What Are You Currently Reading?

[Lamp Post]

I can't believe we don't have this thread, I went through all the threads looking for it.  Brought back such memories, too.  :D  Tell me if I, however, missed it.

 

So, pretty self explainatory.  What are you currently reading?  'Tis appreciated if you'd also say whether or not you'd recommend/not recommend the book, too, so everyone can expand their reading list.  :D 

 

I'm curretly reading:

 - Symphony of Ages Seires -- Elizabeth Haydon.  They're great.  I'm adoring them.

 - The Messenger -- Markus Zusak.  'Tis lovely.  Very down-to-Earth, great writing style, fast moving without too much action. 

 - The Gates -- John Connolly.  Only a few pages into it.  'Tis beyond amazing, though.  I love this author.

 

[nathan_p]

Reading Brave New World for the first time at about nine, I thought it sounded like the best world ever to live in.

Now I realize I was a dumbass. If I really had to pick -- 1984. For all we know everywhere but Oceania is a paradise.

[nathan_p]

Got a 1910 Baedeker's Guide to Great Britain. For 30 bucks.

I'm over the moon.

Also, apparently I can expect The Great Train Robbery in pretty, pretty hardcover to get here in early August.

[Contradiction]

Summer Knight by Jim Butcher. *excitement* Now I have the first through sixth, plus the eighth and ninth book in the series, and I can catch up after reading other things for a couple of months. :D

Something From The Nightside by Simon R. Green, which I have been waiting for for months from the damn library. I finally just went out and bought it - per special order - from the Tattered Cover.

And I finished Coraline a couple of minutes ago. Hooray.

[EndOfTheEarth]

Just got the novelization of the video game Alan Wake (should be interesting, last time I read a video game adapted into a book was for the original Pokemon games.) and Fragment by Warren Fahy.

[EndOfTheEarth]

@ Nathan: Fragment is right up your alley. I just spent the past twenty pages reading a detailed dissection of a completely theoretical animal.

[nathan_p]

You know me so well. Put it on hold at the library.

Currently reading The Dead Zone by Stephen King. Placeholder in between bouts of research and while I wait to get Christine.

[EndOfTheEarth]

Finished Fragment.

It reminded me a lot of Jurassic Park, but the science was thicker. There were two really good lectures in there that made me think, and the level of detail made it a very worthwhile book.
The ending chapter was a bit cheesy though, oh well.

[Ovie! Ovie! Ovie! Oy! Oy! Oy!]

The Night Runner Series by Lynn Lynn Flewelling

[Throne_Spaz]

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr.

[nathan_p]

Just finished Fragment, and I feel like I have to comment.

One, some of the science was a little spotty -- the island is all of two miles square, so it really doesn't make sense to me that it can sustain multiple huge lifeforms... and that the tiny lake can sustain more than one of something "bigger than [a] T-Rex". Two miles by two miles is really not that goddamn big.

Two, some of the characterization is downright hilarious. Almost everyone introduced right off is an ADJECTIVE NOUN, and almost all of them get slaughtered. It's like Mad Libs. That, and our "villain" characters are unlikeable right off the bat... and, unlike unlikable Dennis Nedry in Jurassic Park, we have to spend a whole book with the douche before he bites it. In short, Fahy's characterization is about as subtle as a brick to the head.

Third, this is one of those books where we meet noble savages. That are aliens. Oh God. The, ah, hendros are as intelligent as humans, charmingly naive, and live in harmony with nature. Their anatomy is radically different from ours, but someone in the cast still finds them cute enough to save from the island before it gets nuked.

The book as a whole reads pretty much like if you smoked a bowl and read Jurassic Park. People die on an island. Scientists investigate the island and find some incredibly trippy lifeforms. Some of the lifeforms make it off the island, and we never get a hint of closure as to what the hell happens to them after.

I did find it highly entertaining that... well, you can call the deaths before they happen. Sometimes hundreds of pages before they happen. Also, that everything on the island is non-stop eating everything else. And that every single living thing on the island is a spider-crustacean-thing.

Overall... amusing, but I'd rather read something by Crichton.The whole book seems a little too much like Crichton fanfic by someone who's still figuring out that whole characterization thing (which, yes, was my major problem with the book) and where Crichton's books age well (The Andromeda Strain still reads as plausible, and it's just over forty years old), Fragment with its references to Youtube and MTV probably will not.

[EndOfTheEarth]

I agree with most of this. It isn't a classic, but it's amusing enough anyway.

What were your thoughts on Geoffrey's lectures?

[nathan_p]

Interesting. Somewhat entertaining. I do have to say that Ian Malcolm's equivalent to them was much more fun to read, but Geoffrey wasn't too bad.