1543 replies to this topic

[Saber-Scorpion]

Just finished reading Michael Crichton's recently posthumously-published novel Dragon Teeth. It was good! The subject is the "Bone Wars" or "Great Dinosaur Rush", a little event in American history in which paleontologists - two in particular - frantically competed to discover as many dinosaur species as they could from fossils in the American West. In fact, the novel's genre is basically "Western" - it even features Wyatt Earp as an important protagonist in the last third or fourth of the book.

 

It's kind of a light read though, not nearly as packed with data or with excitement as Crichton's best books. But it still contains enough of both that I think he actually wrote this one, even if he probably deemed it too unfinished for publication. It has his style and voice, unlike his previous posthumously-published book, Micro, which was mostly authored by some other guy who frankly did a terrible job using Crichton's notes to bang out a story. Ugh, I hated that book.

 

So yeah, if you like Crichton's work, I recommend reading this one... as long as you've already read his greats first, like Jurassic Park, Prey, and Timeline... and later The Lost World, State of Fear, Andromeda Strain, Congo... and one of my personal favorites though not the best one to start with: Sphere...

*ahem* Sorry, I really like Crichton. He was taken from us too soon.

[Sephsekla]

I got Goldenhand by Garth Nix for my birthday and ended up reading it in one sitting (which is one of my favourite things to do).

 

Anyone here a fan of the Old Kingdom series? I really love the world that he's created, and I think it would be the perfect setting for a Witcher type game.

[Sephsekla]

I just finished Assassin's Fate by Robin Hobb, and it's left me feeling pretty raw.

9 books following decades of a character's life leave you feeling so invested in every character.

[Ocelot]

It's been about... two years now since I've been able to read a plain old English book, because I've embarked on this damn fool quest to teach myself to speak Japanese and all my novel reading time has been replaced with 日本語の練習. But every now and then I'll squeeze a cheeky little audiobook in, and thus...

 

I've been listening to The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., co-written by Neal Stephenson (who I think is probably my favourite author) and Nicole Galland (who I'd never heard of, but I'll have to check out now), and I really like it so far. It's a story about the formation of a government agency devoted to the use of magic in the present day, after the translation of various historical documents and artefacts proves that magic once existed in the past but hasn't been seen in the world since 1851. It's written as a series of journal entries, letters of correspondence and stuffy government reports (an epistolary novel, to people who know words), and I've just been devouring it over the last week or so. It's a very sci-fi approach to what might otherwise be a pure fantasy story, with a bunch of scientists using quantum theory/collapsing waveform/multiverse arguments to try and understand magic, while being met with barely-concealed derision from the witches who practice it and simply understand it innately.

 

The audiobook is really good, too, with a bunch of different voices reading the various parts. As with all audiobooks, I get this terrible feeling of... like, pseudo-claustrophobia or something at hearing a bunch of unfamiliar words said over and over again but never knowing how to spell them, but I'm suffering through it