July's Jubilant Joust At New Books

[woodsman]

Shadowplay - Tad Williams

 

[murphy]

Just started The Snake Stone, the second in the series by Jason Goodwin. It's a mystery set in the Istanbul of the 1830s. The hero is a 40-year old eunuch. Very well done.

 

[Hilarious Joke]

I finally started Lankhmar by Franz Lieber. It doesn't have a map! Grrrr! But so far I quite like it!

 

[iansales]

A bit of catching up to do. Read Machines & Men by Keith Roberts, a collection of short stories from 1965 and 1966. Not as good as his The Grain Kings - in fact, entirely missable.

Read a bunch of graphic novels: The Daily Mirror Book of Garth, a blast from the past and pretty good despite the newspaper it was originally published in; Jeff Hawke: The Ambassadors, to which the same applies as Garth although it's more intelligent; and Guardians of the Galaxy: The Quest for the Shield, which was... oh dear: I had fond memories of Guardians of the Galaxy as a kid, but this wasn't very good at all.

Also read Journey to the Moon by Eldon C Hall, a very dry, and not all that interesting, book about the development of the Apollo Guidance computer. It was, well, not geeky enough, basically.

Now reading The One From the Other by Philip Kerr, a new Bernie Gunther novel from 2006 - and there's another published after this one too, A Quiet Flame.

 

[Pyar]

I finished Building Harlequin's Moon by Brenda Cooper and Larry Niven. It was a neat book but there were some lacking parts in it. Characterization and plot development seemed a little sloppy.

I started Viewpoints Critical by L. E. Modesitt. Recentley I have started to like short story collections more and more. I'll see how this is, its pretty much a random collection of his stuff throughout his career.