Books moral and immoral

[Erin]

As predicted, I finished The Newlyweds last night (kept reading it through all of the commercial groups and warm-ups during skating ) This is why I have to go through phases where I don't read at all...everything else gets through to the side when I get into a good book. Anyway, I give the book an overall thumbs up, with only two criticisms, (1)

Spoiler

The cousin-loving squicked me out a bit, even if the cousin was adopted

and (2) I felt like the book ended before the story was complete and I would have liked knowing what happened a little further down the road.

Trying to decide what to read next, since I'm spending most of my Sunday flying for work, so I should have time to get through one book. On my e-reader, I have Gillian Flynn's other two books (Dark Places and Sharp Objects) after I liked Gone Girl so much and also E.M. Delafield's Late and Soon, which I think was also a recommendation from this thread.

[FarFarAway]

I finally progressed with Tolkien works. So far I have read The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and am now in the middle of The Fellowship of the Ring.

I can say that I absolutely adore Silmarillion. Reading this books is just like travelling yourself to the fantasy world. Hopefully they will make a movie based on it some day.

The Hobbit is great and I am curious what it will look like as a movie. Less than a month before the premiere anyway

LOTR itself is quite an easy reading after the first two books, because it's just simply interesting and intriguing and I now know the background of it all

[michiruwater]

I liked Sharp Objects, enough to read it in one go on a really long plane ride. Haven't read Dark Places yet.

After reading reviews on it, I decided to buy Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson and started that today instead of The Book Thief. I tried to read it when I was, like, 11, and now I see why I couldn't do it then . Not terribly far in but I really like it so far

[Grannyfan]

Still working on The Worst Hard Time but also reading one called The Bedlam Detectiveon my Kindle. Yesterday received a copy of the new Kate Morton novel, The Secret Keeper. Really looking forward to it.

[jeffisjeff]

I recently bought Room to read on a cross-country plane trip. The comments here about reading it straight through made that seem like a good idea. It was, except for two things: (i) my nook battery died about 3/4 of the way through and (ii) my neighbor probably wondered why I kept crying . This was last week, but I've been so swamped that I only got around to reading the rest of it last night.

[Evilynn]

Treated myself to some Catherynne M. Valente books (The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World) for my birthday, even if I won't have time to read them for awhile (moving house). I got seriously stuck trying to read the first Brandon Sanderson written WOT book, and feel like I need something beautiful and complex to look forward to. I'm not sure what I expected with the WOT book, of course it's going to be different in style, it's another author, but I find it really, really jarring. I'm hoping I'll get used to it eventually.

[ChelleC]

List of the 63 Barnes and Nobles stores that were hacked.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/...paign=20121024

[rjblue]

After reading reviews on it, I decided to buy Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson and started that today instead of The Book Thief. I tried to read it when I was, like, 11, and now I see why I couldn't do it then . Not terribly far in but I really like it so far

I'm trying to read the 100 "best" SF novels, and I'm picking them up whenever I see them at book sales. I read Red Mars a month or so ago, and found it just okay. I never really cared about any of the characters. SF is by far my favourite genre, and I don't like holocaust centered novels or accounts (too painful), but The Book Thief is going on my all-time favourites list, next to Pride and Prejudice, Harry Potter, Ender's Game, The Kitchen God's Wife, Cordelia's Honour, and The Foundling.

[Lara]

List of the 63 Barnes and Nobles stores that were hacked.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/...paign=20121024

Ouch at a number being major NYC stores (Union Square, 5th Avenue).

Hope I didn't miss it being posted before, but I just found this from a Time magazine best blogs list:
http://bookshelfporn.com

[rjblue]

More bad PR for the Kindle

[zaphyre14]

I started Barbara Cleverly's third Letty Talbot mystery "A Darker God" over the weekend but it just wasn't holding my interest. Too many characters, too much long-winded dialog and too little character development.

So I jumped to Rowling's "A Casual Vacancy." Pribably a big mistake since I'm about 75 pages in and the most sympathetic character is the dead guy. It moves along though so I'll probably hang in for a while, but I'm missing the charm of the Harry Potter books.

I did like the Kate Carlisle bookbinder's mystery enough to hunt out the next three on the book swap site. And I have Steven Saylor's "A Gladiator Dies Only Once" collection of Gordianus the Finder short stories.

[zaphyre14]

I scrapped both Rowling and Cleverly last night as too depressing and picked up Kacey Michaels' "A Most Unsuitable Groom." It's old and part of her Becket series which I may or may not have read when they first came out, The hero is approppriately tortured, a soldier wounded in The Americas, who after returning to Britain, is confronted by the woman who saved his life - and the child he doesn't remember fathering. It's way easier reading and even if the plot is predicitable, I like the characters. It's certainly worth the 25 cents I paid for it.

Now I just need to be sure I have batteries on hand so I can still read by flashlight is Hurricane Sandy knocks out my power.

[Artemis@BC]

Note to self: do not start watching a post-apocalyptic TV series (Falling Skies) while you are in the middle of a post-apocalyptic novel (The Twelve). Aside from a confusion of plotlines and characters, there's a very high risk of dreams dominatied by alien vampires.

[susan6]

I'm trying to read the 100 "best" SF novels, and I'm picking them up whenever I see them at book sales. I read Red Mars a month or so ago, and found it just okay. I never really cared about any of the characters. SF is by far my favourite genre, and I don't like holocaust centered novels or accounts (too painful), but The Book Thief is going on my all-time favourites list, next to Pride and Prejudice, Harry Potter, Ender's Game, The Kitchen God's Wife, Cordelia's Honour, and The Foundling.

I tried reading Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" and Asimov's "Foundation".....and got bored and stopped both times. On the other hand, Herbert's "Dune" is one of my favorite books. So I never know what I'm going to like. Kind of frustrating.

[rjblue]

I tried reading Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" and Asimov's "Foundation".....and got bored and stopped both times. On the other hand, Herbert's "Dune" is one of my favorite books. So I never know what I'm going to like. Kind of frustrating.

Those are three very diverse authors. That is one thing about SF as a genre category- the writing styles are wildly varied. The only thing they have in common is that somewhere in the plot there is a "what if".

"Dune" is on my list of books to find. For some reason I used to get it confused with "Battlefield Earth" which is on my never-to-read list.

[michiruwater]

About 1/5 of the way through Red Mars and still liking it very much. Asimov is an author I've been meaning to read but haven't really delved into yet.

[PrincessLeppard]

There is a word for you and it starts with a B and ends with an h.

:

Just for this, I hope that silly baseball team loses. And yes, I will be seething inside for two freaking months knowing you've read it and I haven't.

They just won the World Series.

The book is really good, but it certainly doesn't exactly wrap up the trilogy.

As it to be expected, I guess.

Le sigh.

[Artemis@BC]

Finished The Twelve last night. At about 2:00 am. Then took another 45 minutes to fall asleep after that.

Great book, even better than the 1st one (The Passage, which I enjoyed very much). I started the book assuming it was the 2nd in a trilogy, or possibly even longer series. At the point I started reading last night (about 150 pages to go), the way things were going I began to think that the story might end with this one. But no. There's obviously more to come.

(Just looked it up, and indeed it is being called "The Passage Trilogy.")

So, on the one hand I'm glad that there will be a third book ... but on the other I'm not pleased I have to wait until 2014!

This was also a book I was very happy to have in hard copy as opposed to ebook. In addition to several maps, there's also a dramatis personae list that's handy to be able to refer to -- and I just find that sort of flipping easier with a paper book.

I highly recommend this one for fans of post-apocalyptic lit. Less so for those expecting vampire lit -- there are creatures that share some characteristics with vampires, but not the things that vampire lovers tend to love. Just sayin'

BTW, there's an excellent and extremely creative recap of The Passage at the beginning of The Twelve, so although reading The Twelve first obviously makes the most sense, it is actually possible to dive straight into The Twelve.

[Prancer]

Has anyone tried the Supper Club Mystery series?

I was looking for something else in a digital library and stumbled across Carbs and Cadavers. There were 14 people on the waiting list, even though it wasn't a new book, so I thought, "Ah, that must be a good book," and put myself on the waiting list. Well, now I have it and so far, I am not thrilled.

I read this on the author's bio: She taught sixth grade language arts in Cary, North Carolina for the majority of her eight-year teaching career and it hit me that that's one thing I don't like about the book--the sentence structure and pacing of the book make me think of books written for middle schoolers. The characters are adults doing adult things, but there is a certain subject-verb-predicate, subject-verb-predicate, overexplanation of detail to the way they are described that is getting on my nerves.

If anyone has read it, is the story worth the writing?

[zaphyre14]

I haven't read that series - I tend to stay away from the food-based series just because I don't cook and I'm not that ineterested in the recipes the authors add ad accents to the stories.

To me, almost all of those theme-based mysteries are the adult substitute for the Nancy Drew books we read as kids. So far the only author I've really liked in the cozy genre is Elaine Viets. Donna Andrews was okay and I currently like Kate Carlisle. And even those I rarely pick up new and instead scarf them up at yard and library sales or on the swap site.

I'm currently reading another of Kasey Michaels' Beket historicals, "The Return of the Prodigal." I skipped the volume between the last one I read and this one so some time has passed; Waterloo is done but the plot to restore Napoleon to the throne of France goes on and it doesn't seem as if I missed much of the family saga. Again the hero is wounded (lost part of his left arm) and tortured by the many secrets of his past; he seems a bit manic-depressive to me, although he is recovering from a narcotic addiction as well. The heroine is a more complex character, although at times she borders on the Too-Stupid-to-Live stereotype when she misses obvious truths about her "father's" character supposedly out of loyalty and love. But she's no spineless wimp, nor simpering virgin, which is unusual enough in these tales so I'm content to keep reading. Again for 25 cents, it's a decent read.