OS Book Club Pt II

[Executor]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I am currently studying to become a lawyer
and in recent years, I've been reading law books.

When I finally graduate, I'll start reading something about maritime adventure, fantasy-like the book "Terror" by Dan Simmons.
Or maybe I'll reread it.

Terror is an excellent book. Highly recommended!

[Hammerhunker]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Have any of you read any Bryce Courtney books? Good gracious, what a tremendous talent, especially when in life he began publishing his novels.

[Beantown]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

After a few more books (6.5 since I last posted about him) - if you like ****ed up horror stuff, Michaelbrent Collings is your man. Ho. Ly. ****.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[JohnnytheSkin]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

So a "kids" book recommendation...The Christmas Pig by JK Rowling.

Simply beautiful, heartfelt, emotional, and maybe my fave of hers. Some may say it's a little derivative as it borrows from Toy Story, Velveteen Rabbit, and themes from Coraline, but I don't care. Just a lovely story.

[KSUowls]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

My library got a little bigger this Christmas. Most of my new titles are from top recommended lists and known authors like Sanderson and Wier. However, I did get a few surprises. One of them was the Necroseam Chronicles by Ellie Raine. My parents were at a local event about a month ago that featured an artist flea market. The author was one of the vendors there selling her series, and based on the types of books I usually read (fantasy/adventure) my parents got this one for me.


Willow of Ashes
-Ellie Raine

The back cover illustrates a pretty neat sounding fantasy world featuring multiple realms/nations. 1 such realm is called "under continent" featuring grim reapers whose job it is to kill demons across the world, and of one of the major players here is the Princess of Death (Willow) who will one day be the queen of these reapers. The other major player that the back cover mentions is a "Necromancer" apprentice, who is a childhood friend of the Death Princess.
One review described this story, "If Tim Burton wrote the Lord of the Rings". Well...I literally started reading this about 20 minutes after watching The Two Towers yesterday, and I can emphatically say that review is false.**

This summary is the only reason I'm even writing the review, because it sounded like a cool setting.

First, let's get the good out of the way:
By far the best part of this book was a minor character named Kurk. Kurk is a ferret, a familiar of another minor character named Ringed. What makes Kurk so great is that he thinks is the the exiled emperor of an alien planet He speaks in pseudo posh tongue, and he refers to Ringed as his butler. Truly he is only there for comic relief as he doesn't actually serve a purpose to the plot (a problem that crosses streams in other parts of the story), but he really was fun.

The Princess of Death was also, at times, an interesting character. But of course at other times she was a tropey YA female protagonist.

The Bad:
******* FURRIES

Even as someone whose interest fall in the nerdy/geeky category, likes anime, sci fi and fantasy stories. I loathe animal/hybrid characters, and I do not understand the obsession with catgirls and things like that. It was not apparent from either the cover art (a pretty ashen haired young woman with a scythe) or the back cover that this story would feature human/animal hybrids. That's what we got though. Had this not been a Christmas gift then I would have tossed this book aside on page 2 when it mentions a character with wolf ears.

The inhabitants of this land are called shifters, bi-pedal humanoid beings with various animal aesthetics. For the most part these animal features are pretty mild, ranging from cat/dog/bunny ears to a lions tail, and in some cases the features only show when the character is stressed (1 character grows cat ears when he's scared). The book reminds us of these features throughout the story, making mention of a slight twitch in a character's fox ears or how one character's lions tail hangs down. And were it not for these constant reminders, I could have pretended that these characters were all (or mostly all) just human, because having wolf ears or any other animal feature made absolutely zero impact on the story except for 1 instance near the end.

Even without the furry little problem, there were just some major consistency issues.

Spoiler

The main cast are all apprentice reapers, all just 1 mission away from being knighted. But at the same time they are implied to be much weaker than a full knight. Also, Willow is said to be a genius with a scythe (the main reaper weapon), and she commands basically all the different elements of magic (where most people only control 1). She goes toe to toe with these major demon characters and gets completely beaten down in both instances. 2 of her male apprentice friends (who are supposed to be weaker than her) are able to pretty easily defeat both of these all powerful demons though.

To her credit, the author has implied a pretty interesting world in which this all takes place. She never explains it though. The world exists in some magic/steam punk type setting. Characters travel to cities in trains, but also use stage coaches. There are even magical TV's throughout the land so everyone can catch the news. Less than a paragraph throughout the book is dedicated to explaining the intricacies of this world though, and that is a problem for a book that is nearly 400 pages long.

[JohnnytheSkin]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Reread Good Omens for like the fifth time and decided to look into more of the late, great Terry Pratchett.

Read Nation, regarded by some as his best novel, and it was really good. About two young people brought together after a devastating tidal wave, one a Pacific islander and the other a nobleman's daughter, and how people can connect despite language and social barriers. Marketed as "young adult" for some reason but had lots of heavy, thoughtful themes. Highly recommended.

Then looked into the daunting Discworld series. Have two awesome board games set there from Martin Wallace, and the character names, locations, and the setting of a flat world residing on four elephants atop a tortoise was always intriguing to me. Bought a few of the "best" per Reddit and the internets. Read ten pages of Mort, about Death wanting an apprentice, laughed out loud several times I got looks from the family, and bought all of them on my Kindle. Just finished The Color of Magic about the inept wizard Rincewind and the tourist Twoflower and am in love. If you like Douglas Adams or British whimsy and humor in general, Discworld is for you.

[TripleCrown9]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Hey guys, I'm going out of town for a couple weeks for work and I'm looking for some suggestions.

I mainly read baseball non-fiction, but I'm also interested in horror, mystery, and sometimes sci-fi.

Any good books that I can dig into while living in a hotel room? Sorry for being super vague in my interests lol.

Or any really interesting sports history books.

[KSUowls]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Ballplayer is a great baseball book. I'm certainly bias, but Chipper Jones has a lot of great stories to tell. It was funny at times, and overall just very insightful as to some of the inner workings of being a ballplayer.

I don't read a ton mystery books, but a few that I enjoyed are: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski falls into the mystery category. It's a bit of a mind **** in more ways than one. The Davinci Code and Angels and Demons by Dan Brown are also both entertaining, much better than their movie adaptations.

Sci-Fi has a wide range from more grounded works like the Martian to Space Operas like Ender's Game. I'll list a few that are generally well received across the spectrum.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A comedy/sci-fi book that is a must read if you've never experienced it.

Dune is a good option if you enjoyed the movie. It gives context to a lot of what you would have seen there as well as extending beyond where the movie ended. It is very heavy on the politics of the universe though. Don't expect a lot of action.

I'll also list Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I haven't read this yet, but it's near the top of my reading list. It seems to hit every sci-fi book recommendation list that I've ever seen.

[KSUowls]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Skyward
-Brandon Sanderson


As is evident by my postings on here. I've read a lot of crap over the last year or so. Skyward was thoroughly enjoyable beginning to end though.

When the main character's father is branded a coward for his actions against an alien race some 10 years earlier the main character Spin grows up being known as the daughter of a coward. Eventually she joins the pilots academy to try and prover herself and also prove that her father is not the coward that everyone says he is, but she faces many hardships along the way.

Spin is a bit more brutish than I typically care for in a MC. She grew up with a chip on her shoulder, and so it is easy to justify. Fortunately, the story didn't take it too far. She was quick to anger, but she also was able to show restraint to the point that there were only a few times that she really blew up on people.

The true highlight of the story though comes in the form of an ancient (yet advanced) fighter ship that she stumbles upon. This ship has a sentient AI that I could easily see being in a Douglas Adams story. It's last pilot gave it the standing order to "lie low, take stock, avoid fights". It took this quite literally, and so when Spin finds it buried in this cavern, it keeps asking her to bring it new mushrooms to catalogue. It's also quite insistent on that last order to avoid fights. Clearly this means that it was simply a research ship. There are numerous comical lines throughout, but this one was my favorite.

As Spin explains to this ship who the aliens are, how they send squadrons of ships down with some bombs that can penetrate down into the caverns where humanity lives:

"Why don't they bombard you from orbit?"
"What?"
"Not that I'd know anything about things like that," it added. "Being a noncombat machine. Obviously."
"You have four guns"
"Someone must have stuck those on when I wasn't looking"

[Donald Allen]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I'm reading The Sound and the Fury - the magnum opus of the American writer William Faulkner. It is quite difficult to perceive the text. In the novel, the author uses the principle of "double vision" to reveal the same problem and the flow of consciousness. I will reread Shakespeare's most famous works, I will read them regularly. On the website https://studydriver.com/othello/ when I was preparing for a class at university I knew a few interesting articles about Othello and decided to reread the drama. It's unforgettable.

[Hammerhunker]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I'm rereading one of my favorite football books, America's Game, by Michael MacCambridge. It was written in 2004 which seems like yesterday but holy smokes this book is getting old. MacCambridge masterfully spins the aspects of the game's evolution with politics and social conditions into a thorough depiction of the NFL's unique role in America's history.

As I read through this again, I could see it made into a multi-year series on Netflix either as a documentary or a creatively done story.

[mkharsh33]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Reading the entire ACD Sherlock Holmes series - in order and in their entirety. It's a task, but I'm enjoying them immensely.

[KSUowls]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Warhammer 40k: Horus Rising

“IN THE GRIM DARKNESS OF THE FAR FUTURE THERE IS ONLY WAR.”

This is the tagline for the Warhammer 40K franchise, and it has always made me want to get into it. The setting of the 40K universe is not one of exploration that you see in something like Star Trek. Even Star Wars can't really hold a candle to the extreme belligerence of this sci-fi setting. It's a story about conquest and Humanity's struggle to survive among the stars.

Warhammer 40K largely follows the human faction known as the Imperium, followers of the Emperor of Man. A being who is considered like a god by many for his supreme power. Horus Rising actually takes place 10,000 years before what is known as Warhammer 40k (40k meaning the 40th millennium), and it is about one of the Emperor's sons, Horus, and his expedition fleet which is tasked with uniting lost human colonies and exterminating xenos (aliens) anywhere they are found. There is too much background lore to explain in a few sentences, but suffice to say that the universe is expansive.

Despite all of this, the book started out surprisingly slow. The expedition fleet is engaged in some form of conflict at multiple times throughout the story, but there is very heavy exposition leading up to and encircling those conflicts. While the pace does eventually pick up some later on, it never really builds into a climax. This makes sense to an extent because this book just starts the events of what will eventually become a civil war, but still somewhat surprising. It reminded me a bit like reading Dune. Dune speaks of conflict that occurs during the setting and events of the book, but it never shows it. Horus Rising shows the conflict, but it was never a focus of the writing. I actually appreciated this the more it went on though. It allowed for deeper character progression and introduction into the universe.

Overall a very enjoyable story.

As a side note. This was my first ever audio book, and it was a weird experience. I'm a binge reader. I will usually read an entire book, cover to cover, the same day that I open to the first page. It took over a week to listen to this story though. I wanted to continue the story at many points, but I found that I can only really listen whenever I'm doing specific tasks like working out or driving. Any other time I tried to listen it would make me sleepy or my attention would be too split to really retain anything. So, I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I wish I could read a book in a day, I get so distracted, I have to take a break after every chapter lol. I'm with you on audio only, it's impossible for me. I usually have the book right there and follow along and just use it for pace, or for sci-fi books with lots of weird pronunciations. I do like the way everything syncs between Kindle and Audible so I can read on my own and then pick back up with the audio when I'm ready, Project Hail Mary was great to read that way.

[Gramps91]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I don't think I could do audiobook only. I like holding the book in my hands, which is why I'm also opposed to things like Kindle. I do like using audiobooks for pacing though. Sometimes, on my own I'll skip over entire paragraphs and wind up getting confused. Listening to the audiobook as a guide while I read keeps me on pace and some audiobooks are pretty cool, actually. I like to take my time with books to make them last longer so I'm usually a one chapter a day kind of reader.