the poem was just something Tolkien wrote in his old age - I mean the book. It's illustrated like a kid's story - is it a picture book about metaphorical death? But then why the extensive explanations of what the illustrations mean? Are we targeting the kids who like Lord of the Rings and probably don't want to be caught dead with a picture book? Adults with a weird fascination for picture books? If it's exclusively aimed at suckers (like me) who will read any old thing with Tolkien's name on it, why bother with the gorgeous picture book illustrations? Who asked for this?!

 

Plato's Republic

It's so interesting and yet....a day in and I may need a mental break in another day or two.It's a slow, trudging read, despite how interesting it is.

 

The President's Plane is Missing by Robert Serling (Rod Serling's big brother). Written in 1967, parts of it are dated, but it is still a very well-written political mystery tale. And the aviation parts are very detailed and completely accurate. The titular president's plane is a fictional design, but still totally realistic. Do you know how rare that is in popular fiction of any era?

 

Probably about as common as high accuracy astronaut fiction, which is to say not very common all.

 

Highly relevant to the direction this thread is taking: The Shaping of Middle-earth. I'm now one-third done with The History of Middle-earth, and I'm loving it. This book brings us up to around the time of the writing of The Hobbit (on which it offers little insight, unfortunately), presenting Tolkien's turn toward writing more summarized overviews of his legendarium rather than the full-length tales of the Lost Tales and epic poems. There's the Sketch of the Mythology, a summary written for publishers to provide context for the poems, the first stab at a Silmarillion-style history, an essay on the geography and cosmology of Arda accompanied by maps, and a set of annals in which Tolkien tries to work out the internal chronology of the First Age. It's all very interesting, and even in this summary form, we see a lot of new ideas bubbling to the surface for the first time -- most notably, to my relief, Tolkien finally simplifying and paying off his narrative by having Earendel successfully petition the Valar for their intercession, rather than the convoluted and unsatisfying narrative that somehow persisted for years and years in which the entire history of his tales builds up to Earendel, who reaches Valinor . . . only to find it's empty and the Elves and "sons of the Valar" have already left to kick Morgoth's ass on Ulmo's initiative, and then just sort of wanders pointlessly through many, many various permutations of his and Elwing's fate. There are also some details more fully explored here that would ultimately be more obscured -- the Silmarillion is rather vague about the idea of Morgoth's ultimate return for a final battle in the far future, but here that idea is pretty clearly fleshed out, with the awesome detail that it will ultimately be Turin Turambar who kills him with Gurthang (which is here still named Gurtholfin -- there's nothing quite like the relief of a "final" name-form emerging so you can stop having to do the mental math of what name equals what -- I'm going to be so happy when Finarfin emerges and Finrod and Felagund can go back to being the same person).

Also there are translations by Tolkien of his work into Old English. You know, for those of you who read Old English.

 

If you want Hobbit insights I think you’re stuck with The Annotated Hobbit and The History of The Hobbit; or, at least, those are the ones I know of.

Love my black blade wielding unlucky strong son.

 

I'm listening to "Lost Stars" by Claudia Gray. Really engaging characters in Ciena and Thane and their fellow cadets; like particularly Nash and Jude and Kendy. Ved is too full of himself

 

"Terrible Lizard" about the birth of geology and paleontology.

Though yesterday I grabbed a free stack of classics at the "Bring a Book, get a book" swap at the local forest preserve. It's a great deal. You can bring as many old books as you want and take as many in return. It's a huge hit every year.

 

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

 

Just finished; Persepolis Rising by James S.A. Corey. Seven books in even the best series can start to get stale, but the authors continue to keep things fresh and take the story in unexpected places. The endgame is clearly afoot and where things ultimately end up is anybody's guess. Can't ask for more than that. - 8/10

About to begin; Gonna wait one more book before diving back into the Gray Man series (Partially because I want to let it breath a bit more. Partially because I'm waiting for book #2 to arrive). I've got a couple of fantasy series here, but I'm waiting until I'm in the right mood for a fantasy adventure. So Project 731 by Jeremy Robinson (Book #3 in his fun Kaiju series) it is.

 

I'm doing a chronological read-through of Legends books, comics, and some other media (occasional short stories, young reader books, and video games, in cases where I have reasonable access to them). I'm blogging about them here. My complete list of what I'm reading and how I'm breaking them down is here. I'm also interspersing New Canon stories throughout, so I can keep on top it.

I'm about to finish a "Prelude to Episode I" series, and as such I'm currently reading Darth Plagueis by James Luceno. I have thoughts about Plagueis, but the novel is amazing so far (I've read it before, but re-reading it along with other prelude to Episode I stories is an interesting experience).

 

I did that a while ago. It took me around two years to finish.

 

Mine will take much longer than that. Partially because I'm a slow reader. Partially because I'm including comics and video games, and I really am trying to consume one at a time (with exceptions; I played Starfighter while reading some Darth Maul books, but I waited to read SWTOR novels until I'd finished watching Let's Play series of KOTOR I and II).