Discussion Books, books, books!

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The last book I read was The Shepherd's Crown by Terry Pratchett. It was his last book and I didn't really want to read it... only as it was his last. It was sad reading the last chapter as it was written after he died 🙁

I guess he could be classified as Fantasy but with a very silly side

I had read almost all his books, I think they all around here somewhere.

I started to lose my eyesight around same time and have never found anyone like him again. So last book I read was 2 years or so ago.
 
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Currently fighting the same thing...audio books help, but it just isn't the same flavor of experience.

Oh....Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 'Children of Time' is a very good first effort on his part. I look forward to seeing more from him.
 
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anort3 said:
I've read Night Angel but not Light Bringer. Read the Kingkiller books and even the Auri? is that her name? book but it wasn't as good as the first 2. He's turning into G.R.R. Martin with the slow book releases. lol

Lets see, a few fantasy author favorites.

Robin Hobb - Everything but the Soldier's Son books. Skip those.

Joe Abercrombie - First Law world books. All great.

Raymond E Feist - I've been a fan since the 80s and read the original Magician books as they were released. Ended up reading everything he's written.

Robert Jordan - Read The Wheel of Time as it was released. I have all of them in 1st edition hard backs. The series was finished by Branden Sanderson leading to----

Branden Sanderson - Love him. All of them with Mistborn and of course The Stormlight Archive being extra amazing. I want the next Stormlight book now! lol.

Steven King - In general I love King but his later stuff isn't anywhere near as good as the old stuff. I loved The Gunslinger world and how The Dark Tower ties all of his works together hence the mention here in fantasy. The Stand and The Talisman are two of my all time favorite books. I've read them both probably 10 times each.

Dragonlance - I've got around 30 of them. I went back and reread them a few years ago and they were still enjoyable although not as much as when i was a kid. Weiss and Hickman were the best authors of the bunch and I've read a few of their other series as well like The Deathgate Cycle and the Darksword books. I haven't read any of the newer Dragonlance stuff though.

Dennis L McKiernan - Very Lord of the Ringsish. Very. Especially the first trilogy and the follow up duology. But also an amazing world that I've read every single book and short story collection of.

Tad Williams. - Everything he's written. Memory, Sorrow and Thorn and the Osten Ard books are the inspiration for a bunch of later fantasy. He's in the middle of a new series based in that world now and it's good so far.

Terry Goodkind. I hesitate to even mention him because the quality of his books just went to hell but the first part of the Sword of Truth series is great. And then it's not. I read the whole first series and even gave the follow ups a chance but I just couldn't keep reading him. I think the last one I read was The Omen Machine.

That's just a few off the top of my head. 😛
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I've read most of those but I haven't read anything by a few of those Authors so I will have to check them out. 😀
 
AllanGH said:
Currently fighting the same thing...audio books help, but it just isn't the same flavor of experience.
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well, its the same with movies based on books you read, they never the same. reading leaves much of the work to your imagination and many times other people's interpretations aren't the same as what you imagine.

I read Stephen King's IT before seeing any of the adaptations and the spider in the 1st one looked like something we have around here that is harmless and was not as scary as what I imagined it looked like.

That and trying to adapt Dune by Frank Herbert into a movie is just impossible (yes, I read all of those too).

I had a job in the 1990's which was so boring I could actually read entire S King books in a week. It was the job I discovered T Pratchett in and he was the author I got a book of for Xmas every year until 2015. Last 3 years I have looked for someone similar but I seem to have read all the books like his.

I need to find these again - most my books in storage in boxes my dad knew the contents of but he died 4 years ago, so needle in haystack situation. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Pliocene_Exile
 
I am totally into the classics. Charles Dickens, The POLDARK series of books (Winston Graham), Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, George Eliot (really a woman)... all great stuff.

the Poldark books are so much better than that new series PBS is doing based on the novels. The better series for TV is the classic BBC version, even they changed some stuff purists would gasp at though--that and they never finished all 12 books dang it.
 
Favorite author is easily Philip K Dick, some of my favorites from him are:

Ubik
A Maze of Death
Time Out of Joint
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
so many more...

Currently I'm reading a series of novels by David Wong (Jason Pargin) that falls in to the scifi/thriller/dark comedy category:

John Dies At The End
This Book Is Full Of Spiders
What The Hell Did I Just Read
 
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USAFRet said:
Being in the USAF, I've moved more times than I can count or remember.

And some volumes have moved with me every time.
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I'm a Squid who was raised by a Marine.
I only did 4 years active but I definitely understand the transient military life style.
My family moved 4 times before my mother insisted that my father buy a house in the city they came from so we as kids would have stability in our lives.
I was actually born in a civilian hospital in South Carolina (near Paris Island where my father was a DI).
I joined the Navy at 17 just after graduating high school so I would be able to afford to go to college.
So I tend to only keep a limited amount of "things".
But everything I do keep has meaning to me.
 
USAFRet said:
Being in the USAF, I've moved more times than I can count or remember.
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Very familiar circumstances. I grew-up in the USAF, and can identify 10 moves during my Father's career.

After I left home, life gave me more "opportunities" to move than I would have cared for....somewhere between 15 and 18 moves, off the top of my head, and we probably have at least one more move to make before I kick-off.

I'm still hanging on to those paper favorites, though.

[EDIT]
Odd Thomas, Forever Odd, Brother Odd, and Odd Hours....I think I might loop-back and re-read these in the next week or two.
 
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I always considered Koontz the poor writer's Stephen King but the Odd books were pretty good. Looks like there are some newer ones I haven't read.
 
anort3 said:
I always considered Koontz the poor writer's Stephen King but the Odd books were pretty good. Looks like there are some newer ones I haven't read.
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Definitely lesser known but I dunno about the poor man's version... Koontz has some great stuff like Phantoms, Intensity, the Odd stuff, etc. IMO a lot of King's stuff is overrated... for example I read "Under The Dome" a while back and it was a bit of a snooze fest, mostly because it was about 10x longer than it needed to be. If you're gonna read it get an e-reader, the book in physical form is the size of a dictionary
 
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i ran across a series a couple years back and plowed through the dozen or so that were available then. think there are a few more now i need to read, but have to wait until i have free-time again.

it's the pendergast series from preston & child

they are fun adventures and easy reads but i still enjoyed the heck out of them for some reason

www.prestonchild.com

Series

Series
www.prestonchild.com

stephen king is my fav and i've read all his stuff multiple times. great stuff but movies made since the late 80's all sucked compared to the books.

i'll read just abut anything that can hook me and suck me in. a well written story is always a fun read.

the passage trilogy by justin cronan was fun as well. i don't usually get into thus type stuff but again it grabbed me and kept me reading. a bit of a vampire theme but they don't sparkle in the sunlight nor fight werewolves for the love of high schoolers......

Amazon.com: The Passage: A Novel (Book One of The Passage Trilogy): 8601400421468: Cronin, Justin: Books

Amazon.com: The Passage: A Novel (Book One of The Passage Trilogy): 8601400421468: Cronin, Justin: Books
www.amazon.com

finally i do enjoy some historical set books as well. a good mystery set in a past time can be fun if done right. can't recall who wrote it but if i can find it again, i read a series of historical mysteries based in spanish inquisition times around england. the writer did a great job portraying the investigator trying to get to the bottom of a crime while trying to not be accused of being a heretic and so on when he questions the local "priests" and their guesses as to what happened.
 
I think that the only novel of King's that I read was 'Carrie', and that pretty-much put an end to his books for me. My wife, on the other hand used to feed on King's novels.

She kind-of scares me at times.
 
his early stuff like carrie, christine, misery, cujo, pet semetary and so on are easier reads to me than his newer stuff. books were much smaller but were great stories. those movies were probably the only good ones they made back in the day.

his newer stuff is so out there that it's hard to make a movie of it. and in my opinion they have failed miserably in every attempt. i just giving up on any movie they make and not bothering anymore. i did see the new pet semetary and though it leaves the book behind and goes off in a new direction, it was actually pretty good. kind of a zombie angle to the old story the way they went with it.

i loved the dark tower series and the way it pulled most of the universe he built all together. but in my opinion, they are best read after you've read everything else up to that point. it just makes it that much more enjoyable when as you read you pick up all the overlap and references made to the other books. they are good on their own, but much better with al the background filled in :)
 
Carrie was written while he was in college I believe. It was one of my least favorite and the only one of his older works I didn't read multiple times.

Koontz isn't a bad writer at all or I wouldn't have read as many as I have but he's just so prolific and generic that his books all run together for me. There are a few standouts but without googling I can only name 3 or 4 of them. He just doesn't have the gift of character development that King has ( had ).

I LOVED The Passage. The Twelve left me wondering what I'd just read and City of Mirrors was good again. The TV series which I really didn't like at first started growing on me towards the end of the season. Then they cancelled it. It needed HBO or Showtime treatment. Network TV was a poor fit.
 
JeckeL said:
Definitely lesser known but I dunno about the poor man's version... Koontz has some great stuff like Phantoms, Intensity, the Odd stuff, etc. IMO a lot of King's stuff is overrated... for example I read "Under The Dome" a while back and it was a bit of a snooze fest, mostly because it was about 10x longer than it needed to be. If you're gonna read it get an e-reader, the book in physical form is the size of a dictionary
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The Dome pissed me off.
Long slog through...reveal on the last 3 pages.
It was alien kids screwing around. It felt like he was tired of writing the thing, and just came up with crap to finish it off.
 
carrie was his first book i believe which he never intended to publish. but he got behind and owed a book to the publisher so he dusted it off and sent it in. i liked it though there were a ton of terrible movies made in the 90's and after based on it.

koontz is very hit or miss to me. i've enjoyed a few of them and hated a bunch more. hard to know until i'm in the middle of it, if it like it or not.

i did not know they made a show out of the passage series. but in keeping with my "i refuse to watch movies based on books i read" i'll avoid it anyway if i run across it.

another series i enjoyed was the peculiar children books. they were fun and i also avoided the movie they made. sometimes fantasy is better in my mind than it ever will be coming from someone else's mind and on the big screen for the masses. feels better to just have my own personal version in my head and leave it at that :)

even the harry potter movies messed up the scenery i built in my mind as i read them. they were not as bad as many adaptations but what i imagined was so much better
 
Under the Dome is a great example of post sobriety, post getting hit by the car King. It was a mess.
 
i liked the premise but it was way too long. sadly i watched the series on amazon and immediately regretted that decision.

i'll read just about anything but i don't care for comic books no matter what they call them now. nor do i like the over the top fantasy type stuff. dragons and wizards and elves oh my. not my thing at all. so all that game of thrones stuff does not hold my interest at all in any way.
 
Colif said:
The last book I read was The Shepherd's Crown by Terry Pratchett. It was his last book and I didn't really want to read it... only as it was his last. It was sad reading the last chapter as it was written after he died 🙁

I guess he could be classified as Fantasy but with a very silly side

I had read almost all his books, I think they all around here somewhere.

I started to lose my eyesight around same time and have never found anyone like him again. So last book I read was 2 years or so ago.
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I re-read Good Omens when I heard the Amazon series was coming out.

Shockingly, while I'd heard of Pratchett and Discworld over the years, I somehow never quite got to it. A few years back, my brother gave me a bunch of the Discworld books, a semi-random assortment. I read the 3rd, 4th, and 5th ones, and while he insisted order didn't really matter, I felt like I was missing something.

Got the first two, and a few others in the first dozen or so that were missing, and enjoyed them immensely. Ordered all the rest.

Went through all 41 in about a year-ish. I was hesitant when I got to The Shepherd's Crown. I had enjoyed this series so much, I think I didn't want to really face up to the harsh reality "and there will be no more."
 
that's how i felt when i finished michael chriton's books.

knowing there would be no more was a sad day for me. his mix of science and sci-fi i doubt will ever be matched. i doubt anyone will want to put the research work in that he did to keep everything right on the edge of "that's scary how close we are to being able to do that"
 
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