What Are You Reading?

[Ironclad Alibi]

I just finished Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood. It is the first Phryne Fisher novel. I have the trilogy volume. The next two titles are Flying Too High and Murder on the Ballarat Train.

We also watched the first TV show based on Cocaine Blues. There were a few differences.

[Pixelated]

"Bimbos of the Death Sun", Sharon McCrumb

That sounds like a classic; I have to see if it's available around here!

I'm rereading Michael Jecks' Medieval West Country mystery novels, set in 14th-century England. One character is the bailiff of Lydford, Simon Puttock, and the other is the Keeper of the King's Peace, Sir Baldwin Furnshill, who is also one of the few Templars who escaped the purge. They're pretty good, although the story lines can get so tangled in some of the books that you want to sit down and start drawing one of those crime scene-type boards with pictures and bits of string showing how all the characters and motives and whatnot are tied together.

I'm also about halfway through "A Court of Thorns and Roses" by Sarah J. Maas, but I'm finding it a tough slog. The heroine/narrator goes on and on and on about how vile and awful and dreadful her captor is until you want to scream "OH FFS, GET A ROOM!!" In all likelihood I'll finish it, but it's not a keeper and I won't bother to read any of the sequels.

[Ghel]

I finished Name of the Wind. Although I liked it, I feel the need to point out that Denna is a manic pixie dream girl. Some of the other women in the story might have been interesting, had Kvothe not been obsessed with Denna and ignored all the others.

Next up is Wise Man's Fear, second in the unfinished trilogy.

[Nunavut Pants]

It seems I'm no longer much of a Poul Anderson fan. I read two of his books in the last couple of months, and came away quite unimpressed. I used to like his stuff a lot more; I think I still like some of it. (E.g., Three Hearts and Three Lions, Ensign Flandry, etc.) But "Brain Wave" and "Starfarers" did nothing for me. I wound up skimming through the last third of Starfarers, which I never do.

[greek_jester]

I recently started reading the Netherworld Paranormal Police Departments series'. The main author is John P Logsdon, and each sub-series within the overarching universe is a collaboration with another author. You're supposed to start with the Ian Dex novels, but I started with Piper & Payne and had no problems following what was going on (to be honest, if I'd started with the Ian Dex novels I might have given up, as I didn't really like the character, although he did improve a little in the later books). It's an interesting concept with interesting world-building, but I do prefer some branches of the universe to others.

[AnaKhouri]

Just finished 'Sons of Cain: Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present'. Much more scholarly than I expected, and very interesting. But between that and Triumph of the Moon (which I am still slogging through) I am looking for something fun to read next. Maybe one of the mysteries by my friend from my writing group.

[Mental_Mouse]

I used to like the Drood books, but somewhere around #7 or 8 I started getting a sense of "what's the point"; the guy seemed to be basically invulnerable and can do anything (unless the author says otherwise), he's got his family buffaloed, and the emotional/development stuff (such as it was) was losing traction. I'd still read another Nightside book if he did one, but that story arc got wrapped up pretty thoroughly.

[dbuzman]

I'm currently rereading Live and Let Drood (Secret Histories Series #6) by Simon R Green. All the book titles are plays on James Bond movie names.

[Mental_Mouse]

I have that book! It is in a two book volume titled Bimbos and Zombies, the second novel being Zombies of the Gene Pool by the same author.

It's going to be read one of these days.

I've read it, in one of my rare forays out of SF/F. Pretty decent. Asimov had at least one mystery set at a con too.

[Ironclad Alibi]

"Bimbos of the Death Sun", Sharon McCrumb

I have that book! It is in a two book volume titled Bimbos and Zombies, the second novel being Zombies of the Gene Pool by the same author.

It's going to be read one of these days.

[morgana]

"Bimbos of the Death Sun", Sharon McCrumb

[Kit-Ginevra]

The Future of Us by Jay Asher & Carolyn Mackler.... Josh and Emma find a disc that lets them log on to their Facebook pages on the Internet with their friends relationships and status updates...except it's 1996 and no-one's heard of Facebook

I read Alice in Wonderland. I have wanted to read this book for a long time. And I want to say that the book is not worse than the movie.

[Nunavut Pants]

It's a bit similar to the Potter books, but only in the sense there's magic and occult stuff in it.

Good point, but that's the short-one-sentence description. A slightly longer description would add "...as written by a Doctor Who writer."

[mjr]

You're intending to learn the Czech language? I've got German and Russian novels and "English to [language]" dictionaries, but with the Russian ones, I will have to start from Square One.

Yes. I have some Czech ancestry in my background, and thought it might be interesting to learn.