What are you reading now?

[Dirty Sanchez]

Just read Chris Hadfield 's auto bio for the third time. Great read and has some simple lessons in there. Just about to get a copy for my son, he's going through a tough time at the minute and I think this book could give him so focus/ perspective.

[QualityChimp]

Just read Chris Hadfield 's auto bio for the third time.

I love the bit where he gives Jill, the master of unlocking, a lockpick.

[Dogg Thang]

Rumour is that she was almost a Jill sandwich.

[QualityChimp]

Rumour is that she was almost a Jill sandwich.

Rule 34?

[Dogg Thang]

Wow, you're right. That's some fun stuff in my search history now. Will be interesting to see what google ads make of that one...

[Finsbury Girl]

Well gave up on Tommy Covenant - I really needed to be in the mood.

Just re-read the The Radix Tetrad books after a little while. I love Attanasio, he is one of my favourite authors around. Radix and Last Legends of Earth in particular stand out. George RR Martin could learn a thing or two from Attanasio about what to leave out, though for me I think Legends was strong enough for a trilogy. Such an epic, epic story - unbelievably good.

Also re-read The Chronicles of Hawklan by a really good low key British author, Roger Taylor. I've read all of his books and he is extremely underrated. Not as good as I remembered from my first read, but very good nonetheless.

As I am on a nostalgia trip, I believe I will read the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books again next. I'm loving kindle on my phone! The publisher Gateway has done the right thing, released a million awesome sci fi and fantasy novels cheap as. I don't mind double dipping on physical books I own @ 2.50 a pop.

[prinnysquad]

Reading Gravity by Tess Gerritsen. Blurb reads like a Quatermass story. Don't know what to make of it two chapters in. It's written in a very easy going style, I guess.

[QualityChimp]

I read it and really enjoyed it, Prin.

It's probably quite different from your last book, but I imagine you want something a little less bleak.
Mind you, being trapped in a space lab with a *something* is no barrel of laughs either!
I think Quatermass or Andromeda Strain in space is a good summary.

I've sought out more of her books after reading Gravity, I enjoyed it that much.

[prinnysquad]

It's very readable. It was recommended to me by my mother, of all people. However, she was responsible for my cultural influences during my youth, effectively turning me into a nerd, so I trusted her judgement and asked to borrow it. After your appraisal I'm a bit more confident about it :-)

[wicky]

Currently reading Uprooted by Naomi Novik, lovely tale so far (it is YA though for those put off by it). Lots of magic and good vs evil etc, feels very typical fantasy.

[QualityChimp]

Just re-listened to The Running Man.

It was especially poignant as half-way through listening to the far-fetched story of a man being hunted and killed on live television, in real life the two Virginia journalists were shot dead on live television and the footage splashed everywhere.

The story is fantastic, with very little to do with the Arnie film. I feel the film has dated, but the book gets more and more relevant. The reading of it is done by Kevin Kenerly and it's perfect.

I'm now listening to First Evidence because he's narrated that too. It's kind of like CSI meets The X-Files. It's a bit slow and I think it's building before a big reveal, but I could do with a revelation to push me on a bit!

I've got loads more to get through too. Shadow Academy, Black Site, Too Bad To Die, The Cleaner, Terminal Man, The Andromeda Strain, The Grendel Affair, Into the Black and so on!

[gordon]

Currently working my way through Jack Vance's sizeable oeuvre. I read Emphyrio in the SF Masterworks series a few years back and was struck by how good it was - beautiful prose, a nice coming-of-age story in a stratified society, a dark secret revealed at the end. All very good. Then I bought Night Lamp last year, which lacked emotional depth but was still a great adventure story and (again) beautifully written. And last week I finished Tales of the Dying Earth - a quartet of books written over three decades, the middle two of which, devoted to a comic character called Cugel, are some of the best fantasy I've read.

So now I'm reading the three books in the Durdane saga, followed by Alastor, Lyonesse, the Demon Princes, Planet of Adventure, and more... I love it when you really get into an author and you have so many wonderful stories to look forward to. (I did much the same with Philip K Dick last year - having read five over the previous twenty years I had a great time polishing off the rest in 9 months.)

So yeah, in short, I'm reading Durdane Book 1: The Anome, by Jack Vance.

[QualityChimp]

I haven't updated this for a bit!

I thought First Evidence was pap. Took ages to get going, went round in circles because it was trying to prevent giving the game away then it all happened in the last few chapters and I'd lost interest by that point. Shame.

I listened to The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton. The narration was good but the characters all sounded very samey.
I thought the film did a much better job and little changes to the plot worked to the story's benefit.
A little bit of paraphrasing large sections of text that you'd skim over in the printed version would've helped, but a great audiobook nonetheless.

Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits is the new book by David Wong (John Dies at the End) and it's great fun!
The concept is that a girl living in a trailer gets sucked into a world of gangsters and unimaginable wealth when her father dies and bequeaths her his inheritance. She then becomes a target to lots of other gangs who want the contents of his vault which only she can unlock...

It's ridiculously far-fetched, but we're seeing it through the eyes of the good-hearted yet sarcastic protagonist, Zoey, so there's laughs in nearly every chapter. It reminded me a little bit of Millar's "Wanted", but she wants to be a good guy, not a bad guy.
I think [MENTION=679]wicky[/MENTION] would like this!

Then I started on John Milton series by Mark Dawson, which are awesome. Similar in vein to Jack Reacher, but he's practically James Bond, but he goes on the run when they won't let him quit.
The first short novellas, 1000 Yards and Tarantula are his adventures as a government agent, then the first full book, The Cleaner sees him quitting and getting involved with a mother and her son who is on the fringes of a gang in the East End of London.
He wants to make amends for his past but it's not as easy as it first seems.

I've then moved on to the next couple of books, Saint Death and The Driver, which are also fantastic.
I found the first couple of Reacher books were fantastic, but they ran out of steam pretty fast. The last one I read, Echo Burning, was really poor and badly written. The John Milton series, however, seem to get better. They reference each other and are building up a large web of plot threads.

The narrator, David Thorpe, is brilliant. I found his newsreader-style awkward at first, but soon got into it and found that not only does he have to do an impressive selection of accents, he manages to differentiate the various characters too.

If you like the Jack Reacher books, I think you'd like the John Milton series.

[Dogg Thang]

I'm currently reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. It's intriguing but a lot of it feels padded. Journeys that should take a couple of paragraphs seem to take a couple of chapters.

[Darwock]

'Don't Suck, Don't Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt' by Kristin Hersh.

Since his death I always seem to think of Vic and his music more often as Xmas approaches, and I was recently on the hunt to see if that house concert that was teased on YouTube had ever been aired in its entirety (it hasn't) - and I stumbled across this book.

I'm two thirds of the way through, and it certainly couldn't be classed as a biography or anything like that, but then again I'm not sure such a thing could be written. Certainly there are very few who knew him as well as Kristin Hersh, but this book comes across as a very personal collection of thoughts and memories, not all of which are even directly related to Vic. I guess the title says it all, and this is what she had to get out of her system. You could call it her memoirs of their time touring together, even if it's memories with her husband it's still all under the umbrella of that time with Vic. I don't feel I'm any closer to knowing what made the man tick, but there have been some real revelations about his character.

She gets a bit poetic sometimes but I guess that's to be expected. I actually feel guilty saying things like that, since I don't think she wrote the book for anyone other than herself. Maybe Tina Chesnutt also.