August 2016: What have you been reading?

I've been dipping in and out of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and have been enjoying them. I think perhaps I read more contemporary SFF these days, as after a while I find the level of telling/heavy use of adjectives/purple prose quite hard going. still enjoyable though.:)

Last night started on Spider Robinson's Callahan's Crosstime Saloon after someone here recommended his work (I can't recall who, but thank you whoever you are(y)). I'm enjoying it, and really like the way he focuses on character portrayal.
 
I'm finally giving Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe a try. (Shadow and Claw, which combines The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator.) It's not a quick read, but it's strangely compelling now that I've gotten into it. Dark and moody, but then, it should be. The narrator is a torturer.
 
Finished The Stone Road by GRR Matthews the other day. Self-published fantasy set in not-ancient China. There should be more fiction set in not-ancient China. Its good fun that doesn't make you work and grows progressively more intriguing as you go, which is always a big one in my book.
 
Summertime by Charles Sheffield. I'm enjoying it so far. Fast paced chapters and big dumb objects! All five books are about 1200 e-reader pages! I'll read until I get bored with it!
 
I finished National Velvet (which is a much more eccentric girl-and-her-horse book than you might expect; the climactic race is barely described at all) and have started The Last Tycoon (1941), F. Scott Fitzgerald's posthumous, uncompleted novel. I understand that a later edition exists under the title The Love of the Last Tycoon.
 
"The Ace of Skulls." by Chris Wooding.

The fourth (and last) of the, "Tales of the Ketty Jay," - an enjoyably daft series about an incompetent pirate crew in a steampunk world.

While I'll leave the fates of most of the crew up to the reader, I was a little upset by the death (from old age) of Slag, the psychotic ship's cat.
 
I just finished Hyperion at 5AM after a 9-hour marathon. I'm not sure If I'm crying because that book is heart wrenching, or from exhaustion after going through all six tales of six well-developed characters in one night. More than anything, I'm wondering, why can't we have more authors who write this well?
 
The Bravest Newbie said:
I just finished Hyperion at 5AM after a 9-hour marathon. I'm not sure If I'm crying because that book is heart wrenching, or from exhaustion after going through all six tales of six well-developed characters in one night. More than anything, I'm wondering, why can't we have more authors who write this well?
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I agree with regard to Hyperion, however for me the sequels sadly tailed off very rapidly and I never did get around to finishing the series. Also don't forget that some credit is due to Chaucer! ;)
 
I've started The Complete Chronicles of Conan in an attempt to familiarize myself with the works of Robert E. Howard and A Game of Thrones in an attempt to read through this series. The furthest I've gotten in Martin's series is A Clash of Kings.
 
I've been really enjoying stuff by Jim C Hines (Libromancer series and The Princess series) and loving Doug Dandrige's Exodus dectet (is that even a word? Decology?) mil-fi
 
Just finished the Winter of the World trilogy by Michael Scott Rohan (The Anvil of Ice, The Forge in the Forest and The Hammer of the Sun). This was written back in the 80s and by the time I had heard of them it was already out of print. I had gotten the first book from the library but could never find the others. But I recently found them published as ebooks. Yay! I really enjoyed them. They take place in our world during an Ice Age, where there are great civilizations of Men that are fighting against the Powers of the Ice, which is a force of evil trying to return the world to a lifeless state. It draws on both Norse and Finnish mythology and could probably be called "Tolkienesque" but I believe in the best sense. There is a similar feeling of a great battle between good and evil and there is a similar large scope of adventure. The main character is a blacksmith who wields a magical kind of "smithcraft" that leads him to make many great artifacts useful during the stories and the smithing often comes under focus. I found it really fascinating. Would highly recommend to anyone who loves high fantasy.

After finishing that I have started reading The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. So far I am not finding it nearly as interesting or entertaining, but I'm only about 10% into it.
 
Mythopoet said:
Just finished the Winter of the World trilogy by Michael Scott Rohan (The Anvil of Ice, The Forge in the Forest and The Hammer of the Sun)
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I've never read them, but they've always stuck in my memory because of the cover art by Ian Miller. From your description, maybe I should have a closer look.
 
I finished The Last Tycoon and, by sheer coincidence, found out that it has been (very loosely) adapted into a proposed series by Amazon . My thoughts on the adaptation from another site:

I just happened to finish reading The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald's half-completed final novel, when I found out that Amazon has turned it into the pilot for a proposed series.

Watch The Last Tycoon Season 1 Episode - Amazon Video

Since this was available free, I gave it a look. (I also appreciated the irony of an unfinished book adapted into an unfinished series.)

It's quite a bit different from the novel. It's set a few years later than the book, which changes things a lot. The movie studio has to deal with Germans demanding changes in films to be shown in their country. (The only political subplot in the novel involves a Communist.) The lead character is still a movie producer whose actress wife has died a few years before, but in the adaptation he's making a biopic of her life, which seems way out of character for the book's version of him. There's a Hooverville of Okies outside the studio, which certainly does not appear in the novel.

It's gorgeous to look at, and the costumes and sets are knockouts. It's not so much Fitzgerald as Mad Men, but with a movie studio instead of an advertising agency, and the 1930's meticulously recreated instead of the 1960's.
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Next, I will go back to an orgy of old science fiction, starting with this random issue of an old magazine I picked up a while ago.

amazing_science_fiction_197402.jpg
 
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