What are you reading right now

[techwizard]

Finished War & Peace! feels like i beat the final boss of literature, at least in terms of length. i know there are much more difficult books out there than this though.

[MaterialHandlerMike]

Drink This, Not That

[Izret101]

I'm "coaching" (i guess would be the right word?) my son through James and the Giant Peach.

He doesn't need much help which is great and he enjoys reading which is even better

[techwizard]

picked up a couple books to help me out a bit with reading deeper into fiction, or at least some clues for what to look for it terms of symbolism/metaphors, etc.

finished How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

now onto How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland

[techwizard]

Finished How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland a week ago roughly. not at all what the title implied, it was for the most part a history of the publishing process and other trivia about books. it felt more like a guide for how to decide on what novel to choose when buying in some parts, not so much about what to look for while reading. How to Read Literature like a Professor was much better in my opinion. this was still interesting enough to finish, just not what i was looking for.

after that i started and finished Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. it was a fun, light read, good adventure story. i don't know how much merit there is to this idea, but i think The Hobbit was at least somewhat inspired by this story at certain points. Ben Gunn is very gollum-like, there is of course the treasure hunt, the doctor is reminiscent of Gandalf. Long John Silver has some elements of Thorin in him. it's interesting to see the similarities anyway.

yesterday i started book one of the Belgariad series, Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings. i know nothing about this series or it's author, but the first 25 pages remind me of a slightly younger version of Wheel of Time, with some elements of Tolkien mixed in. I'm not far enough in to really say how good it is, but it has potential to be interesting.

edit: oh and still chipping away at the bible, little bits at a time. today i finished off Deuteronomy, finally through all the books of Moses. i really hope the other books aren't so encyclopedic and a bit more story-like, but it's still interesting anyway.

[techwizard]

Finished Pawn of Prophecy, what a disappointment. It started out as a promising Tolkien-esque story, but it went downhill really fast. Plot: We have to find someone, who stole something, while being followed by bad guys with unclear intentions. "Who are we looking for and what did they steal?" asks the main character, dozens of times. "We'll tell you when you're old enough." says every other character. That's the first 200 or so pages, out of 258. There's almost no logic behind any of the places that the characters journey to, it just feels like they're moving because, well, this is "epic fantasy" and that means travelling around. To top it off, they're dragged away from their quest by some kings who are on their side. That distracts them for a good quarter of the book at the end, and why did the kings drag them away from their quest? To tell them information they already knew, and that the kings knew that they already knew.

Bad prose (so many cliches and unimaginative adjectives), stupid plot, many stupid characters with little redeeming qualities, heavy handed allusions to Christianity but otherwise pretty shallow, fairly blatant Lord of the Rings knock-off. All around would not recommend to anyone except maybe someone young who wouldn't notice the flaws. The pacing was good enough and there was some entertainment value that I'm sure a younger audience would appreciate it more than I do.

Obviously I decided against continuing in the Belgariad series, even though I own the rest of it. Luckily it was cheap from a friends of the library sale.

Started Homer's The Odyssey, the first 3 lines of this are better than the entirety of Pawn of Prophecy.

[JSoup]

Erm, cross posting this from the books bought topic as I intended to post it in this one but got my tabs confused.

Been doing a lot of reading over the last few months. Got a Nook for Christmas. The last few Warcraft books I hadn't tracked down yet, all of Atomic Robo, and a few gaming history books. Have a complete (or to current, anyway) run of Fables, Hellboy, Xanth and all of Forgotten Realms waiting for me.

[techwizard]

Finished Homer's The Odyssey, loved it.

Started and finished The Kalevala (Karina Brooks prose adaptation), really interesting to read something about a lesser known mythology, Finnish. It's supposed to have been a strong influence on Tolkien's writing which is why I originally picked it up and I can definitely see some connections to the Silmarillion, although not the Lord of the Rings so much. The only problem is that this version was heavily adapted, I think to make it more approachable for kids, though it still has some pretty dark stuff going on. I really want to try the original epic poem form of this now, because i'm sure i missed out on major chunks of the story. My edition was just over 200 pages long, the original form is 400 - 600 pages depending on which edition...

[techwizard]

The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales - finished the first 22 tales out of over 200, so far i like it a lot! the popular ones are extremely familiar of course, with minor differences from what i know of them. many of these are completely unknown to me though, i never read fairy tales or had them read to me as a kid (that i can remember). the only thing i worry is that i'll be going through so many and they're all so short, as well as some seem to repeat the story/morals of others, that i might forget a lot of them quickly.

[techwizard]

no one else here reads...besides video game books? there must be someone

[JSoup]

I'm working through the last few volumes of Fables currently. The story completely goes off the rails around volume 10 and doesn't seem to be stopping any time soon.

[SirPsycho]

no one else here reads...besides video game books? there must be someone

I've been reading boring ass textbooks.

[zcrich01]

I read case law. And lots of it. So, nothing worth discussing.

[Cryptid Collector]

I've been reading a lot of fanfic(mostly Star Fox crossovers right now)

[Zagnorch]

no one else here reads...besides video game books? there must be someone

Even though about once a month a complete stranger will come up to me and tell me I look kind of like Stephen King, I'm not big on reading fiction. My most recent crack at imaginary literary worlds was the first volume of Lord of the Rings, which I bailed on about fifty pages in. I prefer reading about true crime, historical events and figures of interest, and... science fact. Which is why I grabbed this at a local thrift for $0.79:


[img width=420 height=633]http://i1273.photobucket.com/albums/y409/Zagnorch/asimov%20book_zpsvwx4bcd4.jpg[/img]


Thing is, if I hadn't seen all those old Radio Shack print ads featuring Asimov promoting TRS computers, I might not have given this a second glance. I'm currently in the middle of the first chapter, an essay on the discovery and study of isotopes... which I'm finding far more interesting than I expected it to be.