Current Reads

Gilraen wrote:Have you all read Bellwether by Connie Willis? It's one of her more humorous books and not really science fiction at all (more of a workplace satire and romantic comedy); I thought it was great.

I haven't, but it's on my list. I'll get to it soon.

(It's kind of embarrassing, guys. My local library is awesome. Seriously does not get the credit they deserve for all the wonderful things they do. One awesome thing is how easy they make it to request books online, not only from their system, but the wider, state-wide system. Click a button and they'll send you an email when the book is set aside for you.

I hadn't realized how many books I'd requested lately and some longer-term holds had come in, too. There are 6 new books for me (I still have 3 at home), 2 movies for Krill and a new book for Plankton. There was an entire shelf for us. I could barely hold them all Luckily, our vacation is soon, so I'll read some of these in the car.)

Have you all read Bellwether by Connie Willis? It's one of her more humorous books and not really science fiction at all (more of a workplace satire and romantic comedy); I thought it was great.

I like Bellwether a lot. Funny and a lot of the satire about the workplace was spot-on. Plus, there are sheep, which are comedy gold.

Bellwether is officially on my summer reading list. Thanks as always to all you bookworm snarkers for keeping the wonderful recs coming!

I've finally started to tackle A Song of Ice and Fire. I'm about halfway through the first book. Pretty good so far, but I'm intimidated by the number of characters, and I'm hoping I'll be able to make sense of it all.

I actually really liked the plots, but I was sick to death of reading about every damn family sigil and the fact that there had to be a million minor characters introduced, most of whom didn't even matter to the stories at hand. Maybe they factor in down the line, but I really don't want the name of every single person involved in a battle.

I read Me Before You. WAAAAAAAAH. I love hate all of you for making me read this stupid beautiful story.

That book....so painful, but so good and thought-provoking!

I want that book already. I wish people would read faster so the library can gimme it already.

I wanted to take my time with it but it was due back at the library in 3 days, so I read it as slowly as I could. It's definitely going to stay with me.

The only thing I didn't really care for was

Spoiler:

I loved that book so much but read it at COMPLETELY THE WRONG TIME. I wanted like a light romantic charming read and then I was unable to put it down and ended up sobbing like a freak at one am. So good though.

I've requested more JoJo Moyes books from the library because of it.

I'm reading The September Girls by Bennett Madison after reading about it on Culture Vulture. I love mermaids so I'm not even going to lie, that was a huge draw for me, but I am stunned at how good it is. Its super realistic, really sad and kind of dark. And the narrator is male which is unusual for a book like this and the writer has really drawn him well and realistically (probably because he is also a fairly young man himself).

But anyway, if you want good YA that is part of that supernatural romance trend but is actually quite good, and has mermaids this is a good one. However, if you are going to give it to a teenager, I'd recommend an older one. It has language and sexual elements. Which is realistic and well done, but I don't know if I'd give it to my thirteen year old niece.

I read Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini for the first time. I liked it, but for me Scaramouche is definitely heads and shoulders above it and the other Sabatini still in print, the Sea-Hawk.

I finished Ender's Game yesterday and am wondering if it's worth it to pick up the sequels. I loved the first half of the book, but after Ender

Spoiler:

, it began to drag for me.

Speaking of Ender's Game, a college friend just named her son Ender. Can someone enlighten me on if this is a good plan or a terrible one?

He better watch out because he might be the savior of the human race and have to go through hell in military school. That or just be doomed to life as a presumed bully because of his name.

katesti wrote:Speaking of Ender's Game, a college friend just named her son Ender. Can someone enlighten me on if this is a good plan or a terrible one?

It's a terrible one, I think. She should have named the kid Andrew (which is Ender's real name) and then used Ender as his nickname.

katesti wrote:Speaking of Ender's Game, a college friend just named her son Ender. Can someone enlighten me on if this is a good plan or a terrible one?

Terrible; in the later books, his name became the "Adolf Hitler" of the future and nobody would ever have thought to name their kid that. It just seems like a bad omen.

Thanks to this thread, I've checked out a couple of Tana French novels. I'm halfway through In the Woods...and I literally don't want to do anything else but read it. I stupidly left my lights on during yesterday's monsoon (which happened because I HAD to read the book in my car during lunch hour and somehow left the lights on) and rather than come back into the building to find someone with jumper cables, I elected to call AAA and wait an hour just so I'd have an excuse to read more.

Definitely one of those books that you're dying to get to the end of to find out what happens, but it's so good that you don't want it to end.

Aww, this made my night Mayram! Thanks!

Also, if I could find a job as a personal book shopper, my life would be complete. Sigh.

No, thank YOU for all the great book recommendations! :) I might be hitting up your posts again later in the summer when I run out of the current list of books I've got going.

Somehow every single book I've requested from the library recently came in this week so I've got an impossible supply of reading material. I need to stop using the "place hold" feature as my reading list and just keep a list somewhere else.

I read the first sequel to Remember Me last weekend, I was kinda disappointed in it. I don't think he's cut out for sequel writing, I remember being disappointed in Chain Letter 2 too. I was a little bit interested in the Shari parts, but there was way too much time spent on the "Master" and Pike's thoughts on religion and such. I also didn't really care about the new main characters, I was hoping they'd spend more time visiting the old group.

I'm reading Ender's Game, too! I'm actually a little disappointed by it. The dialogue doesn't seem like it would ever be spoken by children, no matter how intelligent they are. (In all honesty, I don't think it would be spoken by adults, either--really stilted.) I'd heard such great things about the book that I included it in a big package of fantasy and sci-fi books I gave my niece for Christmas, and now I kind of want to apologize to her and get her a substitute.

I loved the first half and just sped right through it, but the second half was much more of a drag.

I've read books two and three in the Ender series (not sure how many more there are), and have almost no recollection of them, other than Card seemed to spend a lot of time up his own ass. There was a lot of pontificating and philosophizing on his end, and sighing and eye-rolling on my end.

I told my cousin to just stop at the first book and not to bother with the others.

There's a college basketball player whose name is Andrew Wiggins and I really want him to run onto the court screaming, "REMEMBER, THE ENEMY'S GATES ARE DOWN!!!"

Orson Scott Card is totally the M. Night Shyamalan of sf/fantasy.  One good turn straight out of the gate, and then...bleh.  

(I saw him at a small con at Harvard several years ago and he was a great speaker, erudite and played well to the crowd...in a way that you could totally tell would be far, far less endearing at close range. Everyone else on the panel, to varying degrees, wanted to kill him with their brains.  Especially when he kept saying that he never wrote characters whose morals he agreed with.)

ETA: More specifically, what he said was that once he sees his own views coming out of the mouths of his characters, he immediately changes their viewpoints. Which, given the obvious religion/morality/worldview beatsticks he often ends up with, makes me wonder where he started.

One of (most of?) his characters is basically Jesus (Alvin Maker), so that statement is a little worrying.

I somewhat disagree with that. From memory, Speaker for the Dead, Pastwatch, and the Worthing Chronicle were all pretty good. But it's been some time, and I didn't know his personal views back then.

I tried reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close for the second time and still couldn't get through it because Oskar is just too annoyingly precocious.