currently reading....

[4days]

I was gonna read the Bible, but started Dune instead...

good man. the sequels are increasingly meh, but the first one is fantastic stuff.

currently re-reading 'a confederacy of dunces' after having learned a bit about the author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kennedy_Toole

[xer0s]

Hey 4days, got a question. In the Contents at the front of my book, it says:

Book I: Dune
Book II: Muad'dib
Book III: The Prophet

Are books two and three sequals? Or is Dune simply three different books printed as one? Bit confused on that...

[Mat Linnett]

That's referring to the 3 parts of the book as a whole xer0s. And 4days is right, the first one's fantastic, but the rest get progressively worse.
I still think Herbert's best and most prescient work was "The White Plague". Very dark, but very good.

Me, I'm currently reading "Ender's Shadow", a re-telling of the events of "Ender's Game" from the perspective of another character, Bean, and it's pretty damn good.
Card gets a lot of flack for his religion and politics, but he writes a damn good yarn. Well worth a read.

I also recently finished "The Ware Tetralogy" by Rudy Rucker, a fantastic psychedelic cyberpunk / post-humanist tale that stumbles in a drug-fuelled haze through 4 books and is utterly ace. I'd never read any Rucker before, and was more than pleasantly surprised. He has some incredibly unique ideas that he explores through the course of these books, while maintaining a firm grasp on the seedier side of things.
Brilliant stuff and completely out of left field.

[seremtan]

... the first one's fantastic, but the rest get progressively worse...

most of SF is 'worse' than Dune. the other 5 books in the series are pretty good, especially Children of Dune, but not so much God Emperor of Dune, in which not enough really happens until the end

the Dune books to *really* avoid like the plague are Brian Herbert's (Frank's son) stab at completing Dune 7 (which existed as 1000 pages of notes): Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune; utter pieces of shit, poorly written and the guy makes up a pisspoor excuse to resurrect all the original Dune characters but lack's Frank Herbert's skillz

likewise, avoid all the satellite works by Brian Herbert, the Butlerian Jihad etc. the guy is a talentless hack with the prose style of a mills and boon writer

[menkent]

Just started the second novel of a series about the Saxon kings of England. It's really not great... somewhere between pure history and pure fiction and manages the worst of both. Subject is interesting enough to me that I'll keep it up through this book at least.

[MKJ]

what were those first sequels written by Brian again? Harkonnen I think ?

[Captain]

House Harkonnen?

[MKJ]

indeed

[seremtan]

bet they were shite

[Deathshroud]

Great series, by a great author.

[plained]

finished the david bowie bio, yea it was interesting.

now i'm on the duff duff mckagans book

so far so good

[seremtan]

Great series, by a great author.

finished his diamond age and snow crash recently (really enjoyed), about to start cryptonomicon

might also give gibson's last trilogy (the hubertus bigend/blue ant thing) a go too

annoyingly, very few of stephenson's - or indeed anyone's - books are available for Kindle. seems to be heavily weighted toward out-of-copyright stuff

in fact, as a platform, e-books and e-book readers have a lot of maturing to do

[4days]

baroque cycle is a great read too - can't recommend his stuff highly enough (except anathem, that's pretty damn awful - hopefully he'll re-emerge from his arse for his next novel).

got into reading books/stories on my phone a while back and glad it was mainly out-of-copyright stuff, ended up reading a lot of things that i might've missed otherwise (chesterton, blackwood, lovecraft etc,.). assumed that they'd have caught up with print by now but maybe they haven't.

[Bacon]

i'm currently reading this topic

[MKJ]

Im actually not reading this topic, only the last reply.
If only to get rid of the red icon in front of it, which bugs my ocd.

[Underpants?]

Atlas Shrugged

[seremtan]

it's a art

[GONNAFISTYA]

Atlas Shrugged

I worry about you.

[brisk]

Related. These are fucking incredible.

[xer0s]

The dude has talent. A very strange talent, but very cool nonetheless...

[Unisaw]

The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration

Slavery is alive and well. Good read.

[Deathshroud]

finished his diamond age and snow crash recently (really enjoyed), about to start cryptonomicon

might also give gibson's last trilogy (the hubertus bigend/blue ant thing) a go too

annoyingly, very few of stephenson's - or indeed anyone's - books are available for Kindle. seems to be heavily weighted toward out-of-copyright stuff

in fact, as a platform, e-books and e-book readers have a lot of maturing to do

The whole Baroque Cycle and Anathem are available through Amazon. Was there something in particular that wasn't there?

[Ryoki]

I too have been reading Stephenson!

Zodiac

[Captain]

Just started reading Idoru by William Gibson.

[Mat Linnett]

Heh, I've got a signed copy of that one