Finished Tripwire by Lee Child, third book in the Jack Reacher series.
Ending was expected, but I guess if you have such a long running series, pretty much ending will always be expected. Bad guy meets Reacher, bad guy loses, Reacher wins. Fun to read though, which is the main point. Going to keep reading them.
Don’t think it ticked any of the Bingo boxes though.
What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?
For details on the c/Books bingo challenge that just restarted for the year, you can checkout the initial Book Bingo, and its Recommendation Post. Links are also present in our community sidebar.
I’m splitting my attention between The Classic of Tea and The Legend of Darkness. The former is a nice little hardback with trilingual contents (Classical Chinese, Vernacular Chinese, and English) while the latter is a bilingual edition (Classical Chinese, and English).
How is The Classic of Tea? Don’t have enough interest in Tea to actually read that, but curious after checking it’s details.
It’s a little bit out of date naturally (1300 years will do that to you), but it’s actually kind of amazing how relevant it still is today. It doesn’t have information on all the different varieties of tea available today (the 2011-published tome The Classic of Chinese Tea which is increasingly the standard textbook for tea production in China corrects this), but what it does mention is still here today processed very much in similar fashions (albeit with upgrades in the equipment for picking it).
It would be a bit of a slog to read (because of some unfamiliar terminology you’d have to check up in the appendices) were it not so short. My trilingual edition is a small hardback book of 150 pages (including some opening pages with pretty pictures, two introductions, a preface, two appendices and a references list). About half that is the English text, so you’re looking at reading about 75 pages. I think you could browse it quite successfully over a weekend without strain.
Interesting! Thanks for the info.
I recently finished the dark tower series from king. I enjoyed it.
Now I’m onto the expanse from Corey. I’m on the third book - so far I’m digging this series too.
I also recently finished the Dark Tower and man… don‘t read the finale sitting in a crowded bus like I did, too many feels ._.
I thought the ending was perfect. It was tough, but I agree, how else could it have finished?
I enjoyed it every step of the way in all its wackiness.
Dark Tower: such an excellent series! I even didn’t mind ðe ending as some did; I can’t imagine how else he might have concluded it - ðere was a lot to tie up!
Expanse: I don’t write spoilers, but the auþors have said ðhe Expanse’s main driver was never intended to be ðe sci-fi, and ðis starts being very evident around books 6 or 7, which is when I fully lost interest. I haven’t even boðered to read ðe cliff notes about what happened after. Lots of people liked it regardless - if you make it all ðe way þrough (is ðe series finished?) it’ll be interesting to see your opinion. Did you watch the show?
I have not watched the show yet but I will. The expanse has been on my “want to read” list for a while. Finally picked it up. I worry it’ll start to drag - there’s a lot of books. But so far it’s keeping my attention.
The first few books are well worth the read, just like the first few seasons of the show. I, too, lost interest after some time but I’d still rewatch/reread at least the first half of this opus.
Same, clearly, and a shame; the auþors are quite good wiþ ðeir oðer sci-fi series. If ðey hadn’t said early in ðat Expanse was only incidentally sci-fi, I’d wonder if ðey’d written ðemselves into a corner and didn’t know where to go wiþ the alien aspect. Anyway, I was quite disappointed when I finally gave up.
I think there was a bit of a Rowling- or GOT-effect happening: the film franchise had caught up with the writers, they were under pressure to write more, under the public eye - and that’s when things started going awry.
Doing a deep read of The Politics of Nonviolent Action by Gene Sharp. There are many examples of how effective non-violent action/resistance has been to remove dictatorships. Along with the reasons they were successful or not.
Just did my annual re-read of “Jurassic Park”. 10/10 always recommend.
Started “The Lost World” this morning. I always struggle to get into this one. Funnily enough, the cover has the blurb “Fast and gripping” from The Washington Post Book World. “Fast” is never how I’ve thought of this novel; seems like it takes forever to get going.
Earlier today I finished Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. That was quite a ride! Some really beautiful descriptions of locations and characters, and the way he writes really keeps you on your toes. It’s the first book I’ve read in a while which has kept me hooked until the end. Highly recommend.
Haven’t read anything by Dennis Lehane myself but have heard good thing about most of this novels.
This is the first book I’ve read by him, but I’d love to try out some of his others now. A colleague recommend Small Mercies and I’ve heard Mystic River is also very good.
Looking forward to your reviews.
Oh and I’ve also added The Given Day to my wishlist. It might be some time before I get round to reading these!
Don’t worry, with my speed and backlog, it will probably be months, if not years before I get to these.
Just started the nemesis series. Reading Dreadnought by April Daniels atm. I LOVE it! 2 days in, I’m 50% of the way through.
Between books atm. However, I did finish:
The Fisherman by John Langan (literary cosmic horror) | bingo squares: award, late to the party (HM)
Two friends go fishing at a creek with an unbelievable history.
Given how much buzz this got when it came out, I was expecting something more than the sort of classical Lovecraft et al.-inspired horror that it is, but maybe that’s exactly what its fans were excited for. Would probably rate this as “fine”, albeit far too slow for my taste. I found the middle section more interesting than the rest, largely because it’s more plot-driven and there’s no fishing in it. Be prepared for a lot of fishing.
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers (cozy solarpunk) | bingo squares: minority author, orange, short, LGBTQIA+, award, cozy
2nd novella in the Monk & Robot series. The monk introduces the robot to human civilization.
This was also fine, but I liked the first one better.
(Edited b/c I forgot summaries.)
I just finished The Monkey and the Monk: An Abridgment of The Journey to the West, Wu Cheng’en, Anthony C. Yu (Translator), after attempting to read the primary work. Being exposed to western mythologies, I was very interested in exploring other cultural touchstones. I almost dropped it due to the enormity of the novel, but decided to switch to the abridged version. I’m glad I didz even if my heart didn’t like the concept of an abridgment.
Overall, it was interesting, and I’m glad I read it but there must be some context regarding all the repetition within a single chapter that I’m missing. I can’t count how many times a character explains, word for word, what has just happened to another character. I theorize two reasons. Either that the repetition is for emphasis(though this seemed inconsistent), or in Chinese there is symmetry in the placement on the page.
As a palette cleanser I just sped through The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook Matt Dinniman which was fun and easy.
The repetition is there because these are primarily oral tales that have been barely edited into something that almost, but not quite, has a coherent narrative.
The tales within Journey to the West come from a very wide period of historical storytelling and are in a wide variety of storytelling traditions. There’s very little consistency from tale to tale, and any overarching theme was added much later in forming the “novel”. (It’s a “novel” in the same way that Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a novel, right down to inconsistencies from member story to story.)
Cool, appreciate the context. And this applies both to the repetition between chapters and within a particular chapter?
The repetition between chapters happens because the storyteller of a given story doesn’t know if you know the origin story or not. (It’s like how every damned Superman or Spider-Man or whatever movie always has to show how Superman/Spider-Man came to be.) Within chapters it could be part of an oral recitation thing with the repetitions being vestigial choruses. There is a lot of scholarship around this novel, and I’m not really deeply involved in any of it. I’m a situation- and opportunity-driven dabbler.
The Oxford Handook of Theology, Sexuality, and Gender, ed. Adrian Thatcher. I’ve got 6 chapters left to go.
Just finished The midwife of Auschwitz, by Anna Stuart. Very good, very emotional, just loved this book.
For now, I search for something lighter for the vacation (and not too complex to follow because during vacations, I’m frequently interrupted in the reading). I don’t see something in my to read pile, so I’ll look in this post or older. But if someone have an advice…
What about some litRPG? They are generally not too deep and great to pass time.
“Schronisko które przestało istnieć” by Sławek Gortych - just began. and “Za Cenę Śmierci” by Małgorzata Rogala - 2nd volume of series I’ve began to love. Both crime/thriller books.
I just finished the Chrysalids by John Wyndham. I thought it was a great book and I’ve gotten Day of the Triffids also by John Wyndham out from the library and will start reading that one tonight.
I finished what’s out for the Amra Thetys series and now I’m working through a bunch of physical books I just picked up. I’m starting with When The Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi and I’ll probably pick up Royal Gambit by Daniel O’Malley after I finish that (it’s the latest book following The Rook storyline.
Blitzed through the Thursday Murder Club series (all of the published ones so far) and really enjoyed them. There are some really touching moments of grief mixed with optimism and hope draped in a backdrop of ridiculousness and intrigue. The short chapters make it easy to digest.
Read The Gone World whose take on time travel was neat and used the mechanic to craft an intriguing world(s). The crime/detective angle kept me pretty interested, though the writing style was a bit odd for me. There were many uses of sentence fragments that didn’t flow naturally, more akin to bullet points shoehorned into paragraphs. There was also some background delivered via exposition/monologue that felt a tad lazy. I’ve heard that the ending is a sticking point for some but I didn’t find it difficult to follow and thought the execution was not bad.
Finally also got around to A Wizard of Earthsea which I adored. The internal growth and journey of the protagonist felt genuine. I absolutely loved that there is much left to the imagination on this one. Shed some light on how I perceive Rothfuss’ works.
My current book is A Gentleman in Moscow which is thus far well written and fairly entertaining though I’m not far enough to provide a more meaningful review.
Reading Camp Damascus epub.
