Other Books you are currently reading?

Just finished Chester Himes' A Rage in Harlem, it's the second of his novels I've read and they've both been compelling reading.

 

Finished the book, hated every page of part 4.

I really can't understand why he'd do that, other than drug addiction or going cold turkey.

 

It was definitely a tonal shift. Given all the delays in it being released, I can only imagine the editing process being even worse that usual

 

I ordered my copy in December 2016. Delays, what delays?

 

The Pale Blue Eye - I sort of expected more from the movie, but the book definitely delivered.

 

Audiobook - Redshirts

 

awesome book

 

Just finished Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, which got a bit heavy going in the middle but suddenly became a ripping great yarn.

I'm now on Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, which is going well so far but I've only just started.

 

Excursion To Hell.
About the Paras on Mount Longdon.
Great read

 

Just finished reading the last book in The Expanse series: Leviathan Falls.

I don't typically read except when I'm on holiday. Then I typically chew through a couple books. But at the end of my last holidays I finished book 6, which is where the show ends.

Fast forward to last week, I've been going on a bit of a social media cleanse and suddenly found myself bored, so I decided to start the 7th book. That quickly turned into the final trilogy.

I greatly enjoyed the books: the tension, the people, the humanity. Absolutely brilliant.

Now I'm just miserable it's all over.

 

Halfway through book 5 here.

 

I myself have stalled on Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive, book 4. They're huge things, and the first 2 were absolute belters but now it's just getting a bit convoluted, drawn out and over-the-top. The first book was a sort of tense, grounded political war thriller. By book 4 you're into all the

Spoiler

flying supersoldiers and gods and magical items

of conventional nerd fantasy and it's just a bit...juvenile. It reminds me of anime shows. Season one grabs you because it's an interesting premise with good character writing and before you know it you're into season 7 with no end in sight and everyone's a flying superhero with a magic cat and a talking sword or some ****, and ugh just tell a story, I don't need Saturday morning gimmicks.

I might try GoT, from the TV series it looks quite grounded and gimmick free other than the existence of dragons.

 

I would say that depends on your patience and memory.

The 'A Song of Ice and Fire' books are dense - really dense - and this is coming from someone who will happily read The Silmarillion cover to cover multiple times a year. Multiple chapters will be dedicated to some character you've never heard of before and then nothing more is said about that character. That character will be abruptly re-introduced in later books and now suddenly you're supposed to remember everything that was written three books ago about some seemingly minor character. There's been plenty of memes/jokes/etc doing the rounds about how much Tolkein goes on about trees or poetry, but IMO that pales in comparison to how tiresome it is when George RR Martin spends an entire chapter's worth of pages talking about heraldry or house mottos.

You'll also be in for a frustratingly long wait for books 6 & 7: book 5, A Dance with Dragons, was published in 2011 and he's been working on book 6, The Winds of Winter, ever since then. He's been saying off and on for a decade that he's "nearly finished". EDIT: And it's not even like these are basically "new", or "sequel", books that pick up where earlier books left off - the entire story of A Song of Ice and Fire will not be complete until book 7, A Dream of Spring, is published.

I read all the ASOIAF books once when the TV show was at its height; I did plan to go back and read them again when book 6 got published, but the longer that gap grows the less I've felt the desire to go back to them. Yet I'll happily re-read the entire 41-book Discworld series multiple times a year and not get bored of it. In fact I'm doing that again right now - started a month or so ago and I'm up to book 14, Lords and Ladies.

I'm not recommending against reading A Song of Ice & Fire, but personally I find the books - as well as George RR Martin's style and approach to writing - slow, tiresome, and frustrating.

 

Got The Fold by Peter Clines going on audiobook after 14, enjoyed 14 more than I thought I would so the higher expectations for The Fold are there and so far being met

 

Thank you man, I'll take that under advisement. From the opening chapters I liked his writing style, but I have been warned about the density of his books, and the random cut back and forth, and the barrage of names and places. Idk. Brandon Sanderson just feels more and more like a YA author trying to be George RR Martin, the more I persevere with him, and I want something a bit more mature.

 

A Song of Ice and Fire is excellent, they are long books with a number of large characters but they're such compelling reading you don't really get time to forget. Well, other than the hiatus but coming to them this late in the day that won't affect you, and I'm not expecting any more to be published in any case.

Besides, Bronn is so much cooler in the books.

 

Yeah, I know what you mean about "a bit more mature". I read ASOIAF when the TV show was at it's height - probably somewhere around season 2 or 3, after A Dance with Dragons was published - and I guess I did enjoy them despite the criticisms I have. In the time since then I've read plenty of other book series (serieses...?) that I will happily go back to, but I haven't really felt any great compulsion to go back to ASOIAF. I absolutely loved Discworld; when I first read them, I read all 41 books twice in the same year, and I'm reading them again now. I've read the Dune books a couple of times in the last 5 or so years, and despite the issues with the later books, the earlier ones are compelling enough for me to read again. The Expanse - I've read that series of books about three times, both the books and the TV adaptation are among my favourite science fiction works of all time.

Maybe my gripes are more with George RR Martin himself, rather than his work in general, but I still think that he takes a long time to get to where he's going.

 

The Cosmere books start to get more interesting when you realise they're all interlinked and start getting into the origin of the shards, which is where the magic on each planet comes from, and the motivations of repeat characters that crop up in different series (Wit is in all of them) . I do find his work easy reads though, and some totally come across as youth fiction. Tress of the emerald sea felt like a kids book.

If you want something more mature to properly get your teeth into, I'd recommend Steven Erickson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series. The scale of them leaves the political manouvering of GoT or stormlight for dust.

 

Don't see an awful lot of mention of David Gemmell on here...

 

I once ran his sales table for a day at a scifi convention in Birmingham.