What are you reading now?

['Press Start']

Bruce Lee - Wisdom for the way.

A small hardback full of Bruce's quote on Martial Arts and philosophy. Also contains great photos and drawings by Bruce. Brilliant little book if you like small quotes to ponder or philosophy in general.


- Running water never grows stale. So you just have to 'keep on flowing'.

[QualityChimp]

"It is like a finger pointing away to the moon... "

I've just finished Outpost, which was suggested by a very blue monkey a few pages back.

I read it at the same time as a girl at work and we both loved it, so much so that she's watched both 28 Days and Weeks Later to get more zombie fixes!

Zombies, infection and remote Polar bases may make you think of The Thing or various undead stories, but this one manages to stay unique.

The setting, events and characters are all great and very different to anything that's gone before.

I really enjoyed it and can heartily recommend it to fans of sci-fi with a hint of horror and action.

[charlesr]

- Running water never grows stale. So you just have to 'keep on flowing.'[/I]

That pic was from a blocked site list, so I removed it. Wondered why this page was giving me warning messages

[NW2013]

Just started reading The Windup Girl but I'm finding it heavy going to be honest. It's set in a future where corporations control access to food and other foodstuffs are subject to disease, etc. It's almost a bit steampunk-y because power is limited and a lot of power is generated manually, i.e. treadles on computers. I'm hoping it gets better. I only got it because I was looking for something with robots/cyborgs in it but couldn't really find anything.

Read Neurolink (also known as The Coin Giver) last weekend and I enjoyed that and also read Jeff Noon's Vurt which was a lot of fun too.

['Press Start']

That pic was from a blocked site list, so I removed it. Wondered why this page was giving me warning messages

Opps. Sorry. I take this thread is okay with pictures? I realise I shouldn't just post the picture of the book but write a little something about it.

[charlesr]

Yeah, pics are fine, but my virus scanner has blocked the site that was hosting the pics completely.

[JazzFunk]

Just done Ballard's Crash and got about a third of the way into Stephen King's Thinner. Didn't like Crash, not at all. Sterile, boring, obviously *technically* fantastically written but I just don't like Ballard's 'way' at all (I felt the same way about High Rise). Lots of blood and sperm in there but nothing else, it's just a massive, soulless, repetitive void (which seems to be part of the book's point), and I doubt I'll bother with any of his other stuff now, he's carved his own autistic niche and it glistens quite nicely but is so damn cold to the touch, brrrr. Much preferring Thinner, despite how old-skool and conventional it is, it's like a little log fire and I haven't read any King in over 20 years.

[QualityChimp]

How did you find Thinner, JazzyJeff?

I've been listening to the audiobook whilst driving around and finished it yesterday.

I really enjoyed it and thought it was a well-crafted little tale, maybe like a fleshed-out Tales from the Crypt or of the Unexpected.

I was looking forward to a happy resolution and then I realised it was a Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman, the pseudonym he used to write his really dark stories, so I got ready for an unhappy ending!

The audiobook was read by Joe Mantegna, whom I know best as mob boss, Fat Tony in The Simpsons, so although his mobster voice was convincing, I couldn't help thinking of a yellow Mafioso.

I also recently finished reading All Fun And Games Until Somebody Loses An Eye by Christopher Brookmyre, which I stumbled across whilst reading this article about the strange history of the Die Hard movies.

Jane Fleming, a 46-year-old housewife and grandmother, lives a quiet life in suburban East Kilbride. All that changes when her son, Ross, who works in the arms industry, is forced into hiding when his latest research attracts unwanted attention. Aided by the mysterious Bett, Jane must confront drug dealers, assassins and ruthless arms dealers in order to save her son.

It's total escapism and feels like The Long Kiss Goodnight if it was based around a Scottish housewife, who really isn't a spy, but steps up when her family comes under attack.

There are some nice action sequences and plenty of twists along the way, but one of my favourite bits was an escape plan that involved putting on Die Hard really loud and using the gunfire and to hide their movements.

[JazzFunk]

Soz 4 late rply m8! Ummm....I'm ashamed to say I never got any further with Thinner, though I have a week of nights coming up and am determined to plow through it then, 'cos I was totally hooked the moment the

->Open Spoiler<-

other guy starts getting covered in scales, I love weird **** about people turning into other things, like The Fly and that modern Outer Limits episode where that dude from The Waltons starts to turn into an amphibian/a fish, after ingesting nanobots.

Actually, that sounds f*cking awesome, am gonna download that episode!!!!

So, yeah, it's a truly fun book I'll eventually finish, Joe Mantegna sounds like a cool choice for the audiobook (speaking of which, you reminded me I got the entire "I Partridge" audiobook on the PC, it's about time I listened to it.)

[wicky]

At the start of the year I decided to keep a spreadsheet of which films I have watched and which books I have read.

This year I have read a total of 22 books and really enjoyed 95% of them. I read mostly fantasy books (which is new for me) which included the game of thrones series, most of the works of Brandon Sanderson, a couple of Gemmell books and the Renshai trilogy by Mickey Zucker Reichart.

It's too tough to pick a favourite of the year, so many of them were excellent. However the worst by far was Soul Identity by Dennis Batchelder (got it free with my kobo)

[mekanor]

Just finished reading this:



I didn't really know what to expect going into this, but I ended up absolutely loving it! I'd rank it as one of the best Star Wars novels I've read. A Sith mining ship crashes on an unknown planet devoid of metal meaning they're unable to repair their ship or build a new one. It's a bunch of short storys spread over a few thousand years. There's so much potential in the setting. No metal means it's basically medieval star wars. I didn't expect to like it anywhere near as much as I did so it was a nice surprise.

I've now started reading this:


Not sure if I'll be able to get into it as I'm finding the old english quite a chore to read. I've only just started so it may just take a bit of getting used to, but at the moment it feels like I'm missing half of the meaning. I'm pretty keen to read it though so I'll persist for a bit.

[redstar_dan]

I am reading Rama 2 currently, pretty much just started.
I loved Rendezvous with Rama.

[Charlie]

I couldn't read Paradise Lost either. Just couldn't get my silly head around the language. Pity.

Currently reading:



This fascinating book charts the relationship between Mark Rowlands, a rootless
philosopher, and Brenin, his well-traveled wolf. After acquiring Brenin as a
cub, it quickly became apparent that Breinin was never to be left alone, as the
consequences to Mark?s house and its contents were dire. As a result, Brenin and
Mark went everywhere together?from classroom lecture to Ireland, England, and
France. More than just an exotic pet, Brenin exerted an immense influence on
Rowlands as both a person, and, strangely enough, as a philosopher, leading him
to re-evaluate his attitude to love, happiness, nature and death. By turns funny
(what do you do when your wolf eats your air-conditioning unit?) and poignant,
this life-affirming book will make you reappraise what it means to be human.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Strange book. At times interesting and insightful, at times plain dull. The author, a 'professional' philosopher (whatever that is) states early on in the book that he doesn't enjoy hearing people talk about their lives as he finds it dull (something I tend to agree with) but then goes on to, often unnecessarily, talk about his life quite a bit in the book. Not got very far into it yet but so far the wolf he lives with seems the smarter animal, and definitely the more interesting. I dunno, all these modern philosophers are too wooly for my liking, focusing on semi-nonsense, avoiding the essence.

[QualityChimp]

I also recently finished reading All Fun And Games Until Somebody Loses An Eye by Christopher Brookmyre, which I stumbled across whilst reading this article about the strange history of the Die Hard movies.

I really enjoyed this book, so I thought I'd check out another of his titles, Not The End Of The World.

The synopsis sounds great:
The crew of an oceanic research vessel goes missing in the Pacific along with their mini-submarine. An evangelical media star holds a rally next door to a convention in LA devoted to 'nubile' cinematic entertainment. The cops know there's going to be trouble and they are not disappointed. What they didn't foresee was the presence in their state of a Glaswegian photographer with an indecipherable accent and a strong dislike of hypocrisy, or of a terrorist who seems to have access to plutonium as well as Semtex.

However, I really didn't enjoy the book at all. I struggled to finish as it was boring and preachy. It took about 3 attempts and only a sense of completion drove me to finish it off.

There's a great set up with the Marie Celeste-style boat, but nothing happened for nearly half the book. I looked and it was 49% through before the plot picked up again. It spends ages dwelling on child cruelty, paedophilia and incest and explaining it must be the Catholic upbringing that causes it.

There are two main problems - the author, Christopher Brookmyre, hates religion, especially Catholicism. That's fine, each to their own. I knew he had a beef when he touched upon the subject in Fun And Games, but here he spends about half the book preaching about how evil religion is. I don't understand why he thought writing a massive anti-religious rant in the middle of a crime thriller would be a riveting read. It isn't. It's just as boring listening to an anti-religion rant as it would be listening to a dusty old sermon.

The second problem is that the protagonist is clearly supposed to be him. A lanky Scot in America that is sarcastic and better than everybody else around him. *yawn*

It doesn't surprise me to find he's the President of the Humanist Society of Scotland who's objective is "to represent the views of people in Scotland who wish to lead good and worthwhile lives guided by reason and compassion rather than religion or superstition".

He sounds like Richard Dawkins, who was interesting at first, but he's a bit of a one-trick anti-God pony that's now turned to writing a book for kids that explains that everything from Aztecs to aliens is all bollocks, so don't bother having any imagination because you live and then you die.
Sweet dreams, my prince.

I'd rather read David Icke banging on about the Reptilian Brotherhood because at least it shows a little bit of imagination and his bonkers ranting is amusing!

So, yeah. I didn't enjoy slogging my way through this boring, dragged out and preachy crime "thriller".
I was genuinely surprised how well received it is.

[Guts]

No metal means it's basically medieval star wars.

Wouldn't "no metal" mean "Stone Age Star Wars"?