So what is your August majesty reading?

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Devil's Advocate

Devil's Advocate

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I don't know if these kind of threads are only supposed to be started and stickied by the mods, but since no one's done it yet, I am taking the liberty. (At least for the 'start' part; can't do much about the 'sticky'.)

I finished The Well of Ascension, the second in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy. Quite good, so far, but I will hold judgement until I finish the series.

Moving on, then, to the final instalment - The Hero of Ages.

So what, exactly, are you reading..?
 
I'm going to try to dispel my one major reading prejudice by reading Tom Sawyer.
I've never been able to get past the first chapter.
 
Gollum was going to come along and start this thread tonight. It really should have been a moderator, to avoid the confusion of two different people starting two different threads. However, since it's already been started, I will stick this one.
 
I finished Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino last night. It's beautiful and fascinating, but I have a haunting feeling that there's a lot to it that I didn't get. Maybe reading it slower would've helped me get and remember the points made with each city a lot better, but it was so fascinating that I couldn't make myself slow down, so I'm just left with a very mixed heap of impressions, feelings and thoughts. Then again - maybe, that was his purpose. I did enjoy it, either way.

Now I'm moving onto The Plague by Albert Camus.
 
Nikitta said:
Now I'm moving onto The Plague by Albert Camus.
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I've read this two or three times (in translation only), but the last several years ago now. I think it's one of those books where there's more happening under the surface than on the face of it. Even knowing the plague-Nazi symbolism I don't think I ever fully grasped what was going on.


I'm half-way through Robin Hobbs' The Dragon Keeper and finding it heavy going. The interminable info-dumping masquerading as dialogue/internal reflection is getting me down, as is the just-as-frequent repetition of things she's already told us. I know it's late on in the series and she obviously wants to ensure new readers are as up to speed as old ones, but it's getting beyond a joke. I haven't read any other of her novels, as I've mentioned before, but I get the impression that there is somewhat less plot here than is needed and she's doing an awful lot of padding to bulk the book out.
 
Nikitta said:
I finished Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino last night. It's beautiful and fascinating, but I have a haunting feeling that there's a lot to it that I didn't get. Maybe reading it slower would've helped me get and remember the points made with each city a lot better, but it was so fascinating that I couldn't make myself slow down, so I'm just left with a very mixed heap of impressions, feelings and thoughts. Then again - maybe, that was his purpose. I did enjoy it, either way.
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This is one of my all-time favourites. I also made the mistake of going through it too quickly at first reading, and I ended up with an impression that it started dragging half-way through. The images you get of the first cities are so clear, but by the end you've hardly got any idea of what Calvino is talking about.

Right now I'm reading Matter by Iain M. Banks. It's a colossal book, some 550-odd pages, and it could have done with some editing. It's a heavy read, but after having gone backwards and forwards through earlier chapters, checking the glossary on the end frequently, the experience has started to pay off. Banks' setting is, as always, grand and stunning.
 
Nikitta said:
I finished Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino last night. It's beautiful and fascinating, but I have a haunting feeling that there's a lot to it that I didn't get. Maybe reading it slower would've helped me get and remember the points made with each city a lot better, but it was so fascinating that I couldn't make myself slow down, so I'm just left with a very mixed heap of impressions, feelings and thoughts. Then again - maybe, that was his purpose. I did enjoy it, either way.
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Glad you liked it Nikita. It is certainly a great novel, albeit If On A winter's Night A Traveller still remains my favourite Calvino to date. Drop me a line and I can suggest some further reading in this direction, in fact on Italian literature in general that contains elements of the fantastic, especially one of Calvino's mentors in Tomaso Landolfi....:) Speaking of which I would strongly recommend you try Calvino's collection Cosmicomics, recently republished containing all of these stories in English in the single volume....:)
 
Thadlerian said:
This is one of my all-time favourites. I also made the mistake of going through it too quickly at first reading, and I ended up with an impression that it started dragging half-way through. The images you get of the first cities are so clear, but by the end you've hardly got any idea of what Calvino is talking about.
Click to expand...

That's exactly how it was with me too! I think it's healthy to wait a little before re-reading, though.
 
I'm in the middle of "The Curse of Chalion" by Lois McMaster Bujold - love the faux-Spanish setting and her self-deprecating protagonist Cazaril, but almost disappointed now the "real" fantasy elements are kicking in. There'd better not be any dragons turning up, or I'll be seriously pissed off...
 
After skipping around a bit the last week or so, my current reading is entirely non-genre-related: Washington Irving's The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, an account of one of the many ventures to open up the West commercially and politically. It is actually considerably more interesting than it sounds....
 
The Shining. 400 down, roughly a hundred to go. Next time I pick it up will probably be to a finish.

Jack Torrance is officially psycho-dad at this point.
 
Dr No - Ian Flemming

Although, this was one of the earlier and higher quality James Bond films, I'm surprised just how much the films failed to capture the high quality of the the writing. The less said about the later films, the better.
 
I read and finished The Outlaw Josey Wales by Forrest Carter

It was a powerful,exciting story with good,real characters. I enjoyed how gritty but also down to earth Josey Wales himself was written. The writer was a racist con man who faked bieng an indian but he could write a very good western.

I look forward to reading the other Josey Wales book.
 
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