I saw A Feast for Crows in a book shop the other day and even though all the loose ends will piss me off (note to Martin: get an editor, you’ve been essentially rewriting a finished text for the last five years), I gave in and purchased it. I also remembered I ought to make an rpgc book thread.
Right now I’m reading The Comedians by Graham Greene. I like Greene because he can be both light reading and have robust characters. So far there’s his typical premise of characters stranded in what we’d now call a failed state (it’s set in Haiti during the reign of Papa Doc Chevalier), though their intentions for doing so have not been revealed yet. I’m just 30 pages in, so we’ll see how that goes.
The last book I read were The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. I understand it received significant publicity in the States, so you may be familiar with it. It’s the story of a family, told in turn by the perspective by each of its three adult children and parents. At times it goes into “crazy hijinks” territory like a man accepting the offer of the separated husband of his ex to come with him to Lithuania and serve as spinster/PR fraud guy, but it also explores some interesting subjects (money,creeping age, familial relations of all kinds etc.) and is easily readable. I liked it.
Currently, I’m reading À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie by Hervé Guibert, which has this awesome, trashy VH1: Behind the Critical Theory vibe, mixed with a caustic, almost cruel and certainly grim humour with occasional moments of what seem almost like genuine emotion, but it’s pretty hard to say, since he mentions several times in the novel that he lies constantly.
Watership Down is good. It’s up there on my list of favorites.
I recently finished Changes by Jim Butcher. Especially cool because I was able to go to a “reading” and Q&A (no reading was actually involved) and got my copy signed.
I’m currently reading Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil by Drew Karpyshyn. It’s not terribly good, 3rd in this particular character’s arc. It’s a little sadistic, which is more of a “meh” factor. I prefer stories involving Heroes in the SW universe.
Tom Gordon was good, if kind of weird since in a lot of ways almost nothing happened.
The China book has been good so far, except that I don’t know how to pronounce most of the Chinese works. Im sure most things that look like Ch’ing-ling are not pronounced like I think they are.
Edit: I like The Old Man and the Sea. I read it a few years ago, along with the book The Pearl.
If anything, its not too bad because they are relatively short. Much lighter reading in that sense than most books I was assigned in high school.
I never had to read any Hemmingway in high school, actually.
I’m reading Electric Flesh. I’ve been meaning to for a while, ever since a friend was supposed to read it for her fiction class. Partly just because, from what I could tell, it seemed wholly awful and only noteworthy for the excesses to which it goes at any opportunity. It’s actually shaping up not to be so bad, thus far, but I still doubt I’d assign it to students in a class. 43
