The Library/Bookshelf! (COBbie Literature Thread)

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.

I seem to enjoy reading works by foreign authors published in the eighties.

That is a great book. I had a chance to read it my sophomore/junior year.

As I have borrowed it from my library due to not having access to my bank accounts, I must go to the used bookshop once everything's activated and see if I can snag a copy of my own.

After reading a sample chapter I really wanna pick up Infinity Blade : Awakening

JG 26: Top Guns of the Luftwaffe.

This should be good!

Reading No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. It's probably the most depressing novel I've ever read.

I'm proud of myself. I walked out of a half priced books after spending less than twenty dollars.

Jones: Let me know how that goes.

For a good WWII combat reporter book.

Guadal Canal Diary.

Memoirs Of A Geisha is my current read

It was quite interesting, though stuffing one unit's experience of the entire war into one book did mean things were a bit abbreviated.

Cool. You ever read anything about Erich Hartmann?

I found a rather interesting book. Ebert's Bigger Little Movie Glossary I think this should be something tropes editors and readers should consider reading or going through.

edited 30th Jun '12 6:20:31 PM by TuefelHundenIV

One of my favorite ways of finding new authors is to check the final ballots for the Hugo Awards and Nebula Awards. Overall, it's about 50-50 whether I'll like a work on the final ballot, but when it comes to unknown (to me) authors, those are excellent odds compared to most other sources. (Except for friend-recommendations, of course, but that only helps if you know people who know how to find good new authors.)

edited 30th Jun '12 9:21:35 PM by Xtifr

I've never read any works specifically about him, though I've read of his exploits in more general works.

BTW, if anyone's curious, the 2012 Hugo nominees for best novel are:

• Among Others by Jo Walton (we don't have a page on this one)
• A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin (A Song Of Ice And Fire series novel)
• Deadline by Mira Grant (we don't have the book or the author)
• Embassytown by China Mieville (we don't have a page on this one)
• Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

Grant and Corey are new names to me; I'll have to check them out. Embassytown is excellent, and my top choice so far. But this is definitely showing some holes in our coverage if we only have two of the nominees for SF's biggest award.

eta: correction: Deadline is apparently in the Newsflesh series, so we have three. Nowhere near as bad as I thought.

edited 21st Jul '12 4:12:17 AM by Xtifr

@Leradny - Oh man, I love that book! It's one of my favorites of all time, despite its flaws.

Currently reading The Odyssey. I'm still on book 5, though.

Then I'll have to actually go read some of these to trope them. I like Jo Walton's non-fiction writings, so I suspect I'll like her fiction, and I know I like Mieville.

I've really been considering reading Leviathan Wakes. Guess I should finally look into it.

edited 26th Jul '12 12:38:45 PM by Parable

Just got done reading through the current books in Monster Hunter International . Pretty amusing series. There is a bit of right wing nut in some of it. But it is not so prevalent as to overshadow or really interupt with the story.

edited 26th Jul '12 6:12:45 PM by TuefelHundenIV

It seems that "right wing nut" is a strong book-buying market, given the number of books that have that kind of slant. I wonder why?

To be fair it is a Baen book. They publish quite a few books like that. Quite a few are reasonably well written and entertaining but they have that clear slant to them.

They've clearly worked out that there's a market for that, especially in military-style SF. I have a decent amount of tolerance for it even though it's not in most aspects my politics; I can suspend the disbelief. It works better when they've created viewpoint characters who would realistically hold that kind of political slant; military officers, for instance, are likely to have fairly pro-military politics and a bit of a "toughen up and stop whining" attitude. It's when they are taking the omniscient point-of-view and still treating politics from a simplistic right-wing attitude it gets a bit silly.

Agreed. Ringo bumps into often enough. I still like the Posleen Invasionseries though. I am sucker for Alien Invasion fiction.

Hmm, I've found it hard to take Alien Invasion stories seriously since Niven & Pournelle deconstructed it in the seventies, with Footfall. I did enjoy Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series, though, where the aliens show up expecting the primitive creatures with spears and swords that their scouts had reported, and instead find World War II going on.

Niven pointed out most of the problems with Footfall and proceeded to build an alien invasion that could be defeated. Ringo did something similar with the Posleen, but did so in a completely different way. It's also significantly softer scifi wise, but at least the flaws with the Posleen are with the species, not just management being morons. Voyage of the Space Bubble is probably better on it, but never really gets to the open war stage. I'm curious if the alien invasion justified qualifies as a subgenre yet.