What are you reading?

[Jules]

Handstands in the dark. A very good book about a girl growing up in poverty in Scotland and how she made it through to become a author and comedian

[sir_drinks_alot]

Lolita it's not like the movies at all much better more of an Adult theme.

[Graham]

Can I just remind people posting in this thread that rather than just a single line listing what they're reading (or have just read), it would be useful if they could include a short review/ description of the work so others can get some idea of whether they'd like to read it, thanks

The Runes of the Earth - Stephen Donaldson

Continuing the story of "The Land" from the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, this new series features Linden Avery "The Chosen".

As before, some thousands of years have passed in The Land, but Lord Foul has, it seems, risen again and is threatening destruction again, this time by influencing Covenant's son and driving his ex-wife insane.

He also has arranged for Linden Avery's adopted son, who appears to have some link with The Land, to be kidnapped.

Linden Avery returns to The Land to discover that the Harauchi (the people who formed the Bloodguard) have assumed the position of "Masters" and decided that since Earthpower was the cause of so many of the problems of the past (eg the Desecration caused by Kevin Landwaster) that they should deny all knowledge of it to the people in the hope that this will prevent more destruction, but they fail to realise that Earthpower was also its salvation.

This book is more classic Donaldson, somewhat overblown and over-written (as usual a good editor could have trimmed out some of the excess, and just *how many* times can you use a word like "crepuscular"?!), but none the less his descriptions are vivid and striking and his characters thoughts and actions credible.

For those who have followed the stories of The Land, this one is worth reading.

(One minor chuckle, it's generally agreed that, in the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, "The One Tree" is a bit of a waste of space, achieving nothing much except increasing the page count. In the synopsis at the start of TRotE it gets about one paragraph...!! )

[Russ]

Digital Fortress by Dan Brown.

Not all that impressed, Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, Deception Point and DF all have the same structure and basic premise (which I won't do in to as it could possibly be a spoiler for some) and it's getting a bit boring now.

[Angua]

Thud by Terry Pratchett

Commander Vimes is under scrutiny again (for once it's not Vetinary) in this original 'Book of the Game' as the Battle of Koom Valley threatens to be held all over again, with the Watch somewhere in the middle. Hilarious as usual

[Graham]

I'm waiting for the copy of Thud I've got on order from the local library to come in...

[punky]

I've just finished "Adrian Mole And The Weapons Of Mass Destruction".

Its the latest Adrian Mole diary. He's about 35ish in this one, and set to the run up of the war in Iraq. Its nowhere near as riotously funny as its predescessors, but amusing in places. Its always an enjoyable read though. Its interesting how the characters have changed from being kids. Or rather not changed.

I'd give it 8/10. A must if you like those books.

[Graham]

Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets - Orson Scott Card.

The first is the story of the boy known only as "Bean", from his early childhood on the streets of Amsterdam to his view of the events that happen in Battle School from Ender's Game, but it's by no means just a re-write.

The second and third tell how he helps Peter Wiggin (Ender's older brother) in his quest to become Hegemon of Earth following the chaos that resulted after the end of the war against the Buggers.

IMO the continuing Ender stories (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide and Children of the Mind) weren't particularly good, going completely away from the original themes of Ender's Game but if you enjoyed EG then I strongly recommend these.

[Anonymouse]

Originally Posted by Graham

I've read The Portable Door which was pretty good, but I tried others of his like Snow White and the Seven Samurai which I just found tedious and unfunny.

My favourite Holt is Faust Among Equals. Has to be. The ongoing battle of wits (or lack thereof) between Lucky George and Kurt Lundqvist rivals anything Terry Pratchett's done. Phrases like 'up above the world so high, like a death ray in the sky' still have me in stitches. The idea that Menelaus didn't actually want Helen of Troy back because of her tendency to go insane with an American Express card and a Liberty catalogue, and that it took 10 years and the concentrated moral pressure of three continents to force him to take her back...totally irreverent.

Djinn Rummy, My Hero and Paint Your Dragon are pretty hysterical, too.

[Anonymouse]

Originally Posted by Graham

It's a bit different, isn't it?!

A 'bit' different? A BIT? The character of Rico was utterly butchered by Verhoeven! For a start, the Rico in the novel would never have done something as stupid as allowing a member of his squad to remove his helmet during a live fire exercise! At the very least, he would have called 'cease fire' to his squad. Nor would he have received only ten licks - it'd have been more like a court-martial followed by dishonourable discharge. There is no room for such incompetence in the Mobile Infantry.

And as for pulling that claw out of Dizzy - oh, please! That was easily the worst thing he could've done - if you come across someone who's been impaled, stabbed, whatever, you do NOT pull the damn thing out! At least while it's in there it's plugging the wound. But no, this moron yanks it out, doing even more damage to poor Dizzy's lungs as he does so, condemning her to an agonising death. If he'd left the claw in, she'd have had a chance.

Plus the future world portrayed gave most viewers the (utterly false) impression that the Federation was a military dictatorship. This is because the question of why only veterans were eligible to vote was glossed over. Verhoeven completely missed the whole point of the novel, viz. the difference between a civilian and a citizen.

And no way - no way - would a cap trooper barely out of boot camp have been promoted to lieutenant that fast. In fact, none of the squad had even finished their training; no matter how short of men the M.I. might have been, they would not send anyone into combat who wasn't qualified. Picture it: you're a veteran, you've survived multiple combat drops, and suddenly you're expected to babysit raw recruits who haven't even finished boot. Yeah. The cap troopers described in the novel would, under those circumstances, refuse to drop - and their CO would back them to the hilt. What would you do?

Having said all that, Sgt. Zim was spot on.


Anyway. What am I reading? Well, I read a lot. Heinlein (duh!), Clarke, Asimov, Pratchett, Holt, Rankin, Dick, Adams...my bedroom is more like a library. Over 700 books, collected over 30+ years. One author I recently discovered, though, totally took my breath away: Richard Morgan. His books so far are Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Market Forces and Woken Furies.

Altered Carbon - something of a cross between Total Recall, Neuromancer, Starship Troopers and more, but it's all original. For a first novel it's incredible. It'd do justice to an established writer. The premise is this:

It's the 26th Century. Science has advanced to the point that at birth, everyone has a cortical stack implanted at the base of the skull, which records not just your memories, but emotions, thoughts, personality - everything. The upshot is that if you have the money for it, you can live out your life, pay for a new, cloned body and be downloaded into it - you might be a 100-year-old man in a teenager's body. Or you can swap bodies at will - a standard practice for the rich is to have two or more clones and swap between them every few months, to save wear and tear. You can have custom-made bodies, or sleeves, as they're termed. Want to change sex, to find out how the other half lives? Not a problem - just have yourself downloaded into a sleeve of the opposite gender.

Not only that, you can, if you're very rich, have updates to backup copies of yourself broadcast to a storage facility every few hours - so even if someone torches your head off in an attempt to permanently kill you (termed Real Death, as opposed to the faux, impermanent death you experience if your stack is intact), all you lose is a few hours of your life.

It adds a new twist to the idea of a murder mystery, which the novel essentially is - namely that the person retaining a detective to investigate a murder is in fact the victim. In other words, he's saying 'Someone killed me. Find out who and why.' The mystery is deepened by the fact that there's no point in killing a man who's backed up - you can't kill him just by torching his stack; you'd have to deal with the storage facility, too. To do that, you've got to find it, and the kind of money this man has buys a lot of protection. Having found it, you've got to get in, and of course the highly paid and therefore generally unbribable security staff might have something to say about that.

So why kill him?

No hints. Read it. You'll love it. I can't recommend it highly enough, though it does get rather gruesome in places. Hardly surprising in a world where it's possible to torture someone to death several times, either physically or in virtual or both, and therefore there really are worse things than death...

There was a terrific joke in the novel, too; one character, a cop, wears a T-shirt saying 'You Have The Right To Remain Silent - Why Don't You Try It For A While?' I loved that so much I had Streetshirts put it on a T-shirt for me!

Broken Angels and Woken Furies are sequels (sort of; they deal with the same protagonist, one Takeshi Kovacs, ex-member of the feared Envoy Corps, but they don't follow on exactly); Market Forces is set in our near future, and speculates about the way things are going with multinational corporations. It's reminiscent of Rollerball (the original version, if you please).

In an earlier post, someone mentioned Ronan the Barbarian. Brilliant stuff. A female warrior, Tyson, throws three spears - one takes out a zombie, the other two hit double top in a dartboard. What does the bartender shout? "One Undead and eighty!", of course.

Tales From The White Hart - superb. My favourite Tale is definitely The Reluctant Orchid.

Hothouse - entertaining, but if the novel is set 2000 million years in the future, then the Sun has entered its red giant phase at least 2000 million years too early. And while the Moon and Earth are indeed exerting a gradual braking effect on each other (to the extent that 400 million years ago, the day was only 20 hours long), there won't be time for their rotation to be reduced to zero because the Sun will go nova before then.

[dilli-theclaw]

I am just about to finish Stephen King's Danse Macabre.

Which is an interesting view/lesson on the horror genre. Not just Kings work by the way, although he does explain the thoughts behind some of his books in it.

My dad just gave me my old copy of Have Spacesuit, will travel (Heinlein). Old but good (at least when I was 10)

p.s. the thing that I really missed from the film version of starship troopers was powered armour - I was looking forward to seeing that. Oh and we'd better not mention the evilness that was starship troopers 2

[Graham]

Originally Posted by Anonymouse

A 'bit' different? A BIT?

Calm down, you'll have a coronary!

The character of Rico was utterly butchered by Verhoeven! For a start, the Rico in the novel would never have done something as stupid as allowing a member of his squad to remove his helmet during a live fire exercise!

Well, there was a touch of irony in my comment, but yes, you're right.

And them walking along a valley in a nice neat column? No one on point, no one up high to scout the flanks and, "oh, look, falling rocks. We'll look at them suspiciously, but not do anything about it"

Or what about "before this girl even gets to pilot the Starship, she does some insanely dangerous manouevres around the space station, then when she gets into the pilot's chair she does some more really stupid stuff, but instead of her getting a new a$$hole ripped into her, it's 'wow, wasn't that well done'"!!

Or how about "let's send massed infantry onto this planet with no armour or air support and then be surprised when they get butchered".

And talking of which, massed infantry??? Where the hell were the armoured suits of the novel which allowed a squad of men to fight with the effectiveness of an armoured brigade?

Apart from a couple of bits of dialogue and good effects, the whole thing was a waste of time.

Anyway. What am I reading? Well, I read a lot. Heinlein (duh!), Clarke, Asimov, Pratchett, Holt, Rankin, Dick, Adams...my bedroom is more like a library. Over 700 books, collected over 30+ years.

I've only got about 300 at the moment, but I cleared out a lot of stuff that I hadn't read for ages and didn't want to read again when I moved.

A lot of it matches your list, apart from Holt and Rankin who I just can't get into as mentioned earlier in the thread.

One author I recently discovered, though, totally took my breath away: Richard Morgan. His books so far are Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Market Forces and Woken Furies.

Not heard of him, but the review sounds interesting.

Have you tried Allen Steele: Orbital Decay, Lunar Descent, Clarke County Space etc? I found his stuff very readable and good "hard" SF.

Not only that, you can, if you're very rich, have updates to backup copies of yourself broadcast to a storage facility every few hours - so even if someone torches your head off in an attempt to permanently kill you (termed Real Death, as opposed to the faux, impermanent death you experience if your stack is intact), all you lose is a few hours of your life.

Useful!

There was a terrific joke in the novel, too; one character, a cop, wears a T-shirt saying 'You Have The Right To Remain Silent - Why Don't You Try It For A While?'

Nice one!

[Russ]

Just finished 'State of Fear' by Michael Crichton. Just wait til another thread appears here on global warming!!

[Anonymouse]

Originally Posted by Graham

Or what about "before this girl even gets to pilot the Starship, she does some insanely dangerous manouevres around the space station, then when she gets into the pilot's chair she does some more really stupid stuff, but instead of her getting a new a$$hole ripped into her, it's 'wow, wasn't that well done'"!!

Yes, I forgot about that. Isn't it crazy that with all the gravimetric, motion and other sensors at their command, they could've avoided that asteroid just by looking out of the freakin' window a bit sooner?! What kind of pilot relies solely on instruments? A dead one, that's what! And who places a cadet at the helm of a multi-million-credit starship like the Rodger Young?

Or how about "let's send massed infantry onto this planet with no armour or air support and then be surprised when they get butchered".

Yes, that was stupid, given that they already knew the Arachnids tended to number in the tens of thousands at any given location. I don't even want to think about how many billions of them there must've been on Klendathu itself. Why didn't the Navy plaster the landing areas before the M.I. dropped?

On the other hand, Verhoeven occasionally has a macabre sense of humour. Remember Shujimi in the shower scene (Dina Meyer naked. Naked in a shower. Right in front of the guys. Ooh, those lucky b***ards!) saying his Harvard tuition was going to cost an arm and a leg? Well, on Klendathu it did - the Bugs ripped both off before dismembering him totally. Wheter the joke was intentional, I don't know.

Remember Total Recall? "You think this is the real Quaid?" The guards turn away - "It is!" and he handily blows them away. Or Richter having his arms ripped off by the elevator and falling back down the shaft - Quaid tosses the arms after him and calls, "See you at the party, Richter!"

We'll leave the glaring scientific inaccuracies of Total Recall's Mars for another time, I think...

[shredder]

I'm reading 'To Kill A Mocking Bird' at the moment, I haven't read it since school!