What are you reading?

[deathanddrek]

A New Year's Resolution I'm accidentally sticking to so far this year: don't hop between a dozen unfinished books. I've picked up PatW again. After that I'd like to try The Broken Sword.

[bigbearomaha]

Right now i have two books I am reading. The Two Towers, by Tolkien (again) and "Deeply Odd" by Dean Koontz

[austinjimm]

A crisp $10 bill for the first person to read this book and give a review:

[francisca]

Night Arrant by some dude named Gary.

[grodog]

I've just finished Farmer's Image of the Beast, and am nearly done with its sequel, Blown. Very heady stuff.

[Philotomy Jurament]

Just finished a re-read of Cornwell's Arthur series, and am getting ready to start Harry Harrison's The Hammer and the Cross.

[capitalbill]

A crisp $10 bill for the first person to read this book and give a review

I don't know about reading the book, but I'm thinking a game based off that cover would be a hoot!

[T. Foster]

Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King. I especially like the part about the wives hurling sharpened dinner-plates

[ThirstyStirge]

Nazi garden gnomes?!?!

Now I've seen it all!

[Philotomy Jurament]

I got bored with The Hammer and the Cross and didn't make it through it.

I was taking a break from fiction, but started Somerset Maugham's The Magician the other night, and it's captured my interest.

[Welleran]

I'm on a long-term Great War reading kick. I'm going to try to read about 2 WW1 books a month between now and the end of 2018 (100+ books for the 100 year anniversary of the war). So far I've finished A Short History of WW1 by Stokesbury, Dreadnaught by Massie, and The Lions of July by Jannen. In parallel I'm doing a multimedia supplement -- games of Diplomacy, movies, lectures, etc. (They need to get that Diplomacy site back up!).

I'm tracking my reading here: http://readinggreatwar.blogspot.com/

[TRP]

I'm just about to wrap-up Abercrombie's First Law trilogy. It's a bit of a Howardian/Cornwellian mash-up with a hefty dose of cynicism.

First Law is a fantasy story that takes place in a relatively low magic setting. I could say more on that, but thar be spoilers. The tech level is about late Roman Republic, but armor and weaponry are closer to something significantly later with prodigious use of crossbows, nice straight long swords and even lighter dueling sword.

Mighty empires clash, but we follow the pawns through the story and not the big dogs. That's just as it should be for this gritty tale. My favorite character is the northman Ninefingers, and I found him to be a fitting 21st Century Conan. That's not to say he's some politically correct Emo-nan; he's far from that. Ninefingers is larger than life, but he's a more accessible character to us mere humans.

Other than now to declare that I liked the trilogy a lot, that's all I'll say about the books, because I don't want to get into spoiler tags. It's a tale a reader should get into without expectations. I did, and exploring Abercrombie's world that way was just as fun as exploring some DM's new world.

[Philotomy Jurament]

I'm just about to wrap-up Abercrombie's First Law trilogy. It's a bit of a Howardian/Cornwellian mash-up with a hefty dose of cynicism.

Sounds pretty cool; I'll have to check those out.

[T. Foster]

I just read Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow in honor of True Detective. Not great - only the first 4 stories (out of 10) relate to the King in Yellow and the last 5 aren't even supernatural-based, they're stories about artists in Belle Epoque Paris, kind of like low-grade Guy de Maupassant or Somerset Maugham. Those first 4 stories are good (a couple of them very good) but can probably be read in anthologies just as easily as here, and there's no reason at all to read the others.

Now I'm reading The Real Cool Killers, part of Chester Himes' "Harlem Detectives" series. No fantasy/D&D connection at all, but really enjoyable and incredibly hard-boiled and violent. Within the first 3 pages a dude gets his arm chopped off in a bar and that's like, not even the crime that anyone cares about.

[Flambeaux]

Rereading Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.
May tackle Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles next. My oldest is tearing his way through them and I don't recall reading them.

Haven't been able to eat supper together consistently-enough to read anything at that time.

Reading Beatrix Potter to the kids at bedtime.