Harry potter!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just read the latest Harry Potter for the like tenth time

I'm also reading a book by one of my favorite authors, Tom Robbins, called "Still Life with Woodpecker". I highly recommend "Another Roadside Attraction", by the same guy. I also recently finished "The Alchemist", Paulo Coelho, which was also amazing.

Well now I finished all the Hannibal books so I've moved on to a crime novel called "The Devil's Feather" by Minette Walters. It's a pretty intriguing concept so far. Seemingly someone has been taking advantage of the war and is performing acts of sadism on unsuspecting women. The main character thinks it's a mercenary she keeps running into.

I'm reading the Sellswords trilogy by R.A. Salvatore.

I didn't know he was even writing them until this week, which made me very happy. I was a big fan of the Drizzt books in my younger years, and this is an offshoot of them, focusing on the 'bad guys' Entreri and Jarlaxle.

This post has been edited by Dantrag: Aug 8 2007, 04:59 AM

Tell ya what I'm going to be reading ... the 3nd and 3rd parts of The Merlin Codex by Robert Holdstock. Number two is The Iron Grail and the final is The Broken Kings.

Just gotta figure out where I'm going to buy them.

Stock portfolios, weather reports, bad war news...

nah, I'd love to get my hands on that last Harry Potter,
heard it was a good ending

Right now, I finished "Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt (recommended by my aunt)
and working on For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemmingway

Sidenote: Lotta highschoolers are begging me for my copies, and I say, I was in your boat once, get your own, and they say, but you're out of high school, and I say I read what I want, and they say you're a *** and I say whatever, still cooler than you

(Personal Victory Dance)

Yeah!

I am currently reading the Silmarillion by J.R.R Tolkien and I've currently reached the chapter which tells about Beren and Luthien. I've loved it so far, expecially because it gives a feeling of ancient myth and heroic ballad to every tale. I felt sad when I read about Fingolfin's final battle and Morgoth's only battle during the whole First Age. It was somewhat tragic. I think that was the effect that Tolkien wished for that scene to have.

The other bits, the Oath of Feanor, the Curse of Mandos etc. were all well done and gave an excellent feel of myth and legend to the story, as I said before. I reccomend it to any Tolkien fan, though the beggining is a bit...over-drawn. All about Gods, the making of Arda (the World) etc. The really interesting things start with Feanor's crafting of the Silmarils, that's when things really start to roll. The wars of Beleriand are the book's highpoint imo.

Tolkien is a genius anyway, though his descriptions can be a bit long sometimes. Describing a few hills and a forest in almost a page always gets me confused and makes it hard for me to imagin things in my head. His descriptions in The Hobbit were somewhat shorter and concise and got the point out well, but that was when Tolkien was in his early days.

I've also recently read Atilla the Hun by John Man. A truly fascinating read which dispells many of the myths surrounding the Huns, their way of life and their origin while painting their leader, Atilla, in a historically-accurate, unbiased way. I reccomend it to any fans of Ancient History. The book also has a chapter solely dedicated to the art of horse-archery which is truly interesting for archers and riders alike.

I just finished rereading Richard Meredith's "Time Liner Trilogy". This was written a while ago (1970s), back when a trilogy was only three books.

Anyway: it's SF, has parallel universes, lots of action and a very neat ending to the plot. Can't say more: spoilers.

The three books are:

• At The Narrow Passage
• No Brother, No Friend
• Vestiges of Time

I last read this years ago but it's still just as good. Oddly enough, this read-around I was reminded of Jack Cloudy: this is the sort of thing I think he would write, or at least enjoy reading. That twist ending, to me, is rather Cloudy-esque.

Word.

Friday, I finished Animal Farm by George Orwell.

One of my new favorite books right there.

Animal Farm is a good book, I love it when books have underlying meanings like that

I've decided to grab my copy of Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales off of my shelf again... It's been to long and I love their stories

Feist's Flight of the Nighthawks, nearly finished it as well.

Mutineer's Moon. I'm currently at chapter six. And by golly, it's tremendous fun. The whole thing reminds me of the Lensman series in terms of scale. The titular moon for example, is in reality just a really old warship in a line of over a thousand, that just blew up our moon because it needed to camouflage it as something and the damn big rock was a rather convenient object with nearly the same mass and size. The late moon's surface detail was fatefully reproduced, though underneath all that lies enough firepower to vaporize the solar system several times over. Now who needs a Death Star? The Dahak would slap it into next thursday from lightyears away. I think I'm in love

The mutineer's are people who were rather uncomfortable with the thought of moving right into the path of this huge alien invasion that knocked out like a dozen interstellar imperiums and stuff. So Dahak has been sitting there, under orders to destroy all evacuated mutineers but the only way to do so would be by employing enough firepower to wipe out 70% of the human population and it is also under orders to protect any sentient non-traitor or alien invaders lifeforms. On top of that, it has been playing dead for fifty-thousand years cause if the mutineer's found out that Dahak was still fully operational as opposed to a near-powerless hulk running on automated defence protocols, they would reinforce their base and force the good old fake-moon to vaporize the whole planet.

It really makes me chuckle constantly when our naive earthman (descended from a loyal bridge crew member) is brought onboard and bombarded to captain, in an attempt to get someone who can fix the dilemma.
,,No way you could ever build a base that big on our moon without anyone noticing!"
,,This isn't a base. It's a starship."

I'm reading the fifth book of the Artemis Fowl series (having read all four prior in two weeks from the school library). Can't wait for Eoin Colfer to finish the sixth! Having fininshed the Harry Potter Series, I must say I prefer Artemis Fowl, technology, magic, and intellect all together, what could be better?

Troy: Fall of Kings by David and Stella Gemmel. It's the final book in Gemmel's Troy Trilogy and unfortunately he passed away before finishing it entirely. His wife had to finish the book. It has been a riveting read so far though.

It's also a shame Robert Jordan died. Hopefully they manage to release some sort of ending to his "Wheel of Time" series. I've put in too many hours and read a few less than necessary books in order to see an ending to that series.

On another note, the final book to Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" series comes out this week! I can't wait to see how he finishes this one off. The previous two books have been better than the sorta pointless couple of books that came out beforehand (he is still pretty preachy about Objectivism or whatever he supports too). But despite that, I've become too attached to characters like Richard and Kahlan to just abandon the series right at it's climax.

Currently about a third of the way into Tara Harper's "Shadow Leader." I read it ages ago but completely forgot what happens. Setting is offworld, far in the future. Old colony of Earth, civilization fell and is now essentially medieval Europe in technology. The flora and fauna are a mix of Earth life and whatever was native to that planet. It's supposed to be SF, so there are psychic abilities instead of magic and alien creatures instead of fantasy creatures. But it is essentially fantasy.

So far the book is just Our Heros wandering around the countryside facing danger after danger. Save for the fact that they are on the run from something, there is no discernable plot yet (though it's still a nice read). What is funny is ... that is exactly what my nano story is doing, at the moment.

This post has been edited by blockhead: Nov 11 2007, 05:38 PM

Well, it is now finished. I have read Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" series, all 11 or 12 of them. I have the say that Goodkind cleaned a lot of things up in "Confessor" in just 600 pages. There was still a big mess he had to get his characters to solve before things could be fine again. I did find that the ending was a bit too "happy-go-lucky" but I guess it helps to promote Goodkind's view on life. I also found it really convenient that characters realized pivotal things just before the situation needed them. Personally, I would've enjoyed a "trial by fire" way of realization.

Overall though, I spent a whole night trying to finish it, because there were definitely some amazing parts in the last book. Eventually, I'm going to read each book in this series one after the other in order to give myself a good, true impression of this series.

Now, I move onto Gemmel's "Jon Shannow" trilogy.

I read the sequel to Mutineer's moon. Speaking of which, I found Mutineer's moon's ending rather lame, tension-wise and very unrealistic, or inconsistent. First they've been yapping about in the whole book about how Collin is the only guy in the last sixty-thousand years or so and can control all of Dahak and its support vehicles with his mind, which happens to include the battleships the mutineer's have turned into their base. But then, they go into a battle between the 'good mutineer's' and the 'so bad they make Satan look like a boy-scout psychopath mutineers'.

Ok, so what did they do wrong? First of all, everyone, even those suited up in this forcefield-equipped powered armour, erupts into a fountain of gore when hit with a handgun, no exceptions. Except two. Collin's love interest can take five seconds of continuous fire from a portable cannon and only end up with all the joints fused together which gives Collin the great chance to go into an unstoppable rage along the lines of:,,You killed my chick! Prepare to die!" She later turns on her radio, conveniently after he's had the chance to sob over her armour for a good two minutes. Wow, I guess the faceplate wasn't transparant or something.

Anyway, back to the battle, Collin only gets some cinematic scorchmarks from the same cannon. And their armour was exactly the same one that violently explodes from the much weaker handguns! Geez, this is just plain stupid!

Then, the bad guy gets beat up in righteous unarmed combat. Unarmed guy with augmented muscles versus a guy with better augmented muscles and reflexes wearing powered armour that further boosts him? Yeah, righteous and honorable and fair indeed. *sarcasm* Anyway, bad guy starts the self destruct by detonating his battleship's ammo supplies. Cue mass hysteria which ends as Collin, with a microsecond to spare, realizes he is the big chief here and tells the battleship to stop, by searching out the node where the self-destruct order is right now and then telling it to shut down that node. First of all, how the hell is a search program going to move faster through the electronics than a fricking self-destruct order? It's just not possible! Secondly, he damn well didn't have time for the search order, don't get me started on starting a search, listening to its report, then sending the shutdown order and still make it on time. Even if I'm going to allow this total nonsense, the order should have moved further down the line by the time the shutdown order came through. Stupid!

Oh, and honestly, with all the attention and dialogue about his command over all Dahak's stuff, he should have simply walked up to the base and issue a 'full shutdown and seal all bulkheads then gass all compartments' order. Cause honestly, that's what you would have expected them to come up with after they've put a dozen or so of the world's finest strategists, tacticians, intelligence specialists and engineers together in one room and let them brainstorm for a couple of weeks. Even if they'd assumed that the codes had been changed, couldn't hurt to try. But no, we absolutely must have a long gunfight and massive indoor fighting with automated turrets that rip up anything that moves, including the psychopaths who placed them.


Ok, let's skip to the sequel now.

'The Armageddon Inheritance' I think it was called. Anyway, this one upped the scale considerably, by having the protagonist go in search for the guys who built Dahak and get some help against the alien invasion which is really happening now. Ok, so he finds out that the Fourth Imperium has turned into the fifth, then into the fifth Empire, so he's a bit screwed. (no, it's not evil like Star Wars'. The first emperor is portrayed as a real hero who stopped a long civil war with moon-sized battleships all over. Oh, and he made the job description of emperor a real nightmare to make sure that no powerhungry madman would even be tempted of taking the job.)

Anyway, he tries to hack into a computer that controls the whole fleet. (Don't ask. That Ai had better be a safe one.) When that fails, he simply bombards himself to the next emperor of the fifth Empire, without having read the job description. Anyway, the comp now listens to him and presenst him with the Royal guard, 52 planetoids with 25% more mass than Dahak, a thousand times the speed and firepower.

Back to Earth where we've had a dreadfully panicked battle fought against the alien scouts which ends up in a loss as they accelerate one of Jupiter's moons and slam it into the earth. Cue fifth Empire planetoid showing up, fry the moon and every scout in the system in five seconds flat. Lots of rejoicing.

Ok, the rest of the book is basically the 52 planetoids duking it out against the full fleet of several million aliens, all a heck of a lot smaller but with their smallest ship still 20 km long. While amusing simply due to the sheer amount of scale, one has to wonder why Collin pressed for close-range all the time when he was forcing engagements in deep space and had the range+speed+firepower advantage. And why didn't he use his teleportation engines instead of missiles? No alien can apparently get a target lock on a planetoid in the time it takes to jump in and out. Meanwhile, the gravitic distortion caused by it causes some insane damage. A minor miscalculation from the much weaker Dahak wooped a whole planet into a radically different orbit back in the first book, imagine it being done on purpose.

Nah, most of the planetoids got blown to pieces or had to limp home before the final engagement. Honestly, other than the scale, there wasn't anything impressive about the battles. For the most part, it was Collin's love interest looking at a screen and praying that Collin didn't get blown to pieces. Yeah, I would pray if I were her. Damn fool with his addiction to point-blank engagements and then refuse to use teleportation to get out and rip the whole enemy fleet apart in the process.

There's a third book in the series, but I don't think I'm going to read it. There doesn't seem to be anything left for Dahak to shoot at and honestly, even moon-sized superbattleships get old if the battles aren't mindboggling.


As for 'the Sword of Truth' series, I've only read part two which my grandparents got from gods know where. It was fun though four things keep bugging me.
1:The angst. "Oh no, she doesn't love me!" If that's enough for him to kill himself off when he thinks she's dead and no longer around to love him, then why was he so focussed on surviving when he thought she actually wished he was dead? Seriously, but I don't understand Richard here.

2: The prophecies. Sorry, but I wonder how the world ever managed to go on without him. There's a bloody ultra-important prophecy which only he can fulfill in like every town and bend in the road they come across.

3: The perfection. Best mage, best swordsman (good enough to give Luper a run for his money, I'd say), best archer. That's a lot, even for his magic sword. The archery is weird as well, since Calan later learns the super-shooting as well which makes it seem like a normal skill. But then, I'm left with wondering why a whole tribe that relies on archery to get food never learned it. Though I shouldn't rant about this. Cause face it, is Luper any different? Ok, so Lup never fires a bow, but he's just as good at the rest of it.

4:How the hell comes he gets all the girls? Is he just that good-looking or something? I swear, in just one book, he gets Kahlan, that chick who bombards him to her husband cause he killed her five/seven other ones. (I forgot how many, but he killed forty people in that battle alone. Cause prophecy said he should.)

And then there's the chick that's supposed to be his teacher at this temple aka 'mage breeding ground' aka 'the thing next to the creepy forest where all the creepy rituals are held and where all the sick monsters are'. And, except for Kahlan (who's the only one I don't really have any problems with), he actively keeps telling them to bug off. Does it work? Nope, they still love him. Well, not the teaching chick. She tried to kill him when her 'oh so perfect superior who just happens to tell her creepy stuff about wearing skimpy dresses in a conservative environment and kissing as many guys as she can cause it pleases the Creator' tells her he's evil. Gave some nice characterization to the library-dude though. Oh, guess I've got a fifth. Also remembered her name now.
5:Why did Warrick love Pasha so much? Seriously, she is like an utter airhead who treats him like trash, if she notices him at all. That makes her the last person you would expect him to have the hots for, no matter how good-looking she is. Err, guess he's still got the hormones going even after a hundred years.

There were also a lot of convenient coincidences, but every story has those. Now don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the story for what it was, but I just couldn't get to enjoy Richard. I felt more for the minor characters, like this mud people warchief who tags along with Kahlan, or Zed. Yes, especially Zed. Bags, he's simply hilarious.

Oh, and one last thing about the creepy monsters in the creepy forest. I don't know what Goodkind had been smoking when he made that up, but honestly, couldn't he have figured out a way to infuse a woman with magic that didn't involve some grotesque rape? That part just made me feel sick.

This post has been edited by jack cloudy: Dec 1 2007, 11:11 PM

Good thing you didn't read the first book then. There's at least 2 chapters where Richard is being tortured that can almost be compared as him being punished by some cruel dominatrix. Goodkind is certainly graphic with some of his descriptions but I know an author who goes beyond him: George RR Martin. I must admit though, I like Martin's work as well

I read some folk fairy tales a while ago O_o one can really gets surprised how... fantastic... those events described in those folk stories are - dragons who abduct female royal blood so they could cuddle them, offspring of bears and humans who can eat enough food for 100 men working in fields, snakes that turn into handsome husbands... weird crap. Heritage of the world, too.

This post has been edited by milanius: Dec 2 2007, 12:55 PM