July 2016: What Have You Been Reading?

I've just finished reading the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy, by Laini Taylor. Amazon had been trying for quite a while to convince me to buy the books, but the covers put me off, I thought they looked so boring and amateurish (although it's a major publisher). However, I finally downloaded the sample for the first one, and was thereby completely hooked. I was low on money after I finished reading that book, and had to wait several days before buying the next two -- which I did immediately as soon as I was in funds.

I guess you would call the trilogy a crossover between YA and adult, since the protagonist is 17 but the books are long and the plot complex compared to most YA. Beginning in modern day Prague, at times very dark, at times whimsical, angels, "monsters," magic, wishes, romance, and more.

Having finished the trilogy, I promptly bought The Night of Cake and Puppets, a novella telling how two of the secondary characters met. It's a charming and romantic story, and if the title doesn't give it away, filled with gentle whimsy.
 
Uprooted by Naomi Novik, which won the Locus fantasy award yhis year. Quite good.

The View From The Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman. A collection of his articles, reviews and speeches. Some interesting stuff.
 
The Martian War by Kevin J Anderson

Finished it last night. It's entertaining and definitely keeps close in style to the originals it's influenced by. That said it hasn't made me a Kevin J Anderson fan and it's doubtful I'll pick up anything else he's written. I'd rather read the originals instead.
 
oaymond l weil Genesis: not as good writtenas the others in my opinion. oliver bowden assassin's creed series... nice read but not enough to keep
 
I'm about 2/3rds of the way through Christian Cameron's Killer of Men. It's a bit like something Bernard Cornwell might have written had he written about the Persian Wars, I suppose - very much in the style of The Last Kingdom but not quite on Cornwell's level. I'm enjoying it muchly, though, even if Cameron has some really irritating narrative ticks that throw me out of its world and make me roll my eyes on regular occasions.
 
Read The Burning Man by Christopher Fowler, another in the Bryant and May quirky crime novels, and a short story collection of Bryant and May tales, London's Glory.

In between those, read a bunch of Agatha Raisin "crime" novels by M C Beaton. Afraid I didn't take to those, won't bother again and was glad to get back to B & M.
 
About 40 pages into Experimental Films by Gemma Files. First I've read by her, and I'm finding the beginning intriguing.


Randy M.
 
Still working on The Fireman by Joe Hill. Almost at page 500. It's a really good book, and I've totally bought into it.

Also still listening to Armada the audiobook, and should be done today or monday in traffic.
 
I just finished Return of the Crimson Guard by Ian Cameron Esselemont. It was overall a better effort than Night of Knives but I'm finding Esselemont a step below Erikson in the writing department. Now I'm on to Stonewielder.
 
ratsy said:
Still working on The Fireman by Joe Hill. Almost at page 500. It's a really good book, and I've totally bought into it.

Also still listening to Armada the audiobook, and should be done today or monday in traffic.
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I'm looking forward to reading The Fireman, it sounds brilliant!

How was Armada? I enjoyed Ready Player 1
 
I just finished The Rise of Endymion to complete the Hyperion Cantos. I must say, I really enjoyed the first two books moreso than the last two, but the Endymion sequence was at least a worthy effort and I did want to see how the series wrapped itself up. Now I'm onto to Frank Herbert's Dune for the second time in an effort to read that series of books by him.
 
I finished The Fireman by Joe Hill this weekend. I'm finding it hard to describe this book. It wasn't quite what I expected, and it was what I will call a soft read. The entire 750 page book is in Harper's POV and Joe does a great job with her character. It wasn't a horror book, but more of a post-virus story about a group of people, being hunted down for carrying a spore that makes people start on fire. Unless you learn to control the Dragonscale. It was a great book, and I was utterly impressed with Hill's writing chops. He called it his version of The Stand, and though it was much less epic than his dad's book, it was a book I will highly recommend. My only complaint was they were in the same setting for much too long in the book in my opinion. It all worked for the story, but I couldn't help but feel they should have been moving.

Now that I finished with Hill's book, I moved on to the eagerly anticipated final instalment in Stephen King's series with End of Watch. I'm just a little ways in and am already sunk into the story, as always. Looking forward to seeing how this all shapes up in the end.

@Pedro Del Mar I should be finishing Armada on the drive home today. It falls flat for me, especially when compared to Ready Player One. It feels really young, and there was way too little action and way too much teenage contemplation in it for me.
 
I had another crack at Tim Powers's The Stress of Her Regard on holiday, and got into it this time. I love his wilder flights of imagination -- he has a rare ability to create supernatural beings that inspire awe, and which feel genuinely alien. I was also very impressed with how he worked the details of the historical figures' lives into his plot. (Both of these aspects were what I liked about his Declare, which I'm now tempted to read again.) However, having to stick quite closely to the Romantic poets' history, and his insistence on finding secret significance in odd bits of their writings and then having to explain it, felt like it restricted the story a bit, and the overall arcs were a bit confused and unsatisfying.
 
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