Endymion Dan Simmons

Using the Library app from our local library (digital copies of books/audio books) I was listening to IT while working.

I started this after getting it from my Dad for Christmas.
Meathead

Right now I'm reading the Kindle version of, Fifty Years a Hunter and Trapper (Autobiography, experiences and observations of Eldred Nathaniel Woodcock). It's pretty interesting as I grew up hunting, fishing, trapping and camping a few counties to the west of where this guy spent most of his time in PA.

Just finished Wyte Trash by Isenberg and Dagger 22 .   Just stared Second Chance.

Just finished Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, just in time to make 50 books on my Goodreads Challenge for 2016. Those books are a good time.

The Crippled God by Steven Erikson

Book 10 and last in the series

Attached File

While I admit that I've sworn off Lee Child, I get ebooks free from the library so I did just finish reading his Jack Reacher novel, "Night School".  The book is a step back to when Reacher was a 35 yo kickass Army MP Investigator and includes the requirement that you suspend all sense of reality, a dead hooker, neo-NAZIs, Islamic terrorists, and Reacher's love interest does Cowgirl and Reverse Cowgirl.  What more could you ask for from Lee Child?

The Liar the Cheat and the Thief: Deception and the Art of Sword Play by Maija Soderholm.

Don't own a sword, but there are lessons contained therein.

Judas Unchained ( part two of a two part set from Peter F. Hamilton's "Commonwealth Saga" )

Part one was just fucking incredible.  I read it four times in a row!  I am 2/3 finished with Judas Unchained and it is also fantastic.  It takes a while to rebuild from book one, but once it gets going.....

The Mercenaries.  4th book in Bill Baldwin's Helmsman series.

I just finished up Bringing the Thunder by Gordon Robinson. It's a firsthand account of his time as a B-29 pilot in the last six months of WWII. If you have Kindle Unlimted you can read it for free.

Just started The Last Man on The Moon by Gene Cernan since he passed the the other day. I had seen the documentary on Netflix and wanted to read it. Figured now was a good time.

@4v50 - Just finished Viking Panzers: The German SS 5th Tank Regiment in the East in World War II by Ewald Klapdor.

It chronicles the unit which eventually came to be called 5. SS-Panzer Division "Wiking" from its founding prior to Operation Barbarossa all the way to the end of the war. It describes the events of the war on a virtually daily and weekly basis, frequently referencing  the daily logs of the regiments, the division, and the korps and armies to which it was attached. The level of detail is very high (as I noted in a previous post, at one point the author provides a long list of the maps available to the officers of the 5SSPD), but that does make it m o n o t o n o u s.

Page after page reads like a matter-of-fact log of events: this company drove twenty kilometers to form a reserve for this unit to the left of the division, this battalion counterattacked, the regiment's strength was this many Panzer IV (Long) and this many Panzer III (Short).

The monotony is broken in spots by references to memoirs, letters, diaries, and interviews with soldiers and officers of the Division, and sometimes with excerpts from writings of German generals (Guderian, especially) and occasionally Soviet commanders. These personal stories inject a lot of life and color into the chronicle, but there aren't enough of them.

It's interesting in the broad strokes, at least -- the division starts off full of piss and vinegar, rolling over poorly-equipped soviets during the invasion, awash in fuel and ammunition. All the reports are about weak resistance and long forward thrusts by the battalions, notes of huge numbers of crappy lend-lease tanks set on fire, guns and vehicles captured by the boatload. But then they get transferred to the Caucasus and their attacks bog down in the poor terrain, and Stalingrad starts eating all of their air assets and artillery ammunition. They fail to break through to the middle-east, and it's all downhill from there: hundreds of pages of withdrawals, line-shortening, rearguard actions, counterattacks (the phrase "immediate counterattack" gets used so many times in this book that I'm convinced there must be a special compound word for it in German), and shortages of men and materiel.

This is only the second book I've ever read concerning the Eastern Front in WW2 (the other was Otto Carius' Tigers in the Mud), and I feel like maybe I would have gotten more out of it if I knew more about the subject generally, so I could contextualize all of the little day-to-day movements and attacks involving the 5SSPD and its adjacent or attached formations. Without that context, though, I found Viking Panzers to mostly be a dull slog. 3/5

I have also been reading Deep Navigation, a collection of short stories by Alastair Reynolds, and now that I'm done with Viking Panzers, I think I'll start on Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which my mother and father both recommended to me.

I'm currently reading Book 5 of the Discworld series.

I've been pleasantly surprised by this series.  They are quite funny.

They are like a "Hitchhikers Guides To The Galaxy" only written for fantasy readers.

Glory Boys by our own RykWriter aka Rick Partlow

It's fun and a good escape.  And it's also great to support an arfcomer.

I recently finished Unintended Consequences.

Now I'm starting Tom Clancy's Without Remorse.

Almost done with rereading The Martian.

Very good, it can get a little "sciency" but there's a lot of funny stuff.

Just finished Edward Longacre's Sharpshooters.  It's about the 9th New Jersey Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War.

Finished Deep Navigation today, a collection of short stories by Alastair Reynolds. They're not all bangers, but not one of them is a dud. I already liked what little of Reynolds I have read (Troika, an excellent novella), and this has only enhanced my opinion of him. Looking forward to picking up a proper novel by him soon.

Finally found a Kindle Edition of The Mysterious Affair at Styles that was actually worth a damn (most of the free or $0.99 editions lack the illustrations, or are terribly formatted, or were OCRed by a Speak & Spell hooked up to a Game Boy Camera, or all three), so I'm cruising through that.

I need to put a boring or semiboring book back into my rotation, to make penance for reading all this fun stuff in a row.

First volume of Hammer's Slammers

Six Frigates. Great book on the early American navy, lots of political context. Been reading this and working on a scale model of USS Constitution. I think it's  a phase.

Just finished "Drood" by Dan Simmons.  It reminded me that no matter who was the author, or how many tubes of lip stick and cans of turd polish the author uses, historical fiction sucks.

Try Cecelia Holland.

Just finished "Escape Clause", a Virgil Flowers novel by John Sanford.  Good escapist entertainment reading - one of the better Virgil Flowers novels.

MHO, YMMV, etc.

Your suggestion is noted, but I think I'll pass.  Thank you, anyway.  I'm done with historical fiction.

"Rust: The Longest War" by Jonathan Waldman

Pretty interesting read

Re-reading Starship Troopers before Fields of Fire comes out at the end of this month.

Fixing to start on these two.
Republic by Plato.
The Lords of Creation by Frederick Lewis Allan.

Finished Without Remorse and loved it. Starting Rainbow Six now.

I just finished The Mysterious Affair at Styles and the attached essays and notes. Decent book, looking forward to reading more Poirot mysteries -- not really looking forward to more casual anti-semitism, but whatever. 3/5

Just started Graft by Matt Hill. Kind of a near-future-noir thing so far; kind of bangs on a lot with characters' internal monologues, but I'm still into it so far.

Also started A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I'm liking its friendly style and its willingness to meander off on interesting tangents, which keep the subject matter from getting too dry.

Like 80% done with Creation now. Hoping to be done with it soon. God, it's dull.

#19 of Randy Wayne White's Doc Ford series

Finished Graft by Matt Hill today at the office.
There's a grimy noir kind of feel to it -- it feels like Cyberpunk except nobody has a computer. It's got that grimy, oil-slick urban sensibility that the Sprawl Trilogy does, but in a depressed great-recession-era Industrial-Britain kind of way. It's some kind of -punk, but the thing that goes in front of the dash is some weird british slang word for "out of work murderer" that I don't know.

There's science fiction elements, but they're subtle and mysterious becuase none of the main characters have the education to actually understand them. There's bits of the narrative and world I wish that there'd been a little bit more exposition to explain what the hell was going on, but I guess it wasn't necessary.

There were no outright eye-rollers, and I don't know enough about British slang to know if there were as many typos and content errors as I thought there were. It occasionally gets up its own ass with the noir-comic-book-ass description of what characters are thinking or feeling, but it never goes so far that it outstays its welcome. After about 2/3 of the way in, I couldn't put it down. At its most gripping this is a 5/5. Giving it 4/5 overall -- if this year turns out to be a bumper year of good-ass books, that glow might fade to a 3/5, but there's not a hoot in hell of it going below that. Recommended.

Harlot's ghost- Norman mailer. A good read so far.

I got about 40% into Steel Breach by Casey Calouette and had to stop. It's just not good. The writing is wildly inconsistent and shotgun-speckled with typos (I still have no fucking idea if an important background character is named "Atli" or "Atzi"), the premise is so silly it's barely comprehensible (we have stargates and interstellar transports, but moving armor is too expensive, but there's plenty of starlift and stargate capacity for... infantry, ammunition, concrete, artillery, and artillery shells; also we forgot that airplanes are a thing so we can't shoot them down, but we have artillery-intercepting defense guns), the characters are all as flat and predictable as this crappy review. Even the action is bad. 1/5.

ETA: Going to start Losing My Religion by Kyell Gold instead. Maybe gay furries will wash out the taste of bad Mil-SF.

In the last few weeks I finished: 

Herodotus' Histories
War Stories of the Green Berets, by Hans Halberstadt
Persistent Patriot: the New Hampshire Life and Letters of Franklin Pierce, by Irving Bell
A World Turned Over, by Lorian Hemingway
and Self Reliance, by Emerson. 

Almost done with Catch 22, reading it for the first time.

Finally finished Creation by Gore Vidal, which I was reading ve-e-ery slowly for a book club. That book is a hell of a lot of people standing around and talking or sprawling on couches and talking or prostrating themselves in front of kings and talking or riding on chariots and talking. Slow and as dry for the first four-fifths, but the last chunk of it is pretty interesting and partially rescues the whole thing. 3/5.

Started on Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell today at lunch. Only read the first 5% or so so far.

Still working on Losing My Religion by Kyell Gold, about a third of the way through it. Enjoying it so far. Like Bridges, it has more heart than I expected from a little romance novella.

Also about 1/3 of the way through A Short History Of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Still enjoying it's steady pace (a chapter does not wear out its welcome or belabor its point) and friendly conversational tone.

Started book 1 of "The Expanse" series, Leviathan Wakes.  So far it's very true to the show (or vice versa, actually) and really good.

Started "The Magicians" for the 3rd time

Legends by Robert Littell

I jump around a lot when reading, so I switch books often and can be reading several at once...
Just finished


Currently

Hey, I bought The Lives of Tao a little while back. Please be sure to come back here and let us know what you think about it, I'd very much like to know!!

Well I'm about halfway through already. Though not groundbreaking by any means, I'm finding it a fun quick little read. Took a little to get into but it picked up. I'd rate it so far a good "Summer read". Consequently I'm loving most books I've read by Angry Robot Books

Awesome!

Thanks very much, Taktiq!