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What are you reading?

I just started reading Eight Little Piggies from the series of books by Stephen Jay Gould. I really like his style of writing and I wonder why I haven't herd his writings mentioned more often on the forum.

Before I came home from college I was reading one of the books out of the Hitch hikers trilogy. I fergot the name but it is the one where the tv anchor goes to help the aliens with their astrology.
 
I have read virtually everything of Gould's except for his big Theory of Evolution, which is geared towards the "community".

An excellent writer, and a staunch defender of Evolution.
 
While at my brothers over Xmas I got halfway through a book called I think "The strange case of the dog that barked in the night" written from the viewpoint of a kid with Aspergers syndrome (which my nephew has and who thinks the book is good too) so I have to find my own copy. Really good book but I can't find it on Amazon.

Systems Programmer’s Guide to:z/OS System Logger - IBM Redbook- not a fun book but about time I got a better grip on this.

Chris Brookmyre's "One fine day in the middle of the night"

And after finishing "Fools fate" I've been re-reading Robin Hobbs assassin books.
 
Finished Dune: The Machine Crusade not too long ago. A decent new set of prequels to Dune, althought they do not compare in scope with the original series obviously. Am also just finishing up The Fall of Berlin 1945, by Anthony Beevor, very good book so far. Also have a series of books concentrating on old military tactics such as Roman Warfare all of them general edited by John Keegan (my fave military author). Anything by Orson Scott Card is good, finished up his Shadow of the Hegemon sometime back. I have his latest Ender book Shadow Puppets, but I can't remember if I've read it or not. Heh the story is so familiar to me that I just can't tell.

I have the latest Wheel of Time book but I've not made any attempt to pick it up so far. I agree that Jordon is starting to wear his welcome a little thin. With every book he opens up more plotlines than he does in attempting to wrap up the zillion he already has going. He's a good writer thankfully and so I never have a problem reading his books, but at the end I'm often frustrated lately that the end still seems to be no where in sight. A good alternative if you like the Wheel of Time books is the RuneLord series by David Farland, it has quiet an interesting system for how its magic works that I've not really seen before.

Also looking forward to glancing through Achtung Panzer by Heinz Guderian. A small book relating to his proposed tactics of Blitzkrieg.
 
bug_girl
i really like the Dead until Dark Series. it may be that as someone raised southern, i love the idea of alternate rednecks.
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I didn't say it was bad, just light reading. I'll probably read the second book this weekend and finish the third next week before going on to something different.

I'm looking for a good book about Sir Richard Burton.

Ossai
 
The Thurber Carnival by J. Thurber and Baudolino by U. Eco. Both are pretty pleasant books..
 
Just finished these recently. All very good to great!

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
Oranges by John McPhee
Idlewild by Nick Sagan (Carl Sagan's son-his first novel)
Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle (dated but still veyr good)

Reading My Turf by William Nack right now. Pieces he published in SI on horse racing, boxing, baseball, etc.
 
Among my Christmas presents was Stephen J. Gould's last book, "The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister's Pox". As with all Gould's longer works I find it heavy going, overloaded with asides of purely academic interest and stuffed with references which conceal the point rather than illustrate it.

I have always felt Gould was master of the essay, whether on baseball, Mickey Mouse or Natural History. His longer works are as needlessly ornate as the gothic cathedrals he loved.

I think he needed a hard hearted editor, but by the end of his life he had so much authority in the field of popular science writing that he was allowed to get away with murder. Which is a pity, because he was a superb teacher when he was constrained by space to stick to the point.

Right now I'm back to the greatest British short story writer of either the 19th or the 20th century. Kipling. Just for fun.
 
i'm reading Stiff. I'm only 1/4 of the way through, and i'm ready to recommend it.
very funny, and very interesting.

it's about cadavers, of course.
 
Just finished Harry Turtledove's "In The Presence Of Mine Enemys", in which he dicks with the theme of "The Man In The High Tower".
Deuschland wins WWII and III.
Now suppose you were a jew in ein jeudenfrei society.
 
Hexxenhammer said:
I see someone's reading Perdido Street Station. I finished it just before starting Quicksilver. Best book I've read in a long time by FAR. I just got The Scar and King Rat so I'm looking forward to reading more China Mieville.
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I picked up Perdido Street Station as my Christmas book (because it was big, and because I couldn't remember the name of the author or title of the book I wanted to buy, which is about a kid growing up in the outback whose best friend is the spirit of an aboriginal girl, if anyone can help here?).

I found his prose style rather turgid and over-egged—so New Crobuzon is a sh!tty place to live, got that in the first chapter!—and the inventiveness seemed too often plot-driven and occasionally ludicrous—I was practically wetting myself with laughter at the handlings episode—I got hooked somewhere around page 300, and found the ending to be satisfyingly Dickensian.

I'm going to read The Scar, but right now I need to get New Crobuzon's grime off my skin (metaphorically speaking), which is why I've just finished Ken Macleod's Cosmonaut Keep, just started Kathleen Anne Goonan's Light Music and once again moved Gidden's critique of the classic sociologists to the bottom of the pile (his prose style is dense, if illuminating, but he doesn't really do much in the character and plot development departments ;) ).

It took me a while to get to Cosmonaut Keep, because though I loved the four books in Macleod's Fall Revolution future history trilogy (he he he), I don't go a bundle on Space Opera/Alien stuff, which this book is full of, and to be honest Macleod has a Dickian way of making his human societies and technologies seem kind of freaky anyway; introducing aliens seems unnecessary. But Cosmonaut Keep has got more than enough of Macleod's usual concerns about (left-wing) political ideology and the impact of new technology, but the novel felt rushed, with people and settings only sketched out, and the plot too dependent on co-incidence and circumstance. I'm guessing that as this book is the first in a trilogy, it's all about scene-setting and laying out future teasers.

At the heart of the book though is a groovy twist on the old Arthur C. Clarke adage about advanced technology—in this case, there are gods, and these gods are microbe-sized aliens who seem to have more than a healthy preoccupation with Earth—as well as some timely jabs at both US and European society, and also at capitalism, communism, (state) socialism and computer project management.

I carnt say much about Goonan's Light Music because I've only read the first chapter so far, except that it's the conclusion of a loose quadrology (?) set in the near future after a cataclysmic event which simultaneously destroyed all electronic communication, turned all the children into human homing pigeons and precipitated the development of nanotechnology which rendered parts of the US even more bizarre than <del>they are now</del> any alien vista.
 
Valid criticism of Perdido Street Station Billy. Personally I liked the handlingers and all the other really wacky stuff.

For those of you who dig alternate history, I just finished reading a graphic novel written by David Brin called "The Life Eaters". Imagine that on D-day the Allied invasion was stopped by the Norse Gods who had been summoned by the Nazi's. And that Loki decided to side with the Allies. But the Allies aren't sure if they're really gods or something else entirely. Touches on all of Brin's usual themes of optimism in the face of overwhelming odds, human cleverness, and science as ally instead of enemy. Great read with great art. You won't find it at Barnes and Noble though, you'll need a good comic book store.
 
Chanileslie said:
I need reading suggestions!!! I will read anything most of the time although I don't like alternative history books nor do I car for cyber punk all that much, but anything else. I would love to hear about some good Science Fiction.
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I'll try and help, but a lot of SF stuff I like is kind of cyberpunk influenced, although I've got to admit that out of the "first wave" stuff, apart from William Gibson's stuff, I never really got into any of the other cyberpunk authors.

I'm not a big fan of space alien stuff, but I'd recommend John Varley's Gaiea trilogy (Titan, Wizard and Demon), which is about a group of space explorers who discover that one of the moons of Saturn is inhabited, is also alive and is quite possibly insane.

A bit newer is M. John Harrison's Light, which uses a bonkers take on the whole space opera theme to evoke the weirdness of quantum physics. It's set in the 25th century in an area of the galaxy known as The Beach, and concerns a woman who has turned into a pirate spaceship and a man who lived in virtual reality, mysterious alien artefacts, black hole surfing and a couple of oddball physicists in 1999 London who somehow become the fathers of interstellar flight despite being pursued by a spectral horse's head.

Quite the opposite is Paradox by John Meaney, which is set on a human-colonised world in the far future, in which our hero, who has a stutter for a surname, loses his mum, dad, and his left arm, and then proceeds to wander through this feudal world, gets involved with the technological elite who rule it, talks a lot of (possibly pseudo-)scientific jargon and that's it really. I didn't particularly enjoy it because I found the characters to be one-dimensional, the setting forced and clumsy (for instance, the colonists live underground in caverns, so it's a society which is both physically and socially stratified; one's a metaphor for the other, see? :rolleyes: ), but I mention it because if you like hard SF, you'll probably like this.

Totally not SF, but highly recommended is David Mitchell's number9dream, which is about a kid who goes to look for his father in Tokyo, and whose exploits are enlivened by a rather active imagination. It's an exhilarating, touching, amusing and enfuriating journey which covers the hero's entire life and more besides.

Originally posted by Hexxenhammer
Valid criticism of Perdido Street Station Billy. Personally I liked the handlingers and all the other really wacky stuff.
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Thanks! In regards to the handlingers (and without spoiling the book too much for anyone currently reading it), it was their rather abrupt (and South Park-esque) appearance that amused me, but didn't seem to git in with the other stuff going on. But I loved the Weaver, and I still carnt look at a moth without feeling a shiver go down my spine... ;)
 
I read The Scar first (got it for a present) and just finished Perdido street.

I like Miehville's rather dense prose (see the Worm Ororborous thread) and he uses it to good effect. Interesting to see what the guy comes up with next.

I loved the Varley trilogy too, read it the first time years ago.
 
Soapy Sam said:
Billy. You won't like "The Scar" either.
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Overall, I did like Perdido Street Station. Or perhaps more accurately, I found it particularly addictive in an appalled-but-captivated kind of way :)

Originally posted by Bikewer
I read The Scar first (got it for a present) and just finished Perdido street.

I like Miehville's rather dense prose (see the Worm Ororborous thread) and he uses it to good effect. Interesting to see what the guy comes up with next.
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From what I heard, he's got another Bas-Leg (my wife went to Bassleg school in Newport; I wonder if there's a connection?) novel up his sleeve, then he's going to write something less fantastical. But I could be wrong :)

I loved the Varley trilogy too, read it the first time years ago.
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The first book I read by Varley was The Ophiuchi Hotline, and it was a real antidote to both the New Wave stuff (Moorcock, Delaney, Zelazny, Ellison et al) I was into and the hard science SF my brother tried to get me to read. I can see why some people consider Varley to be a godfather of Gibson et al. But oh, where is he now?!!
 
The last thing I read of Varley's was Red Thunder; entertaining and seemingly written with a movie contract in mind.

Prior to that, The Golden Globe. Wonderful stuff, with clever tie-ins to the world-of-entertainment stuff, set in his storyline where mankind has been kicked off the Earth, and the remnants have set up shop on the moon.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...103-2810236-3449438?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
 
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