Too many good books!

[shadesong]

My current lunchtime book is Heart of Gold by Sharon Shinn, which is *really* good so far. Thanks, bheansidhe, for getting me hooked on her! :)

mightywombat lent me Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk. And Work-friend Jeanette lent me Blood and Ivory by P.C. Hodgell, the long-awaited Jamethiel Priestsbane short story collection. With three brand new stories written just for it!

So what do I read next? My head's gonna explode, I tell you. An embarrassment of riches.

Comments

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

There's a new Honor book out.

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Whassat?

[yendi]

Honor Harrington -- David Weber! We've got like ten of them!

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Ummokay.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

Yeah, having seen them on your bookshelf I figured I wouldn't have to say more. A basic SF literacy is assumed, after all...

This is the 11th, not counting the three anthologies. War Of Honor. Almost 900 pages. I'm 300 pages in and not one bomb pumped laser has clawed at even one sidewall. Yup, no battles. Very wierd. But Honor is commanding a fleet and has arrived in freindly territory, so we can assume that eventually the fleets will stop maunvering and close to missle range, and that heavy grasers will punch through battle steel shortly after that.

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Ah. Haven't heard good things about the series, therefore never picked it up... there are too many good things out there to read without picking up things that only have negative feedback!

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I've never heard anything negative about them. The series re-invents the space opera and manages to break the one rule I've heard for writing science fiction. Some author at a convention years ago said "if you want to be published, don't ever even put the words 'space pirates' on paper" and space piracy is a recurring theme in the series. Now this looks at it from the other angle, anti-piracy operations by the space navy, but still, it has space pirates. And telepathic cats. Just, sometimes it helps to skim his technical explainations of vectors and velocities and physics. Those can get dry, but at least he doesn't have spaceships doing banking turns....

[galdrin.livejournal.com]

Current lunch-time book - _The_Ill-Made_Mute_ (The Bitterbynde #1) by Cecelia Dart-Thornton
Curent bed-time book - _Prospero's_Children_ by Jan Siegel

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

_Prospero's_Children_ by Jan Siegel

I read this one recently. Very good. I want the sequels.

[dslartoo.livejournal.com]

I must be a trendsetter. Used the phrase "embarrassment of riches" in a reply to you this morning. Then it shows up in an entry from you. Then an entry from iroshi. :)

I'm working my way through a massive stack of books, some used, some new, that includes "Retief Unbound" by Keith Laumer, "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood, Robert McCammon's "Gone South" which I haven't read in a while, three crime noir books by Ross MacDonald which I picked up before the move, a new Terry Pratchett Discworld book, "Mountains of Majipoor" from Robert Silverberg and many more.

cheers,
Phil

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

I actually didn't get that until after I posted (I don't know if it's Yahoomail or LJ, but I have *not* been getting reply notifications in a timely fashion!)... and Ro and I posted ours almost simultaneously, I think! Weird.

[dslartoo.livejournal.com]

No, it's Livejournal. Notifications have been late for weeks now.

Were you actually looking for recommendations on new stuff to read, or was this just a "what are you reading?" inquiry? Realized I hadn't looked closely enough at the original entry.

cheers,
Phil

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Neither, actually - it was just a "whee, neat new books!" entry. But I always like to know who's reading what. :)

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

That book is amazing--the first page of it I've quoted for an example of how to start your novel. Her world building there is just absolutely perfect--it's amazing how much information she gives you with out you even realizing you're being given it--she sets the scene in general, tells you what it looks like just now, tells you that there are three different types of races there, lets you infer which one is the majority race, and just keeps going! All this in like the first half page.

I truly can't believe you haven't been reading her stuff before now--I've been lauding her since the second of the Alleuia files came out, and it's all so wonderful, I'm surprised you never read it before.

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

I guess I never noticed you singing her praises! :) I'm definitely going to be reading her work now...

[lonesomenumber1]

And Work-friend Jeanette lent me Blood and Ivory by P.C. Hodgell, the long-awaited Jamethiel Priestsbane short story collection.

Is this a hardcover or a paperback? 'Cause if it's a hardcover, I'm going to be very annoyed with the folks at Barnes and Noble, who still haven't sent me mine. And slightly annoyed at Meisha Merlin, who never seem to update their web site.

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Hardcover. Yeah, it was you that got me started on Hodgell!

Meisha Merlin sucks ass. They're publishing some fantastic books (Keith Hartman, reprinting Liaden and Hodgell), but as a publisher, they suck ass - it seems that most of their books don't get proofread, they change fonts in midpage for no apparent reason, and yeah, their website is worthless.

[lonesomenumber1]

I didn't notice an unusual amount of proofreading errors in the hardcover editions of Dark of the Gods or Seeker's Mask, but the changes in font in the trade paperback of Partners in Necessity drove me crazy.

All will be forgiven if they publish a sequel to Seeker's Mask, though.

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

The most heinous of the errors were in the Tanya Huff collection, whose title escapes me, and the Keith Hartman books, especially Gumshoe Gorilla, which also had the hideous random font changes - even worse than Partners in Necessity did!

But yes. Need sequel to Seeker's Mask. Need it now.

[eilonwy.livejournal.com]

Have you read Sharon Shinn's other stuff?

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Just read Archangel recently, and bheansidhe's going to lend me more stuff...

[eilonwy.livejournal.com]

Well, you'll simply have to read the two that follow Archangel, naturally. :) And you should read Summers at Castle Auburn too, if you get a chance. It's more fantasy than anything else, very different from the Archangel trilogy or Heart of Gold (not, of course, that I've read Heart of Gold. It's on my to-be-read pile) but it's very good. At least, I think so. Critics seemed less certain... ::Shrug:: Oh well, what do they know? :)

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Heart of Gold is veryvery good so far. :)