# What are you reading [Jun 2017]?



## Elodan (Jun 1, 2017)

Another month, another thread.  Going to catch up with what I read since I last posted,


I read _Bound _by Benedict Jacka (the 8th Alex Verus novel).  Another good read.  While there's a lot happening, it sometimes feels like the story isn't moving forward.  These is supposed to be the penultimate book in the series, and it feels like there's two or three more novels worth of materials to go.  

I also finished _Lord of the Fire Lands_ by Dave Duncan.  Decent fantasy in the King's Blades series.

I'm currently about half way through _Silent Hall_ by NS Dolkart.  It sort of feels like a sandbox D&D campaign where the characters are just going from place to place with no real central story.  There's a fair amount of exposition about the gods of the setting (it is the first book in the Godserfs series).  Decent writing but I feel like I could put the book down, never read it again, and wouldn't care what happens to the characters.

Comics
I read Marvel's _Star Wars: Han Solo_ trade.  I thought this was an excellent read.  Felt like it kept true to the character and Han's growth during the original trilogy.

I also took my birthday money and bought a lot of DC's rebirth titles.

_Action Comics Vol 1 - Path of Doom_.  The issue is essentially one big fight but there's also a pretty good story mixed in.  Going to pick up the next volume.
_Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corp Vol 1 - Sinestro's Law_.  Deals with the return of the Green Lantern Corps (Hal, John, Guy) and sets up another fight with the Sinestro Corps.  Does feel like it's treading over the same ground but I will be picking up the next one.
_Wonder Woman Vol 1 - The Lies_.  It addresses the various origin stories and lives of Wonder Woman and the central issue is that Diana doesn't know which ones are true.  There's a big bad who's really not a factor in the story and is defeated rather off-handily.  Good enough to pick up Vol 2.
_Detective Comics Vol 1 - Rise of the Batman_.  Decent story but like _Batman Vol 1 - I am Batman_ it didn't really grab me.  Won't be picking the next one up.  Will be grabbing Batman Beyond Vol 1.
_Justice League Vol 1 - The Extinction Machines_.  Decent story.  Not sure about picking up the next one yet.


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## Kramodlog (Jun 1, 2017)

_The Forever War._


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## Jhaelen (Jun 2, 2017)

Right now, I'm reading 'Beyond the Rim', an adventure module for FFG's 'Edge of the Empire' Star Wars RPG. It's the first official adventure module I bought, trying to decide if they're worth it.
So far I like the additional setting and background info it contains, but the adventure itself seem to be fairly generic, i.e. nothing I couldn't come up with myself.


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## megamania (Jun 2, 2017)

Started King's Wizard and the Glass (part 4 of Dark Tower).

Makes me want to do more of my DnD world of Jenner's World.


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## Zaukrie (Jun 2, 2017)

Just finished Norse mythology by Gaiman. It was fine. Not sure what I was expecting.

Started the 13th Age rulebook. It appears to be there game I should be playing.

Also working thru the classic D&D comics. Seem pretty light on content. 

Not sure what fiction is next.


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## Blue (Jun 2, 2017)

Elodan said:


> I read _Bound _by Benedict Jacka (the 8th Alex Verus novel).  Another good read.  While there's a lot happening, it sometimes feels like the story isn't moving forward.  These is supposed to be the penultimate book in the series, and it feels like there's two or three more novels worth of materials to go.




I read Bound just recently and enjoyed it - I think the last two delivered a good "buy the next book now" ending without compromising the rest of the book that works well in a series.

That said, I never would have guessed this to the the last-book-but-one.  At the pace they have been going, this is just getting into the thick of it.  Now they are poised for bigger issue, and but they need to have a grand I-been-manipulated-by-Richard book ending before they close up the series.

I'm with you I would expect, at minimum, 2-3 more books in the series.

That's ... somewhat disappointing to know.


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## Blue (Jun 2, 2017)

So, with my large to-be-read pile staring at me, I made a left at Albuquerque and am four books and a short story into an entirely different series.

I think it was an announcement here about the tie-in RPG that made me look at Wearing the Cape by Marion Harmon.  I haven't read superhero fiction in forever, never been one of my genres.  I think The Legion of Nothing web serial was the last I got into, but I didn't even read Wildcards.  (Should I?)

Anyway, it had lots of review, and lots of good reviews.  It wasn't out in Mass Market Paperback, only trade paperback and kindle.  I was about to head out and needed a transportable book (which the single-bound The Inheritance Trilogy I'm also reading is NOT).  So I bought the kindle version.

And then the next book.

And then the third book.

And then backtracked to buy the short-story between books two and three.

And now I bought the last book.

I *still* have no idea why these are such a draw, but they have me laughing out loud a lot which is likely related.  The writing is good, but no fantastic word-crafting.  Dialog is snappy and witty, I enjoy that.  Good job making the PoV character very emphasizable.  Plots are decent, they don't telegraph the twists too much.  (Though the first book could have used a little more build up for the end.)  But they're just fun.  And there is a good amount of deconstruction of the superhero concept that the author has faithfully reflected in the worldbuilding.

I wouldn't rate them as great works of literature, but I will go out and buy them one after another because I enjoy reading them.


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## Blue (Jun 2, 2017)

Zaukrie said:


> Started the 13th Age rulebook. It appears to be there game I should be playing.




I'm a really big fan of 13th Age, been running it since it came out.  While Morrus was excellent in hosting the 13th Age SRD, the 13th Age discussion is fairly light here.  G+ has a more active community if you want.  https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/105266185948211782098


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## Elodan (Jun 3, 2017)

Blue said:


> ...
> I think The Legion of Nothing web serial was the last I got into, but I didn't even read Wildcards.  (Should I?)
> ...




I read the first 5 - 7 Wild Cards books when they first came out.  I remember liking them a fair amount (of course this was like 20 years ago).  Like all anthologies the stories are uneven and I think I felt things were getting repetitive with the last couple of books.


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## megamania (Jun 4, 2017)

Just finished Valiant's "Book of Death".     So much potential.......


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## Nellisir (Jun 5, 2017)

Reading _Wolves Eat Dogs_, by Martin Cruz Smith. Typically excellent. Also read _Strange Country_, by Mark Dapin, which is a pretty good collection of humor/travel articles about Australia.


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## Hrothgar Rannúlfr (Jun 5, 2017)

Right now, I'm reading _Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft_.  Currently exploring _At the Mountains of Madness_.

I'm alternating between Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (not just Conan, but Kull, Kane, Morn, ext...).


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## Jhaelen (Jun 6, 2017)

I started reading the 'Tales from the Loop' RPG which I received a while ago, after backing the kickstarter project (a first for me!).

Apparently it uses the 'Mutant: Year Zero' rules. All I've seen about it in the book is rather unexciting, though: rolling a bunch of d6 with one or more sixes meaning 'success'. Yeah, well. That sure means rolling a lot of dice for a simple binary result - I think I'm not a fan. Maybe I'm spoiled by FFG's Star Wars system.

The setting seems interesting, though. Apparently it's meant to be created 'collaboratively', as well, with every other 'scene' being suggested by one of the players. I'd be willing to give that a try.


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## Nellisir (Jun 7, 2017)

Nellisir said:


> Reading _Wolves Eat Dogs_, by Martin Cruz Smith. Typically excellent. Also read _Strange Country_, by Mark Dapin, which is a pretty good collection of humor/travel articles about Australia.




Finished _Wolves Eat Dogs_ and the next book in the series, _Stalin's Ghost_. Not sure what I'll read next.


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## Richards (Jun 11, 2017)

I'm reading _Silver Pigs_ by Lindsey Davis, another mystery set in a different time period: this time ancient Rome circa AD 70.  I'm four chapters in and already captivated; the protagonist, Falco, is described on the back cover as "Sam Spade in a ratty toga" and so far the description is pretty apt.  He's a low-life, but likable.

Oh, and the pigs in the title refer to ingots of silver that have gone missing.

Johnathan


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## Zaukrie (Jun 12, 2017)

About halfway thru this.. ..

https://g.co/kgs/YARymr


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## Argyle King (Jun 12, 2017)

I recently picked up _The Complete Works of Lao Tzu_; it contains both the "Tao Teh Ching" and "Hua Hu Ching".


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## Blue (Jun 13, 2017)

Okay, I finished six books (and a short story) in Wearing the Cape.  The last book was a lot more experimental - it was crossovers and team-ups, and included (with permission) dimension traveling to team up with supers written by others.  UIt was more short stories/novellas with a framing story, and played with the writing style.

I first want to call out that I'm glad he did it.  He took a chance, including a Shakespearean-style play with Midsummer's Night Dream that I quite enjoyed.  Changing up your writing style, point of view, and whole setting for a sixth book in a series takes guts.

On the other hand, I was less thrilled with it because I was unfamiliar with every single one of the team-ups (except Shakespeare), so I missed all the "woo!" points of them.  I think it was several modern books plus one web comic.

I don't know if book 7 is out, but I finally got back to what I had been reading when I started that as a "portable" book, which was The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, first of four stories in The Inheritance Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin.  I finished that.  It was enjoyable, I give it good grades for world building and also making a plot involving the fate of gods work well on a human level.  Call it 8/10.  It didn't blow me away the same way her The Fifth Season did, but it was far from "same old same old".

I've now started the next book in the series, not too far into it though I've hit some laugh-out-loud moments I needed to read to my wife, such as how the PoV character learned to read.  Like her other works, she paints realistic people with flaws that you can empathize with.


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## Richards (Jun 16, 2017)

Well, I just spent Tuesday and Thursday of this week traveling to and from Albuquerque, so I managed to start and finish two entire books while sitting at airports and on planes.  The first of these was the latest Agent Pendergast novel, _The Obsidian Chamber_, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.  It was far from the best in the series but still an enjoyable read.  Then I read _Rain Storm_ by Barry Eisler, the third in a series of novels about a modern-day Japanese-American assassin named John Rain.  It was up to the level of the first two books in the series.

Next up, I'll probably start _The Colorado Kid_ by Stephen King.  For a 25-cent library book sale purchase, I'm pretty sure I'll get my money's worth.  (_Silver Pigs_ and _Rain Storm_ were similarly 25-cent purchases; I paid full price for _The Obsidian Chamber_ at an airport bookstore, after deciding on a whim to check to see if it was out in paperback yet.)

Johnathan


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## Mallus (Jun 16, 2017)

I'm enjoying the Hell out of a first volume of an omnibus release of James White's "Sector General" stories about a far-future intergalactic space hospital where everyone sounds very British. They're grand, old-fashioned, largely pacifist space opera, centered around heroic medical staff solving problems & saving individual lives. Even though the series is, like 50+ years old, it has some of the best aliens in SF. Wonderful, solid traditional storytelling.

After that, Ive got _Raven Stratagem_, the sequel to _Ninefox Gambit_ by Yoon Ha Lee, which is the best SF book I read last year. Also space opera, but one where the physics is indistinguishable from Korean mythology and half of everything sounds like poetry.


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## Richards (Jun 17, 2017)

I remember those Sector General books.  They were very good - I still remember liking them despite not having read anything new in the series for literally dozens of years.

Johnathan


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## Jhaelen (Jun 19, 2017)

I finally started reading 'The Prestige' by Christopher Priest. Unlike in the film adaption, the first part is set in today's time and about a descendant of one of the illusionists, so that's new to me. I'm very interested in how much the novel's different from the movie.


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## Ralif Redhammer (Jun 20, 2017)

Finally finished Esslemont’s Return of the Crimson Guard. Despite feeling more “Malazan-y” than the prior novel, with its 800+ page length, disparate narratives, and strong military fantasy bent, I liked it much less. Something was missing. In Erikson’s Malazan books, there’s always a payoff, a connectivity that ties the tales together. In this book, that just wasn’t done in a satisfactory way. Things felt either tacked-on or unresolved. Still, it was nice to return to the Malazan world.

Now it’s onto Flashing Swords #2, the sword & sorcery collection edited by Lin Carter.


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## Richards (Jun 21, 2017)

I remember the "Flashing Swords!" collections.  There were some pretty good stories in there.

I just started Dean Koontz's _The Face_.  It ought to be good; out of the scores of his novels I've read over the years, he's only disappointed me twice.

Johnathan


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## Blue (Jun 21, 2017)

I finished off all four stories in N.K. Jemisin's The Inheritance Trilogy.  For stories about gods and mortals, they were all very much about people.  Quite solid, and also very consistent in the nature of the gods.  4/5 for the series.  It was a trilogy, and then a novella got tacked on later.  I enjoyed the heck out of the novella and read swaths of it out-loud to my wife.  It did not stand by itself, but the internal dialog of a newborn godling had me bursting out in laughter time and time again.  It was fun - to make a MCU reference it was Guardians of the Galaxy vs. Avengers.

I've just started The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated into English by Lucia Graves.  Part of the lure was to expand what I read, and this is the first translated novel-length fiction I've ever read.  I worried about if wordcrafting and polish might suffer, but it has so far be very enjoyable including on those fronts.  I'm still early but it's pulled me in.


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## BattleMats (Jun 21, 2017)

I can highly recommend The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, it's the first book of the Gentleman Bastard series.

Reads just like a rogue based RPG campaign.


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## Zaukrie (Jun 22, 2017)

The lies of Locke Lamora is one of my all time favorite books.


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## Nellisir (Jun 22, 2017)

Blue said:


> I finished off all four stories in N.K. Jemisin's The Inheritance Trilogy.  For stories about gods and mortals, they were all very much about people.  Quite solid, and also very consistent in the nature of the gods.  4/5 for the series.  It was a trilogy, and then a novella got tacked on later.  I enjoyed the heck out of the novella and read swaths of it out-loud to my wife.  It did not stand by itself, but the internal dialog of a newborn godling had me bursting out in laughter time and time again.  It was fun - to make a MCU reference it was Guardians of the Galaxy vs. Avengers.




Not sure I've read the novella. Where did you find it?  These are the books that got me started on NK Jemisin.

Personally, the bit with the goddess of hunger and her pure indignation when confronted with the hole of nothing was just pure fun.


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## Blue (Jun 23, 2017)

Nellisir said:


> Not sure I've read the novella. Where did you find it?  These are the books that got me started on NK Jemisin.
> 
> Personally, the bit with the goddess of hunger and her pure indignation when confronted with the hole of nothing was just pure fun.




Oh yeah, Lil was great!

I had picked up a several inch thick softcover from Amazon that had the original trilogy and the novella.  It shows for me as $12.53 or $9.99 for the kindle version.  (Evil shoulder devil:  If you buy it for yourself, you can give your other copies to someone who needs N.K. Jemisin in their life.  Good shoulder angel:  Eh, what he said.)

https://smile.amazon.com/Inheritanc...25673&sr=8-1&keywords=the+inheritance+trilogy

(Not an affiliate link, but it does go to smile.amazon.com to donate to a charity of your choice without costing you anything.  So there.)


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## Nellisir (Jun 23, 2017)

Blue said:


> Oh yeah, Lil was great!
> 
> I had picked up a several inch thick softcover from Amazon that had the original trilogy and the novella.  It shows for me as $12.53 or $9.99 for the kindle version.  (Evil shoulder devil:  If you buy it for yourself, you can give your other copies to someone who needs N.K. Jemisin in their life.  Good shoulder angel:  Eh, what he said.)
> 
> ...




Oooo....Or I can keep both copies and read with both hands!!!


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## Blue (Jun 26, 2017)

So, like two years ago I gave my youngest the first book in Edding's Belgariad.  She had liked LLoyd Alexander's Taran books so I figured it was worth a try.  We found it recently when moving furniture and I grabbed it when wanting a light read.

i remember enjoying those way back when, but reading it now felt like it was YA.  There was no subtly to anything, it was all writ large.  And the characters are sure Mary Sues, though that is at least partly by convention.  

But I was struck by how pedestrian the writing was as well.  I enjoy the polish of Patrick Rothfuss or the descriptiveness of N.K. Jemisin.  There was no wordplay, or writing-as-craft.

It's a really quick read so I'll stick it out, but if I finish all five is a different story.  This worries me for his Starhawk series, I've had RPG characters in different genres inspired but how he acts as well as knightly orders in my homebrew settings.  But now I'm a bit concerned that my best memories of those books are only kept if I don't pick them up again.

Which won't stop me, just saying.


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## Ralif Redhammer (Jun 26, 2017)

Finished Flashing Swords #2. Pretty good stuff, save for the last Brak the Barbarian tale. That one really epitomized the lowest of the Conan wannabee trend.

Now I’m reading Cinder: The Lunar Chronicles Book 1. So far, it’s decent, though I fear some of the later plot points are already too predictably set up in the opening. Hopefully I’m wrong there…


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## Jhaelen (Jun 29, 2017)

I've finished reading 'The Prestige' by Christopher Priest. While I enjoyed it a lot, I wished I hadn't seen the movie before. I kept wondering how much I would have guessed about what was really going on hadn't I already known. It's also been interesting to see where the movie deviates from the novel, especially regarding the 'Prestige materials'.

Next up is 'Bold as Love' by Gwyneth Jones.


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## Ralif Redhammer (Jun 29, 2017)

Finished Cinder quickly. It was a fun read, but I think was held back by too-early too-heavy foreshadowing. I mean, it’s cyberpunk retelling of Cinderella, so some beats are expected, but still, some of the pages should’ve come with spoiler warnings.

Now I’m starting up Sanderson’s Bands of Mourning. Looking forward to seeing how the second Mistborn trilogy ends.


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## Blue (Jun 29, 2017)

Ralif Redhammer said:


> Now I’m starting up Sanderson’s Bands of Mourning. Looking forward to seeing how the second Mistborn trilogy ends.




I'd be very interested in your thoughts of that.  I've only read the first Mistborn trilogy.  It was quite good, and I'm amazed how many details at the end seemed entirely planned since page one of the first book and how he tied them together, but I'm not one of the people raving about the series.  So I've held off picking up other Mistborn books since.


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## Richards (Jun 30, 2017)

I finished Dean Koontz's _The Face_ and moved on to Stephen King's _Joyland_, a ghost story and coming-of-age story taking place in an amusement park.  It was really good - which is likely why I managed to finish it up in one day.  (Well, that and I had a lot of free time on my hands yesterday.)

Next up, I'm back to Dean Koontz with _The City_.

Johnathan


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## Lpelmond (Jul 3, 2017)

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand


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## Hand of Evil (Jul 3, 2017)

All the Conan books - got the new Conan RPG and it made me want to go back and re-read all of Howard's stuff.


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