New year, new reading thread. Please try to keep it spoiler free. You can find the past four years here: 2012 What are you reading? 2011 What are you reading? 2010 What are you reading? 2009 What are you reading? I'm looking forward to reading more in 2013. I had a pretty good year of reading in 2012 then got derailed in the last 4 months of the year with a pretty insane schedule at work and home. Things are a bit more back to normal now, and my wife is starting a new job that won't require 100+ hour work weeks. It took me three months to finish up The Shadow of the Wind, which is crazy to me as it's my favorite book. I'm working on rereading the sequel The Angel's Game which is still excellently written. I've been told that The Prisoner of Heaven will do quite a bit to clear up the confusing ending to The Angel's Game. I hope to have an update on that soon. I also finished A Red Country by Joe Abercrombie. I liked it, but it was probably my least favorite book by him. The secondary characters, normally an Abercrombie strength, were very lacking as was the humor. This was a grim book, which isn't a bad thing, but I really missed the dark humor that leavens Abercrombie's tales. I was also disappointed by Lamb. Spoiler The return of the Bloody Nine should have been one of the highpoints of the reading year, but his character felt vastly underused in this tale. Even his big circle fight scene was broken up into sections as they cut between it and Shy's imprisonment. I really wanted to see that scene get full blown attention, but they wound up cutting moments from it and it really took away from the scene. The Bloody Nine vs the Feared this was not. Still it was not a bad book, and I am very eager to read Abercrombie's upcoming trilogy. There aren't a lot of books on my radar for this year. River of Starts by Guy Gavriel Kay (April 3) is tops on my list. Set in the same geographical area as Under Heaven but taking place centuries later, Kay looks poised to write another epic masterpiece. I'm hoping for new releases by Markus Zusak (Bridge of Clay), Scott Lynch (Republic of Thieves), and Robert McCammon. McCammon is a machine, and he'll have something out later this year. I just hope it's book 5 of the Mattheew Corbett series. I'm also intrigued by The Last Battle by Jordan\Sanderson. I'm debating if I'm going to just read the final trilogy or if I'm up to\have time to read the whole damn thing from The Eye of the World.
From the 2012 thread. Sorry to take so long to reply. I am working on those, and I hope to have an answer for you soon. But from an author event last summer where I met Zafon and heard him speak, he views it like a box that you can enter from any side. He said he intended for readers to be able to tackle the series in any order they wanted and to have different experiences shaded by what parts of the tale they understood. If you're looking to start right away, I'd recommend Angel's Game before Prisoner of Heaven. I think the ending of Angel's Game is dealt with pretty heavily so that might spoil the enjoyment of it if you read Prisoner first.
I don't read much, but i'm trying to... I like books like hunger games and stuff like that. Books that have a lot of murder. Also books like the outsiders, can you please recommend me some books?
Thanks! I decided to start The Angel's Game a few days ago and am a quarter of the way through. I love Zafon's writing style as well as this book so far. I hope the ending isn't as bad as everyone says. BTW, What happened to that book club we started?
I've been slowly reading The Book Thief for a while now. I thought it started off slowly but I've been enjoying it as of late.
The Hydrogen Sonata -- Banks Blue Remembered Earth -- Reynolds Caliban's War -- Corey These are the next 3 books I will read.
I'm trying to finish up A Dance with Dragons. I told myself I would finish it by the 3rd, but I still have about 250 pages to go. Next on my list is either to reread The Hobbit, or go back and finish Jon Hodgman's That Is All.
Not being able to answer the random question in the Game of Thrones thread, I find myself with an itch to reread the ASOIAF series. I hated the pace and unfamiliarity of AFFC, but I've heard from plenty of people that reading it again is well worth it.
You can try reading AFFC together with ADWD as one giant book. Here's a chapter order you can follow.
About 80% of the way through Memories of Ice, book 3 of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. I'm desperately trying to finish it before Memories of Light, final book of the Wheel of Time series, comes out in 7 days. Once I finish both of those, it'll be book 4 of the Malazan series.
I just finished The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. Winner of both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for best SF novel a couple of years ago, I happened to run across it behind some other stuff on a bookshelf, having forgotten all about buying it. The best SF novel I've read in quite a while. It'll scare the hell out of you with its depiction of the near future. Five stars. If you haven't read it yet, do so!
I liked it but felt it came up short with some pretty two dimensional characters. It could have been great, and I did like Bacigalupi's writing style quite a bit. It might have suffered because I had just read The Dervish House by Ian McDonald, which is a not as bleak future novel set in Istanbul. I was comparing the two novels the whole time, and I loved some of the characters in that book, especially Can Durukan the Boy Detective and his BitBot snake\bird\monkey\rat (one of my absolute favorite characters of 2011). Deckard, you'd probably like this one. No replicants, but it has a pretty intricate layered plot in a cool not too distant future with some cool nano technology. I really need to read more of McDonald's stuff in 2012.