Tag: etrainer

Hi Ed- I saw your comments on the Lawrence Block books! It's been nearly 20 years since I've read the Burglar series and yes they are light & fun but very readable. The guy I have to rave about right now is Ken Bruen and his Irish hero Jack Taylor series. Outstanding stuff! Do yourself a favor and pick up "The Guards". I see you added "Caught Stealing". Have you started it? Another terrific book by another cutting-edge author!! Hope to see you around!
Mark

msf59 által bejegyzett 10:23 pm (EST) -kor a Nov 10, 2009

Okey doke. Keep a readin' Thanks.

BillShears által bejegyzett 11:27 pm (EST) -kor a Nov 5, 2009

Understood. I posted on your "rekindle my interest" post. Here's a sample of my own work:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21965594/Kite-...

BillShears által bejegyzett 9:15 am (EST) -kor a Nov 4, 2009

Glad you got a chance to look at the list! And thanks for the mention of Gold Coast. I'll try to check it out sometime.
I think I only finish about one-third of the books I start these days. I don't know what changed in me - I used to invariably finish books. Now it seems like it takes more to grab my attention. Or maybe I don't have as much time for reading as I used to, so it takes more days/weeks to finish and if it isn't good enough I forget exactly what the plot line was where I left off and I just don't care enough to pick it up one more time. :-) That's kind of how it feels. I usually give a book at least a one-third reading through, though, before I give up on it. After a great start, it took Snow Crash until about one-quarter of the way through for it to start to pick up steam, but then it just kept getting better and better through the end and it turned out to be a tremendous book. But 600 pages is a pretty long book, and so one-third is pretty long, too! Hopefully Cyteen will pick up soon. Otherwise, life's too short for uninteresting books. :-) I have never read anything by C.J. Cherryh. Somehow I've gotten the impression she has a pretty good-sized following but still it's not everybody's cup of tea. Maybe it's not yours. I've seen her name used on other author's works quite a few times in the context of "if you like C.J. Cherryh's books, you'll like this one." You know that kind of blurb. So apparently her books epitomize a certain type. Cyteen is probably her most often-mentioned book, though. If you don't like it much, maybe all Cherryh's books are no-gos for you.
I was never sure if Cherryh was a man or woman and had to look it up to figure out whether it was 'his' or 'her' to write this. I just found has this fascinating page about her -
http://www.cherryh.com/www/whosCJ.htm . Not that it makes the book any better or worse, but it sounds like she's made a heck of an interesting life for herself!
Five years ago or so I read the 'Otherland' series of four books by Tad Williams which I thought were endlessly inventive and interesting, but between them it was somewhere between 2400 and 3200 pages of reading. They were about trying to save the lives of children who had gone into virtual reality and had the energy of minds captured and redirected. The virtual reality world was actually a chain of worlds, each made via software by a different person, and each having a unique flavor. There was an Oz world, a "War in the Trenches" world, an "Ancient Egypt" world, a "prehistoric" world, a sort of "London city maze" world, a "Trojan War" world, and others, each fully fleshed out with inhabitants, some of which were real beings and some of which were pure software constructs. There were serious bad guys, heroes, a worthwhile quest, characters one could relate to, etc., way much too interesting to quit on. I'm not that fast a reader, so it took me about nine months to get through them. I think I may have read a couple of other books in between, though. Anyway, as good as they were I hesitate to recommend them to anyone now because they are definitely not stand-alone books, and it's a huge time commitment to read the whole series. When I consider nine months as a percentage of my lifetime, that was a pretty big piece of my life's reading experience! :-) I often wish I were a faster reader... Anyway, I didn't recommend them to you because of that, and because they are pretty unique and they don't feel related to the styles of any of the old-time writers we used to love. There were better books to recommend. But when you mention reading time commitment, I definitely know what you mean!
Anyway, there is a huge variation in the flavors of SF and fantasy these days, and I'm sure you'll find some you really like.
Thanks again for the DeMille recommendation. Next time I'm in the mood for something that's not fantasy/SF I'll look for it, for sure.
Jim

bibliojim által bejegyzett 11:52 am (EST) -kor a Oct 18, 2009

Hi! I left a list of several SF books with explanations of what I thought was great about each of them in that thread on what SF is great. You probably already feel overwhelmed with suggestion, but I hope the additional description there will be helpful. I used to love the same authors you did (still do love them, but you know what I mean), and I listed only books I thought were great that appeal to me for the same reasons I used to like Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, etc. Those reasons were great use of language (esp Bradbury), interesting ideas, engaging characters, and talk about things that really matter, in a different context. I like books that provoke thought without being at all dry, and that give real experiences because they are so vivid. That's what you should find in the books I listed.

I see you've actually been working on the list you got from other people! I hope you're enjoying the books. I mentioned a couple other books by China Mieville. I've only read one, but I give it a 10 out of 10, and very few books I read get that. Farthing won a big award when it came out. I looked at a sequel in a bookstore last year, but thought it seemed kind of tedious. I hope you like Farthing. Cyteen is indeed supposed to be great.

I saw that Nelson DeMille is prominent in your author cloud. I listened to The Charm School on CD while I was driving a long ways to work every day, and I was extremely impressed. I thought it was a wonderful book. A lot of those spy-type thrillers aren't so interesting to me because they tend to feature a lot of callous or cardboard people (or so I think), but The Charm School was pretty darn good. Are others of his books as good? Can you suggest a couple others I might like?

bibliojim által bejegyzett 11:56 pm (EST) -kor a Oct 15, 2009

is Guardian of Lies worth reading?

berthirsch által bejegyzett 12:35 pm (EST) -kor a Aug 28, 2009

It use to be my prime area of study, although the Pacific Theater was not my forte. I have read some good ones on Iwo Jima. I'm glad to hear that it made it safe and sound.

Poleaxe által bejegyzett 8:25 am (EST) -kor a May 13, 2009