Amph What book are you reading right now?

4th company of the Ultra Marines adventures prior to the return of their Primarch Robute Guilliman from 10,000 years in stasis.

Halfway through. So far they have put down a coup on a mining world that was influenced by foreign interests(the irony, this book was written 20 years ago) and prevented a reawakened Cthullu like star god called the night bringer from activating a super weapon.

Now in the 2nd story, 4th company alongside a company from thr Morticators chapter and Imperial Guard regiments from the planet Lorges and the famous Death Korps of Kreig are helping the people of Tarsis Ultra prepare for a invasion of the Tyranids(think the Zerg from Star craft or the aliens from Alien)

There is even a direct reference to the film Aliens in the novelm the Tyranids first destroy a village called Hadley's hope.

 

Just finished reading Reclamation, an Elite Dangerous book. I liked it a lot, and just because of the game, but it is a good story.

 

Star Wars: Light of the Jedi

 

Coming late to CJ Sansom's books about Matthew Shardlake, set during the reign of Henry VIII. Read the first one and liked it so I'm on to the second - Dark Fire. Just started it last night.

 

From a Certain Point of View (Star Wars)
Forty short pieces of fiction set during the original movie. Most of them were decent, a few were pretty good, a handful weren't to my taste at all.

 

I’m reading A Game of Thrones for the first time, you may have heard of it.

 

I've been stuck on page 523 of Book One for nearly 5 years!
@DarthIshyZ

 

Dave Barry Hits Below The Beltway (2001). Dave won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1988 for "his consistently effective use of humor as a device for presenting fresh insights into serious concerns," per Wiki. I would like to gain insights and find some humor from this book delving into US politics with a big fat shovel.

 

I'm currently reading SW: Galaxy's Edge: Black Spire. It's really good. SW novel about a recruitment effort on an out-of-the-way world.

 

Saint Magnus The Last Viking
by Susan Peek

 

Aurora Rising was a many layered murder mystery with rogue AI and space colonies and hi tech and a civilization at steak as a well meaning tyrant promises benign rule. It moves an a good pace despite a lot happening.

Back in 2012 I passed on this next book as the reviews said, in so many words, they wondered how a book could get published with such numerous and horrible editing errors. But recent conversation on the topic dropped solar sail and Shkadov Thrusters into my brain so I hunted it down...and failed and had to order it on Amazon.

Bowl Of Heaven by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven. A Shkadov Thruster is a stellar engine using a solar sail the size of say a third to half a Dyson sphere where the sail and the star can now be moved.....rrreeeaallll ssslllooowww. Apparently the authors speed things up by using the sail to create a beam of plasma coming off the star but acceleration to high velocity still takes millions of years.

 

TH1RTE3N by Richard K. Morgan

This is the second book by Morgan that I have read--- the first being The Steel Remains--- and, while I am only 100 pages in, I prefer this one to whatever the heck the other one was. Both books have a lot of big, fancy words and both love to use the f-word in dialogue and narration to the point where every character sounds alike, but, TH1RTE3N, has a much better premise and isn't hampered down by overly wordy world-building and unlikeable characters. There is one character who I am not a fan of, and the others are no prizes themselves, but they aren't the eye-rolling inducing types that the POV characters of The Steel Remains were, so that is the plus to end all pluses. It mostly takes place in the States, but the country itself is organized and controlled by different entities as befitting it's alt-futuristic nature. I appreciate the setting as it does color the characters differently from one another, in theory, it just needs to be better put into action.

 

No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black & Free in America (2019) – Darnell L. Moore

Darnell Moore was in on BLM on the ground floor, helping to organize the protests in Ferguson that really kickstarted the organization. Now he has a memoir and it’s worth reminding everyone before I get into things that I really don’t like the memoir as a genre. This book follows a pretty standard path for these kinds of books, starting with Moore’s childhood and youth in Camden, New Jersey, moving through his college years, crippling health problems, struggling with his sexuality & his faith, becoming a writer and politically active. Probably the most interesting section to me was the section that dealt with his time as a youth pastor, a real firebrand but also closeted, wrestling with the guilt of gay sexual encounters while trying to function as the ideal Respectable Christian Young Black Man. This wasn’t particularly well written; memoirs often tread the same ground as other memoirs, so it’s often down to the quality of the prose when it comes to which ones rise and which ones fall in my opinion. Moore unfortunately falls; it’s not terrible prose, just bland and kind of flat. But I do have to direct some criticism at Moore’s editors. I read a first edition and there have been others since, so hopefully these things have been fixed, but I was startled at just how many mistakes there were in the book. Sometimes it was the wrong word used, the old “their/there” kind of thing, mistakes a spell-checker wouldn’t catch. Other times it was just words misspelled. That can happen to anybody and it’s not really Moore’s fault. It's the fault of his publisher and his editors. And it’s too bad, but that kind of thing does impact my enjoyment of a book; for one thing, it just feels like the people publishing the book didn’t really care enough about it to be, well, careful. Anyway, I’m assuming all that is fixed in later editions; it had better be or Moore should seek publication elsewhere. Anyway, all in all, a pretty standard issue memoir with standard issue writing. 2 stars.

tl;dr – Moore has some interesting stories, but the prose is flat and bland; also, not Moore’s fault, but the editors let a lot of mistakes slip through. 2 stars.

 

Going to start SW: Light of the Jedi later this evening.

 

Finder by Suzanne Palmer
A spaceship repo-man's job is complicated by clones, mob turf wars, alien abductions, and mutants. It was interesting. There are enough dangling threads to make me suspect there will be sequels, but it can stand alone.

 

SW Light of the Jedi

 

I’ve only just started on A Clash of Kings, but I’ve been put off by the repetitious recap and need to reference the first book. There's also a long, unnecessary, uninteresting history lesson on the line of Targaryen kings. A clear drop off in quality at this point, just a lot of vanity.

 

Oh, hey, man, you’re reading ASOIAF for the first time? When you’re done, you should read Fire and Blo—

*actually reads your review*

Nvm.

 

About to start on the novelization of The Last Jedi

 

The Oxford History of the French Revolution, by William Doyle. The French Revolution is one of the most significant and influential events in modern history, but it can be tricky to grasp, with its huge cast of characters, its ever-shifting forms of government and endless coups, its kaleidoscope of oddly named factions, and its events named after made-up months that no longer exist (and scholarly disagreement about when it “ends”). Doyle offers a pretty solid guide to the Revolution here that explains, explores, and contextualizes it quite well, an excellent overview for anyone looking to get a handle on this chaotic, sprawling historical subject. He’s not a particularly lively writer, but he is generally clear and very readable. One thing I do wish he was better at is introducing characters. He generally does very little to explore individuals and get a handle on them and their personalities for the reader, and is too prone to just throwing names in there as if the reader is already familiar with them and what they stand for. Had Doyle taken the time to introduce his major players with more in the way of character sketches, it would be an outstanding book, but as is it’s merely very good.

 

I just picked up Gods, Graves And Scholars from a market.
A favourite book of my father when he got into a Tutankhamun obsession back in the 1970's.

Looking forward to stories on ancient Crete, Greece and Egypt.

 

I bought that on release day and it was good. Better than the film imo.

 

Oh my goodness, yes.
I still hate Poe (he’s even worse cause we get into his stupid arrogant head), but Rose makes sense! I like her! It covers more than a day after they leave! Luke isn’t caustic wonky, just a grumpy old man!

I loved the cinematography but did not like the story, so I’ve been waiting for at least half a year to feel ready to read this

 

So I did take a risk with this as I bought all 3 books before I read the first one but happily it paid off. There were indeed a few edited errors. For example one paragraph saying there were no deserts, then a couple of pages later it describes deserts. But nothing ruins the book. It is essentially a cat and mouse across a portion of the bowl as they learn about it along the way while a ship remains in orbit and another group is captured and studied. The aliens running this portion of the story are large dino-bird-like beings who go along an collect beings they come in contact with and tame them through discipline and genetic engineering into subservient caretakers of the bowl. As the book ends the captain of the orbiting ship wonders who is the captain of the bowl.

So moving on to book 2, Shipstar.