I finished reading The Scar by China Mieville. I really enjoyed it. Early on I would have said that Perdido Street Station was a much better book. I think I still prefer PSS but TS runs a close second. It doesn't take off anywhere near as quickly as PSS, but once it does it is a very fun ride. I didn't see most of the twists and turns in the plot until they were just about to be revealed.
01/05/06
Back to reading The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Its been a while.
01/26/06
I've started reading The Door into Summer by Robert Heinlein. Its about 50 years old. Funny how archaic some of the story is. It isn't just his idea of what of the future would be like but also the narration and dialogue. Heinlein uses quite a few expressions that old-fashioned. There is also the censorship. If the author wanted one of the characters to curse he had to refer to it a round about way, like on page 53 when he writes Belle answered with a word I didn't know she used. My eyebrows went up.
Anyhow its a fun little book so far. I get the impression that Dan (the main character) is about to go into deep sleep and wake up thirty years later (if the description on the jacket is accurate). He finds things very different from the way he expected and spends the rest of the book trying to figure out exactly what happened.
02/02/06
I finished The Door into Summer by Robert Heinlein. Like a lot of his books it isn't particularly deep. That's okay. I like the whole time travel thing. Lots of fun, for the most part. Light reading. Now I am on to Richard K. Morgan's second Takeshi Kovacs novel, Fallen Angels.
03/04/06
Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan - I finished it last night on the ride home. The end wasn't quite as satisfying as it could have been but all in all I liked it. It isn't exactly like the previous book about Takeshi Kovacs, Altered Carbon. The previous novel is mixture of sci-fi and noir fiction a la Raymond Chandler, set in the SF Bay area. This one is set 150 light years from Earth on a world called Sanction Four. A world wide war is being waged between capitalist and socialist interests on Sanction Four. Kovacs is serving in a mercenary unit, Carrera's Wedge, which is fighting for the capitalists. Backed by a corporate executive he deserts his unit to go after an archeological find.
Until the end this book really had me. I think what disappointed me in the ending was that it didn't follow through on what came before. Or at least that's how I feel. Up until the end the book has a very existential tone. It is very downbeat until the last twenty to thirty pages. I expected follow through with this tone to the last page. Unfortunately the author insisted on having a "decisive" battle at the end between Kovacs and someone else. It didn't fit with the rest of the book. If it had been quick it might have, but given how the fight dragged out over about twenty pages I got the impression it was supposed to be a climax to book which (up until that moment) I figured would be climax-less. Part of the author's message seems to be that there are no decisive moments; that life just goes on; the names might change but nothing really changes in the long run. That leaves me wondering why he insisted on making that fight stand out the way he did. *shrug*
Anyhow, all in all I enjoyed it. A stupid ending doesn't usually ruin a book or movie for me, provided I enjoyed what came before.
03/05/06
I need to find something new to read since I finished Broken Angels.
03/08/06
I need a new book to read. I've tried picking up Start Making Sense, but it reads like a magazine. I hate it when books written by journalists, newspaper writers, etc. read like a newpaper or magazine. Not all of them do, but its not that hard to spot them. *sigh* So I want to buy something but I think I should wait until after I get my birthday presents, just in case someone gets me something to read.
03/22/06
I got the first of three books I ordered over the weekend, Software by Rudy Rucker. Its an early cyberpunk novel. Its written back in the early days of the personal computer era. Back before GUI was everywhere. Can't wait to see how it reads. It's fairly short.
03/28/06
Wined and dined or stoned and boned? software by rudy rucker is such a trippy novel.
05/06/06
Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn - This is the first book in the Star Wars series that will probably never be made into a movie. It picks up 5 years after the events of Return of the Jedi. Han and Leia are married and she is expecting twins. She is training to become a full-fledged Jedi. The remnants of the Empire are trying to regroup to strike back at was once the Rebel Alliance and is now the New Republic.
I'm only six or seven chapters in but so far it is a fun read. More plot driven than character driven, but that's more or less what I expected.
05/20/06
Heir to the Empire - This is the follow up to Return of the Jedi. It is set 5 years later. The empire is starting to regroup. OK, there aren't any real suprises here but this is a fun read. Its a shame that this trilogy won't be made into movies. They would be much better than the crap Lucas palmed-off on the public for the prequel trilogy.
09/30/06
I've been reading this biography of W.C. Fields and some of the scenes in the movie, It's a Gift, are discussed in the book and they sounded familiar so I decided to rent it.
10/30/06
Star Wars is crack. Since making disparaging remarks about Dark Force Rising I have been enjoying it more or less. Its b-movie quality in terms of the plotting, pacing, and dialogue but I'm not about to stop reading now. Like I said, it is crack.
11/08/06
I'm almost done with Dark Force Rising by Timothy Zahn. Will I buy/read the next/final book in this series? Yes, but not right away.
No comments:
Post a Comment