House of Leaves took me ages to finish, but it was so worth it.

Next in my queue is S., which sounds like it has a really interesting conceit (unlike Danielewski's non-HoL books. Ugh, The Fifty-Year Sword).

Haus of Leaves took me a long time to finish too because it started my existentiality crisis. one of the best books i've read.

i'm reading Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Only ~200 pages in but it's been generally amazing. the writing style is infectious. also got into some non-linear time stuff which I'm really into.

Reading both : While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within by Bruce Bawer and Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too by Claire Berlinski

Just finished Skin Game by Jim Butcher.

~SE++

I once attempted to read House Of Leaves but just threw it away half (2/3?) way through. The beginning was great but then it plunged headlong off a cliff. Does the ending redeem it, or did everyone else like it the whole way through?

I mean, that's part of the whole point of it all. The ending doesn't "redeem" the part you didn't like because that part of the book isn't bad. It's part of the whole work.

I don't know if I can agree with that method of criticism. Nothing is perfect and even a great work has parts it would be better without. Being "part of the whole work" doesn't make the bad bits good. Even if a weak part of the work helps set up a stronger part later, that can't completely excuse it. In an ideal work that part would have been good too.
Either that or you're saying that you found the book the whole way through. To that I just have to say, "Different strokes for different folks".

Quality of work is mutually exclusive from personal preference. Just because you didn't like (understand) that part doesn't mean it's bad.

Finally got around to wrapping Skin Game. Not bad. Gets a bit Leveragey.

Starting Glen Cook's Black Company.

Sometimes you read something that makes you .

Recently I read Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Extremely great book, I simply loved it. I don't know if the series maintain the quality, but it is the best science fiction book I read since Sundiver and other books from the Uplift Saga. And much better than it, my new gold standard for science fiction.

Highly recommended.

Currently working on The Winter Long by Seanan McGuire.

~SE++

Currently reading: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

He has quite a few good points, as well as several metric tons of salt towards the academia.

I recently bought Hyperion but haven't read it yet. I'll bump it up on the list.
I've read Startide Rising, but never any other Uplift book. Guess I'll put that on the really long list of books to read one day.

Excellent read. Totally worth it.

Startide Rising is in my opinion the worst of them, still great, but I only read the original trilogy. I think there are more.

I am reading the Fall of Hyperion now. I am at 1/3 to 1/2 of the book, not so good as the first one until now.

Twenty days later and I am yet to finish Fall of Hyperion. I am at about 4/5 of the book and I will finish it. But I am struggling to continue not because the story is particularly bad, but because of the constant shifting of characters (that annoys me) and the anticlimax that was reach the Time Tombs.

So only a regular book until now, that I hope the finish redeems it.

So I finished the first of Andromeda's Choice. Not planning on picking up the others. It's OK, but nothing great.

I read 1984 again because I'm writing something dystopian-esque. Man, that book is the god father of science fiction info-dumping. It amazes me how powerful it is while at the same time so... dull. I didn't like it, though occasionally Orwell's prose was impeccable.

I just finished Daughter of the Sword by Bein. It was fun--it's about this Tokyo detective hunting down a serial killer who, in turn, is looking for these magical samurai swords. It has some amazing flashback sequences, going through feudal Japan, that I really enjoyed. It's not deep or anything, but it was a nice read.

I follow Chuck Wendig so I thought I'd read some of his stuff. I downloaded Atlanta Burns and will start it on the subway ride home today.

Started Trigger Warning by Gaiman this week too. It seems OK. Like many of his collection of short stories, the poems are pretty mediocre and smug and the stories are mysterious and fascinating and well-paced.

I've picked up American Gods again, so hopefully I can finish it this time without being distracted, but now that I've actually read some of it I went back and looked up this page in Exterminatus Now:

Was supposed to be Sanderson's Firefight, but my book was dead. Started Cook's Shadows Linger.

Finished Atlanta Burns by Chuck Wendig. It's good YA fiction, particularly empowering for its strong, female protagonist and vivid narration. But at some point it got a little unbelievable that every single male white dude (except the nice gay one) was either a nazi, rapist/pedophile, murderer, animal-torturer, or idiot bully.

Still reading Gaiman's Trigger Warning. It's good, but I think I like Fragile Things more.

Really threw myself into Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind. Very good so far, I'm about 500 pages in. I think the first-person narration justifies skipping over all the unnecessarily long descriptions typical of high fantasy, though I kinda roll my eyes at the "beautiful/unattainable" love subplot and all its trappings of "gee you're a bumbling idiot that don't know nothing about women!" Rothfuss has yet to disappoint so far, so I'm eager to see what the twist exactly is that'll make this subplot different than love stories I've read before.

I finished "The Fall of Hyperion" yesterday. Well the end does redeem the book a little, but some explanations are bad. I feel the second book was unnecessary as it drags the story for too long, 100 pages more at the end of Hyperion would have been better.

Now moving to next one.