I consider Memory, Sorry, and Thorn one of Tad Williams best fantasy series, overall maybe third in a list, that has The War of the Flowers above it and Otherland his best. Stick with it, it gets better and better, like all fantasy series it has a lot of world building. Saying that Otherland is huge, four books, but well worth it.
For fiction I'm half-way through The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson. It's the third book in a four book series, with the fourth book coming out next year. It is quite good, and Sanderson continues to be my favorite author. For non-fiction: I just began On Writing by Stephen King.
I've read four or five writing manuals now and that's still my favorite by a mile. I think you'll like it.
My reading goes through phases.... I guess im back in my non-fiction phase. Just finished listening to chapter 3 of Pandoras Lab: 7 stories of science gone wrong and i am in awe Had to pause the book and run up and drop some sick(cool? Ironic?sad?) facts about Fritz Haber and chemical warfare on a coworker who probably thinks im crazy. Next on my docket is Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big questions from tiny mortals about death. Written by a mortician. -sighs- im on the waitlist for it...
Right now I'm reading If I Die in a Combat Zone, by Tim O'Brien, which is a memoir of his service during the Vietnam War. I'm not a really big memoir kind of guy, but this author has a style that just grabs you & makes you feel what he felt. I was first introduced to him back in High School when we were assigned to read another of his books, The Things They Carried, which is also about Vietnam, but it's a little more like a collection of war stories than an actual memoir. In both books he mixes fact & fiction in a way that tells the real truth, if that makes sense. I'm almost done with it (paperback's page count is in the low 300's), but thankfully I've got a new book that I'm expecting to be delivered in the next few days, Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir. This is only her 2nd book & the follow-up to Gideon the Ninth. Basically it's about necromancers....[insert epic echo] in space! [/echo] Speaking of Haruki Murakami, I'd suggest The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84. They're both pretty long & you can start to feel that length, but they aren't tiresome like some long books can be.
I remember reading The Things They Carried (the short story), and I remember it being very powerful. Wasn't it just a list of what the soldiers carried with them? And from that alone you got the idea of what their lives were like.
Pretty much, but it went deeper than just the items they carried. It included the mental burdens as well. The whole book sorta straddles the line between prose & story with its poetic feel. That & the fact that it's not a stereotypical war story is what made me get a copy for myself a few years after I was done with school.
Well, I finished Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope. Is it great literature? I don't know. Was it an enjoyable book? Yes, emphatically; although I think Can You Forgive Her? was the better novel of the two. Waiting for Phineas Redux to arrive in the mail.
I've read Can You Forgive Her? but it's been so long I've forgotten the plot. Have you read Trollope's Dr. Thorne? If you have, you'll understand what I mean when I say that the day after the 2016 US presidential election, I thought, "Good grief, we've elected Sir Roger Scratcherd!" But no more on that. I don't have time to go play in the Debate Room.
I still have his Barchester novels to look forward to. I've just started reading Trollope this last month and I'm really enjoying it. It's been a great thing for me to find a Victorian author that I can love.
A Joanne Harris double whammy: 'Blackberry Wine' (intrigued by the concept of a bottle of wine as narrator) and 'Ten Things About Writing' (to give myself a good boot up the arse and get back into writing).
I'm almost through with Oscar Wilde's Sir Arthur Saville's Crime and Other Stories. I love The Picture of Dorian Gray, and I rather enjoyed his collection of fairy tales, so I thought I'd try this one. I don't generally like short stories as much as novels, but The Canterville Ghost is now one of my favorite shorts ever. Unfortunately, like most collections, the selections are hit or miss. It also contains two of the most boring stories I've ever heard in my life. I'm still making my way through Stephen King's Lisey's Story. I would have been done a week ago, but I keep having to put it down so I don't pass out. I can usually count on King to leave out the blood, but this one is full of it. It's not even horror gore, just lots of cutting, which is way worse on my blood phobia than violent blood. Ugh. Quit it, Stephen!
"The Overstory." I hate this book, but I'm trying to read all the Pulitzers, and it's the newest one that I haven't read. (This is my 20th on the list.) It's killed my page count for the month. It's agony. Imagine a symphony written in the key of C . . . but that's too generous. It's a symphony written in the note of C. Just the same thing, again and again and again and again. The villains are like something out of Mordor. They're just evil for fun. The protagonists are all noble and good and wise. It's Captain Planet in prose. I hate this book. So . . . 174 pages to go, that's about 696 more page flips on my kindle. I can't wait! Once I get through this, it's all downhill. I'm going to read Updike, or maybe Lonesome Dove. (I hate this book.) It's getting one star. There's no way it deserves higher, but I'm going to finish. I set my kindle down after every page and rant. The author apparently researched EVERYTHING about trees and included it. It's all there. History, allegories, science facts. I hate the characters, all of them. They are deranged and they poop a lot. I'm so sick of reading about it. I cannot endure another tree metaphor. I'm rooting for the loggers. Rooting? Arrgh! It's infecting me! Spoiler: Spoiler I hate this book.
Sounds like Melville and the endless tide of fucking sailing historical facts. That book was brutal to get through. This sounds like the same with trees.
I just finished the play M. Butterfly which was fantastic. Never seen a play written so tightly, and so poignant in addressing Orientalism. Starting on Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kayson. Reads a lot like Promising Young Women stylistically, plotwise, and thematically. Actually almost identical...
I’m nearly finishing The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell. This book was one of her most recent releases. I waited weeks and weeks to get this copy from the electronic library out of 67 other people also waiting for a copy and frankly I’m left feeling a little disappointed. I expected more turns and twists from a thriller like this one but everything about it was predictable. One of the reviews says “gripping, pacy, brilliantly twisty” and another “a twisty and engrossing story”. But I thought there was virtually very little that was “twisty” and “unpredictable” about it. It’s a great book if you’re looking for an easy read. The chapters are divided between the POV of three different characters. They seem unattached but by the end of the novel the connection between them is gradually revealed. It was the synopsis that drew me to this book in the first place. Spoiler: For syopsis In a large house in London's fashionable Chelsea, a baby is awake in her cot. Well-fed and cared for, she is happily waiting for someone to pick her up. In the kitchen lie three decomposing corpses. Close to them is a hastily scrawled note. They've been dead for several days. Who has been looking after the baby? And where did they go? Two entangled families. A house with the darkest of secrets. A compulsive new thriller from Lisa Jewell. Another book I’ve recently finished.. and this one I DO recommend is Twenty’s Girl by Sophie Kinsella. If you like to laugh while you’re reading, this is the book you should check out. You’ll be chuckling the entire way through! It’s about a lady who is forced to go to a family funeral of a great aunt she never really knew and is then confronted by the twenty-year old version of her great aunt’s ghost who wants her to stop the funeral so that she could find her necklace and bury her with it before she dies. Then she learns a lot about the life and personality of her great aunt along the way. Somewhere along the way I realised I might be a “twenty’s girl” also (that’s 2020 as opposed to 1920. Has it really been 100 years since?). Anyway, I enjoyed this book very much and it’s been a long time since a book made me chuckle. You should check this one out. It’ll have you like
