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What books are we reading now?

Just want to say for the poster wanting to know about Pratchet,read them you wont be disapointed.Seems you americans are way ahead of me with the Wheel of Time series as well,I'm still trying to get book 11 in any format but I have to wait for books in english here.Raymond E.Fiest is another writer I quite enjoy on the fantasy scene.Clarke and Asimov rule the sci-fi scene for me.Currently rereading Glue by Irvine Welsh but as that is written in the scottish dialect I feel few here have read.Same auther as did the film Trainspotting if that helps.Not sci-fi or so but gives a good insight to scottish life,albeit from a dark perspective.
 
I keep finding new ( to me) Discworld books, recently read Nightwatch. Dave Duncan is another of my favorite authors, just finished "The Guilded Chain", part of his Kings Blades series. You also cant go too wrong with Orson Scott Card, getting ready to read "Treason". I could be wrong, but I recall reading that Wheel of Time will end with book 12, and Terry Goodkinds Sword of Truth series is due to conclude with 2 more installments left to go.
 
I will believe that Robert Jordan has finally ended the Wheel of Time series about three days after they've buried him.

On the flip side, about three days after Terry Pratchett has died, I'll be digging him back up, begging for more.
 
Finally got book 11 in The Wheel of Time yesterday and I'll have the prequel book by the end of the week.Found a bookshop that will order for me as well that seems up to date with the latest releases.Was cheap as well,about half the normal price.Pretty happy about that too.

Most recent books have included Thud by Pratchet,up to his usual standards and Talon of the Silver Hawk by Fiest.Good book but a little to thin for me,I like 5-600 pages minimum in a book otherwise I feel the Author's ripping me off :LOL:
 
Wheel of Time? Is Robert Jordan still beating that horse to death?

I've finally gotten around to checking out Philip Roth and am in the middle of The Plot Against America.
 
I'm reading (in my copius spare time) Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards," a fascinating assessment of our culture through a crititque of classic psychological behaviorism.
 
a book i actually read early this year but i just had to reccomend it is the forever war by joe haldemann, he wrote it after coming home from vietnam and it's a science fiction story that is ultimately about the disconnection veterans feel when returning home, but beyond that i am reading catch 22, it's one of those "classics" i never got round to and am now trying to catch up on.
 
vampire earth? that makes me think of "i am legend", i fucking love that book, it invented the horror/SF crossover near enough.
 
Brian Lumley did an excellent collection of vampire books in The Necroscope and Vampire World series.Was hailed as a modern day Lovecraft and wasn't bad besides.
 
I am reading Jared Diamond's latest work, "Collapse." And, as a lighter counterbalance, I just finished Terry Pratchett's "Hogfather." Very seasonal, very insightful, and very, very funny.
 
Caesar: Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy. I saw him discussing it on C-SPAN's Book TV last week and then read some of the reviews. It is the first full length biography in a decade (the previous was Christian Meier's 1996 Caesar, which I read in English translation) and so far a very good one - balanced, fair and accurate, it is neither repelled by nor enamored of its subject. Goldsworthy is content to present the various accounts of key event and his own take on the reliability of the sources and then leave the decision about which version to believe to the reader.

Regards,

Joe
 
Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. Superb hard-core sci-fi. I'll be following it up with The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, which is really about a Librarian. And Vampires...
 
Caesar: Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy. I saw him discussing it on C-SPAN's Book TV last week and then read some of the reviews. It is the first full length biography in a decade (the previous was Christian Meier's 1996 Caesar, which I read in English translation) and so far a very good one - balanced, fair and accurate, it is neither repelled by nor enamored of its subject. Goldsworthy is content to present the various accounts of key event and his own take on the reliability of the sources and then leave the decision about which version to believe to the reader.

Regards,

Joe

Oh yeah, I saw something about that in the New York Times Book Review this week. There's also a new book about Augustus.


I"m currently reading "The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan," by Ben Macintyre, a biogrophy (of sorts) of Joseph Harlan, a 19th century American adventurer who tried to conquer Afghanistan with a rag-tag army of mercenaries.
 
"The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan,"

Another one I think I came across on BookTV. It is on my list. You'd think something like that would make a terrific subject for a major Hollywood film, instead of the next lousy sequel or bad big screen version of a mediocre TV series, or yet another hideous remake of a film that was either great, and therefore can't be remade, or lousy and therefore shouldn't be. :) (How many versions of Miracle on 34th Street have been made for TV and the movies since 1946? How many can hold a candle to the original?)

There's also a new book about Augustus

That would be Anthony Everitt's Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor. It is sitting on the bookshelf, next up after Caesar.

BTW, I recently acquired some really cool software for cataloging books, music and video of all formats, the Readerware series. My barcode reader (free if you buy all 3 modules at a discount price) won't arrive until next week, but the software does have an interface to Amazon.com and Amazon.uk that will download your purchase history along with cover images, song lists for CDs, credits for DVDs and edition and publisher's information for books. So I've already got a couple of hundred items in my book and DVD databases without ever leaving my computer. :)

Regards,

Joe
 
Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. Superb hard-core sci-fi.

A good one. Arguably the best in the series, although I'm very fond of the last book of the four.

I banged out two books today alone: Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett and We Few by David Weber & John Ringo. The first was pretty good, although not as good as some of Pratchett's prior stuff. The latter was tolerable, but prone to Weber's political polemics and long-winded explanations of space battles. I skipped vast swathes of it, and kept reading mainly to see what would happen to the protagonist.

Now I need to finish Collapse.
 

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