January 2016: What Are You Reading?

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GOLLUM

GOLLUM

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Happy New Year everyone. I hope 2016 is a great year for you and not just for reading.

Please post what you are currently perusing in the New year.
 
Antigonus the One-eyed, a biography of Antigonus Monopthalmus.

Edited extra bit: it's by Jeff Champion, whose biography of Pyrrhus I enjoyed a few years ago. It has signature teeth marks where my brother's dog informed the postman of his feelings.
 
The Mighty Dead : Why Homer Matters.

Just started this and the author is exploring the importance of Homer and how epics such as The Iliad resonate to this day. He also has an interesting theory in moving the events described by Homer from the accepted date of around 1200 BC to 1800 BC. It is a promising read so far.
 
Happy new year @GOLLUM !

VEILED - Benedict Jacka's latest installment in his Alex Verus series.

Plus I'm still pushing on with Lee Child's JACK REACHER series and I'm about to start Becca Fitzpatrick's SILENCE.
 
finished star cross and went straight to oblivion's light
 
4/5 through The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. Really good dark ages quest story. Ishiguro is a skillful and original storyteller.

Enjoying I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that by Ben Goldacre, which is a collection of his pieces in The Guardian, BMJ etc over the last 15 years or so. Brilliant. Goldacre dissects innacurate reporting in the media, by politicians, business, and quacks, using lucid and accessible scientific arguments and well-presented data. If you found statistics boring at school, this will be a revelation. Most of this is available gratis on the Bad Science website. Highly recommended.

And just finished Rise of the Super Furry Animals by Rick Rawlins, which is an amusing, lighthearted account of the development of the psychedelic Welsh pop group.
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Finished this earlier today:

Absolutely great collection of mostly forgotten mystery fiction, each story seemingly better than the one before. Some, especially "The Lost Special" by Arthur Conan Doyle, would make movies worth watching. The last story, "The Clue Of The Silver Spoon's" featuring Robert Barr's detective Eugene Valmont, one of the best. Now reading:

 
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To finish 2015 I reread Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and to start 2016 I started Laura by Vera Caspery, basis for a well-known 1940s movie.

It's been 30+ years since I read the James and I wish I could better remember what I thought at the time. Beautifully written (though with a bit of James' infuriating habit of circling his subject without lighting on it) and interesting combination of ghost story and psychological profile, the borders between which James so obscures that its easy to debate whether the whole is one or the other. I do wish I'd skipped the introduction by Leon Edel until after reading the book; it gives a bit too much away, though he did point out something I think I'd have missed without his pointing:

The governess' allusions to romantic literature and/or scenes from such. It does add to the reading to spot this.

Randy M.
 
Just read Acceptance by Jeff Vandermeer. It was the conclusion of The Southern Reach Trilogy and is competing for the worst book I've ever read.

Such a shame as the first part 'Authority' was fantastic, but it went downhill with the second part 'Annihilation' and the final part was just unreadable. What a complete waste of time and money. I'm incredibly disappointed.
 
Started High Moor 3 by Graeme Reynolds last night. Absolutely superb and what a refreshing change to read a fast moving, action packed, werewolf story from the slow moving, exhausting, nonsensical trilogy I was reading previous (Southern Reach).
 
crooksy73 said:
Just read Acceptance by Jeff Vandermeer. It was the conclusion of The Southern Reach Trilogy and is competing for the worst book I've ever read.

Such a shame as the first part 'Authority' was fantastic, but it went downhill with the second part 'Annihilation' and the final part was just unreadable. What a complete waste of time and money. I'm incredibly disappointed.
Click to expand...

I can't read him at all. I've tried a couple of times and just cannot see the appeal.
 
I won't be reading him again, thats for sure. I really enjoyed Authority, it was refreshing, mysterious and well written. From there on it went seriously downhill, so much so in the last book I found myself skim reading whole chapters because it was so inconsequential to the story and absolute nonsense in parts.
 
I finished Ghostheart by R. J. Ellory. Very good, but kind of slow at the beginning.

Started Darkness Falls by Kyle Mills.
 
I just finished reading Endymion by Dan Simmons. It seemed a marked departure from what I had come to love about Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion (i.e. very slow going, not nearly as engaging circumstances, etc) but the final few chapters did almost warrant what took place before. Now I'm on to read The Rise of Endymion to complete the series.
 
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