What are you reading at the moment?

[Flub]

I've got no idea what to read next. I've got a big pile of ebooks and none of them are shouting "READ ME"

Here's the queue. You guys can help me decide

Ghosts of Ascalon (The first Guild Wars 2 book)

Years Best SciFi 15

Stone Spring - Stephen Baxter

Watch - Robert J Sawyer

The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi

When Gravity Fails - George Alec Effinger

A World Out Of Time - Larry Niven

I will be dropping everything and reading the new Neal Asher book early next month though. It's already preordered from Amazon for my Kindle app.

[earlymodernsteve]

The Bacigalupi has attracted a lot of positivity - although like yourself I've got the ebook sat there and not making me want to read it. Depending on how quick you get through books, I'd go for the Year's Best SciFi and then you can drop it easily for the Asher.

[Flub]

Turned out to be none of the above A self published author posted about his first sci-fi book on Mobileread and the description sounded ok. I downloaded the Kindle sample and while it was obvious it was a first work and needed an editor's touch it was certainly above par and worth the $3.51 he's asking for it.

So this first and then a bit of Year's Best should get me right up to Neal Asher time.

*Edit* And even better. Preorders for the new Peter Hamilton book have gone up on the Kindle store. That's the beginning of September sorted then.

[Mercury]

I managed to finish two books on holiday and started a third. First up, the latest Jeff Abbott thriller:

His books just get better and better. As usual I ended up thinking the lead character would be suitable for an ongoing series and apparently this is the plan.

Next up, Harlan Coben's debut novel from 20 odd years ago released in the UK for the first time (not even sure if it was released elsewhere):

It's pretty raw, could do with being a few hundred words shorter, a little cliched and I foresaw more of the twists than usual but plenty of glimpses of the very talented writer he has become. As he himself says in the intro, don't buy this if you haven't read one of his books previously but if you are already a fan, it's definitely worth picking up. If you haven't read anything of his, check out Tell No One.

I am now about half way through:

It has just got to the part where Surrender Dorothy (precursor to Sleeper) have been signed and it is an easy read. She is very self-deprecating and I have found it an interesting insight in to trying to make it as a band.

[Silent Runner]

I didn't know Louise Wener had a biography out. I'm going to get that, I enjoy a good Britpop retrospective.

[Eats hoops and leaves]

has anybody read the new Iain Banks book yet?

I'm currently reading The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon. Predictably excellent.

[Mercury]

I didn't know Louise Wener had a biography out. I'm going to get that, I enjoy a good Britpop retrospective.

Ignore the fact that Fearne Cotton recommends it - you won't regret it.

[Stanley]

I've finished reading The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. It's pretty much the same as The Da Vinci Code - poorly written, crap characters, lenghthy desciptions of buildings on so on, and yet I loved every moment.

Next up : On The Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin.

[Flub]

I'm going to read The Haunted Vagina by Carlton Mellick III. Here's a description

It's difficult to love a woman whose vagina is a gateway to the world of the dead...

Steve is madly in love with his eccentric girlfriend, Stacy. Unfortunately, their sex life has been suffering as of late, because Steve is worried about the odd noises that have been coming from Stacy's pubic region. She says that her vagina is haunted. She doesn't think it's that big of a deal. Steve, on the other hand, completely disagrees.

When a living corpse climbs out of her during an awkward night of sex, Stacy learns that her vagina is actually a doorway to another world. She persuades Steve to climb inside of her to explore this strange new place. But once inside, Steve finds it difficult to return... especially once he meets an oddly attractive woman named Fig, who lives within the lonely haunted world between Stacy's legs.

[Scribblor]

That sounds INCREDIBLE.

[Flub]

One of his other books. Razor Wire Pubic Hair has this description

Imagine a world without men where the only way a woman can reproduce is with the help of a giant computerized incubator and a genetically engineered sex toy. Now imagine that this sex toy is intelligent. It has emotions and a soul. It hopes and dreams and it falls in love. This is the premise of Carlton Mellick III's RAZOR WIRE PUBIC HAIR.

One of the main characters "The Sister" is a nymphomaniac who is covered from head to toe in vaginas. Celsia is an Amazon warrior with pubic hair made of razor wire. The main character is a genetically engineered hermaphrodite sex toy named Celsia 2 who longs to be loved by his/her owner. Oh, but wait, there's more ... there's sex starved zombies, hordes of marauding rapists, twat frogs, a hoota beasts that is basically just a big hairy vagina with legs, and still another giant talking and apparently quite wise vagina built into the wall of the mansion in which many of these creatures reside.

What's most bizarre is that none of this seems to be there for pure shock value. In fact, this perverse menagerie of beings are presented in such a matter of fact manner that it is as if the last thing the author wants is for you to be shocked by them. He wants you to just accept them so that he can just get on with his story. And what a story it is!

RAZOR WIRE PUBIC HAIR is the touching tale of a living, breathing, thinking, sex toy that is hopelessly in love with its owner who views it as little more than an object. This book could be a metaphor for so many sexual relationships where one partner is dominant and the other is submissive, struggling to be seen as more than merely an object of lust but as a potential true love.

The most disturbing thing about this book is how much heart it contains. "Your purpose in life is to fuck as much as your body will allow before your death. You are a dildo." Celsia 2 is told and you can almost hear his/her heart break. Take away all the surreal sexual accoutrements and this could almost be a tragic romance novel about lost and unrequited love.

Personally I'd like a pet twat frog.

[hereticboy]

Those sound amazing.

Still haven't got round to reading Dune. Since my last post I've had The Color Purple and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? thrown at me by a literature student, so I've read them. I enjoyed both of them, and would really recommend They Shoot Horses, They?. It's weighs in at a tiny 115-ish pages, but it's a really good, dark read.

She's given me six books, a few of which are apparently really depressing reads. I love a bit of depression, me, so I can't wait to get stuck in.

[InsideOutBoy]

I have 10 novels in my to read pile at the moment!

After the 3rd time of trying to get into it I've given up on Game of Thrones. I don't like the writing style or that every character has to have an obvious edgy side.

I have also abandoned American Gods by Neil Gaiman after 200 pages. It has potential but it's too slow and meandering.

I have discovered the joys of Hemingway. That man lives up to the legend. He can turn anything into a page turner.

I fear the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo will go next. But it's just maintaining my interest for now.

[Yiggy]

Just finished Nothing to Envy. A fascinating insight into North Korea.

A clever book. The author is a US journalist who has spent over a decade based in Seoul as a Korean correspondent. She has based the book around 6 North Korean defectors whom she has spent years interviewing. She tells their individual stories and in doing so gives a thorough background to what has happened in North Korea over the past few decades. She starts with a history of the divide and then tells their stories then their defection then their life in their new chosen country.

It's fascinating stuff and quite moving. What has happened to that country is astonishing. I think it affected me more because they started out doing so well with the positive points of communism working such as food distribution, healthcare and education but the downfall of the economy, the famine the brutality of the regime and the isolation of the North Koreans is all shown beautifully. There is certainly some artistic license by the author as she is telling stories based on interviews but her time in the country comes through as well. She also does a good job of it not being too one sided. She does point out what did work. I didn't know for example that after the divide the North Korean economy did considerably better than the South. Also in the final part we learn of the guilt that the defectors felt about what they did to survive. Some of them even wanting to go back.

Anyway I flew through it and because it is based in fact but tells of peoples lives in the form of a drama it makes it heart-wrenching. Loved it.

[LittleJoe]

Didn't it win an award quite recently? I remember being interested in it.

[Yiggy]

Quite possibly. It only came out recently and would certainly be award material.

[Eats hoops and leaves]

I finished reading The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon last night.

It's a fascinating collection of little chapters - thoughts and ideas and strings of categorised words; observations and jokes, poems and lists - written by a person believed to be called Sei Shonagon around the year 990. She served the Empress Teishi at the time as a gentlewoman in Japan.

The book doesn't have a strict narrative - instead it drifts in and out of dates and times and situations as though in a dream (this is in now way related to book's title, by the way) - at one point the author even tries to start a novel, but this is quickly abandoned. ]

Aside from the historical interest - as you can imagine, the book is a rich source of utterly absorbing information on medieval Japan, and there are all sorts of controversies pertaining the authenticity of certain chapters etc., what with there being so many different versions of the book - what this book does for me is reinforce the belief and confidence in humanity. It's 1000 years old, yet the writing is punchy, witty and modern. This isn't due to the translation; Sei Shonagon wrote light-years head of her contemporaries. She reaches across time and holds your hand because she is just the same as we are now. She laughs at others' misfortune in unbelievably cruel ways, and in the next sentence she writes about a peasant she saw with aching empathy. Shonagon lived in a very different time, where class and social standing ruled the day, yet her humanity shines through this when her defences are down. She writes about the sound the lid of a kettle makes when it closes, at how she delights in the way a light tree branch springs upwards once the required amount of morning dew has burned away in the early afternoon sun. She writes about the expression in a man's eyes when he leaves her bed in the morning and she knows she won't see him again. She writes about how young adults are ruining the language by dropping certain letters. She discusses her fears at her new job and how she quickly settled in. She is introverted and extroverted at the same time, confused, happy and sad. She is completely real and it's very easy to forget just how old this text is.

Another thing that strikes is the description of the clothes. I think that we're used to food being a huge indicator of culture and time. In Japan it was clothes, and Shonagon takes a lot of time to describe the colours, shapes and patterns on clothes. She writes with complete passion about how it's unseemly to wear certain shades of autumn green at certain times of the day and the way a sleeve will roll up slightly, revealing a gorgeous colour of some sort. It's too early in the morning for me to think of any examples, but you can almost taste the colours as she writes about them. It's so charming to read somebody writing with such strength of passion - and of course her tastes just sound scrumptious.

Nobody knows what happened to her once she left service. Some say she went on to lead a life every bit as exciting as the one she details in the book, whereas one story speaks of her old and decrepit and bitter. I don't know which one is more romantic to me.

There were some problems with my translation, in that it suffered from the translator forgetting that she isn't some superwoman genius above the rest of us - a common problem I find with Japanese fiction. I'll explain: the notes and appendices are extensive, but too much so; words that describe the shape of a roof or a certain cloth will be starred and noted, fine. Words like 'mat' and 'room' do not need to be explained to us. Russian books do not suffer from this patronising state - it's just Japanese fiction. A typical side-effect of the fanboyism an interest in that culture seems to fuel? I dunno but it's annoying.

I challenge anybody to read this and not fall in love with Sei Shonagon.

[the_buddha_of_gaming]

I've just started this -

Only US campaigns though, unfortunately.

[The Boatman]

I'm going to read The Haunted Vagina by Carlton Mellick III. Here's a description

Strangely enough we sold one of these last week in the bookshop I work in. Somebody ordered a copy in ages ago and never picked it up, then somebody else bought it!

[Silent Runner]

I started Gutted by Tony Black on Saturday and it’s pretty good so far. The main character is a bit clichéd, alcoholic ex journalist turned PI, but it’s well written and the other characters are interesting. The cover described it as a cross between Ian Rankin and Irvine Welsh which is pretty accurate but closed to Rankin. It’s set in Edinburgh, a local gangster has just been murdered, 50K has gone missing and the cop heading up the investigation is trying to fit up our hero for the whole deal. It’s a decent piece of crime fiction.

I also started The Count of Monte Cristo. I’m only 50 or so pages into this one but I like it. I’m sure everyone is familiar with the story, innocent man is framed for a crime he didn’t commit and is locked up on an Island. He plots revenge on the guys who framed him and hears about some hidden treasure.

[BrerLappin]

Currently reading For King & Country - Voices from WW1

Its essentially jsut a big collection of letters home fromt he trenches, and poetry written by soldiers. Some of it is just

Amazingly good so far. Id like to thank The Darkness (game, not cheese rock band) for getting me interested in WW1 poetry!!

[earlymodernsteve]

Just finished Jasper Kent's Twelve which was much better than I was expecting. Vampire novel set in Napoleonic war era Russia. Generic, but in a good way. Have now started Skulduggery Pleasant which is awesome - Kid's books FTW!

[Captain Novaforce]

I love Steel Remains. Can't wait for the sequel.

Sweet, will order it then.

Have just beasted Iron and Blood by Tony Ballantyne, second of his Penrose books about a planet populated with robots at war with each other. I only really started reading it due to the cool cover of Twisted Metal, the first one, but they're pretty damn good.

[Lost and Found]

Quite possibly. It only came out recently and would certainly be award material.

I think it just picked up the BBC Samuel Johnson Award for non-fiction. Big things!

I'm reading Mark Watson's new novel Eleven and thoroughly enjoying it. I've been off work for a couple of days not feeling fantastic, and it was so nice to eat up half a novel in a day. I hope I can keep up with it now that I am heading back in.

[zuum]

I've just finished reading:

Transition by Iain Banks (NB not Iain M Banks although it pretty much straddles both his lines of work) which was tremendously enjoyable. It's hard to say too much about it without spoiling it but the central premise involves people transitioning between parallel dimensions. Some review have mentioned that it's convoluted and meandering which might be fair although I thought it suited the subject matter. In any case it cracks on at a fair old pace. Banks always makes me laugh with his old fogey ideas that all futuristic parties will have trapeze artists and people consuming elaborate drinks from glasses with integral goldfish bowls and he didn't let me down this time.

Adrian Mole: The prostate years by Sue Townsend

Vintage Mole by the now blind author. As the title would suggest probably the most melancholy book in the series but the author doesn't Mole's potentially fatal condition as any reason to let up on him. in typical fashion Mole loves and loses, and loves again. etc.

King Solomon's Mines by H Rider Haggard

I never read this when I was a kid and picked it up mainly due to my interest in the works of Alan Moore. It's a more or less straight down the line tale of African adventure featuring elephant hunters, hidden diamond mines, blood letting, death by spear, huge battles between warring factions etc. Protagonist Allan Quattermain is an entertaining and likeable narrator even if some of his musings on the nature of the "kaffir" would likely have the author strung up if he wasn't already dead. It's very much a novel of a time when the white man was convinced of his God-given superiority over every other living thing on the planet but no less entertaining for it. Maybe almost a guilty pleasure nowadays.

[earlymodernsteve]

Polished off Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munroe this week, which was excellent but jolly depressing. A completely unlikeable priapic antihero dragging his slowly-going-blind son around a succession of tragi-farcical sexual situations, all capped off with a surprisingly moving ending. In fact, so affected was I by the ending that I couldn't sleep and so finally read Skulduggery Pleasant which was the perfect young adult fantasy antidote. Although I'll now have to add the rest of the series to the to-read pile.

Have now started The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia but too early to form any kind of opinion.

[camps]

Just finished Jasper Kent's Twelve which was much better than I was expecting. Vampire novel set in Napoleonic war era Russia.

Sequel is out - Thirteen Years Later

[Rudi von Starnberg]

I finished James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand the other day and it was amazing. Ellroy's prose is just dizzying and the depth of detail he can convey in these terse staccato sentences is very impressive. The nastiness made it kind of hard to read in parts but it was a very rewarding book. I've got Blood's A Rover to read soon, too.

I also read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 on the train back up from Edinburgh. Not much that needs to be said, other than that it was excellent. I've also read about half of number9dream by David Mitchell, on recommendation from a friend. Never read any of Mitchell's stuff and I think honestly I may have avoided it for nebulous reasons, but I'm loving this. Strange and energetic and thrilling and engrossing.

After that I've got another recommendation to read, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and also The Third Policeman by Flann o' Brien. Good reading times.

[earlymodernsteve]

I finished James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand the other day and it was amazing. Ellroy's prose is just dizzying and the depth of detail he can convey in these terse staccato sentences is very impressive. The nastiness made it kind of hard to read in parts but it was a very rewarding book. I've got Blood's A Rover to read soon, too.

I also read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 on the train back up from Edinburgh. Not much that needs to be said, other than that it was excellent. I've also read about half of number9dream by David Mitchell, on recommendation from a friend. Never read any of Mitchell's stuff and I think honestly I may have avoided it for nebulous reasons, but I'm loving this. Strange and energetic and thrilling and engrossing.

After that I've got another recommendation to read, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and also The Third Policeman by Flann o' Brien. Good reading times.

Both of those recommendations are good books, Rudi. The Third Policeman in particular is one of the funniest books I've ever read.

[Flub]

Sweet, will order it then.

Have just beasted Iron and Blood by Tony Ballantyne, second of his Penrose books about a planet populated with robots at war with each other. I only really started reading it due to the cool cover of Twisted Metal, the first one, but they're pretty damn good.

Read Tony Ballantyne's previous series. Can't remember the titles but they're a loosely linked series about Earth affairs being overseen by AIs. Some really good stuff in there. BTW. If you have any problems with graphic descriptions of gay sex and much use of the word cunt you should probably stay away from the Steel Remains

I'm currently reading the first Guild Wars 2 novel Ghosts of Ascalon and compared to the utter shit that Blizzard put out and dare to call novels it's high art