Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

Reading the Best Of H.P. Lovecraft. Pretty good, but there are a few sticking points. Overuse of the too-horrible-to-describe trope being the foremost. In one story it's applied to a footprint of all Yog-Sothoth forsaken things. Unless it- I don't know, eats people or something, a footprint, no matter how weird, isn't scary. It wasn't even in a scary context ("But that means... somebody was here!"). It was just a photograph of a footprint.
Dialogue invariably runs on for too long. Nobody manages to say anything without taking up at least a page of text. And when Lovecraft wants people to speak in accents (at least in The Dunwhich Horror) it's practically unreadable.
Lovecraft's racist attitude also shines through in places and it's disquieting.
Still pretty good stuff though.

I find the racist bits a kinda funny. There's also the bit where women are weaker with magic...because reasons.

Not fond of his accents either.

My problem tends to be that you can usually see things coming a mile away. Not his fault, so much as the fact that the same things have been done to death in the time since these stories were written. Generally speaking, they still manage to be pretty well-written. Enough for me to enjoy going back & rereading from time to time anyway.

Woken Furies by Richard K Morgan

I know I'm late on this but I can't resist: isn't House of Leaves just Infinite Jest with training wheels?

On topic... finally got around d to reading ASOIAF, and yes, it's good. Also reading Spandau, which is revealing, and Man and His Symbols, which is arduously fascinating.

Mostly erotic fanfiction about Garfield's head on Pamela Anderson's body.

I read Foucault's Pendulum by Eco. it took a long time.

I supposed I'm moving onto gravity's rainbow.

but I don't want to read again.

I wouldn't want to read again if I read 5 pages of Gravity's Rainbow, either.

Emperor of Thorns by Mark Lawrence

I finished Rothfuss's "Wise Man's Fears" and can't wait for the sequal.

I then read "The Ocean at the End of the Lane," which I don't think was very good and would never have been published if Gaiman's name wasn't tacked onto it.

I then started AR Luria's "The Man with the Shattered World," which is pretty good so far, if dense.

During that I read "Ex-Heroes" by Peter Clines, which is a fast-paced but overall mediocre book about super heroes in the zombie apocalypse. It's part of a series that I don't think I'll finish.

Now I'm reading "The Map of Time" by Felix Palma. It's dense. I hate that steampunk authors always feel like they need to pad their pages.

Reading Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe. The style reminds me of Patrick Rothfuss, or the contrary to be more accurate, but with less likable characters.

^I loved that one. I hope you enjoy it.

Finished Stonewielder by Ian C Esslemont.

Moving on to Orb, Scepter, Throne by Esslemont.

I tried reading that,but I just couldn't get into it.

As for what am I reading : Castro's War by Robert Conroy for fiction and The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope by Jonathan Alter.

I may either go back and do The Dresden Files or read the Gone Series after I'm done with Conroy

Until now, I am liking it very much. Main character is a good sanguinary torturer, how I can not like him?

Good Omens by Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman. Which is just perfect since I'm binge-watching Supernatural as well. Funniest book I've read in years.

I've spent the last week binge reading Cracked articles...I may seriously have a problem...

one of my fave authors and I'm binge watching Supernatural too... my 1st time watching, just started season 2.

House of Leaves was... interesting. I won't say it held me the whole way through (in particular I couldn't get into the Johnny Truant stuff) but I really liked Exploration #5 and the ending of the Navidson Record, in part because it was not at all the way I thought a book like this was going to go.

The King in Yellow was pretty great. I'm referring to the Thom Ryng play that attempts to recreate the hinted-at text from the Robert W. Chambers short stories. I'm not going to claim it totally lives up to the title, but nothing could, and if nothing else it tells a good story and I'll give it props for actually incorporating everything Chambers made clear about the play.

A Deepness in the Sky was... well, it cemented my opinion that Vernor Vinge is among the best when it comes to modern scifi writers. I was pretty sure with A Fire Upon the Deep, but I'm convinced -- he can pull off scifi that's both harder than cream cheese and does space/planet speculation. He creates a ton of engaging characters, and manages to tell what's a sprawling narrative in a very tight, page-turning way. The best part is that unlike in the more grandiose space operas, it's not the fate of planets and suns that carries the weight of the piece, it's the fate of humans (and spiders), even if larger things are at stake, you care because the characters care and you've learned to care about them, not because faceless statistics say something is important.

Now Reading: The Night Land: A Story Retold. The original is an astounding, macabre, fantastical vision trapped in prose that was archaic and overwrought even when it was written. I'm about halfway in Story Retold is a GOOD adaptation thusfar. Like, it does what you're supposed to do when you adapt a work to a new media: grow and explore what was already there in new ways, trying to show what's already great in a new light, or with a new technique.

Next: Um... yeah, I'm actually going to have to find something since my current schedule leaves me with 15 minutes to half an hour where a book is to be my sole escape from simply sitting in my car and waiting. A few of the things I've been considering
1) The Hunger Games, but I'm not sure how much I want to get into the book versus film mess, so I may just stick to watching
2) Discworld, but where to start?
3) the WH40K Caiaphas Cain novels, since I've heard they're pretty good. But I'm hesitant to launch into anything so long (also an issue with Discworld) or to give GW so much as a cent right now.

Since I've got problems with all my ideas, I'm also up for recommendations in any of these spheres...
* Space-faring Science Fiction (Hard or soft doesn't matter much to me, but I tend to get way more into stuff that can leave Earth and Sol behind even if they're a setting in the work)
* Dark Fantasy and/or Cosmic Horror (Lovecraftian stuff, including/especially in the vein of his Dreamlands work)
* Sword and Sorcery/Fantasy Adventure (often including that branded "young adult", amidst which I have found gems of if not surpassing quality than at least vast enjoyment in the past)

The Color of Magic because I just bought the Discworld collection and started on my first publication-order read-through.

Decoherence and the Appearance of a Classical World in Quantum Theory as part of my research.

Classical Mathematical Physics because I get uncomfortable when not reading a mathematical physics book.

An Elementary Grammar of the Old Norse Or Icelandic Language because why not?


You might like The Algebraist or the Culture Series by Iain M. Banks. I particularly enjoyed the former.

ooh, lovely chart.
Glad to hear A Deepness In The Sky is good. I've heard it wasn't in quite the same vein as Fire Upon The Deep and that scared me off, but maybe I should reconsider. It occurs to me that Vernor Vinge is the greatest author of book titles. I like his books, but the titles, man, nobody touches his titles.