"The Road To Wigan Pier" by Orwell. I'm halfway through. It's an anecdotal examination of poverty and the lower class in 1937, especially the north-south divide and the miners. I knew next to nothing about the miners and what their jobs consisted of before I started this, and it's fascinating. As per Orwell, class observations and philosophical musings are scattered throughout.
The Road to Wigan Pier is indeed a very good book. I recently realized that I'd never actually read "The Importance of Being Ernest", so that's my most recent read. Thoroughly entertaining!
Just bought Speaker for the Dead, hoping to get started on it soon. I got a bunch of photography books for xmas that I need to look through first. Looks good though, I hear a lot of people prefer it to Ender's Game - at least according to the author Holy crap. I got Dune off of Audible and it's something like 22 hours long, which must put it around the 700-800pg mark (the longer HP books are around the same length in audio form, at least). Times 15! I've only gotten about halfway though one of them.
IMO Dune and The Ender series are a lot alike. The first book is awesome then the series degenerates into a bunch of pseudo religious plots that have nothing to do with the original story and leave a nasty taste in your mouth when you're done. Best book I've read recently was The Wasp Factory.
Hm......... of the few dozen I've read this month, I'd most recommend http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/f/lorna-freeman/covenants.htm It's nothing that hasnt been done before with the magic and the prince and sundry of other matters........ But it's like comparing a Ferrari to a Race Car, they both can do 230mph, cost more money than most people will see in their life times...... and are simply cool as hell..... But the ferrari does it in style........ It just came across as very polished very well thought out book. Like I said, nothing hugely original...... but just polish Of course the Lt. Leary series is uberness as always http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/d/david-drake/with-lightnings.htm along with John Ringos through the looking glass series... very interesting take on science and space travel. http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/r/john-ringo/into-looking-glass.htm And Kelly McCullough's Ravirn Series started out a mite slow but it has literally been getting better every book with 3 out now and a 4th in may thats one I seriously cant wait for.... since book 3 is one of my favorite books of the past year. http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/m/kelly-mccullough/
Sphere. I thought it was a good science mystery/thriller(as I see it). Although some details do bug me as I read, they were somehow horribly wrong. I like how Crichton ended the story, putting an end to all time paradox related issues. Sphere is my second Crichton book, Next being the first. And now ploughing through some old Stephen King books. Shinning, Cell, and Misery. I read Duma Key awhile back and thought it was good too, so now I'm go back to some of his old work. Bought a bundle of the three on a discount.
On the non-fiction side of things, I've been reading this one book off and on. Confucius Lives Next Door by T.R. Reid. It's written by a journalist who lived in Japan for a while, and while it's dated (published in 1999) it's a fascinating read on Japanese society especially in comparison to American/Western society. As an American who lived in S. Korea, it makes some very interesting points about cultural values and cohesiveness in many different sectors of life: schools, communities, work, government, business, etc. On a different topic, I stumbled upon R.A Salvatore last year and really devoured his Drizzt books. Great character and writing style, though sometimes it gets repetitive. I've found that my memory has gotten shot, as I've gotten older. Used to be I could tell you all kinds of details about a book I'd read years earlier, these days I sometimes forget that I've even read a book until I'm a few chapters in (ok, that's only happened once.) Partly it's the way I read ficton: super fast and straight through.
great book haven't heard the audible version i'll have to try that out Rant by Chuck Palahniuk i liked the multiple pieced story he got going there slow start though... oh and Angles & Demons by Dan Brown liked that one more than The Da Vinci Code
At the moment I'm working my way through the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. Not exactly work King is known for but great series all the same. Before starting the Dark Tower read through George R. R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series. Still waiting for him to complete the next book in the series but the previous books were pretty immense.
Have you read Survivor by the same? It's fantastic. I'm still trying to finish Random Acts of Heroic Love by Scheinmann, which is a bit mopey and melodramatic in places but generally good. I'm totally bemused as to where the story (or stories) could possibly go.
Thomas Pynchon, Yukio Mishima, Orwell, W.S Burroughs, can't really go wrong with anything there. I guess Mishima's later books are kind of pretentious as ****. Graphic Novels are good for speed reading. Not total **** super hero crap but stuff like chris ware, daniel clowes, alan moore, seth are all great reads.
Planescape: Torment If you've played the game you'll know the outline. I had this free with my copy of the game.
Last book I read was Nation by PTerry. A very good story. Currently reading 'The Wit & Wisdom of the Discworld' - it's giving me an appetite for some old Discworld books.
+1. And that's Sir PTerry now... http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24858964-23109,00.html As for what I'm reading at the mo, I've just finsihed re-reading the Dreaming Void by Peter F Hamilton, and started on the Temporal Void, which is the next book in the Void trilogy. Very Good so far. PFH knows how to spin a decent SF yarn, as evidenced by the excellent Night's Dawn sequence and the first Commonwealth sequence (Pandora's Star, Judas Unchained. The Void trilogy is set in the same universe, only about 1000 years on from the events on the first books). Also try his earlier Greg Mandell books (Mindstar Rising, et al) http://www.peterfhamilton.co.uk/ Realy enjoyed the Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothuss early last year as well - waiting for the next one is a real pain!
Him from League of Gentlemen. Imagine if James Bond was a Victorian and wasn't fussed about which hole he filled, so to speak. This one he's struggling with his forthcoming retirement in the 1960's. Very funny, and full of priceless characters. Example (quoted from Gatiss) is Whitley Bey, half Turkish, half Geordie, "...the secret leader of a cadre of psychoanalysts-cum-mercenaries called the Jung Turks. Their speciality lay in imagining themselves into the mind of the enemy and then working out, through analysis, what their next move would be. If this failed they fell back on good old-fashioned Balkan brutality." Also:
Earnest is amazing. It's technically a quick play, so it's only something like 70 pages long, too, but it's SO GOOD. Let's see, favorite books... Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. My favorite fiction work of all time in any medium. If you can wrap your head around the convoluted timeline (at certain times it will seem like it's continuing in a single direction and suddenly wrap around and start again from a point it first touched on maybe twelve chapters earlier, which means certain events happen more than once and in entirely different contexts, etc.), it's a real gem. Clevinger's trial is the most hilariously nonsensical scene of back and forth dialogue I think I've ever encountered - and that includes Monty Python. It's that good. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Michael Crichton did some great stuff. My personal favorites are The Andromeda Strain, Timeline, and Prey. If you're okay with spiritual/basic Christian reading, start off with Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. (It's practically the antithesis of preachy, so don't let the general category put you off). And I probably couldn't get away without listing A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster. The cover is deceptively childish - it's more or less a high-minded dissertation on the nature of fun, what makes a good game, where games fit as an artistic medium, etc. - Diosjenin -
