Golden Oldies out there...what books are you reading right now?

[daveb]

4 hours ago, EricaB said:

But I've also been having fun reading the Tiffany Aching books in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series - I've just got one more to go, "The Shepherd's Crown." 

That's a good series. While it's part of Discworld (which is good, too) they also feel like part of British folklore. I still have a couple of books in that series to look forward to (and quite a few in the whole Discworld series).  

[EricaB]

8 minutes ago, daveb said:

That's a good series. While it's part of Discworld (which is good, too) they also feel like part of British folklore. I still have a couple of books in that series to look forward to (and quite a few in the whole Discworld series).  

I hadn't thought about it being rather like folklore before, but you're right. I haven't read all of the Discworld books, either (as you said, more to look forward to!), but some friends said I might particularly like the Tiffany Aching ones, and they're right. Also, I didn't realize until I borrowed the last one from them that the last in that sub-series is also the last one Pratchett wrote. So I'm looking forward to it, but it will also be bittersweet.

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

Terry Pratchett...what a legend!

[Tanwen]

I crashed spectacularly with my OU Environmental module and rather than repeat the mistake, I've opted to go on a completely different tack...Creative Writing. I've been reading some of the set books 'Dr Faustus' does not 'translate' well onto Kindle and I think I'll need to get a print copy, but I've read through 'Burial at Thebes' and have downloaded 'Hard Times'

[Green Mandala]

 

On 7/21/2017 at 6:25 PM, Green Mandala said:

The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi - Mark Hodder

I just put this on hold at my library.

[Greenbeard]

11 hours ago, Green Mandala said:

 

I just put this on hold at my library.

Re. The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi. If you're going to join the Burton & Swinburne series midway in, this is a good place to do so: Mark Hodder kind of - kind of - presses the reset button with his characters here, and the book stands up pretty well, I think, as a novel in it's own right. But it's so much more fun if you've read what's gone on before and know what the characters don't know! 

[Green Mandala]

13 hours ago, Greenbeard said:

But it's so much more fun if you've read what's gone on before and know what the characters don't know! 

Thanks for the heads up. I'll look for the previous ones. I'm looking for a new genre.

[Gentle Giant]

14 hours ago, Greenbeard said:

Re. The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi. If you're going to join the Burton & Swinburne series midway in, this is a good place to do so: Mark Hodder kind of - kind of - presses the reset button with his characters here, and the book stands up pretty well, I think, as a novel in it's own right. But it's so much more fun if you've read what's gone on before and know what the characters don't know! 

@Greenbeard That book sounded interesting to me too and I have it book marked to get through my library system when I'm ready to give it a try. (I have so many books to get through yet) But what books come before this one, which to start with? How many are in this series?

[Greenbeard]

13 hours ago, Green Mandala said:

Thanks for the heads up. I'll look for the previous ones. I'm looking for a new genre.

 

12 hours ago, Gentle Giant said:

@Greenbeard That book sounded interesting to me too and I have it book marked to get through my library system when I'm ready to give it a try. (I have so many books to get through yet) But what books come before this one, which to start with? How many are in this series?

There are currently six Burton & Swinburne novels. In order, they are:-

 

The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack

The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man

Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon

The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi

The Return of the Discontinued Man

The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats

[Gentle Giant]

@Greenbeard Thanks for the list! I know I saw some of these titles when searching for the El Yezdi book. I also remember you talking about the Spring Heeled Jack one another time here on AVEN.

[Green Mandala]

Yes, @Greenbeard thanks for the list. Now I don't have to look them up. I'll search the first one and go for it.

[ggcatlady]

Just read The Girl Before by JP Delaney.  It's a psychological suspense/thriller type novel.  I just bought Mother & Others: Australian writers on why not all women are mothers and not all mothers are the same. I bought it for $9.99, marked down from $32.99 at QBD.  I find it hard to resist a bargain!  Need to read Elli, a coming-of-age autobiography about the Jewish holocaust in WW2 for a book club I belong to but I am finding it difficult to motivate myself to finish it because of the sheer horror inside.

[ggcatlady]

On 1/24/2017 at 6:33 AM, imnotafreakofnature! said:

I think keeping a spreadsheet is a great idea! I don't know why I've never thought of it. (Just a dizbrain, I guess! lol) So I started one for this year. We'll see how I do.

 

It's good to see you back, chandrakirti!

The Goodreads website is another good way of keeping track of books you've read.  They have an app you can use on your smart phone.  Plus it's a good place to write and read reviews.

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

@Greenbeard , @Gentle Giant  and @Green Mandala, apart from the fact these books sound intriguing, when I was a kid, my mother used to threaten me with a visit from 'spring heeled Jack' if I didn't behave....seeing his name after all these years made me shiver! 

[Greenbeard]

On 7/29/2017 at 8:11 AM, chandrakirti said:

@Greenbeard , @Gentle Giant  and @Green Mandala, apart from the fact these books sound intriguing, when I was a kid, my mother used to threaten me with a visit from 'spring heeled Jack' if I didn't behave....seeing his name after all these years made me shiver! 

And shiver you should, for he can turn up at any place - and (as is revealed in the books) at any time! ()

 

(By the way, can you - or anybody - tell me, please: how do you do this thing where you get '@username' to pop up, white-on-blue, to attract another member's attention?)

[daveb]

@Greenbeard, I'm on a pc so it may be different if you're on a different device. But the way it works on my pc is I type the @ sign and then a floating list of names pops up near the "at" sign, and gets refined as I type in more of a given user's name. When I see the name I want I click on it in the floating list and it fills in. If I just type the "at" sign and name without selecting from the list it doesn't work.

[Gentle Giant]

After I finish the book I'm reading now, I will get the Spring Heeled Jack one. I'm really curious to check it out.

[Green Mandala]

@Gentle Giant @Greenbeard same here. I'm curious too.

I've read some Steampunk: The Difference Engine and The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (a graphic novel).

And of course, I've read several of Jules Verne's books; however he was not intentionally Steampunk. The two above are.

So this series intrigues me.

[Greenbeard]

On 7/29/2017 at 6:10 PM, daveb said:

@Greenbeard, I'm on a pc so it may be different if you're on a different device. But the way it works on my pc is I type the @ sign and then a floating list of names pops up near the "at" sign, and gets refined as I type in more of a given user's name. When I see the name I want I click on it in the floating list and it fills in. If I just type the "at" sign and name without selecting from the list it doesn't work.

Right: let's see if this works...

 

Hello, @daveb!

 

Yippee! ...TQ (thank you) and   !!!

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

Yay @Greenbeard!

[Greenbeard]

Just finished this...

 

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

Hmm. Well. Yes. I suppose you could call this a sci-fi novel. Which it is! And to start off with, it's really quite intriguing. An eleven-year-old girl falls into a large hole that mysteriously opens up in the woods near to where she lives in South Dakota, USA, and is found - battered and bruised but otherwise unharmed - lying in the palm of a gigantic metal hand! Twenty years on as an adult, she heads a government-funded scientific research project dedicated to finding out exactly what it is she stumbled upon as a child. ...However, from then on in, instead of heading off into Arthur C. Clarke territory as I hoped it might do, the plot reads more and more like a comic book origin story. Don't get me wrong: I think comics are great, but the kind of writing that makes for a good comic can come across as just plain dumb in novel form. Which is what happens here (in my opinion). Apparently, the book has been optioned as a movie, and I can imagine the finished product going down a bomb with the Transformers crowd, and it fitting in well with the current vogue for CGI-laden superhero flicks, but as a novel... Well, I really want something with a bit more substance, texture and intelligence to it. 2/10.       

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

I sidelined Stephen King's Tower series for now. Got into Val McDermid's crime thriller 'Out of Bounds' instead. It's riveting!

[Greenbeard]

And I've just finished this one...

 

Noah's Child by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt

A slender volume, this, set in Belgium during World War II, about a Roman Catholic priest who hides Jewish children from the Nazis in the orphanage that he runs. ...I really wanted to like this book, but I actually feel quite indifferent about it. As I say, it's a slender volume, and that's the problem I had with it: it reads more like a first draft for a more expansive work: the characters needed fleshing out some more; more needed to happen... I mean, the story takes place over a three-year period - all inside 130 pages! ...And it really could have done with being told in the third person. There's a scene where a German Army officer correctly puts two and two together vis-a-vis the true heritage of the children in the priest's care, and then turns a blind eye to what's been going on. I really wanted to know why. What was going on inside his head?  

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

I started reading the new Ben Kane book about the Eagles, set in Tuteborg forest just after the massacre of the roman legions . It's old history with the twist of inserted characters, a centurion and his legionary friend. Germanicus is the general in charge of cleaning up and recovering the eagles. He's ok, but his son was Caligula......

[Greenbeard]

Here's an oddity I've just finished...

 

The Singular & Extraordinary Tale of Mirror & Goliath by Ishbelle Bee

An almost (almost) annoyingly whimsical and deeply, deeply macabre fairy tale for grown-ups: a reworking, basically, of the Little Red Riding Hood story, in which a little girl called Mirror, who isn't quite what she appears to be, and her shape-shifting protector, Goliath Honey-Flower, arrive in Victorian England where the demonic Mr. Fingers (aided by an assortment of deranged underlings) attempts to capture Mirror, with a view to making a meal of her - body and soul. ...It took a while for me to properly get into this one: the narrative leaps backwards and forwards in time all over the place and is told from a multiplicity of different character perspectives. However, two-thirds of the way in, it all started to pull together quite nicely and I relaxed, let myself sink into the overall aesthetic of the story: one of apple blossom, homemade plum pudding, pussycat smiles and severed human heads! () ...I may well return to this book at some point, try and work out exactly what the moral of the tale is. 

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

Now reading 'Delivering Happiness' by Tony Hsieh, who started Zappos and is now part of Amazon. I'm not a business person, but his informal style is interesting. As for business, I've not developed a business mind at all.

[Gentle Giant]

I just finished The Accidental Hero by Matt Myklusch. It is good. It's similar to Harry Potter, but mixed with super heroes and science fiction.

 

I just put in my order at my library for The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack. Looking forward to it.

[Decaf]

I'm rereading some of the books I read as a child, just for curiosity.
My favourites so far are the Uncle books by J.P Martin. The illustrations are by Quentin Blake.
Uncle is an elephant who wears a silk dressing gown and lives at Homeward Castle with his faithful monkey.
He often does battle with his enemy, Beaver Hateman, who lives at Badfort.

 

[hatpin]

On 13/08/2017 at 10:42 PM, chandrakirti said:

I started reading the new Ben Kane book about the Eagles, set in Tuteborg forest just after the massacre of the roman legions . It's old history with the twist of inserted characters, a centurion and his legionary friend. Germanicus is the general in charge of cleaning up and recovering the eagles. He's ok, but his son was Caligula......

What did you think of this in the end? I love Roman history, but recent novels (Scarrow etc) have all felt very samey. 

 

Working through some of Gillian Bradshaw's more obscure books at the moment, and enjoyed The Wolf Hunt, based on one of the lais of Marie de France. 

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

It was ok, for the most part, the history tied up nicely, and I felt that there was more to find out about the characters in the next book, but , having read Scarrow as well, it's a narrow genre really. Take a real event, put two fictional characters/narrators in, then tell it through their eyes, plus, if you factor in that few Roman history novels seem to be based outside of the Julio Claudian era, they're giving a slice of the Roman world, not the wider view. I'd like to see more based in the pre - imperial days.

 

Just finished one called 'Blood sisters' by Jane Corry. Psychological thriller. Absolutely brilliant! So many twists and turns, realistic storyline, Icouldn't put it down. About two half sisters and a friend that meet with a tragic accident on the way to school one morning , the back story to the accident and the far reaching repercussions. I must admit I never saw the many twists coming , or the sinister last paragraph either! I may track down her other two books now. Her first was 'My husband's wife'.