Topic: Books You're Currently Reading?

@MightyDemon82 We sounds fantastic. Glad you enjoyed it, from the sounds of things. Added it to the list.

@FuriousMachine I'll read the books first and then seek out the movies to do a comparison. I remember not being overly keen on Hannibal when I watched it in the cinema 24 years ago 😮 .

@BlAcK_Sw0rDsMaN It's an excellent book, Only about 230 pages long. It only took me longer to read due to a certain metroidvania with bugs.

@MightyDemon82 Haha, I have heard great things about Silksong, too. I also loved 1984 and Animal Farm ,the latter of which I would strongly recommend, if you haven't read it already! .

@BlAcK_Sw0rDsMaN I know you like your challenging games, so I think you would enjoy it. I have read those already, great books. I got a boxset of Orwell books with those included, I still need to read the remaining three books.

I am speedily reading through Doctor Thorne now, at this rate I should finish it today. Speedily reading through it, because it has not been holding my attention as well as the first two books in Trollope's six-book series.

Full impressions to follow.

Edit: I've finished it now ,and whilst it did have some good moments, I have to say I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as The Warden and Barchester Towers. I'll reserve judgement of the work as a whole, until I have completely read the entire sextology.

Next up: Framley Parsonage, the fourth book in the series.

Edit II: I've read about a fifth of 'Framley' now, so far it is much better than Doctor Thorne.

Edit II: Putting gaming on hold for a few days/weeks so I can finish off the Chronicles of Barset in it's entirety, I'm about 4/5 of the way thru Framley Parsonage as it stands. Full impressions to follow, The Small House at Allington ,is up next, which should be followed by The Last Chronicle of Barset to round off the series.

Finished The World We Make, the second entry in N.K. Jemisin's "Great Cities" duology, which was almost as good as the first one. It was a joy to follow these characters to the conclusion of their story, but that conclusion feels a tiny bit abrupt (which is probably due to it being a planned trilogy that was cut short as real life events sapped the author's will to continue with this particular tale). Apart from that minor quibble, this is an excellent series I heartily recommend to fans of the genre. I also think this world/universe/multiverse can hold many interesting tales in the future, should Jemisin feel like returning, even without an external Lovecraftian threat looming (there's enough latent conflict between the cities to carry some epic stories alone). Five stars.

Also read the short story The Ledge from Stephen King's Night Shift collection. This short story about a man on a ledge is peak King and another solid entry in a collection that has a lot of good ones. Five stars.

Now that I'm done with the "Great Cities" series, I'm ready to listen to the discussion of the book with the author on BBC Audio's "World Book Club". Been looking forward to hearing the author as I've become very fascinated with her and she's quickly becoming a favourite. AND I also discovered that she co-authored a novel in the "Mass Effect: Andromeda" trilogy and with ME being my absolute favourite game series of all time, that trilogy just jumped up high on my priority reading list.

I also realised that it's been forever and a day since I read non-fiction, so I pushed Black Klansman, the memoir of Ron Stallworth, the first black detective in Colorado Springs, who winds up going undercover in the KKK after coming across a classified ad. Haven't seen the Spike Lee movie adaptation either, which I hear is very good, so that will probably follow

William Gibson's Neuromancer. I ripped the original BBC audio drama and have it playing through the PS5 while I do side stuff in CyberPunk. It's basically where the genre began so I thought it was fitting.

I've finished Framley Parsonage ,it was epic and sweeping in scope, with much attention and care given to the inner and outer worlds of the characters, I was satisfied with the conclusion, and am looking forward to reading the fifth book in the series, The Small House at Allington, next.

Edit: I enjoyed it (Framley) almost as much as Barchester Towers.

@AgentCooper Welcome back to bookworm central, nerd!
I also lost my dad to cancer, though for me it's 30 years ago this year, so not as fresh. I fully expect a similar experience with Crying in H Mart (which is also on my reading list), though, as every now and then something comes along and stirs up all kinds of emotions.

I've read two of your purchases and Shōgun is a fantastic read, in my opinion. The FX show was stellar, but the novel is even better. One of my favourites.

There There was a mixed bag for me. Very well written and a compelling story, but I felt that it would have benefitted greatly from giving the reader more time to spend with the somewhat large-ish character gallery so that when the denouement came it would have more of an impact. In short: too short, should have been longer. Absolutely a worthwhile read, though.

I've also been putting off The Odyssey and not sure I'll get to it before Nolan's (hopefully) epic hits the screens. I still find it a little bit daunting. Would love to hear your thoughts on it down the line.

Hadn't heard of The Memory Police, but the first lines of the synopsis on Goodreads were enough to put it on my list. Thanks

I haven't updated this for a while. But i'm on about book... (I was going to guess 10, but it is in fact 11) book 11 of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Tales/The Last Kingdom...

Pfft, there's clearly no nerrrrrds here.

@FuriousMachine @AgentCooper and, wait... Nolan is tackling the Odyssey?!?!?! I might have to migrate this to the movie thread tomorrow and make demands that this be at least a 4 hour epic. And / or multiple films. Eh, I'll look it up some time, as it's news to me 😁

@Ravix Yeah, I've even seen a teaser in theatres for it, that got some criticism because Jon Bernthal spoke in an American accent. Can't find the teaser online, though, only fanmade dross for now, it seems.

And how dare you question our nerd status?!

Finished Ron Stallworth's memoir Black Klansman. This "stranger than fiction" tale of a black Colorado Springs officer who managed to go undercover with the KKK in the 70s is, on the face of it, both hilarious and compelling. I mean, how can this story of a black man making fools of David Duke and his ilk of so-called "superior intelligence" be anything other than a fantastic read? Unfortunately, while the book contains a few great moments where these white supremacist troglodytes are clearly and satisfyingly exposed as the idiots they are, the investigation that frames it is both quite uneventful and, worse, boring. Even at a brisk 200 pages or so, this book feels drawn out and even repetitive at times. Also, the personalities of the officers involved, even Stallworth himself to some extent, does not come through and you feel left with just a bunch of names on paper.
I have yet to see the Spike Lee film that is based on this, but I feel confident in saying that watching the movie would be a better bet than reading this if you're interested in the story.
Still, despite its shortcomings, the book is far from hopeless and could be worth a go if you want to delve deeper into these events. Three stars.

From the Stephen King short story collection Night Shift I read The Lawnmower Man which was a fun and very short story about a highly unusual lawnmowing service (and has absolutely nothing to do with the atrociously bad movie from the 90s).

Next up is Cold Storage by David Koepp (screenwriter of "Jurassic Park", among others) which the blurb hypes as "for readers of Andy Weir and Noah Hawley". That is not a low bar to set, so I'm curious to see if Koepp delivers. He's very uneven as a screenwriter, in my opinion - well, the resulting movies are, anyway - but he has his name attached to some real good ones, so this should be interesting.

I am about halfway through The Small House at Allington ,by Trollope, and I must say, it is high Shakespearean comedic farce! Some parts are particularly amusing, mixed in with more serious moments. I've decided to take the view that Trollope was probably highly influenced by Shakespeare, and probably read him in his youth.

@AgentCooper Damn, I was hoping Spike Lee and a little creative license would put a little oomph into the movie... will still check it out, but expectations are lowered.

I finished The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope, the ending was quite different to what I expected, but, without giving anything away, I will say that I still enjoyed the book.

Next up is The Last Chronicle of Barset ,which, as the name would suggest, is the last book in the Chronicles of Barset series, by Trollope - I'll have read them all if I get to finish it without any unforeseen circumstances taking me away from it.

I picked up some more William Gibson novels after really enjoying Neuromancer. Both Mona Lisa Overdrive and Count Zero. I can see why he's been such an influence on the Cyberpunk genre, his world building is absolutely phenomenal. I only noticed afterwards that he also wrote the unproduced screenplay for Alien, which was okay but I think they went with the right screenplay in the end.

@GirlVersusGame I wasn't all too happy with the "Sprawl" trilogy; some great worldbuilding but I found many of the stories slow and unengaging, particularly in Count Zero. They do pick up towards the end, though and Mona Lisa Overdrive even managed to get up to three & a half stars for me in my Goodreads "review". I actually preferred the "Sprawl" set novellas/short stories in his Burning Chrome collection, "Johnny Mnemonic" and the titular "Burning Chrome". Curious to hear what you think of them, if you get to reading them (if you haven't already, of course). The collection contains some other good novellas, too, in my opinion.

@FuriousMachine I didn't expect you to mention goodreads, that's where I got a lot of my suggestions from. I try to read fiction but often just end up collecting it for a rainy day. If it wasn't for playing Cyberpunk I wouldn't have looked too much into the genre. I'm glad I did though, I was considering Johnny Mnemonic too but wasn't sure if it was a novel or a screenplay. I never found the time to be too active on there, out of 6K books I've left a total of maybe 3 reviews and they were probably for friends. I probably should rate some of them, at some point. I had a quick look over Burning Chrome, I'll give it a go thanks. I see it on audible now so I might go that route, it's an impressive cast of narrators.

@GirlVersusGame I love Goodreads, helps me keep track of everything I want to read. I leave some thoughts and a rating to books I read there, initially just as a reminder/note to myself, but then someone wanted to know what they said, so I switched to English. Now they've turned into semi-reviews, I guess. I more or less echo the same thoughts in this thread here between the books.
When I read collections, I've recently started to add an update for each entry, as well. Here is the one for "Burning Chrome", if you're interested. The tiny stars in each entry is my rating for that story (out of 5). Overall solid collection

@FuriousMachine Thanks for sharing! you have great taste in movies so when you mentioned goodreads I was curious about your overall collection. We've read a lot of the same non-fiction books. I sent you a friend request on there, there's nothing too weird on my page but it's not up to date. I have about 6K of 8K actually catalogued. Book preservation is really important to me, probably more than games at this point. I went through a phase for a while where if a topic caught my interest I'd read everything I could find about it rather than just rely on Youtube or something. Now there are only so many hours in the day.