What are you reading? April 2009

[S. Baldrick]

Turn Coat by Jim Butcher.

 

[LightPhoenix]

Lots of scientific papers and textbooks... stupid thesis.

 

[S. Baldrick]

Mean Streets which is a collection of urban fantasy novellas by Jim Butcher, Kat Richardson, Simon R. Green, and Thomas E. Sniegoski.

 

[EricNoah]

Turn Coat by Jim Butcher.

That's going to be my next audiobook...

 

[Mark]

Lots of scientific papers and textbooks... stupid thesis.

Hang in there!

 

[Pants]

Finishing up The Sandman with The Wake. Up next is my continued reread of The Darkness that Comes Before.

Kindly Ones was great. A rare exception when hype does not ruin something.

 

[Krug]

Just finished Song of Kali. Not quite terrifying, but filled with great ideas.

 

[CCamfield]

I haven't posted in a while... trying to think of what I've been reading.

- Jennifer Fallon's first trilogy, pretty good fantasy with a lot of politicking
- the first two NESFA hardcovers of Roger Zelazny's short fiction. Awesome, amazing, falling in love with Zelazny's writing again. Last story I read was "The Keys to December"
- just started "A Short History of Indians in Canada" by Thomas King, which is incredibly funny and extremely biting

 

[Jack7]

Non-fiction:

Let the Dog Decide - perhaps best training book on dogs I've ever read, and enormously helpful with my Saint Bernard/Great Dane sire and my Great Dane bitch.

The Intelligent Investor - I'm rereading Benjamin Graham's great book every couple of years.

Human Anatomy: the Beauty of Form and Function - a great lecture series on anatomy I just finished. I was using it as a lab reference for homeschooling the kids but liked it so well I listened to it myself. It was professor Young at Howard.

Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook - I try to read at least one biogas every reading cycle. Biographies are invaluable reference sources for understanding human behavior, as well as history. This is a good one about Cook.


Fiction:

I just finished Jim Butcher's Fool Moon. To me, and I like the Dresden books, it was his least interesting book, being little more than a "monster fight." No Dick work, no real magic, not much psychologically interesting. Instead it was little more than a stand-up slugfest. (Don't get me wrong, it was a good slugfest and I like an occasional slugfest.) So the book was his least interesting read, but, it was also one of the more viscerally exciting. Because the fights were something out of a comic book, beat the hell outta each other, get close to being killed several times, exhausted, think can't go on anymore, do so anyways. I like a guy who won't lay down even though he should be dead. It was not an interesting book, but it was very exciting.

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard - He was no Lovecraft when it came to horror but he could sometimes be just plain weird, creepy, and enjoyable to read.

For my literature reading I'm rereading The Idiot. I love reading Russian writers and poets, Tolstoy being my favorite, but I alos like Dostoevskii, Pushkin, Chekhov, etc.

 

[CCamfield]

Jack, your mention of Cook reminded me that I recently also read

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Albert Lansing.

Truly... astonishing. Crazy. WW1-period, an expedition with a sailing ship (!) investigating Antarctica get trapped in the ice. They spend MONTHS stuck on the ice, before finally reaching some rocks that barely qualify as an island. Then, cannibalizing as much as they can, a few of them set sail across hundreds of miles of water in a 22 foot ship's boat to reach a 25 mile island with a whaling station, to get help for the rest. Which they do, but they can't sail around to side with the station. So they climb mountains that no one has ever climbed, slide down the other side when no other option is available, and manage to make it to the station, months and months after they had been assumed dead. If I were religious, or it were D&D I would have said the hand of a god was with them.