So…

Updated on October 19, 2007 By Ken Begg 23 Comments

…what are you guys reading these days?

I’ll start off.  I’m currently reading The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, a pretty good fantasy book that sides set in a world with more swords than sorcery (although there is some of that).  The world is sharply drawn, as is the large cast of characters, who are all well differentiated, and believably shaded.  Guys that would be villains in other books are protagonists here, and vice versa.  Nice stuff. It’s the first in a prospective series, and I’m pretty sure I’ll continuing reading them as they come out.

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  • Are we just sticking to print books? Because I don’t remember the last time I picked one up. The last thing I remember reading was online. Hopefully “Lackadaisy” and “8-Bit Theater” counts. ;)

    As for the last thing I read … I’ve been rereading Mike Nelson’s “Movie Megacheese,” which is still a pretty good book about pretty bad movies.

  • Oh yes, almost forgot … “My Freshman Year,” by Rebekah Nathan. It’s a real life account of how an anthropology professor decides to one day enroll in her own University just to observe what students are like these days. She finds out things that had never cross her mind. (My favorite part is when she discovered that, although she encouraged students to ask questions as a teacher, she realized that students who did so were “punished” by their peers.)

  • sardu

    Movie Megacheese is highly entertaining. Mike should do more reviews in print.

    I just finished Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrel, a Victorian styled magic story. A bit rambling and unfocused but ultimately pretty entertaining.

  • Ericb

    The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. I’m only on page 40 but it’s been fun so far. I’m a big fan of Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle but I’ve never read his earlier sci-fi stuff. He has a nice sense of humor which keeps his stuff from falling into to the humorless, distopian gloom that characterises so much “cyberpunk” fiction.

  • Blake Matthews

    The last thing I read was “The Shadow Out of Time.” I then tried to read “Dom Casmurro” by Machado de Assis (in Portuguese) and just couldn’t take it.

    Hey, did they make any fan-fic books based on the Matrix films? Just curious.

  • Tork_110

    The last book I read was “The Time Machine Did It” by a former Simpsons writer. It’s a funny, short book about a bad detective. The first page is worth the price alone. I was surprised how the author was actually able to tie the plot together at the end.

    I’m currently reading a novel called “Creature From The Black Lagoon: Time’s Black Lagoon.” I should enjoy this because it’s about a couple in the not too distant future who go back millions of years to search for Gill-Men after watching clips of the classic films. Unfortunately, the excuse for going back in time is that the heroes want to get Gill-Man DNA so they can splice it into human DNA because the Debate Is Settled over global warming. I want to enjoy the book, but now I’m defensive about whenever the next time global warming is brought up to justify the trip. I’m not a global warming fan.

    The next book I’ll probably read is Wintersmith because I’m a huge Discworld fan.

  • Darren Bennett

    “Wintersmith” is on the shelf, but I’m currently reading the previous book “A Hat Full of Sky” – shows how big the pile is. Also currently reading “Dante” – by Barbara Reynolds – about the author of the world’s first SF trilogy: The Commedia. Gotta love that 14th Century Italian Poetry section at Borders.
    Currently the fiction shelf has 23 outstanding to read, and the non-fiction shelf about the same. I keep it like that, cause you never know what you’re going to be in the mood for when you finish the current book.
    Hardcopy Forever!

  • Danny

    Mostly graphic novels at the moment, though I have a copy of “Soon I Will be Invincible” sitting on my bed. It’s good, but I recently discovered a comic shop in town, and blew through some savings.

    I just read “Good as Lily” by Derek Kirk Kim. Meh. Never really saw what everyone else seems to see in him.

    I’m just starting on “Confessions of a Blabbermouth” by Mike and Louise Carey. I mainly picked it up because it’s illustrated by Aaron Alexovich, who did the character art for Invader Zim, as well as making my second-favorite graphic novel, “Serenity Rose” (The first two chapters of which are available free here: http://www.heartshapedskull.com/). Only read about five pages before getting distracted, but it seems pretty decent.

    Also have “Re-Gifters” by Mike Carey, Sony Liew, and Marc Hempel, and “Clubbing” by Andi Watson and Josh Howard, but I haven’t read them yet.

    Also picked up “Kokoro”, a 19th-century Japanese novel, but that’s for school, so I’m putting off reading it until the last possible second, and “Princess Knight“, one of the first Osamu Tezuka Manga, which is also for a class but which I’m reading.

    Can you tell I’m a comic fan?

  • hk6909

    What does “book” mean?

    I dunno, about the only thing I’ve spared time to read recently is that awful movie-superhero fanfiction I reviewed once upon a time, and that’s so I can rebuild the rants that were lost when my old hard drive went down.

  • Charles Goodwin

    I’ve just finished two books by Charles Stross that I found quite entertaining: The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. They were a nice amalgam of my own various interests– sci-fi, spy thriller, Lovecraftian horror, and computer uber-geekdom. I hope he will be coming out with more of these!

    On the non-fiction front, I have been reading Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer by James Swanson, a very-well-done book about the Lincoln assassination and the hunt for John Wilkes Booth and the assassination conspirators. I didn’t think it likely that there was anything new to learn about this subject, but there were a few interesting items in the book that I had not previously known.

  • andy80

    Just finished the third Harry Potter book, now I’m starting on “The Boss: Mayor Richard Daley.” It deals with the corruption, racism, handling of the Democratic Convention in 1968. It was written in ’71 by Mike Royko, probably one of the best journalists ever.

  • Altair IV

    I’m nearing the end of my epic quest to read the entire H.P. Lovecraft Oeuvre. I have only a few short stories to go, but then I still have about another half-year of reading various stories like Frankenstein, the stuff that influenced Lovecraft, before I’m completely finished there.

    Then I’m off to read George Orwell and a couple of other classic novels I’ve been putting off for a while, the last Potter book, and re-reads of some old favorites (like LOTR for about the 12th time). I’m also planning to eventually pick up the Discworld novels. I’ve been hearing so many references to Terry Pratchett’s works that it looks like I’m going to have to read at least a few of them if I don’t want to lose any geek cred.

    The sad thing is that continuous access to the internet has seriously reduced the time I used to spend reading books. I’m still reading a lot, perhaps more than ever even, but now it’s mostly things like Jabootu reviews, Wikipedia, and various science, history, and tech sites.

  • Ericb

    “I’m nearing the end of my epic quest to read the entire H.P”

    I tried that last year. I hit a wall with “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” Indeed, most of his “dream” stories are annoying. I read all his good stuff though.

  • Altair IV

    Yes, Kadath can be a bit of a slog to read through in places, but I mostly enjoyed it. HPL’s dreamquest stories are really an extension of his early interest in epic fantasy, and quite different thematically from his mythos stuff, though there are a lot of common elements between them. Whether you enjoy them or not really comes down to personal taste.

    Did you ever read The Shunned House? To my mind that’s by far HPL’s creepiest short story. It’s a good old-fashioned haunted-house story with a genuinely frightening climax. I really didn’t find most of his other stuff to be that scary, but that’s probably just because I’ve been jaded by the fact that his once-original ideas have become commonplace in movies and stories in the decades since he wrote them.

  • Pip

    Non-Fiction: Cicely Wedgwood’s “The Thirty Years War”. Just getting to the part where the King of Sweden comes down and ruins everything.

    Fiction: (from Oprah’s book club – I can hear the shouts of scorn now) “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy

  • tk

    I’m reading The Science of Getting Rich. If you are ready for it, it is pretty powerful.
    It is available on the web for free.

  • Patrick Coyle

    Lately I’ve been working on “God and the Philosophers,” a collection of personal essays from philosophical professionals on how they reconcile intellectual reasoning with faith in the divine. It’s heavy stuff, and certainly not something to blaze through in a couple of days without inviting some serious headaches.

    On the flip side, I took a break to spend about four hours breezing through a novel that came with a Magic: The Gathering “fat pack” (which I mostly get for the nifty deck boxes). They’re supposed to tie into the world and characters of the current set, but it’s mostly just pointless fluff. Seiously. At the end, I’d realizd that the actual plot was resolved about halfway through, and everything since was just pointless contrivance meant to fill up the last hundred pages or so. Lord, what a waste.

    I’m also reading a friend’s book called “The Second Gate” for about the fifth time, because I’m giving it the third round of edits. In short, it’s a sci-fi novel where two knights from a race of psionics, divided over religious dispute, both become unwitingly intertwined with the next prophet of their god, whose coming was concealed by the high-ups because they knew she would tear down their civilization. Along the way they learn about the origins of their race, the reason half a planet was bombed into radioactive glass, and exactly what happens when people open portals to hell.

    If this book sells (and a few publishers have offered to buy it outright), I’d eagerly anticipate the animated miniseries.

  • Terrahawk

    The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote. It’s a great overview of the war.

    Pip, you reading an Oprah book club book has my world spinning about me.

  • Josh

    Speaking of Discworld, I just finished Making Money, Terry Pratchett’s new Moist von Lipwig book. It was very good.

  • Eric M

    Re: Moist Von Lipwig/Terry Pratchett:
    Didn’t know there was a “sequel” to Going Postal. Definitely going to have to look that up!
    I read a Rincewind anthology a few months back that had me in stitches.
    As for right now, I’ve been reading Glen Cook’s “Black Company” series.
    It has many elements of The Blade Itself, in fact.
    Swords with a good helping of sorcery; the Black Company itself is a band of mercenaries comprised of outlaws, cutthroats, and others with questionable pasts. “Bad guys”, if you will. But they usually make for the best characters, anyways, and drive the story well.
    There are nine novels in all, which have been anthologized in 4 volumes.
    Worth checking out for fans of military fantasy.

  • I actually did a brief review of The Jennifer Morgue as a blog entry (and Soon I Will Be Invincible, too). Stross has expressed interest in writing at least two other Laundry books–that’s the organization in The Jennifer Morgue, although I’m not sure he yet has a contract to do so. His project list is backed up, though, so it looks like even if more such books follow, we’re talking 2009 or later.

    You might want to check out his Merchant Princes series, which is a take on Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber and the heroine of which is a *gasp* businesswoman who fights court intrigue by trying to take advantage of her family’s outdated business models. It’s actually weird to read a series where the hero is a capitalist, although I’m not sure why that would be. Sci-Fi has a lot of libertarian authors.

    Military sci-fi fans should also check out (assuming they haven’t) one of the genre’s founders, David Drake–who also has a very good fantasy world series. However, the third volume of his Complete Hammer’s Slammers, really the benchmark series for military sci-fi, is due out next month.

  • Dan Coyle

    Sci-Fi does have a lot of libertarians, and they all write for Baen Books it seems. ;-)

    What am I reading?

    Armed Madhouse– rather stunning examples of corporate malfesance and election corruption, and the foolish neocon ideology that led to losing the peace in Iraq. It’s not all about the oil, because even the oil companies didn’t want to dance to Grover Norquist or Paul Bremer’s tune.

    Failed States– for a guy so concerened about the state of democracy, Noam Chomsky sure likes fighting old battles. How many times is he going to go over the bombing of Kosovo? How many times is he going to make Nazi to US analogies with monstrously tortured syntax and loaded wording? ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

    The Red and the Black– Stendhal’s delightful satire of a weaselly young man determined to scheme his way to the top of 19th century French society.

    The Depths of Time– Roger MacBride Allen’s time travel story is very slow going so far but he’s got some interesting ideas on how commercial space travel and time travel would merge up.

  • The Rev. D.D.

    Just reread “Godzilla on My Mind” by William Tsutsui; I enjoy his thoughtful approach to the whole oeuvre of kaiju eiga.

    I’m going to finally sit down and read the Harry Potter books next; I also want to hunt down a couple of titles mentioned here (“Soon I Will Be Invincible”, “The Time Machine Did It,” maybe that Gill-Man one, the Laundry ones).
    I may have to find “Confessions of a Blabbermouth” just because I too loved “Serenity Rose.”