Just finished Brian Sandersons "The Way Of Kings." Pretty solid book, but a little drawn out. Sets up a potentially great sequel coming out in March.
Sanderson finished Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series after he passed. Very good writer.
I loved TWOK, thought it was wildly imaginative.
Dont' get me wrong, I enjoyed the book. Very creative and great character development, but very slow at times. Really not a lot of action until the last 100 pages, in a 1200 page paperback book. However, now that Kaladin, Dalinar, shallan, and szeth have found their roles in the story I really look forward to the next book. I am curious to see what happens with some of the secondary characters that had a chapter or two in the book.
Now I just have to finish the wheel of time series. Been working on that for twenty years. Now that its finally finished I am trying to read the whole thing. Kept forgetting characters and the intricacies of the plot in the years between book releases.
Nice, I read all but the last 3 or 4 of them in a row. Ran out of them to read and haven't gone back to read the others, although they are in my 'to read' pile.
Finished up Dreamcatcher (1st book of 2014)...not my favorite Stephen King book, but there were some interesting parts. Now reading:
Finished up this..honestly it wasn't my fave Vonnegut book...
Not one of my favorites either. But even his stinkers (Slapstick, Deadeye Dick) are better than most books out there, imho.
I agree. I read Galapagos recently and I thought that book was much better. I think possibly for God Bless you Mr. Rosewater some of the satire didn't translate from '65 until now...
I finished a Stroke of Insight. I agree with my hubby's review. It's definitely an interesting book from many perspectives. It's interesting to understand the thought process that occurs during and after a stroke from a neuroanatomist. She also lends helpful advice in living a happier life. Although, at the end the repetitiveness about the benefits of the right brain seemed like she was padding the book. I do think it could be very helpful for anyone with a loved one that has suffered a stroke.
This is one of my all-time favorite shows, and I always loved how grounded the show felt despite being set mostly in space. This is a pretty good read so far, explaining the sciencey things in detail the show didn't want to take the time for because it was more concerned with little stuff like characters, storyline and drama. :-P
Not a bad read, with great explanations connecting what was shown on the show and real world science.
Based on ya'll's reviews, I think I need to check out Stroke of Insight. My MIL had a TIA in October and I'd like to learn more about strokes.
It's a good book for general interest, no doubt, but it really is geared toward those with loved ones who have experienced a stroke. I recommend for you.
1. Finding a comfortable reading position is a never-ending quest. Chair or bed? Side or back? In a box? With a fox?
2. On airplanes, you hesitantly flick on the overhead light while everyone else is napping.
3. Paper cuts may look like minor injuries, but the pain can be excruciating.
4. Walking and reading at the same time requires hand-eye coordination only professional athletes have been endowed with.
5. What on earth are you supposed to do with the jacket on a hardcover while you're reading it? Keep it on and risk damaging it? Take it off and store it in a weird nook, never to find it again?
6. Deciding what to read is a choice that presents you with an embarrassment of riches.
7. The typeface and page length of a book can seriously impact your reading experience, sometimes for the worse (sans-serif font is a huge no-no).
8. A book can be composed of the worst drivel you've ever laid eyes on, you're still afflicted with major guilt when you banish it to the "I Will Never Ever Ever Finish This. Like, Ever." shelf.
9. You lament time that you've wasted in the past; all of those hours scouring celebrity Twitters could have been put towards finally reading Moby Dick!
10. Some people count down the minutes until their lunch hour; you count down the minutes until Jeffery Eugenides or Donna Tartt releases their next book (roughly 5 million for Tartt, but who's counting?!)
11. Finishing a book you loved is like saying goodbye to a good friend. You've been through so much together! And while you may see each other again, it won't be quite the same.
12. Forget finding roommates; the most stressful thing about moving is figuring out a way to transport boxes upon boxes of heavy books.
13. You're constantly rethinking your bookshelf strategy. Should you color-coordinate, or take a more practical approach, such as publication date or alphabetization? Or, if you're feeling ambitious, should you tackle the autobiographical bookshelf, à la Rob Gordon from High Fidelity?
14. Your mood is directly impacted by the mood of the book that you're reading; your friends have learned to avoid you during Dostoyevsky months or Bret Easton Ellis weeks.
15. You take found books home like abandoned puppies, chirping, "Can we keep it?!" That'd be well and good if it didn't happen once a day.
16. One does not simply walk by a bookstore. One must poke around, at the very least, and one usually ends up filling one's tote bag with more books than one can carry.
17. "I don't read" is a relationship death knell, akin to "I loathe my mother" or "I enjoy upsetting kittens."
18. You may or may not own two (or three or four) copies of a beloved book. You can't help it, the redesigned covers are irresistible!
19. Laundry day and other important obligations get completely overlooked when you're in the middle of a great, un-put-downable book. "Same shirt Saturday"? Sorry you're not sorry.
Shows: 6.27.08 Hartford, CT/5.15.10 Hartford, CT/6.18.2011 Hartford, CT (EV Solo)/10.19.13 Brooklyn/10.25.13 Hartford
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Great list, most of them were applicable for me. #8 is something I wish I could get past. #12 --- as I moved from CA to NJ I gave away boxes and boxes and boxes of books. Knew I would be living in an APT for 6 months while we looked for a house and it killed me to do it but I managed to find good homes with interested readers for hundreds and hundreds of books. Have to admit that I ended up taking a few hundred to my local library and left for them to book sale them or shelve them. (Hoping most got put on shelves) Now that I have a house & plenty of room I have already exceeded the bookshelves that we have so some sort of plan needs to be enacted. I cannot 'e-read' --- guess I am like the vinyl folks on Lost Dogs. I am wondering what I will do with all of my 'friends' now. Big readers -- how do you store your books?
Currently reading Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. Have finished books one and two and just starting book three. They were a xmas gift for xmas '12 and I have only just got around to them. I don't know what it is about Murakami but I always enjoy his books.
So are we strangers now? Like rock and roll and the radio?
Finally finished Jonny Bails Floatin yesterday (awesome book, read it if you can!!!) and went on to my second Kindle book. This time, it's a German novel. It's called Der Turm, English would be The Tower, written by German author Uwe Tellkamp. It is set basically in the time I grew up in GDR. If you ever want to know what it was like, I would probably recommend this book. Here's a review in English:
"Just as today we see the lost world of the German bourgeoisie through the eyes of Thomas Mann, so later generations will read Tellkamp’s novel in order to re-experience the stagnation and implosion of the GDR." —Süddeutsche Zeitung
Set in the 1980s in the socialist German Democratic Republic, The Tower tells the story of a middle-class family living in a dilapidated Dresden. The son, Christian Hoffmann, wants to study medicine but ends up in the chemical industry, following a twelve-month imprisonment for reading subversive literature. His father, Richard, is a successful surgeon with a secret child from a long-term affair. And Richard’s brother-in-law, Meno Rohde, an editor at a Dresden publishing house, is negotiating between writers and the censors. An entire world of characters and events spin around the family in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the GDR.
Epically written, lovingly detailed, and filled with drama, Uwe Tellkamp’s The Tower tells the tale of the GDR in decline, a country in which three generations drift—helplessly in some cases, impatiently in others—towards the maelstrom of the 1989 revolution.
The website also says it will be available in English in July 2014. I just started, so I cannot make a statement if I like it or not. Sounds promising though, after the first pages.
Post edited by Leezestarr313 on
Please, Pearl Jam, consider a Benaroya Hall vinyl reissue!
I want suggestions too! I moved to a house half the size of my old house...I have aspirations to get organized, but every time I open a box, I find it's full of books...and I don't now what to do. No real room for a bookcase, so they are chilling in boxes in the basement for now.
Thread Integrity: Just finished Quiet', and 'Inside of a Dog'-highly recommend the latter to ALL 'dog people'.
The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
Some words regarding my current read. I had not listened to Metallica for a long, long time and pretty much gave up on the band after the Black Album. I always very much enjoyed their earlier work though, up until the ...And Justice for All album, yet after that my interest started to dwindle.
However, recently it struck me once more how much I love the song Fade to Black, so I picked up my copy of the Live Shit: Binge & Purge live album from the 1993 Nowhere Else to Roam tour and am appreciating it once more. I still remember seeing Metallica live in Belgium around that time and having a blast.
So I decided to order Enter Night by Mick Wall, and started catching up on some Metallica history:
Their roots lie in the heavy rock of 70s groups like Deep Purple. The music they played--heavy metal mixed with punk attitude--became its own genre: thrash. Their bassist died and they survived to became the biggest-selling band in the world. As grunge threatened to overtake them, they reinvented themselves. Then their singer went into rehab and they almost fell apart. They are Metallica, the most influential heavy metal band of the last thirty years.
As Led Zeppelin was for hard rock and the Sex Pistols were for punk, Metallica became the band that defined the look and sound of 1980s heavy metal. Inventors of thrash metal--Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth followed--it was always Metallica who led the way, who pushed to another level, who became the last of the superstar rockers.
Metallica is the fifth-largest selling artist of all time, with 100 million records sold worldwide. Their music has extended its reach beyond rock and metal, and into the pop mainstream, as they went from speed metal to MTV with their hit single "Enter Sandman." Until now there hasn't been a critical, authoritative, in-depth portrait of the band. Mick Wall's thoroughly researched, insightful work is enriched by his interviews with band members, record company execs, roadies, and fellow musicians. He tells the story of how a tennis-playing, music-loving Danish immigrant named Lars Ulrich created a band with singer James Hetfield and made his dreams a reality. "Enter Night" follows the band through tragedy and triumph, from the bus crash that killed their bassist Cliff Burton in 1986 to the 2004 documentary "Some Kind of Monster," and on to their current status as the leaders of the Big Four festival that played to a million fans in Britain and Europe and continues in the U.S. in 2011.
"Enter Night" delves into the various incarnations of the band, and the personalities of all key members, past and present--especially Ulrich and Hetfield--to produce the definitive word on the biggest metal band on the planet.
"...bring it back someway bring it back, back, back... to the clean form, to the pure form..."
Finished Last of the Mohicans. Ultimately, a great read. Took a while to get used to his style and the narrative holes, but I ended up enjoying it a lot. The movie sucks though. Haha.
I was given a book by a friend to read, which is always a nice thought, but it really messes with my queue because I feel like I have to read it now.
Reading this:
1998-06-30 Minneapolis
2003-06-16 St. Paul
2006-06-26 St. Paul
2007-08-05 Chicago
2009-08-23 Chicago
2009-08-28 San Francisco
2010-05-01 NOLA (Jazz Fest)
2011-07-02 EV Minneapolis
2011-09-03 PJ20
2011-09-04 PJ20
2011-09-17 Winnipeg
2012-06-26 Amsterdam
2012-06-27 Amsterdam
2013-07-19 Wrigley
2013-11-21 San Diego
2013-11-23 Los Angeles
2013-11-24 Los Angeles
2014-07-08 Leeds, UK
2014-07-11 Milton Keynes, UK
2014-10-09 Lincoln
2014-10-19 St. Paul
2014-10-20 Milwaukee
2016-08-20 Wrigley 1
2016-08-22 Wrigley 2 2018-06-18 London 1 2018-08-18 Wrigley 1 2018-08-20 Wrigley 2 2022-09-16 Nashville 2023-08-31 St. Paul 2023-09-02 St. Paul 2023-09-05 Chicago 1 2024-08-31 Wrigley 2 2024-09-15 Fenway 1 2024-09-27 Ohana 1 2024-09-29 Ohana 2
Finished Last of the Mohicans. Ultimately, a great read. Took a while to get used to his style and the narrative holes, but I ended up enjoying it a lot. The movie sucks though. Haha.
I was given a book by a friend to read, which is always a nice thought, but it really messes with my queue because I feel like I have to read it now.
Reading this:
I really liked this book. Had a "classic Bachman" feel to it. Almost wish it was longer.
I want suggestions too! I moved to a house half the size of my old house...I have aspirations to get organized, but every time I open a box, I find it's full of books...and I don't now what to do. No real room for a bookcase, so they are chilling in boxes in the basement for now.
Thread Integrity: Just finished Quiet', and 'Inside of a Dog'-highly recommend the latter to ALL 'dog people'.
We live in the narrowest space I think I've ever lived in -- and I grew up in a travel trailer -- but we have a reasonably high ceiling. So, what we did is a single shelf that wraps around most of our apartment that is accessible by a step ladder.
Finished up this one this weekend...I really enjoyed it...it was interesting how the author (with the help of many advisors) approached living out the laws/rules of the bible for a year...
I've just finished The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sherlock Homes), Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Utopia by Thomas More. The Hound was a good read and my first from the Sherlock series but i'm not desperate to read anymore anytime soon. Heart of Darkness was good (This book famously inspired the movie Apocalypse Now) but I think I prefered the short story 'Youth' tagged at the end of the book. Utopia was a quick an interesting read, I believe this book actually coined the phrase 'Utopia' (it was written in 1516).
Finished Last of the Mohicans. Ultimately, a great read. Took a while to get used to his style and the narrative holes, but I ended up enjoying it a lot. The movie sucks though. Haha.
Which movie? It's been filmed about umpteen times. ) If you mean the one with Daniel Day-Lewis, yeah, except for the characters the story doesn't much resemble the book.
I've just finished The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sherlock Homes), Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Utopia by Thomas More. The Hound was a good read and my first from the Sherlock series but i'm not desperate to read anymore anytime soon. Heart of Darkness was good (This book famously inspired the movie Apocalypse Now) but I think I prefered the short story 'Youth' tagged at the end of the book.
When I first read Heart of Darkness, I thought it was a bit overdone. Later, I read King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild and got a completely new insight into the story. Conrad wrote about what he saw and he probably saw some pretty horrible things in Africa.
Comments
I finished a Stroke of Insight. I agree with my hubby's review. It's definitely an interesting book from many perspectives. It's interesting to understand the thought process that occurs during and after a stroke from a neuroanatomist. She also lends helpful advice in living a happier life. Although, at the end the repetitiveness about the benefits of the right brain seemed like she was padding the book. I do think it could be very helpful for anyone with a loved one that has suffered a stroke.
I plan on starting to read this book next:
Now I'm diving back into the Barsoom series ...
"Let's check Idaho."
"Let's check Idaho."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/10/book-lover_n_4562002.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
19 Quirky Conundrums Only Book Lovers Understand
1. Finding a comfortable reading position is a never-ending quest. Chair or bed? Side or back? In a box? With a fox?
2. On airplanes, you hesitantly flick on the overhead light while everyone else is napping.
3. Paper cuts may look like minor injuries, but the pain can be excruciating.
4. Walking and reading at the same time requires hand-eye coordination only professional athletes have been endowed with.
5. What on earth are you supposed to do with the jacket on a hardcover while you're reading it? Keep it on and risk damaging it? Take it off and store it in a weird nook, never to find it again?
6. Deciding what to read is a choice that presents you with an embarrassment of riches.
7. The typeface and page length of a book can seriously impact your reading experience, sometimes for the worse (sans-serif font is a huge no-no).
8. A book can be composed of the worst drivel you've ever laid eyes on, you're still afflicted with major guilt when you banish it to the "I Will Never Ever Ever Finish This. Like, Ever." shelf.
9. You lament time that you've wasted in the past; all of those hours scouring celebrity Twitters could have been put towards finally reading Moby Dick!
10. Some people count down the minutes until their lunch hour; you count down the minutes until Jeffery Eugenides or Donna Tartt releases their next book (roughly 5 million for Tartt, but who's counting?!)
11. Finishing a book you loved is like saying goodbye to a good friend. You've been through so much together! And while you may see each other again, it won't be quite the same.
12. Forget finding roommates; the most stressful thing about moving is figuring out a way to transport boxes upon boxes of heavy books.
13. You're constantly rethinking your bookshelf strategy. Should you color-coordinate, or take a more practical approach, such as publication date or alphabetization? Or, if you're feeling ambitious, should you tackle the autobiographical bookshelf, à la Rob Gordon from High Fidelity?
14. Your mood is directly impacted by the mood of the book that you're reading; your friends have learned to avoid you during Dostoyevsky months or Bret Easton Ellis weeks.
15. You take found books home like abandoned puppies, chirping, "Can we keep it?!" That'd be well and good if it didn't happen once a day.
16. One does not simply walk by a bookstore. One must poke around, at the very least, and one usually ends up filling one's tote bag with more books than one can carry.
17. "I don't read" is a relationship death knell, akin to "I loathe my mother" or "I enjoy upsetting kittens."
18. You may or may not own two (or three or four) copies of a beloved book. You can't help it, the redesigned covers are irresistible!
19. Laundry day and other important obligations get completely overlooked when you're in the middle of a great, un-put-downable book. "Same shirt Saturday"? Sorry you're not sorry.
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Absolutely agree with all these!
"Let's check Idaho."
#8 is something I wish I could get past.
#12 --- as I moved from CA to NJ I gave away boxes and boxes and boxes of books. Knew I would be living in an APT for 6 months while we looked for a house and it killed me to do it but I managed to find good homes with interested readers for hundreds and hundreds of books. Have to admit that I ended up taking a few hundred to my local library and left for them to book sale them or shelve them. (Hoping most got put on shelves)
Now that I have a house & plenty of room I have already exceeded the bookshelves that we have so some sort of plan needs to be enacted. I cannot 'e-read' --- guess I am like the vinyl folks on Lost Dogs. I am wondering what I will do with all of my 'friends' now.
Big readers -- how do you store your books?
"Just as today we see the lost world of the German bourgeoisie through the eyes of Thomas Mann, so later generations will read Tellkamp’s novel in order to re-experience the stagnation and implosion of the GDR." —Süddeutsche Zeitung
Set in the 1980s in the socialist German Democratic Republic, The Tower tells the story of a middle-class family living in a dilapidated Dresden. The son, Christian Hoffmann, wants to study medicine but ends up in the chemical industry, following a twelve-month imprisonment for reading subversive literature. His father, Richard, is a successful surgeon with a secret child from a long-term affair. And Richard’s brother-in-law, Meno Rohde, an editor at a Dresden publishing house, is negotiating between writers and the censors. An entire world of characters and events spin around the family in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the GDR.
Epically written, lovingly detailed, and filled with drama, Uwe Tellkamp’s The Tower tells the tale of the GDR in decline, a country in which three generations drift—helplessly in some cases, impatiently in others—towards the maelstrom of the 1989 revolution.
http://frischand.co/16/the-tower
The website also says it will be available in English in July 2014. I just started, so I cannot make a statement if I like it or not. Sounds promising though, after the first pages.
Thread Integrity: Just finished Quiet', and 'Inside of a Dog'-highly recommend the latter to ALL 'dog people'.
- Christopher McCandless
just started fellow forum friend Lukinfan's new novel... 35 pages in...so far its great!
However, recently it struck me once more how much I love the song Fade to Black, so I picked up my copy of the Live Shit: Binge & Purge live album from the 1993 Nowhere Else to Roam tour and am appreciating it once more. I still remember seeing Metallica live in Belgium around that time and having a blast.
So I decided to order Enter Night by Mick Wall, and started catching up on some Metallica history:
Their roots lie in the heavy rock of 70s groups like Deep Purple. The music they played--heavy metal mixed with punk attitude--became its own genre: thrash. Their bassist died and they survived to became the biggest-selling band in the world. As grunge threatened to overtake them, they reinvented themselves. Then their singer went into rehab and they almost fell apart. They are Metallica, the most influential heavy metal band of the last thirty years.
As Led Zeppelin was for hard rock and the Sex Pistols were for punk, Metallica became the band that defined the look and sound of 1980s heavy metal. Inventors of thrash metal--Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth followed--it was always Metallica who led the way, who pushed to another level, who became the last of the superstar rockers.
Metallica is the fifth-largest selling artist of all time, with 100 million records sold worldwide. Their music has extended its reach beyond rock and metal, and into the pop mainstream, as they went from speed metal to MTV with their hit single "Enter Sandman." Until now there hasn't been a critical, authoritative, in-depth portrait of the band. Mick Wall's thoroughly researched, insightful work is enriched by his interviews with band members, record company execs, roadies, and fellow musicians. He tells the story of how a tennis-playing, music-loving Danish immigrant named Lars Ulrich created a band with singer James Hetfield and made his dreams a reality. "Enter Night" follows the band through tragedy and triumph, from the bus crash that killed their bassist Cliff Burton in 1986 to the 2004 documentary "Some Kind of Monster," and on to their current status as the leaders of the Big Four festival that played to a million fans in Britain and Europe and continues in the U.S. in 2011.
"Enter Night" delves into the various incarnations of the band, and the personalities of all key members, past and present--especially Ulrich and Hetfield--to produce the definitive word on the biggest metal band on the planet.
My Fugazi Live Series ramblings and blog: anothersievefistedfind.tumblr.com
I was given a book by a friend to read, which is always a nice thought, but it really messes with my queue because I feel like I have to read it now.
Reading this:
2003-06-16 St. Paul
2006-06-26 St. Paul
2007-08-05 Chicago
2009-08-23 Chicago
2009-08-28 San Francisco
2010-05-01 NOLA (Jazz Fest)
2011-07-02 EV Minneapolis
2011-09-03 PJ20
2011-09-04 PJ20
2011-09-17 Winnipeg
2012-06-26 Amsterdam
2012-06-27 Amsterdam
2013-07-19 Wrigley
2013-11-21 San Diego
2013-11-23 Los Angeles
2013-11-24 Los Angeles
2014-07-08 Leeds, UK
2014-07-11 Milton Keynes, UK
2014-10-09 Lincoln
2014-10-19 St. Paul
2014-10-20 Milwaukee
2016-08-20 Wrigley 1
2016-08-22 Wrigley 2
2018-06-18 London 1
2018-08-18 Wrigley 1
2018-08-20 Wrigley 2
2022-09-16 Nashville
2023-08-31 St. Paul
2023-09-02 St. Paul
2023-09-05 Chicago 1
2024-08-31 Wrigley 2
2024-09-15 Fenway 1
2024-09-27 Ohana 1
2024-09-29 Ohana 2
Now I'm reading the 10th book in the series of 11 ... almost done!
"Let's check Idaho."
"Let's check Idaho."
PM if you want pics/video.
Works for us.
Currently reading this
I hope you enjoy the rest!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18414.Utopia
And now I have moved onto this:
If you mean the one with Daniel Day-Lewis, yeah, except for the characters the story doesn't much resemble the book.