Book Thread Continued

[Arvis]

Recently read man in the high castle and loved it.

JUST started watching the Amazon series based on this.  It's on the absolute fringes of what I'm willing to stomach, content-wise, but the concept is truly fascinating.

Plus: Rufus Sewell.  So there's that.

[Yoda]

I'm onto the narrative of arthur gordon pym of nantucket, or nagpn for short. Seems pretty legit so far. I wish Poe wrote more full length stories

[Tooker]

Looks like I forgot to come here and say something about a book I read recently.

It's called Romeo And/Or Juliet, and it's a choose-your-own-adventure type book where you can choose to play the path of the Shakespeare play... if you want to die. It's pretty great. Very fun and funny. You start out by choosing whether to be Romeo or Juliet, and my first time as Romeo, they ended up getting married and living happily ever after, after Romeo snuck into her house dressed as a maid to see if he could figure out how to end their families' feud. They saw each other across a room and she fell in love, amazed at meeting a man brave enough to dress that way.  My first time as Juliet, she ended up running away from home, meeting a dude named something like Yolo Swagski in a bar, and going away with him to his island, where she became a personal trainer for knights, and eventually after a mutual-but-not-devastating breakup, a pirate.

The author has written a bunch of Adventure Time comics, so that'll give you a better-known example of his style.
http://amzn.to/2mQPcqA

[Jimmy]

Now that the semester is finished I have time for recreational reading again. I did read The Canterbury Tales close to their entirety this semester, so there's that. I also worked on a Beowulf translation for quite a while, so I guess you could say I read that again.

Anyway, since BotW was all I did for my spring break, I just started reading Storm of Swords. I'm a little more than 200 pages into it and I'm liking where it's going so far. I'm getting the feeling the first two books were a set up for this one, so I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.

After that I'm going to read Nemesis Games (Expanse #5), or possibly The Gunslinger (Dark Tower #1) because the trailer for The Dark Tower movie looked amazing and now I'm curious about the books.

[Arvis]

Finished up The Complete Peanuts: 1965-1966 (for the 2nd time) and am now back to reading Star Trek TNG novels.  This time, it's The Peacekeepers, which is TNG #2, and seems to be pretty rare, as none of the bookstores around had it so I had to go ahead and buy it online for full price.

The cover of The Peacekeepers features Picard in the center, framed by Worf and Troi.  I am about 70% of the way through the book and Picard has done very little, Worf even less, and Troi has had all of three scenes, none of them important.  The cover art also features a few alien ships that also have yet to make an appearance in the narrative.  Every other TNG novel I have read has not had this weird disparity between cover and content.

Incidentally, 1966 is the year Peppermint Patty was introduced to the Peanuts strip (16 years into its run), and she's fantastic.  I had no idea that she first meets the gang because she is looking to meet cute boys (initially, her interest is in Linus, who she hears about from her friend Roy who meets both CB and Linus at summer camp in separate years).  So, while she is established from the beginning as a huge tomboy, she's also the first female character to show an unashamed interest in dating (although both Lucy and Sally have established monogamous crushes at this point).
I'm curious how long until Marcie (maybe my favorite character) is also introduced.

[Rgeneb1]

@Arvis
I've been steadily working my way through the complete peanuts too, I've been at it for about a year now and have just finished up 1971. So I can satisfy your curiosity and let you know it was in this volume Marcie first showed up.
I never read any Peanuts as a kid and not being American I didn't get to see all those famous thanksgiving and christmas TV specials that get mentioned so often. Surprised me greatly just how much I am loving the strip. It's less laugh out loud funny that other strips but a real slow burn, you get to love all the characters. Peppermint Patty is possibly the best though, brace yourself for raunchiness, in 1971 there is some accidental hand touching. Steamy stuff :)
I probably shouldn't make comparisons between Peanuts and other classics but it amazes me how much of Calvin and Hobbes borrowed from this era. Charlie Brown was messing around with unusual snowmen ans unassailable snow forts decades before Calvin; and Snoopys fantasies of being a WW1 flying ace are pure Spaceman Spiff.

[Arvis]

Glad to find a kindred spirit, @Rgeneb1 !

That was a great point about C&H, too.  Now that you point it out, could C&H really just have been Peanuts for a different generation?  They're the two best strips of all time, and very different in a lot of ways, but also very similar.  Hard for me to know exactly what Peanuts truly was to the comic strip readers of the 1950s.  But with Calvin, I was reading those strips almost when they first began, so I have a better idea of its cultural grounding.  Makes me approach them very differently.

[Tooker]

I've never thought about it either, but that connection rings true to me as well. Nice catch, @Rgeneb1 !

[Arvis]

Finished up The Peacekeepers (TNG #2) and enjoyed it just fine.  It got a bit slow during the third quarter and was a bit too jargony, so it was difficult to visualize everything.  But it did what a novel should: use stuff they can't show on tv due to budget constraints.  So lots of zero-g shenanigans and such.  Considering it's only the second-ever TNG novel, I was impressed with it, and none of the characterization felt wrong or anything, although Picard was a bit more stern than he actually is in the show.

Up next: The Captains' Honor (TNG #8), which has a very clever apostrophe use there in that title. This book utilizes the Magna Romans from the TOS episode "Bread and Circuses" and stars (completely in my head) Rufus Sewell as Magna Roman Captain Sejanus, a tactical and military genius (and probably the villain of the book), and Karen Gillan as Ensign Jenny de Luz, a young security officer and martial artist who idolized Tasha Yar.  So far, most of the narration has been done either from her point of view, or Worf's.  I'm not even done with the first chapter, so it's yet to be revealed whether Worf will feature prominently or not.  He is, however, on the cover.

[Dincrest]

After reading so much comic books/graphic novels, I need a real novel.  I wanted to read NeverEnding Story again but A) it's not legally available in E-book format, B) I lost my trade paperback version (which I wouldn't want to read anyway since the font is small), and C) I want to preserve my hardcover copy with the dual font colors (which, again, make reading a bit of a strain since much of the story is in a green font that isn't dark enough to contrast with the pages). 

I read the prologue and first chapter of Lord of the Rings, so I think that trilogy will be what I read now.  The writing style is dense, but as with the Hobbit, once I got used to it, it immersed me. 

I read the Kindle sample of Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson.  I know I had read it years ago but somehow it didn't do it for me then, despite being totally in my wheelhouse.  However, after reading the sample now, I put The Reckoners series on my wishlist. 

I also read the sample of the original Shannara trilogy by Terry Brooks.  I can easily see how many critics see it as a Tolkien/LotR ripoff, but I do like the descriptive prose that's more readable than Tolkien's.  Plus, a good many JRPGs pretty much follow similar plots and that doesn't stop me from enjoying them.  So Shannara having a similar plot doesn't turn me off.  Most every "journey of the hero" story follows that 12-stage monomyth structure, and that doesn't stop them from being enduring.  Spiderman, The Matrix, NeverEnding Story, Labyrinth, Percy Jackson, The Hobbit, Star Wars... http://winteriscoming.net/files/2015/12/The_Hero__s_Journey_by_Dunlavey.jpg

[Jimmy]

I thought Steelheart and the Reckoners series were fun books. It's an interesting world that is fully realized even if it isn't as descriptive as Sanderson's core fantasy work. It's almost like he set up a conundrum that needs solving in each book, and I liked that.

Also, as for Neverending Story, I was in charge of reprints of the hardcover when I worked at Penguin Young Readers. I noticed the ink density of the green was get too light and I advised the printer to darken it on a reprint and made sure to keep it darker (forest green as opposed to lime green) for the subsequent reprints I worked on. So, you may see if you can find a more recent printing to see if the green is darker.

As for my own reading, I finished Storm of Swords the other day. It was so good. Kind of like book 4 in the Wheel of Time series, this book really made me excited about this series. So I jumped right into reading a Feast for Crows. I'm going to motor my way through this, then maybe read one lighter book before going through Dance of Dragons. And since I have serious doubts Martin will ever finish writing the books, I've caved and started watching the show.

[Tooker]

That's a crazy coincidence, @Lando. (I typed Dincrest first - forgot you had changed your name. Thank goodness for that avatar!)  I just started reading the first Shannara trilogy too. I read it way back when I was a teen, so I've basically forgotten everything about it. I hear that it's really just the first book that's got that strong feel.

I'm glad that you're enjoying Steelheart more now - you and the main character have an unusual commonality in the metaphor thing. :)

I still think it's cool that you worked at Penguin, Jimmy. I love books, but my career just never took me to a place where I was involved with them. Maybe when I retire, if libraries still exist in something like their current form, I'll see if they'll let me work at one.

I just read a book called Every Heart a Doorway, and I really liked it. It's about a school for kids who have gone through a doorway to a magical world and now are stuck back on Earth, where nobody believes them. (Like Alice from Wonderland and the Pevensies from Narnia. All of the characters in the book are original, they just had that type of experience.) It's a standalone novel, which seems really rare these days, and I was glad to see it.

I also re-read the first Mistborn book recently, but haven't quite started on the second again yet, because of the aforementioned. :)

[Dincrest]

I'm still Dincrest on the inside :)

Anyway, I'm 3-4 chapters into Lord of the Rings and loving it.  I'm so glad I'm giving it another shot (I could not get into it when I was younger.) The descriptions and worldbuilding are exquisite, though the dialogue doesn't give much personality to the characters (so far.). I had a similar issue with The Hobbit in that the adventure as a whole was cool, but the characters and dialogue weren't particularly memorable except for a few. 

What I'm really digging, though, is that unlike most fantasy novels that have youthful main protagonists, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings have adult protagonists.  Bilbo was 50 in The Hobbit and Frodo is 50 here.  Who says old farts can't have great adventures?  I'm 39 and have had more and wilder adventures in my 30s than my teens and 20s combined, and I foresee more cycling adventures in my 40s.

I still have yet to purchase the Kindle versions of the Reckoners series but it is on my wishlist.  I downloaded a Kindle sample of The Complete Wheel of Time so I'll check that out.  It's quite a robust sample- the first chapter of each book. 

Jimmy-thanks for the heads up.  The publishing date on my NeverEnding Story book is 1997. 

[Tooker]

Aragorn starts the LotR books at 87... but his people live much longer than regular men.

[Jimmy]

And I think Hobbits aren't technically considered adults until they're 33. A little odd considering they don't seem to live longer than humans (a few obvious cases aside). I guess you could say Bilbo and Frodo were well into their adulthood, but I don't think they'd be considered old.