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Books You've Read in 2007 (merged) (1 Viewer)

Holadem

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There was a book sale this weekend at a local library, $1 for hardcovers, $0.5for paperbacks... A goldmine for fans Grisham, Ludlum, Crichton, Koontz, Roberts, Sheldon and other pulp novelists (not a fan).

I did manage to score about 10 Stephen King novels, some of which I already read but didn't own. Also Foucault's Pendulum, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, an Atlas of World History, James Clavel's Gai-Jin, and a couple of others I forget... all for < $15.

--
H
 

Walter C

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The fact that it went on too long, made me almost want to stop reading when halfway through, and I wasn't looking forward to the next one.

It's extremely rare that I start reading a novel, but not finish it.
 

Greg_S_H

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OotP was by far my favorite, but I've become aware over time that I'm in the minority.

Mostly junk food so far this year:

The Further Adventures of Batman, which is a collection of short stories.
King's Quest: The Floating Castle
Star Wars: Republic Commando: Triple Zero

It's better than last year, when I read absolutely nothing. In 2005, I read around 75 books, so I got kind of burned out, I guess.
 

Adam Lenhardt

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Mine too. It's by far the most literary out of the first five. The plot doesn't follow a strict plot structure and most of the conflicts are internal rather than external. The thing I really missed going from five to six, however, was the description and texture. Order of the Phoenix was just chock full of description, and every new location came alive with detail and color. The world seemed probably the most unified it ever has. By contrast, in Half-Blood Prince Snape finally gets Defense Against the Dark Arts, and we get what - one scene with him in the classroom? It takes place largely within old haunts so we don't get much new description and even new locations are underdescribed compared to OOTP. I do think HBP will make a great movie, though.
 

Greg_S_H

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It was kind of the Empire Strikes Back of Harry Potter books. I don't want to say too much since the movie is coming up, but I physically felt the weight of what Harry was going through

with Dumbledore ignoring him, and especially the hellish treatment by Umbridge. When she began to get her comeuppance, and Dumbledore revealed what he was up to, there was a physical feeling of relief and joy that I've rarely felt while reading a book.
 

Bob McLaughlin

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I finished Stephen King's "Lisey's Story" in January. A bit of a mess plotwise (flashbacks within flashbacks, etc.) but still very good, like nothing else he has written up to this point.

I just finished Jane Austen's "Emma" on audiobook. It is amazing how many words are used to propel so little plot, and I don't mean that in a bad way. Of course this story is more about characters and social relationships than plot anyway. This book was like finding a time capsule. I enjoyed it.

Also just finished Augusten Burrough's "Running With Scissors". I had already read the audiobook of "Magical Thinking" last year but I wanted to read "Running With Scissors" in print. Hilarious and harrowing at the same time. I can't believe he got this published, what with all the underage sex, then again, maybe that's what got it published to begin with. I've heard the movie doesn't do it any justice but I'm probably going to rent it anyway out of curiosity--there are some hilarious images in the book I just have to see on the screen!
 

Chris

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Just reading "You Suck! A Love Story"

One of the funniest modern vampire books I've ever read. I was buckled over laughing a few times (when the Cantonese woman who speaks no english but yells out "What's up my n*(&" keeps walking through.. slays me.
 

Holadem

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I finally got thru A Game of Thrones, the first volume of G.R.R Martin's epic A Song of Fire and Ice. At 850+ pages, it certainly took me a couple of weeks.

Much like Harry Potter, I was only able to get into this work because it bears little ressemblance to anything Tolkien. I frankly hate to call this a fantasy novel, with all the juvenile stereotypes the label conjures up. A harsh, grim medieval epic is more like it, an adult tale which if excised of the handful of very low key supernatural/magic occurences, could have taken place anywhere in europe 1000 years ago.

So much more to say, but no time to elaborate. Read this book!

--
H
 

Adam_S

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yes! read A Game of Thrones! it is superb.

for a variety of reasons I've not finished the Lies of Locke Lamora, or the Wisdom of Crowds, or Winning, or John Adams, but all are getting close. I did reread two children's books on a whim (they're so short) and one new one.

Brian's Hunt - Gary Paulson
the only brian book I hadn't read. this very slim, 100 page volume is a long character study and internal monologue, the dialogue moments are quite awkward and there's a seeming surrealism to the bear in question, not quite as strictly survival realistic wilderness oriented as Paulson usually achieves. Still if this is a setup for another longer Brian book (as I think it is) it's quite remarkable. Very different.

Brian's Winter - Gary Paulson
An old favorite, and a better second act/coda to Hatchet than the actual deus ex machina ending in Hatchet. here, we see how much Brian has been changed as he faces a completely new survival situation.

The Hero and the Crown - Robin McKinley

an even older favorite, I appreciated many more things about this book now, and I think perhaps it works better for adults than children. On the other hand, I'm frustrated by the deep structural problems within the book and the virtual deus ex machina victory over the mage near the end of the book. On the other hand, Aerin is one of the finest heroines in all of children's literature.
 

Andy Sheets

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I read:

The Gods of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs was like the Joel Silver of the 1910's - his books are literally non-stop action and carnage. Great fun but also exhausting to read :)

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, by Stephen King. I figured I ought to get around to this since I bought it when I was in high school or sometime around then. It's not bad. Kind of a mishmash of Tolkien, Sergio Leone, Arthurian legend, and Michael Moorcock. As an attempt to capture the flavor of the Robert Browning poem, I think it does reasonably well even if King sometimes falls on his face when he goes for the purple prose (he was a young writer then, so it's understandable).
 

Adam_S

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Winning - Jack Welch
a pretty good book with some good advice, and a lot of tough advice, more for managers and corporate leaders than many just folks, but there's a great deal of good perspective on leadership to be found. Welch would have been a hellish boss to have had, but the sort of guy you'd have still liked working for, I think.

John Adams - David McCullough
finally finished the mammoth, 26 disc unabridged audio book. Just a tremendous and wonderful work, one I"d like to own in hardcover and occasionally return to. Adams was an astonishing man and McCullough navigates his ups and downs, and finds the heart of that man that could appear to be full of contradictions and instead finds a true and focused core that drove one of the greatest american patriots and public servants ever. The parallel story of his life with Abigail and their utter codependence is affecting and wonderful. A tremendous man.

The Lies of Locke Lamora - Scott Lynch
This book is something special. Read it right away! in brief it's self contained adventure/con/thriller (and the debut of a talented new writer) about a con artist in a Renaissance world. Don't miss this book!

Locke Lamora is the orphan of one of the periodic plagues that sweep through cities in a lax sanitation world, he's such an adroit thief that he's an immediate problem for the Fagin-like character that took him in. After violating several rules and endangering this thiefmaker's authority, Locke is quietly shuffled off to be the responsibility of a blind priest, Father Chains, who is not so blind, and not much of a priest, but a completely different kind of thief. Chains is the consummate con artist and he's collecting a very focused coterie of talent that he can train from a young age into pulling off the most amazing feats of theft that the victims don't even really know they've been stolen from. The book moves back and forth between Locke's training (and background) in childhood, and his movements as the professional, uncatchable, untraceable leader of the Gentleman Bastards con artist gang. He has to play a double game with the mafia, another with the priests, and a triple, soon to become even more deliciosly complex, game with those he's robbing. The book is unexpected, brilliant, savagely funny, clever, wry, shocking and downright noble by the end of the darn mess. A fantastic and enjoyable read, not a perfect book, but a damned grand time.

1491: new revelations of the Americas before Columbus - Charles C Mann
I'm somewhat outraged this was abridged, I'll probably read the full book it's so damned good but I will dearly miss the incomparable narration and superb pronunciation of the audio book.

1491 is a stunning summation of a lot of research, a little I was already familiar with, much of it was entirely new. but it is an almost relentless presentation of evidence about the superb levels of civilization, technology, innovation, and unique communities and empires up and down north and south america and their rich and fascinating history and heritage before contact. the book is also careful to lay out the immense amount of coincidences (some thousands of years in the making) that created not just one catastrophe, but a series of compounding catastrophes that devastated native population and permanently altered the culture and well tended landscape of the americas. A fantastic work.

The Blue Sword - Robin McKinley

Structurally this book is better controlled than Hero and the Crown, and the story is quite fun and nostalgic from an adult perspective, but the story is also not terribly interesting, and the writing is not very good in comparison to Deerskin or Hero and the Crown. And the final two chapters never seem to end, and in fact Harry and Corlath seem to say the same thing ten times to one another in the space of four pages. it's frustrating and boring.

How this won the Newberry when Hero and the Crown did not, boggles the mind.
 

bobbyg2

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I only read books when my teachers force me. I have finished none so far this year.
 

Andy Sheets

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Last things I've read were:

The Big Blow, by Joe Lansdale. A ficticious story about a real guy during a real situation, it's about a young Jack Johnson coming up in the boxing world while at the same time the 1900 hurricane that erased Galveston is encroaching. The ending is somewhat disappointing but Lansdale is such a brilliant writer that it's great to read just to experience his command of the language and setting.

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, by HP Lovecraft. I've read all these before but this is the first time I've read the corrected texts from ST Joshi. It's a good excuse for a re-read :) A good chunk of my favorite stories from the man are in this book. The Shadow Over Innsmouth remains his best story, IMO.

Right now I'm finishing up On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers, which is about pirates, black magic, the Fountain of Youth, ghouls...
 

Adam_S

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A Long Way From Chicago - Richard Peck

Excellent Story and beautifully written and handled. The writing is very subtle and deceiving, it manages to maintain the same tone and voice over eight stories (each in which the children are one year older) but at the same time mature the perspective and characters to exactly the right degree. the result is an ending that is poigant, powerful and deeply deserved and earned. There are many more famous, more highly regarded authors who couldn't pull off the subtle impacts and clever writing of this story at all. Just a superb example of the very best children's literature has to offer.
 

Stephen Orr

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The only novel I've finished so fare this year is "Treasure of Khan," by Clive Cussler. I just started Cussler's "Skeleton Coast," although I'm having to share time on it with my wife....
 

Ashley Seymour

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Triple Cross by Peter Lance
It completes his troika starting with 1000 Years for Revenge and Coverup 911.

In the 1960’s Catch-22 was the smart hip black satire on bureaucracies. It picked on the military because then as now it was politically correct. The movie missed being as influential as the book, probably because it came out at the height of the Viet Nam war and was not as compelling as the nightly news. MASH in 1970 and Coneheads in the 90’s did a much better job of poking fun at the ineptness inherent in government organizations.

The books by Lance are fodder for a TV mini series that could run 100 episodes and play like the Sopranos. Most of what is known about the growth of terrorism over the past 25 years has been sanitized, censored and classified to protect the inept. The failure to uncover the 911 plot often criticizes the CIA but counter-terrorism is the prevue of the FBI together with the Department of Justice. Lance leaves the reader with the opinion – actually he states it directly – that their was no functioning counter-terrorism success by the FBI and that any effort that could have borne fruit was taken apart by conflicting efforts to gain conviction against the Mafia, and protect government intelligence and law enforcement agencies from being played by supper al-Qaeda triple agent ali Mohammed.

At the close of the book his final sentiment is one the reader has already been mentally scribbling.

“For the sake of Ronnie Bucca, Louie Garcia’s good friend, and for the sake of every man, woman, and child who died that day, the cold case of 9/11 needs to be reopened, and investigated with tenacity and courage. There has never been a crime in the history of this nation that deserves clearance more than the mass murders of September 11, 2001.
I sincerely hope this is my last 9/11 book. I don’t want to write another one.
 

Elizabeth S

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I'd been away from reading for a long time because it's hard enough keeping up with my TV shows and DVDs.

However, I just finished Thomas Perry's Pursuit. Wow, what an excellent, suspenseful novel!

After that, I tried to get into Harlan Coben's Just One Look and George Pelecanos' Hell to Pay but neither grabbed me. Since I read so rarely nowadays, I don't want to spend it on something where I'm wondering if I should continue or not because it's so-so.
 

Andy Sheets

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On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers. Entertaining read, although mildly disappointing considering how some reviews built it up. I found Powers's writing style somewhat cold and mechanical, which caused the magic of the story to feel less, well, magical :) Surprising that Hollywood isn't trying to make this into a movie since the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise hit so big...

Grifter's Game, by Lawrence Block. I don't know why it took me so long to get around to reading this because it's *great* :) Excellent crime novel in the tradition of James Cain, with a delightfully twisted "happy" ending.

Just started reading The Black Castle, by Les Daniels...
 

Garrett Lundy

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I've finished the 4 published volumes in A Song Of Fire And Ice (Game of Thrones, Clash of Kings, Storm of Swords, Feast of Crows). I am constantly impressed with the series. Now that I'm waiting for book 5 I know how my wife feels about Harry Potter. Valar Morghulis

Amazon is currently shipping Daywatch to me (The sequel to Nightwatch).
*If anyone cares, Nightwatch the book is three seperate stories. Nightwatch the movie is the film version of story 1 in the book.
 

Adam_S

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The Tale of Despereaux - Kate diCamillo (unabridged audio)

This is a fabulous fairy tale and marvelous piece of children's literature, charming, silly, powerful, dark and uplifting, it's a superb example of young children's fantasy literature. :)

The audio version is beyond outstanding, one of the best audiobooks I've ever heard!

Manhunt: The Twelve Day Hunt for Lincoln's Killer - James L Swanson (unabridged Audio)

Excellent and exhaustive piece of history on the Lincoln assassination. If there's one drawback it's the novelization of thought processes and emotions/feelings. Swanson does a good job hypothesizing these elements but it comes across close to fact rather than the inference of a historian, Nathaniel Philbrick did a much better job addressing this issue in Mayflower, because you didn't feel the influence of the author unless he wanted you to, pointing out where he might be wrong. Manhunt is an exciting and methodical film, very much in the vein of the movie Zodiac in many of it's exacting details. The climax in the burning barn is very cinematically rendered by Swanson. I should note that I had thought (from an unfortunate episode of unsolved mysteries half seen about ten years ago) that John Wilkes Booth had never been caught. Seems I fell victim to some of the mytholigizing about Booth that goes on even today. I feel I've a better grasp on his character, as well as that of Mudd (having been deceived by Prisoner of Shark Island, a superb if horribly inaccurate John Ford film), Stanton and the rest of the response of the country to Booth's acts of assassination.

It's curious that Booth acted at the moment he did, the day when Lincoln had first felt the war was truly over. And it's easy to wonder if Lincoln's agenda of universal male suffrage would have every passed had he not been martyred when he was. I'm terribly interested in the history of 1850-1900 at the moment and will probably search for some texts on the era.

Rich Dad Poor Dad - Robert T Kiyosaki (abridged audio)

Kiyosaki is a terrible, terrible writer with an intensely compelling story and perspective on finance and self discipline. What he says is not very different from what Zig Ziglar and others profess, but it's good to keep oneself constantly informed from these perspectives as I try to avoid many of the hazards of the middle class. And this better opened my eyes to creatively searching for money creating assets to invest in rather than relying simply on savings, financial discipline and retirement plans. I've already ideas to use to creatively increase revenue but this book prompted me to suddenly generate several long range plans that may completely change the place I thought I would be in five-ten years.

The Thousandfold Thought - R. Scott Bakkar

The final volume of the Prince of Nothing trilogy finally completes an overlong and often uncompelling story. Much like Majipoor Chronicles, by Robert Silverberg, PoN is a completely mileau based story. The characters while interesting are so overpowered by Bakkar's supreme Nietzchien ubermensch that in TTT the story rapidly degenerates into a ponderous sort of hero worship as we're gradually filled in on the details of the prior apocalypse and the mysterious Inchoroi aliens.

However by the end of the book Achamian has come to a significant moment, one that the series' best character, Cnaiur began book one at--WOW, what character development! Achamian insensibly is dropped off at the beach for no discernible reason other than to make him walk a little bit more before this final confrontation / 'character realization'.

Kellhus has revealed himself as invincible super deduper superduper socerer extraordinaire and has an almost entirely uninteresting confrontation with his father.

Finally, after 2000 pages it's painfully broken up and haltingly a dispassionate plot summary, revealing only one half guessed 'surprise' about Maithanet. Whether or not Kellhus is a villain seems to be resolved with him assuming a heroic/savioric mantle and opposing the vile Dunyain, but he is definitely not a good hero. He's the sort of the embodiment of an idealistic benevolent dictator/god-surrogate that will make everyone do what is 'best' for themselves that so mars so much modern intellectual discourse. Kellhus is anathema to free will because he is ultimately the perfect, binary, organic-machine controller/processer--a very odd sort of 'hero', more like the Matrix's Architect than any other fiction character I can think of.

One other problem with the world is just how thinly veiled the analogues to Dune, Christianity and Islam the mileau invention contains. This limits insight into the religous process fantasy can offer and the series degenerates into becoming a decoding game of spot the reference material. It's the type of weak fantasy technique that makes for some of the worst examples of the genre (tolkien imitators anyone?) in most contexts. It's a shame the actual writing is good enough to keep you reading, but Bakkar's use of the genre is deeply limited in it's effect and execution. A fanciful, deep and detailed invention, but far from the excellence the genre is capable of.
 

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