Amph What book are you reading right now?

A Feast For Crows

Not sure if it's just me but I'm enjoying this less than the previous books. There's a lot of subplots in this one that I'm just not interested in. I'm hoping it picks up though.

 

I fist misread that as A Feast For Cows

 

The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
I've read Chandler before so I knew how good his prose was going to be going in.

 

She Lies in Wait (2019) – Gytha Lodge

A skeleton is discovered! It’s the body of a young-teen that went missing thirty years ago when she was on a camping trip with six of her friends! The case is reopened! Old memories are dredged up! You get the drill. This is a totally serviceable little genre novel. There’s nothing new here in terms of structure or characters or procedure or anything. None of the characters really come to life and the plot is pretty predictable. It’s written well enough to be entertaining and it does have one really suspenseful sequence near the end of the book involving a police officer tailing a drug dealer. The book does do one kind of interesting red herring which is that about half-way through the book, the main cop starts acting weird and suddenly the book makes you wonder if he, who is also from the area where the crime was committed thirty years ago, might be the killer. Unfortunately, the book spoils this by announcing at the very front of the novel that this is the first in a series about this cop, so that whole thing is kind of wasted since you know he’s not the killer. Anyway, doesn’t even really stand out among its genre; nothing particularly awful, but also just not worth your time. 2 ½ stars.

tl;dr – occasionally entertaining genre novel has nothing new to add to its cliched story and characters; not particularly bad, just not of any real interest. 2 ½ stars.

 

Yeah, but what if they did a series about a serial killer cop? The twist of every single book is that actually the cop did it!

 

Or what would be great is every book ended with the cop arresting the killer, but there was always just a little bit of doubt about whether the cop might have framed them.

 

Pretty sure that’s, like, 65% of all neo-noirs by volume. The rest are about solving the Black Dahlia case.

 

It's my least favorite of the five. The focus on characters I didn't care as much about is a big reason why. It also seemed to lack focus at times. When (if?) the series is completed, I want to do a re-read and see if it reads different as part of a whole than it did standing alone.

 

something something Septon Meribald something something @Darth Guy something something

 

Whenever Winds is announced I plan on doing a reread and I'm going to do the Boiled Leather AFFC/ADWD read, for curiosity's sake.

Amazing.

 

I should've known this existed. That might just be the way to go next time 'round.

 

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

 

The Romanovs, 1613-1918, by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Three hundred years of history is a lot to cover, even in a brick of a book. It takes a lot of talent to digest it all down. Sebag Montefiore doesn’t quite succeed.

He’s got a breezy, light style that focuses a lot on personality and anecdote, and he could easily write a good, gossipy biography of any of the nineteenth-century tsars, which is where most of the book’s focus is. But at this scale, the subject is too big for anecdote; ministers fly by in a blur, and Sebag Montefiore can’t marshal all of the political upheaval, the dynastic politics, the whirl of personalities, into an orderly narrative. The core personalities of each ruler stand out, but everything else is a bit of a haze.

And speaking of core personalities, it doesn’t help absorption into the book that the Romanovs are an unrelenting parade of maniacs, tyrants, buffoonish martinets, pious philanderers, idiots, and scoundrels. There are only two or three who are even halfway sympathetic. They’re interesting personalities, but the whole first two centuries are loathsome and the last century is human but rather pathetic.

I would be interested in reading Sebag Montefiore on a more constrained topic, and I already have another book from him in the stack (on an even broader topic, so we’ll see), but I didn’t love this book. The cover design is gorgeous, though; at least it’ll look great on my shelf.

 

IMO unfortunately he's just not very good. Like, he's best known for his work on Stalin, but nowadays you're better off reading Kotkin or Khlevniuk, and the same problem of being lesser than an alternate option seems to hold for every one of his nonfiction works I encounter. You mention that he might be better off with a Romanov one-off, but why read his Catherine the Great when Robert K. Massie is right the hell there? I've never figured out what the argument for the guy is.

 

I’ve actually got Massie’s Catherine in my pile.

Yeah, I doubt I’ll pick up anything from him aside from the history of Jerusalem I’ve already got.

 

Just finished; Act of Treason by Vince Flynn. This series runs like a finely tuned machine. I've got three Flynn penned entries left. I'll be curious to see how the books written by Kyle Mills (who took over the series when Flynn passed) measure up when I get there. - 8/10

Currently reading; Forever and a Day by Anthony Horowitz. This is a James Bond novel that acts as a sort of prequel to Casino Royale. Horowitz is best known for his Alex Rider series. I'm curious to see if he can do the spy thing on a more sophisticated, adult level.

 

just read Bill Shatner's latest book "Live Long and. . . "

it's a bunch of his thoughts on life etc.
He talks several times about how Leonard Nimoy cut him off in his final years and wouldn't talk to him, but he doesn't know why .

anyone know what that was about?

 

We're never going to know for sure, but it's probably not a coincidence that right around the time they stopped speaking Shatner used footage of Nimoy he filmed secretly(!) for a documentary after Nimoy explicitly turned said documentary down. It could be that's the whole of it, seeing as that's a pretty egregious breach of trust, or it could be Nimoy had finally had enough of the somewhat infamous Shatner BS.

 

That's a real shame.

Btw guys, you should check out this documentary I made where I follow this guy around who posts on a forum site about a terrible film series and just graduated grad school to become a doctor. It's a Truman Show type scenario, i.e. he doesn't know that I filmed him. I'll post it very shortly.

 

He does seem to fall out with just about everybody . In the book he talks about not ever really having close friends .

 

Read The Last Wish in about a day and a half. Great stuff. Really looking forward to the rest of the Witcher books. They're all among my favorite characters from the games, so I'm excited to see more from the books. I have a couple irons in the fire as far as other books that I'm reading. Mistborn and Words of Radiance are ongoing. I have such a big reading list its a bit daunting at times.

 

Yeah, I've heard him say that before Nimoy he'd never really had a traditional close friendship. Kinda makes their falling out that much sadder.

 

Great Expectations

 

Just started The President is Missing by James Patterson and Bill Clinton. I go hit and miss on Patterson - I like his NYPD Red and Michael Bennett series but can't get into his Private or Women's Murder Club ones. This is pretty good though - so far it's held my attention. It's a fairly quick read since it's pacy - I'm about halfway through.

 

I've read two of his most recent books, and I can say, without any doubt in my heart, that he is a hack and a sellout. Never again.