October 2019 reading thread

Brian G Turner

Brian G Turner

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Swamped with academic reading, so still no fiction reading for me for the moment.

However, please do share what fiction you're reading and your thoughts on it. :)
 
This Lunchtime I have just started re-reading A Hat Full of Sky by Sir Terry Pratchett. I read it when it first came out but felt like re-reading this autumn.
I remember it being a soft gentle comfortable read. It is as YA as Sir Terry ever got and he never went that Grim-Dark so it should be an enjoyable way to spend some time...
Crivens!!!
 
I have just finished a book called Nevernight,book one of The Nevernight Chronicles,by Jay Kristoff.
I haven't heard of him before,so I don't know if he is well known. The book was full of creative,original ideas and I enjoyed it overall.
There is a lot of violence in the book and so I am a bit hesitant to start book two in the series. I want to,but I have to skip read through the worst of the violence.I think I will read something a bit lighter now and go back to the Nevernight after a break.
 
Brian G Turner said:
Swamped with academic reading, so still no fiction reading for me for the moment.

However, please do share what fiction you're reading and your thoughts on it. :)
Click to expand...
You know depending on the course a lot of academic reading is fiction
 
I'm still just a little way into the second volume, of three, of Journey to the West.

If you like the style of Three Kingdoms or Outlaws of the Marsh but wish the cast list weren't hundreds, this is the ideal book. It's got a main cast of four (five if you include the horse).

I'm also about three quarters into Michael Psellus' Chronographia (it actually has the modernised title of 'Fourteen Byzantine Rulers' but pish to that!). Isaac Comnenus is about to become emperor.
 
althea said:
I have just finished a book called Nevernight,book one of The Nevernight Chronicles,by Jay Kristoff.
I haven't heard of him before,so I don't know if he is well known. The book was full of creative,original ideas and I enjoyed it overall.
There is a lot of violence in the book and so I am a bit hesitant to start book two in the series. I want to,but I have to skip read through the worst of the violence.I think I will read something a bit lighter now and go back to the Nevernight after a break.
Click to expand...
From what i read it's a kind of left hand of god mixed with nightfall i think. Not sure i'm in the mood
 
Started Blood Under Water, by our own Toby Frost. (This is Book Two in his Dark Renaissance series.) Only a couple of chapters in and the situation is already very tense for Guilia.
 
Just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Dogs of War.

Brilliant!! My favourite novel this year, by far. I just wish I were more eloquent to be able to review this book well.

Now on to Fatal Error (Repairman Jack book 14) by F. Paul Wilson. Only one more to go after this.
 
Echoes of the Macabre by Daphne du Maurier

I've finished one story but the time I thought I'd have to read has dried up. Next week I'll be driving a lot, spending time with my daughter and grandson and friends, so probably not a lot of reading in my near future.

That one story, "The Apple Tree" is a doozy, though.

Randy M.
 
i'm with benedict jacka Fallen. Appropriated for the season. Jumping for Peace Talks by jim butcher...the wait is annoying. by the way it seems laurell hamilton is going to launch a new series. Does anyine know anything about whta's about? i mean i love anita, never had much interested in gentry, so i'm kind of hoping something edwardian (as in edward from anita lol)
 
To anyone interested in short stories, Flame Tree Press have so far brought out twenty-one volumes under their Gothic Fantasy range, don't be put off by the range title, these cater to most fiction tastes.
The books are all hardback with beautiful metallic finish covers, there about twenty pounds each and run to four hundred pages plus, the text is fairly fine so you get a lot of bangs for your bucks wordage wise!
There is SF including, Time Travel, AI & Robots, Invasions, Utopia/Dystopia, Ghosts, Supernatural Horror, Chilling Horror, Cozy Crime, Urban Crime, Lost Places, Sword & Sorcery/Steam Punk, Fantasy ect, ect.
The content is a mixture of classic and new short stories plus the odd novel extract, so a bit of a hodge podge, but theirs lots of good stuff in there, these would make good gifts for Christmas for someone starting out in that field, or just good gifts for yourselves, they are all available on Amazon, so give them a look over.
By the same people are a few single author collections, such as H. G. Wells plus a range of collections based on mythology, Greek, Celtic, Norse ect, I haven't looked at any of these so I've no idea what their like, all told the print quality is pretty good.
My one gripe is that the S.F. volume and Time Travel volume contain the same novella, "Armageddon 2419" , this is the very first of the Buck Rogers story from the twenty's or thirty's, and at over forty pages is a fair chunk of both books, this is sloppy to have content overlap, as someone such as me ( who suffers from bibliomania ) who has one will very likely get the other!I
Just thought I'd let you all know, as I think they are a fairly good range of anthologies!!!
 
Finished Frankenstein. Interesting read. I’ve oftentimes heard it referred to as the first SF novel. I’m not sure I’d agree. It’s an interesting early example of ‘wierd’ fiction I would say - a variant of fantasy. There’s nothing SF about it really. Victor builds the monster but there is never any explanation of how, and in many ways it makes no sense at all. I felt the plot was somewhat ludicrous and unbelievable. I don’t mean the idea of making a man from scratch - one has to just accept that - but the nuts and bolts of the story simply aren’t believable. Are we expected to believe the monster spent a year living 10 feet from a family in a connected out-building on their farm and was not once noticed? And during this time he learnt perfect French? I don’t want to stray into spoiler territory, but there are many other examples that are just daft. One gets the clear impression that this was written by a very young writer - it seems to guess at wisdom and life experience rather than use it from true hindsight and the prose seems a little forced, as though it’s the early 19th century equivalent of sixth-firm poetry. I’d say it was rather average, but I’m glad I read it, it wasn’t awful.
 
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