Nothing personal, but I always feel that fantasy readers are just being taken for a ride by the writers. Three trilogies? Really? Does the world need that much fantasy literature?
Oh good. I was really hoping you would show up and tell all of us that we should not like what we like, and instead should only read what you enjoy.
Oh good. I was really hoping you would show up and tell all of us that we should not like what we like, and instead should only read what you enjoy.
Given Resolute14's personal expenditure of time into the subject, and his obvious enjoyment of fantasy literature, a silly response like peter12's would have made me angry too.
I read the First Law Trilogy (by Joe Abercrombie). Just getting back into Fantasy, since being a teenager, thanks to Game of Thrones.
I didn't love it to start, but thoroughly enjoyed it by the end. Thoroughly. Like Abercrombie's writing style. Blunt, to the point, yet very capable of changing voice.
I read the First Law Trilogy (by Joe Abercrombie). Just getting back into Fantasy, since being a teenager, thanks to Game of Thrones.
I didn't love it to start, but thoroughly enjoyed it by the end. Thoroughly. Like Abercrombie's writing style. Blunt, to the point, yet very capable of changing voice.
I read the standalone sequel to First Law, called Best Served Cold. It was okay, too repetitive for my taste. The other sequel is The Heroes. Looks much more promising but has a different format. The entire book spans 3 days in the world and is based on one battle. Haven't read it yet.
Read the Mistborn trilogy (highly recommend) next and I'm onto the sequels for that now.
Last edited by Looch City; 05-25-2014 at 09:55 AM.
Just read The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers. Nonlinear story about the Iraq war, friendship and the aftermath of battle. It was pretty good. The first fiction book I've read in probably 10 years.
Just read On The Farm by Stevie Cameron, which is about Robert Pickton. It goes into great depths about the missing women and their backgrounds, as well as Picktons upbringing and the whole investigation and eventually trial. Extremely we'll researched, and a fascinating read. Devastating story.
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But living an honest life - for that you need the truth. That's the other thing I learned that day, that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, leads to liberation and dignity. -Ricky Gervais
Candide by Voltaire, a witty satire on optimism, good vs. evil and religion among other things. Had me laughing out loud quite a few times.
Read a couple of Poe's stories - The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum Loved the latter, didn't care ofr the former. Poe has been very hit and miss for me.
Currently reading This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski, a collection of short stories based on the author's experiences in a concentration camp during WWII. Horrific is about the only way I can sum it up.
Also been slogging my way through Dracula for months. The early chapters in Transylvania were exciting, but now that Dracula himself has disappeared from much of the story, things have slowed down. Some of the characters' verbosity hasn't helped things either (looking at you van Helsing)
I'm re-reading Fifth Business. It has been decades since I last read it and it still seems to be holding up well.
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"The problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence."
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"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance--it is the illusion of knowledge."
—Daniel J. Boorstin, historian, former Librarian of Congress
"But the Senator, while insisting he was not intoxicated, could not explain his nudity"
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Candide by Voltaire, a witty satire on optimism, good vs. evil and religion among other things. Had me laughing out loud quite a few times.
Read a couple of Poe's stories - The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum Loved the latter, didn't care ofr the former. Poe has been very hit and miss for me.
Currently reading This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski, a collection of short stories based on the author's experiences in a concentration camp during WWII. Horrific is about the only way I can sum it up.
Also been slogging my way through Dracula for months. The early chapters in Transylvania were exciting, but now that Dracula himself has disappeared from much of the story, things have slowed down. Some of the characters' verbosity hasn't helped things either (looking at you van Helsing)
They performed this at Opera in the Park last summer. I'm sure the book would be great!
Just finishing up Why We Lost By Daniel Bolger regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bolger is a former general and offers a very balanced recap of the wars on the ground. Also mixes in a ton of stories about certain events and how they unfolded.
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.
It won the Pulitzer, but even more importantly; it was an "Emma" pick at Indigo
Just a damn fine read for anyone who likes adventure and the transcendence of an underdog you can't stop cheering for. OH and its all about the early days of America's comic book industry.
Swan Song by Robert McCammon
I've got three other books on the go and I happened to read a preview of this book and I haven't been able to put it down. It's a post-apocalyptic tale of survival and madness.
I'm about halfway through and it just keeps getting better.
I'm reading Neal Stephenson's SevenEves. I'm a third of the way in and can't put it down. I'm told the last third of the book is dramatically different than the first two thirds which can piss people off I know but I'll keep reading and decide at the end what I think. So far so great though. Amazing story by one of my favourite writers. Nobody creates a world quite like Stephenson. His book Anathem has stayed with me for years after I read it and I think this one will too.
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I don't read a lot of non-fiction but just read the new Michael Lewis book, Flash Boys. He does a great job of making a relatively arcane topic (high frequency trading) understandable, and the characters are all fascinating. It seems inevitable that it'll become a movie at some point, and there's a lot of commonality with the movie version of Moneyball (although I never read that book).
I am half-way through this book, and it does have my blood boiling as the review on the back cover suggests it would. I do find some of the commentary over my head.
Is the market rigged?
Michael Lewis Reflects on His Book Flash Boys, a Year After It Shook Wall Street to Its Core
By the time I met my characters they’d already spent several years trying to answer those questions. In the end they figured out that the complexity, though it may have arisen innocently enough, served the interest of financial intermediaries rather than the investors and corporations the market is meant to serve. It had enabled a massive amount of predatory trading and had institutionalized a systemic and totally unnecessary unfairness in the market and, in the bargain, rendered it less stable and more prone to flash crashes and outages and other unhappy events. Having understood the problems, Katsuyama and his colleagues had set out not to exploit them but to repair them. That, too, I thought was interesting: some people on Wall Street wanted to fix something, even if it meant less money for Wall Street, and for them personally.
Two weeks before the book’s publication, Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, announced an investigation into the relationship between high-frequency traders, who trade with computer algorithms at nearly light speed, and the 60 or so public and private stock exchanges in the United States. In the days after Flash Boys came out, the Justice Department announced its own investigation, and it was reported that the F.B.I. had another. The S.E.C., responsible in the first place for the market rules, known as Reg NMS, that led to the mess, remained fairly quiet, though its enforcement director let it be known that the commission was investigating exactly what unseemly advantages high-frequency traders were getting for their money . . . The initial explosion was soon followed by a steady fallout of fines and lawsuits and complaints, which, I assume, has really only just begun.
Somewhere in the middle of it all a lawyer—oddly, named Michael Lewis—who had devised the successful legal strategy for going after Big Tobacco, helped file a class-action suit on behalf of investors against the 13 public U.S. stock exchanges, accusing them of, among other things, cheating ordinary investors by selling special access to high-frequency traders.
While Lewis can only estimate the cost to investors of the abuses, he believes it is over $5 billion per year, perhaps as much as $15 billion per year or even higher.
The effect of the existing system on these savings is not trivial. In early 2015, one of America’s largest fund managers sought to quantify the benefits to investors of trading on IEX instead of one of the other U.S. markets. It detected a very clear pattern: on IEX, stocks tended to trade at the “arrival price”—that is, the price at which the stock was quoted when their order arrived in the market. If they wanted to buy 20,000 shares of Microsoft, and Microsoft was offered at $40 a share, they bought at $40 a share. When they sent the same orders to other markets, the price of Microsoft moved against them. This so-called slippage amounted to nearly a third of 1 percent. In 2014, this giant money manager bought and sold roughly $80 billion in U.S. stocks. The teachers and firefighters and other middle-class investors whose pensions it managed were collectively paying a tax of roughly $240 million a year for the benefit of interacting with high-frequency traders in unfair markets.
Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi is a must read. It is heavily redacted by the Americans, but there is still quite a bit of detail about the torture this man has faced while in custody of the Americans and Jordanians. Damning. Great book.
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But living an honest life - for that you need the truth. That's the other thing I learned that day, that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, leads to liberation and dignity. -Ricky Gervais
