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I'm still reading through the Allan Quartermain books by H. Rider Haggard. I've now read:
King Solomon's Mines
Allan Quartermain
Hue-Hue or the Monster
The Ivory Child
The Holy Flower
And I've just started Marie.
I must say, I'm rather enjoying them, I especially like that they are set in Africa, because many of the things described in the books are things I have seen or heard (e.g. the rumble of an elephant), and it helps to bring the stories to life.
I've now finished Marie, and Allan's Wife. And have started Child of Storm. I must say I found the battle against the baboons in Allan's Wife, to be one of the few book-battles I have read, that actually invoked a small sense of horror in me, mainly because I have a fear and loathing of baboons.
I finished A Princess of Mars and really liked it so got Gods of Mars to start eventually as well.
Yesterday I started a thriller book called Never Lie by Freida McFadden. It was really good but also one of those books where you hate every character because they're all awful in one way or another. I actually read the entire thing, all 286 pages, in a day lol. It had a ton of plot twists, almost like she was forcing in as many as she could, but it wasn't an awful book. I actually liked it a lot.
So today I read 'The Mysteries' by Bill Watterson. I didn't expect Calvin & Hobbes but I did expect a story of some kind. It was 72 pages (36 front and back, so not really 72) with maybe one or two lines of text on every other page and a picture on every other page. I didn't really get a story out of it and feel like I wasted the $18 in amazon gift cards I spent. It took me literally 5 minutes to read the entire "novel." I guess if you have the name recognition you can write anything and pass it off as a book.
Today I'm starting Thrawn by Timothy Zahn. I haven't read a good Star Wars novel since I was in HS so am really excited to start on this one.
...
So today I read 'The Mysteries' by Bill Watterson. I didn't expect Calvin & Hobbes but I did expect a story of some kind. It was 72 pages (36 front and back, so not really 72) with maybe one or two lines of text on every other page and a picture on every other page. I didn't really get a story out of it and feel like I wasted the $18 in amazon gift cards I spent. It took me literally 5 minutes to read the entire "novel." I guess if you have the name recognition you can write anything and pass it off as a book.
...
He calls it a graphic novel but it's basically left page is text, right page is a picture. The artwork is really nice but the "story" to it was extremely simple. It's more of an adult fable, at least described by him. I got through the whole thing and was like, "that was it?"
He calls it a graphic novel but it's basically left page is text, right page is a picture. The artwork is really nice but the "story" to it was extremely simple. It's more of an adult fable, at least described by him. I got through the whole thing and was like, "that was it?"
Good choice! I read the Thrawn trilogy a few years back when I was on a Star Wars book streak, and thought it was great. Timothy Zahn has a way with his writing, and these books kept me very engaged, sometimes reading for several hours in a day. His handling of the characters and the plot was very interesting, and I could easily envision the scenes. I highly recommend them, and hope you enjoy them too!
Good choice! I read the Thrawn trilogy a few years back when I was on a Star Wars book streak, and thought it was great. Timothy Zahn has a way with his writing, and these books kept me very engaged, sometimes reading for several hours in a day. His handling of the characters and the plot was very interesting, and I could easily envision the scenes. I highly recommend them, and hope you enjoy them too!
Im loving it so far. Thrawn’s one of my favorite SW characters so seeing his beginnings is awesome. I think the last Star Wars book I read was one when Anakin was still Obi WAN’s padawan and they found a planet that was a living organism. I think it was semi-related to the Yuzhan Vong, not canon anymore though sadly.
I'm going through Jack Vance's Dying Earth series and really loving it. So far I enjoyed the second book the most (The Eyes of the Overworld). It's about this anti-hero character forced on a journey across strange locations on the dying earth causing trouble to himself and others along the way because he's kind of an ass (but you still root for him )
That said, the Ender's Game I reviewed included an introduction he did some 6 years after its first publication.
He had done some editing, fixing, cleaning up of inconsistencies, etc. apparently, when it was being re-issued as a hardback book.
Sadly, his introduction shows a penchant for the 'useless that'... and was not interesting enough to keep me in it.
After my recent reread of Ender's Game I went on to reread the next in the series, "Speaker for the Dead". I just finished today.
I must not have followed the story so well in my original reading decades ago, because I had largely forgotten the story over the years. However, having read it again now, I find the story to be so emotionally charged and compelling I can't imagine forgetting it. It's a great book, IMO.
I'd bet real money it's a book @Ent would enjoy. It includes a great reverence for trees (and also some real-world close-to-homeness...but I'll refrain from providing potential spoilers).
In spite of the dreaded "that" here's a quote from a nonhuman who just happens to be named Human:
"When I tell this story to the wives," said Human, "you'll hear grief so terrible that it will sound like the breaking of trees in a thunderstorm."
For me, it's time to start the third in the Ender series, "Xenocide".
Well... upon the recommendation of one @Eljorahir, it would seem I need consider adding another to my 'retirement or casual reading' trove of books...in spite of 'that'.
Thank you.
I've just laid in most of Stephen Hawking's works, (along with a couple other mathematical engineer types), so I can be aware of and probe his changing theories 1988 through his passing in March 2018. (The Origin of Time, Stephen Hawking's Final Theory having been published by a Thomas Hertog, a partner he was working with, in 2023.)
I've a bit of a need to be much more familiar with this gent and his works than I am at present.
Giving Alan Bliss's 1982 "JRR Tolkien: Finn and Hengest - the Fragment and the Episode" another try.
I'd recently watched a three-lecture-series by Tom Shippey on YouTube about Beowulf, the middle lecture centering on the above book, edited by Bliss using JRRT's lecture notes. Bliss had actually been encouraged to do so by JRRT himself at a meeting the two had in 1966, but it took quite a while even after JRRT's death in 1973, even with support by Christopher Tolkien, to get the book done. This could be serious migraine territory ... 😵💫
I've just finished reading The Call of Cthulhu, and have started At The Mountains of Madness. They are the first of H. P. Lovecraft's books that I have read.
The 2010 German translation of Christopher Tolkien's 2009 "The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun", which has JRRT's original poem and the German translation on facing pages, and additional commentary by the German translators, as it is obviously related to the "Nibelungenlied". The German translation is thus quite a bit longer than CT's original, 560 pages vs. 384.