What are you reading ?

@Corwin: I kind of figured that…. I really liked the first 6 books but then a new protagonist was introduced and I had trouble adjusting to that. I love the RPG based on Amber though, are you familiar with it?

No, what is it?

I just finished the harry Potter series. We bought the whole set recently. I have to say they were much more enjoyable then I thought they would be, I found them hard to put down.
Unfortunately I think they'll be a bit too grim for our sensitive daughter at the moment though, she'll have to wait a year or two before she'll be allowed to read them

Now I'm reading the Servants of Ark series by Jonathan Wylie. It's enjoyable light reading, perfect for the summer

Wow, haven't seen that series in years!! I'm finishing The Destined Queen by Deborah Hale.

Originally Posted by Sorcha Ravenlock
Unfortunately I think they'll be a bit too grim for our sensitive daughter at the moment though, she'll have to wait a year or two before she'll be allowed to read them

How old is your daughter? You might want to try reading aloud. That is how we have done it with our boys. Of course, when we started reading they were much younger and couldn't have done it themselves, but we have kept it up. We're reading #7 aloud now (that is, I read and my wife and boys listen) … despite the fact that my older son read #6 in one day in younger son read #5 in 2 days right before we started this one. It is also amazing family time!

Originally Posted by magerette
This is very bad news for me, Dez. I just finished the second one and I'm already really tired of Susannah. My husband is reading the last one, which is huge(~850 pages) and he says it's better, but he's a pretty uncritical guy where Stephen King is concerned..

Heh tell me about it. I agree 100%, she is a very annoying character. Not as annoying as Jordan's women in wheel of time though! Even if the sixth book was a letdown and clearly the weakest book in the series, I can't wait to see how it finally ends.

Originally Posted by txa1265
How old is your daughter? You might want to try reading aloud. That is how we have done it with our boys. Of course, when we started reading they were much younger and couldn't have done it themselves, but we have kept it up. We're reading #7 aloud now (that is, I read and my wife and boys listen) … despite the fact that my older son read #6 in one day in younger son read #5 in 2 days right before we started this one. It is also amazing family time!

She is 7, but she is very sensitive. We do read a lot to her, but she is emotionally very young and there are certain parts in the later books that I know would upset her for days, like the deaths of certain characters.
She still finds Disney movies upsetting for example, even when we watch them with her.

It's not that I think the books aren't suitable for her age, but more for her character. And only the later ones at that, but I don't think it's fair to let her read part 1 and 2 and then tell her to wait a few yearsto read the rest. At the moment there are other books that she can read, the Potter books can wait

Originally Posted by slam23
@Alrik. Well, Herbert was accused of creating a fascist undercurrent in his work. I don't know if I agree with that, I for sure didn't pick that up when I first read it. But it could be that the soullessness (is that a word?) stems from that.

I was young when I read it, I was a teenager during the 80s, and I didn't pick up things knowingly. I think it went rather the emotional way and unconsciously.

However, I have once read a book about his days in Tibet by a Heinrich Harrer which greatly felt like hatred through the lines to me. I have never had this as strongly ass there. And only much later I learned that he was a Nazi. I think, no, I believe I've felt his hatred somehow through the lines.

I'm a bit sensitive, you know (ever heard about high sensitivity according to Elaine Aron ?).

We just finished reading Harry Potter #7 aloud as a family. It has been my thing since we started with the first one years ago when it was too old for my boys to read. I developed the character voices and accents (and then tweaked them closer to the movie versions) and kept going book after book. I was sick this weekend, so my wife picked up for a bit but they stopped when they saw I had dozed off and then hounded me to pick up the reading after I woke up again. I really enjoyed this one, thought it was one of the better books of the series.

Myself, I'm still working on the Lovecraft collection, but have taken a sidetrip to re-read Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. I had to get a second copy because my original was quite fragile and had been signed by the author at a talk he gave years ago …

Originally Posted by dteowner
Finished the Trudi Canavan book, flew thru "Ghoul" by Brian Keene (gave me what I was looking for, but, meh), and started the final installment of the Dreamers series from David Eddings. So far, the series has been a major disappointment to me. Since Eddings is probably my favorite author, my expectations are quite high, but this series so far has been terribly anti-climactic and rather non-heroic. I could forgive that if the characters were really good, but there's too many for Eddings to really develop any of them. Maybe the conclusion will exceed the previous three volumes.

30 pages to go and the Eddings book continues to disappoint. What a shame.

Just picked up the first of the Dreamers series today from the library. Currently reading Tony Shillitoe's The Amber Legacy which has nothing to do with the Zelazny series!!

The last 30 pages somehow managed to be even worse. What a turd. I'm going to pretend the series was written by someone else that has pictures of Eddings naked with a goat.

Started Neil Gaiman's "American Gods".

Perhaps Eddings is going senile with age!! When I have time to read the first volume, I'll pass on my thoughts.

Well, aside from Cat's Cradle, our kids are bugging my wife and I to read some of their stuff.

I had read "The Warriors", which is about this whole other world of cats and was actually not too bad. Thought I was going to get to read "The Golden Compass" which my other son just finished, but he returned it to the library to get the rest of the series. So instead I am reading "So you want to be a wizard", the first of a (so far) 8 book series by Diane Duane. I don't think I'll like that as much

But it is a break from Lovecraft …

It is interesting that while it has been perhaps 10 years since reading Cat's Cradle, I remembered all of the humor, I knew it was cynical but had forgotten just *how* bitter and cynical it is wrapped in all of the humor. And the ease of reading it belies just how great his stuff really is.

Been a long time since I read Vonnegut, but a lot of it does stick with you. There is always that flavor of cynicism which I think comes a bit from the campus/"beat" coffee-house culture of the fifties and sixties, but in his case it's always tempered with compassion and humor.

Reading these rather silly Dark Tower books from King, I kept getting whiffs, as it were of Vonnegut's style--I remember very clearly Vonnegut using the concept of a karass I believe it was-- in one of his books(maybe God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater?) that is, a group of people aligned together whose fates are inextricably mingled through eternity. Found it rather derivative of King to re-use this calling it a "ka-tet" for his little group of planeswalking weirdos.
In fact, I'm having a hard time getting on with the series. It's kind of like junk food of the mind--

The Karass and all of those other things are from Cat's Cradle, really one of his major works in terms of his humanist view. It is really amazing how much compassion, humanism, humor and cynicism he crams into such small works while crafting wonderful stories and characters.

Karass, vindit, wompeters, granfaloons and foma and on and on and on … all great stuff. The whole idea of Bokonon and the religion of sweet, sweet lies is just completely wonderful as well.

Maybe I need to revisit that book. I know I have a ratty dissolving paperback of it around somewhere. Have you ever read Venus on the Half Shell? Also a classic in it's way.

I'm currently reading "Es war einmal ein Schiff" ("Once upon a time there was a ship" - very rough translation made by me), which is a book on "maritime archaeology". Ships, and ports, and sea-trade, and of course the Vasa.

It's an really interesting expansion to my archaeology knowledge (this is actually my greatest hobby), because it puts light on a field I don't know much about.

I boight it last Sunday on a flea market, and it was a real bargain, because i got it for 7 Euros - they originally wanted 10 - and it is from this year !

Originally Posted by Gallifrey
Gig - how are the Dresden books? I really liked the short-lived TV series.

Frankly, I prefer the short-lived TV series. The TV producers took certain liberties that, in my opinion, made Harry's character more even tempered and heroic. They managed this even while weakening the character somewhat power wise. The tradeoff is that the TV Dresden is a much more confident, less timid, less unsure of himself, less apologetic character. Murphy is spot on, you still just want to reach out and choke her sometimes. And, BoB's… libido… was tamed significantly for television.

Originally Posted by dteowner
Started Neil Gaiman's "American Gods".

I loved that book. IMO Gaiman's best -- there's so much more going on there than the surface narrative. Anansi Boys was another good one in the same style.