D’oh! Somehow I missed that he hasn’t finished it before I started. I swore I’d never do that again as someone who started WoT in 1998 or so. This is also why I haven’t touched Song of Fire and Ice yet.
At least when the last one comes out, there are only two to re-read and not 12 
I bailed on Seveneves at that two thirds point. I didn’t feel bad though, as by then I’d already gotten two novels worth of story.
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Again, judging by the length I see at the bottom of the Kindle app, I can totally see a bail happening.
Seveneves was only bearable because I could audiobook plow thru it with zero effort while looking busy at work.
But it was fun, up to a point.
We could start a thread about Seveneves. I had an autographed copy but the last third was so bad that I dropped it off at a take/leave-a-book shelf. Stephenson isn’t the best with endings.
Since my last confession update:
- The Player of Games
- Descender (comic series)
- The Pages of Pain
- All You Need Is Kill (novel)
- All You Need Is Kill (manga)
- The Sword, the Crown, and the Unspeakable Power (rpg)
Just started reading The Tale of Genji and Use of Weapons. I usually don’t read two fictions at once, but Genji is somewhat dense and I wanted something “fun” to accompany it. I haven’t decided on the next rpg to read.
Use of Weapons is top tier, up there with Surface Detail.
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I also just finished Decender and I’m currently reading Inversions.
Descender is good. However, I literally can’t remember how it ended so it must not have ended great.
According to my records, I’ve read 24 books since I last posted here, so not gonna go down that whole road. This year I am focused on getting through the Geeknights Book Club backlog I haven’t gotten around to yet while also keeping up with the new stuff. So far this year:
- The Odyssey
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Cosmos
- Pages of Pain
- The Little Prince
- Wind, Sand and Stars
Next on the list is Steppenwolf, which should be a quick one. Gonna see how many of the 10 books left on the backlog I can get through before I need to actually start Tale of Genji.
Yeah, all you need is Kill! I read that right after they announced the movie and really liked it. also a huge fan of The Player of Games
I saw Edge of Tomorrow first but only recently. I like the novel as much as its movie adaptation. The manga was ok; it wasn’t really needed but I wanted to see how they adapted it.
Edge of Tomorrow, the novel, ended like a lot of these japanese light novels do for me: disappointingly. They always have this cool premise or these cool ideas, then… fizzle. The secret of space always gets me motivated and then… nothing.
Finished Space Opera. It was okay, I feel like it thought that only the zany bits of Hitchhikers were the best and decided to write a whole book of the zany bits.
I’m now onto Leviathan Wake.
A lot of light novels and manga just get dropped from their magazines due to declining interest and a rushed or incomplete ending is a sign the publisher gave the writer a set number of chapters to wrap it up.
I just finished Three Body Problem. Do you read much non-English literature? I haven’t.
As I was reading, I found myself wondering how much subtext I was missing. Like if an American novel starts talking about the adventures of Ripley Deckard in Gothamville, I would be thinking the library gave me the wrong book or something. But in Chinese (translated to English), I have no idea.
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I’m currently reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a classic I’ve planned to read for a while. English is a second language to me and while I think I have a certain degree of mastery of it (which I guess happens when more than 80 percent of the text you read and language you hear in a day is in english) I’m actually having a difficult time just getting through the text alone. This is because a lot of the characters speak in a heavy southern accent which is written down almost phonetically, so I have to basically speak it in my head while I read it instead of what my brain usually does: recognize a word on a page and understand its meaning.
I guess for the same reason it took me a while to understand that the name “Phoebe” was pronounced “fee-bee” when I read Catcher in the Rye. At least now I also understand why my local bookshop at first had a tough time to figure out which version to order as there are a lot of edited versions for beginning readers and usage in english classes.
The book is of course good so far, but it is also really horrifying to see what was going on in the south, which polite society at the time either actually didn’t know or more likely just turned a blind eye to what chattel slavery was doing to people. It is a tough read in that sense too.
there is a whole lot going on in that book about the Cultural Revolution that I know went right past me. Maybe it plays into the main plot in ways I didn’t understand, but really it just dragged down the whole first part of the book.
Listening to Time Is Tight by Booker T Jones in part because I should write an article reviewing it for my column and in part because it’s read by Jones.
Just finished reading Oryx and Crake the other day. I enjoyed it overall, but I’m not interested in reading the next few books.
Just started reading Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft which has been pretty interesting so far.
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All you need to know about Transgender History by Susan Stryker is the first 1/4 of it is a glossary and the actual book starts in the late 19th century. Not recommended for anyone who is trans or a historian, this is a book for casuals and The Cis.
Casuals? 15 cha