read any good books lately...

I got the three Stieg Larsson books for £ 5 from Tesco due to sheer curiosity and have just started to read the first off three books. So far, so good. I think I will enjoy this.

^Hey, this book is good!

but, if you wanna give one more chance to Clarke, just read Childhood's End. Masterpiece.

tupan wrote: ^Hey, this book is good! but, if you wanna give one more chance to Clarke, just read Childhood's End. Masterpiece.

 

Alitare wrote: Nobody dies, nobody hardly gets hurt. Nobody grows or learns or feels severe pain. Nobody involves themselves with society, politics, human nature, or even a high-class adventure.

The sequels are more like that because of the influence of Gentry Lee. They meet legit aliens in the second book, and in the third book they actually set up a human colony in one of the cylinders, so you even get some society like you wanted. There's organized crime, and racism, and the main character's daughter gets addicted to drugs (and masturbation, but Clarke's sexual characterizations are for another discussion!). I liked the sense of exploration and wonder in the first one, but I read it in like 8th grade when I was really into sci-fi (and even then I thought Clarke was overrated) so I probably would not still agree. And I remember getting progressively more annoyed about certain aspects of the books as they went on, so I probably couldn't recommend them to you. A little while ago I picked up one of my favorite books from that period of my life and I was appalled by how bad it was. It's unsettling to me actually that I can remember so much of them off the top of my head when I read them so long ago.  

I am reading A Force of Nature by Richard Reeves, and while the title is the most cliche thing you could possibly choose for a book about Ernest Rutherford, it's actually pretty well written. It's deliberately not very technical, but it's full of the historical trivia that I find interesting.

Negoba wrote: Alitare wrote: What should I read next? -Player Piano, Vonnegut -The Dispossessed, Le Guin -Rendezvous with Rama, Clarke -Eye of the World (1st Wheel of Time novel), Jordan -Stand on Zanzibar, Brunner -The Gods Themselves, Asimov -Three Stigmata, Dick -Book of the Long Sun, Wolfe -Neuromancer, Gibson (started the first forty pages, wasn't too enthralled) -The Stand, King (Interested, but it's daunting) -Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Heinlein -Crime and Punishment/The Idiot/Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky -Something from Dickens -East of Eden/Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck -To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee -????????? I just bought the entire Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series on eBay for 12 dollars.    The Dispossessed is a great novel, IMO, maybe my favorite utopian novel. The writing and style are more straightforward than Left Hand, but the ideas appeal to me much more. Definitely worth reading.   Eye of the World - I thought the first 4 books of this series are amazing. It's escapists high fantasy with the farm boy / dark lord theme, and you can point to where he stole this element and that. But it is so enormous in scope. Things start going downhill after 4, I quit in the middle of book 7.   If you read the Wolfe book, let me know, that's been on my list to read for a long time.   To Kill a Mockingbird is a beautiful piece of work. Everyone should have read it.

I read to Kill a Mockingbird, and quite enjoyed it, although the ending (after the trial) went on too long for my tastes. I'd give 'er a solid B+. 

Negoba, I'm curious what specifically you didn't like about the later WoT books. I'm in the middle of Winter's Heart right now, and I've loved every page of every book. I'd agree that The Shadow Rising and The Eye of the World are the two best (so far), but the every book has been a winner.

After TSR, the characters shift from "I'm just a normal person who has been thrust into adventure" to "My actions have global significance now; I'm kind of a big deal." Is that part of the problem you have?

Anthony H. wrote: Negoba, I'm curious what specifically you didn't like about the later WoT books. I'm in the middle of Winter's Heart right now, and I've loved every page of every book. I'd agree that The Shadow Rising and The Eye of the World are the two best (so far), but the every book has been a winner. After TSR, the characters shift from "I'm just a normal person who has been thrust into adventure" to "My actions have global significance now; I'm kind of a big deal." Is that part of the problem you have?

I read Cat's Cradle, it kinda bored me tons. Just more Vonnegutism. Kooky religious meanderings? Check! Minimal, but black satirical humor? Check! Simple philosophical ideas that (predictably) Sl*g contemporary society, war, etc.? Check! I just didn't like how it took 9/10ths of the book for the whole Ice-9 material to get going - the rest was a sort of carnivalesque biography of the fictional Felix Hoenikker with silly midgets in foreign governments and all that rag. Nearly nothing of due import occurs until the last twenty pages or so, The only book I actually liked from him was Sirens of Titan. 

I like Cat's Cradle for the wordcraft as much as anything else. Also it's only the second Vonnegut I've read, and the first one was 20 years ago, so it's still pretty novel for me. But I get the criticisms.