What Are You Reading?

[Ceir]

Still paging my way through that Firefly novel, but I multi-read. Got into my first piece of manga - volume 1 of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin. I likes me some giant robots, but man, as a westerner who genuinely has not read manga before, this takes a lot of effort!

Nothing really on the nonfiction front, but picked up a new tabletop rulebook for Team Yankee, the Cold War alt-history minis game.

[Kit-Ginevra]

Have now just got through Why Mummy Gets Sloshed


From the first in the series(Why Mummy Drinks)- 'Welcome to Mummy's world.Daddy likes Gadgets.Boy Child Peter and Girl Child Jane like starting fires,trying to kill each other and driving Mummy to drink,and Mummy just needs a break'.We then progress through Why Mummy Swears,Why Mummy Doesn't Give a F*?#@ and Why Mummy Gets Sloshed through the delightful teenage years until they're stashed off to university and the peace and quiet begins*

Ooh and yippy yay there's a new one coming out for Christmas...Why Mummy Drinks at Christmas


*hahahahahahaha....

[Ghel]

I picked up "Johnny and the Dead" by Terry Pratchett at a recent library book sale. It's very funny. It's a children's/young adult book about a 12-year-old boy who suddenly discovers he can see ghosts. Or the "recently dead" as they prefer to be called. These dead folks rope Johnny into trying to keep the cemetery from being turned into an office building. There's tons of jokes about the dead not understanding the present world, and Johnny and his friends not understanding the past. As soon as I'm done with it, I'm going to pass it on to my 10-year-old stepson. I'm sure he'll love it.

[Nunavut Pants]

Oh, Rivers of London was excellent! The rest of the series is also good!

I've been reading lots of stuff on Reddit, mostly on r/HFY . "Suddenly A Dungeon" and "Accidentally Adopted" have been great fun!!

[Jay 2K Winger]

With my internet access at work disabled, I've started making an actual dent in my reading backlog. And by "dent," I mean I've started to run low on books to read to the point that I'm now actively buying books again for myself instead of just waiting until Xmastime.

Finished off the Nevernight Chronicles by Jay Kristoff, which was an interesting fantasy trilogy with some decent worldbuilding and wonderfully snarky footnotes.

Read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, after hearing about it a while back. Another interesting historical fantasy, want to track down a legitimate source for streaming the TV series they did for it, to see how well it was adapted.

Just started the Rivers of London series, need to pick up the second book.

ETA: Forgot that I also read the first Witcher novel, too.

[Ceir]

Just finished Firefly: Big Damn Hero and I'm into The Magnificent Nine. Pretty shiny so far, they feel like they'd fit into the show pretty well!

[Ironclad Alibi]

I've just finished reading Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith. It was good.

I agree. It is an excellent book. Haven't seen the movie yet.

I am now reading "How To Sell A Haunted House" by Grady Hendrix.

[Ghel]

I've just finished reading Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith. It was good. I saw the movie first, and it had a different vibe. After reading the Expanse series, I'm afraid I've been spoiled by what a good book is. AH:VH was a good book, it just wasn't Expanse levels of good.

I'm now reading the sequel, Last American Vampire. I like it so far. It uses the same framing of "I, the author, am playing a fictional version of myself who's writing a book about supposedly true events" that the first one did. It allows the use of an unreliable narrator, which I rather like.

[Ceir]

Plowing through Star Trek: Constellations, an anthology of TOS-era short stories. Bite-sized and tasty. I specifically just finished 'See No Evil', which I can sum up as "Uhura versus the Planet Of Cancel Culture". For one, it's funny 'cause this book was published in 2006, way before that became A Thing on the internet; for two, nice to get an Uhura-centric story, they're pretty rare.

[Ironclad Alibi]

I finished reading The Atheist's Handbook to the Old Testament Volume One by Dr. Joshua Bowman and have now started reading The Atheist's Handbook to the Old Testament Volume Two by Dr. Joshua Bowman. Volume One covered the Mesopotamia while volume two is concerned with Egypt during the Old Testament times. The forthcoming volume three will cover the conquest of Canaan.

[Nunavut Pants]

Currently reading Stuka, The Doctrine of the German Dive Bomber by the guys known as "Military Aviation History" and "Military History Visualized" on Youtube. It contains translations of original 30s and 40s documents on how the Ju-87 was supposed to be used.

[Ghel]

I'm finally reading the last book in the Wolf Brother series, Wolf Bane. I keep having to remind myself that these books are written for children/teens. The main character, Torak (a teenage boy), keeps making the same mistakes, even when people close to him try to warn him that what he's doing is bad.

I'm mostly reading this series because my stepson wants to talk to me about them. I'm glad I'm on the last one. They're ok, but the repetition is annoying.

[Ironclad Alibi]

I have started reading The Atheist's Handbook to the Old Testament Volume One by Dr. Joshua Bowman. It is a very readable and interesting overview of the Middle East in the late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age.

[Pixelated]

I just finished the mystery novel "Snow-Blind" by Ragnar Jónasson. It's set in northern Iceland, in Siglufjörður a tiny fishing village accessible only via a small mountain tunnel ... and when a blizzard hits, the village is entirely cut off. Ari Thor Arason is the new village constable, up from Reykjavik. He has accepted the post without discussing it with his girlfriend, who is not best pleased that he is heading out into the wild blue yonder and leaving her behind. Upon his arrival he's told that "Nothing ever happens here" and people don't even lock their doors. But that's before a young woman is found half-dressed in a snowbank, bleeding and unconscious, and a well-known writer falls to his death.

And you can imagine how many of the words in this I had to copy and past because I have no clue how to get those accents on my keyboard.

[Ironclad Alibi]

I've paused "The Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys" to read "Fork-Tailed Devil", an account of the P-38 Lightning fighter. It's an older book, but still has quite a bit of interesting info in it. I do think it gets a couple of things wrong (particularly about the P-39 Airacobra and P-40 Warhawk, which are used mostly to contrast with the P-38 in the book) and there are things I think it should have covered better (e.g., the nickname referred to in the title) but it's still fairly interesting for those into WWII aviation.

I read that book many years ago. First published in 1971, I had the fourth printing from 1974. In 1992 an expedition to recovered one of the P-38s (Glacier Girl) buried under the snow and ice in Greenland. A very good book.