Something from Ilkka Remes. He writes plot heavy books. I like character based & driven text more. But I can use his books to study his style & pacing.
I'm beginning The Warning, by Mike Gray and Ira Rosen. It's a nonfiction account of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. I'm also dipping into Ocean Vuong's poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds. I bought it because I love the title.
My fiction reading list is mostly limited to whatever LuAnn at the library buys, so pardon the lowbrow selections, but I just finished Season of the Witch by Christopher Knight (billed on the cover as Stephen King of the North - he isn't, so don't bother) and started the latest Pendergast novel by Preston and Child, with Say Nothing, a true-crime book about a notorious murder in Northern Ireland, on deck.
Re-reading Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. I read it many moons ago and various passages have always resonated with me; thought I'd see what they were really like and how much, if any, my memories had changed them. So far it's as it was before, and I'm having a good time with it.
I did try it, I really did, but it broke me and I never finished it. Took the plunge on the Peter F Hamilton, 2,500 page, two book epic, Commonwealth Saga. Nearly finished the first tome (Pandora's Star); took me around a couple hundred pages just to get into it, and I frequently find myself puzzling over a character introduced a hundred pages before and which I had forgotten about. Other than that, it's great. Just ordered Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, supposed to be a classic.
Recently finished Joe Abnercrombie's Best Served Cold, next up is Warlock Holmes, a Study in Brimstone. I read 3 paragraphs earlier and was cackling. Either that or Jurassic Jail, by William Allen Webb. Sending convicts to Dinosaur Era to serve out their time. Intriguing!
Making it through the Halo book series, based off the games. About half of the novels are phenomenal military or hard science fiction. Right now I'm on Last Light, but I'm almost done. Still five books behind on the eighteen book series.
Fun one. Always nice to have a book you throw at the wall after reading it, but then pick it back up in a few days time and apologize. Quite the ending.
I'm reading Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. One of the best sci-fi books that I've read in a long time.
The Empire of Talents trilogy by Jordan Rivet. Just finished The Spy in the Silver Palace and am now on An Imposter With a Crown. They are turning out to be way better than I originally expected.
Look at Children of Time pg 4 & Garden of Earthly Delights pg 9 & 10. The italics there are only confusing to me or at the very least didn't add anything to the scene.
About 10 chapters into A Song of Ice and Fire. I get what all the hype was about. I don't have much trouble following the main characters. It's all the little side characters that bother me. All the Sirs this and Maestros that, or whatever. Fathers and uncles and cousins 100s of miles away on Casterly Rock or something another. The whole time I'm just waiting for him to get on with the story, because all that info dump is going to go in one ear and out the other because it's irrelevant at the time. I get annoyed when a character seemingly mentioned in passing suddenly becomes important long, long after I forgot about them. Similarly I hate it when I then try to actually pay attention to these minor characters and they end up not mattering whatsoever. Or maybe they'll matter 3 books from now. I don't know. Oh well. I really am enjoying the read.
I need to just stick to one book and binge read it. Instead, I'm reading Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, Richard III: The Maligned King, revisiting Fierce On The Page, and the Scientist's Guide To Writing, while also watching and reflecting on some Masterclass material that I blogged about. I am wondering if I have ADHD. I simply REFUSE to look up any information on it, because I'll have to READ it.
I too am attempting American Gods by Neil Gaiman and frankly I'm finding it a struggle, and it's an effort to turn the pages. This book is lauded as a classic of its time and I'm hoping that will start to kick in soon, because at the moment I have no idea where it's going, I don't like the characters and I'm losing interest very quickly.
The audio book is really good. When I started working at my job, my commute was 30 mins. The book was already checkout of the library, so i got the audiobook and listened to it to and from work. It was SO good to listen to. The narrator did a good job. Maybe try that one?
I'm reading Beneath The Tamarind Tree by Isha Sesay I normally dont read nonfiction (which is why I keep putting off Michelle Obama's book.... yesterday, a man literally stopped me in the library and said "you should read this book!" my response? "I'll get to it eventually"). THIS book, however, has captured my attention. the writing is so descriptive that it reads like a novel. Even the parts where she stops to explain about the different sections of ISIS and how Boko Haram became a part of ISIS was interesting and I couldnt stop reading. She focuses on 4 girls, going in to their family life, why they went to the girls boarding school, and how much each girl meant to their family (one girl was an only child, another girl was 1 of 8, etc.) I'm currently at the part just after Boko Haram took the girls away (according to one of the girls, there was a lot of arguing as to what to do with the girls... half wanted to just leave the girls there because they weren't doing anything, the other half wanted to make a lesson out of them and burn them alive, so the commander compromised and said "lets just take them with us")
