Watchmen

Just finished this. One word:

Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaark.

A linky to a .PDF of O.J. Simpsons If I Did It...

Just finishing Mark Thomas' As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela: Underground Adventures in the Arms and Torture Trade which I've had lying around for a while. Not too bad - pretty one sided, obviously, but a decent enough read. He has his critics but he seems like quite a personable chap, and he's quite entertaining live - he's no Mark Steel, though.

Picked up Jasper Fforde's First Among Sequels at the airport yesterday and I'm tearing through it. Very good at the moment.

Excellent. Which reminds me, I must get to reading Something Rotten very soon. And I believe The Fourth Bear is out on paperback in the UK, like, any day now.

Eloquently put.

Tom Paulin's got nuttin' on me.

Started re-reading William Gibson's Burning Chrome for the first time in years - it's hard to believe that his first story was published 30 years ago.

Did you read it first time round when you were nowt but a teenager?

Shut it, you!






Tsk. Kids today - no respect for their elders...


*shakes head*

That Parkinsons is a bitch eh?

*checks Amazon*

It is! This Thursday!

And First Among Sequels is out Thursday next... *snigger*

I have a shed load of fantasy books for sale if interested mostly feist, goodkind, gemmell

I've got all of Feist's titles, although I don't have any of Gemmell's or Goodkind's.... I'll have a thinky. Let me know how many there are, and how much you want for them, I'll see if I have room!!

cool i'll have a rummage through them tonight or tomorrow depending on my husband's mood.

Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen

How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy

oooooo i'd love to borrow that off you

Finished The Last Battle this morning. Whoo, I have finally read The Chronicles of Narnia! I was enjoying it up until the last chapter or so, and then it started to get on my nerves, so I'm not sure whether I liked it overall or not.

Now onto Harry Potter to ready myself for the 21st! I'm already halfway through Philosopher's Stone - I always forget how short the first three books are.

Unfortunately I haven't got a copy of it yet, it's on my To-Buy list.

check you local library first, you'll be surprised how quick they get books in these days. I keep meaning to pay my fine. It's only £20 and then i can get all the books i like.

The Religion by Tim Willocks
Willocks writes few books, but they do include one of my all time favourites Green River Rising (a blend of Assault on Precinct 13 and Oz). The Religion is only his fourth novel and is an excellnt story set during the Siege Of Malta during the 16th Century. Lot's of violence, lot's of chivalry and neither Christian or Muslim treated as the "good guys". Again, he writes a great hero. Also a chance to learn about an event in history I never really knew much about.

I have the same problem with fines. We can only go to $10 before they stop us from taking out books.

wish they did that here! i rented a paul mckenna dvd and forgot about it. It was crap anyway.

on another subject, has anyone noticed the trend in abusive childhood books? why would you want to read that? there's loads of them. I can understand why the person would want to write the book because it's very therapeutic but reading it is just weird.

Finished First Among Sequels last night and it was yet another brilliantly funny, clever and thrilling book from Mr. Fforde. It's good to see that the Thursday Next series can work with 'one-off' stories just as well as they did as ongoing stories. Although there were parts of it which seem to hint at future plot elements, so it'll be cool to see where the series goes from here.

Finally started reading Atonement last night as well.

Where did you find that? It's not meant to be out until the end of July.

There were loads of copies at the Waterstones at Manchester airport.

According to wikipedia, it's not meant to be out in the UK until July 5th. Not sure what's going on there, then.

I'm actually a bit concerned about my copy since there are a few instances of footnoterphone's being used but none of them show up as footnotes in the book, despite there being spaces for them at the bottom of the pages. Maybe these ones are ones which have been mistakenly sent out.

I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Phallus a few weeks back, then rented the motion picture A Scanner Darkly. The film interested me thoroughly (after it was finished) so I purchased the book. Looking forward to it...

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

I can't think of what to say about it, I've read it that many times. Although, this is the first time I've read it in about two going on three years.

It seems so small to me now. Aside from The Chronicles of Narnia, I haven't read any really short books for a while.

Somebody smuggled them out via the footnoterphone conduits.

Now that I think about it, the guy who sold me it did look a bit fictional...

It wasn't a branch of Kaine's Books, was it?

Just started re-reading Consider Phlebas for the first time in over a decade, I'd forgotten how good it was.

I've been eyeing that off for a while... I've read The Bridge, The Wasp Factory and am currently reading Complicity, but I haven't read any of his sci-fi. Good, is it?

That was the first Iain M Banks book I read, handy as it was also the first Sci Fi and/or Culture novel as well, and I still rate it as one of the best.

Reread Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban over the last couple of days. Azkaban is still my second favourite because of all of the ironic moments, the whole thing with the Time Turner, the Dementors and, of course, Sirius Black.

A kiss of shadows by Laural K. Hamilton.

not as violent as her anita blake vampire novels, but god damn these a lot of sex. I find myself being turned off by the amount of " erotically charged adventure" which is putting it lightly. There's 5 books in the series its every few pages shes at it with someone. I think i'l go back to reading doctor who and the cybermen, or the invisibleman by h.g.wells. Anything not to have to hear about "tenticles and claws across my body."

But i have to say i'm really happy that marvels made her anita blake series a comic book..every character now has a face. Yipeee

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan

Adam made me read this. I'd been put off Morgan by his politics. I don't mind reading books by people I disagree with, but I had the impression that Morgan made his political beliefs integral to the plots of his novels, and I do find it hard to care about a story if I share few of the underlying assumptions about how things work. Anyway, Adam convinced me to give him a go and lent me the book. Thanks!

Altered Carbon is a noir science fiction detective story. Takeshi 'Beat' Kovacs - a criminal with an elite military background - is given a job he can't refuse: find out who killed his wealthy client, who insists that he did not commit suicide, all evidence to the contrary.

I liked it. The blend of science fiction and noir was pretty effective: the science fictional technology was integral to the plot, the dialogue is snappy, the morality is ambiguous and the women are beautiful and dangerous. It's a first novel, and does suffer from a few flaws: there were a few too many scenes for my taste in which the protagonist is in mortal peril with no way out, and is really definitely going to die this time, only for him to escape or be rescued unexpectedly. I also thought his 'Envoy training' (his military background which gives him advanced powers of manipulation and combat) was a slightly clunky plot device - it allows Morgan to make him superhumanly effective or as prone to error as everyone else whenever the plot requires.

The science fiction idea at the core of the novel is interesting: human personalities can be digitally encoded, stored, placed in artificial environments, or inserted into other bodies, either human or artificial. Morgan explores some of the implications of this technology, but I was a bit disappointed he didn't delve into some of the deeper implications for personal identity and freewill.

I thought Morgan's politics intruded themselves unnecessarily in a couple of places, but not too jarringly.

I'm glad I read it, and would consider reading more books from Morgan, but they won't be going to the top of my to-read pile.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly but Jean-Dominique Bauby.

Written by the once editor of Elle magazine who suffered a massive stroke which paralysed his entire body apart from his left eye. He wrote the book with the help of a woman who would point at letters of the alphabet until he blinked. Needless to say it is a very short book. And rather than the depressing, clinical accont I was expecting, it was extremely witty and poignant.

And to coutneract that I am now on to something by the woman who wrote The Devil Wears Prada. I can't actually remember the title but just fancied a romp before I jump back into more depressing but interesting real life stories as is my theme at the moment.

Great review Jon. I can't argue with anything you say except maybe the politics, which I found gave the book impact above standard muscle-bound SF.

The 'DHF' concept and its effects on human psychology is explored further in the other two Kovacs novels (Broken Angels and Woken Furies), as the protagonist inhabits a number of other bodies. However, neither book has quite the same punch as Altered Carbon, and both are missing the hardboiled noir of that story. In other words, I cannot recommend them as essential reading over anything else given your reaction here.

Neither should you read 'Market Forces' or 'Black Man', both of which are angry political polemic disguised as SF. I'm glad you liked Altered Carbon, but I can't imagine you'd want to read more of Morgan's canon!

Speaking of which, I should really review his last novel here at some point.

I've read Foucault's "Les mots et les choses" and will soon start "Surveiller et punir." I really like Foucault's books. And i think I understand them.

Not much on the novel front lately. It's a shame.

Finished Atonement by Ian McEwan last night. Exceptional and the ending has me tearing up. I hope they don't ruin it with the film version.

Last night I ordered The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.

I was looking for something to boost my order into free delivery status and figured I would see what this whole Thursday Next series is about as people seem to talk about it quite fondly.

Tearing up is restrained, I wailed.

Oh I know, I am not criticising his knowledge of literature and language so much as his stucture and methods in his writing. He is a genius and I love Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien would lose me for pages at a time, talking about things he understood since he created them, but had never explained to the reader before. The council of Elrond is a good example of this, people we have never heard of and won't again talking about things we have never heard of and won't again for countless pages, it could have easily pushed a reader away.

I am sure there is a bit on the features of the extended edition of the DVDs also mentioning something like this, about the way he wrote, if it had been more recently, a publisher would have scribbled all over it and sent it back. Lucky they didn't though, really.

I am going to have to find a new book to read. I'm considering getting Chuck Palanhuiks new effort and seeing how it is.

Do, it's good. It's not bumped Survivor down from my favourite, but it's better than some (Diary, Haunted, Lullaby). Interesting structure too.

As for the whole Council of Elrond thing, it all makes sense if you've read The Silmarillion. And The Hobbit.

I can't endorse that enough. Nice choice!






What she said. It's worth the time and it's very strange, as you'd expect. And it is miles better than Haunted.

That's only one example though, and when I was 10, Silmarillion was unknown to me. And came after TLOTR. There are alot of books of history about Middle Earth that will make sense of alot of things, but when the book was first published it wasn't available to people, that was my point, back then no one had any means, other than the bit of information given in The Hobbit, to explain a number of bits in Rings where Tolkien sort of strays, and it could have been a factor that lost him his audience initially had his story not been so captivating. Same as how he often wrote in his languages and never quite translated what he had said.




I think I will, thank you both

This Book Will Save Your Life - A.M. Homes

A great read from start to finish. Reminded me a little of Coupland or even Tom Wolf (but mercifully shorter). Every character is well fleshed out, through dialogue as opposed to description, and you actually become quite fond of them. In fact most of the book relies more on dialogue than descriptive passages, which makes for a quick and easy read - a good thing seeing that throughout you really want to know what happens to those involved. Not something I say often about books, but I actually wanted more - not because it seemed rushed or incomplete, but because I actually cared about the people in the book and wanted to know how things turned out for all of them.

Yes!

Do you want me to send you 'Music for Torching' when I've finished it? So far it's another belter by Homes.

She's my new hero.

That would be mighty kind of you, though I do have a little pile of books to get through first. I might make a Borders trip and stock up on some more - I was surprised how much she has written.