"What are you reading?" thread.

GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Tried rereading "Time Enough For Love" by Heinlein. Look, I'm a Heinlein fan, safe to say, but this book is ridiculous. EVERY WOMAN HE MEETS WANTS LONG'S BABY. Strangers. His hospital nurse. Even those descended from him. Even those arguably closely related. Even his mother. EVEN PRETEEN FEMALE CLONES OF HIMSELF. And they put it in so many words. "Impregnate me! I want your child!" Come ON man, what in the actual hell?

Yeah, and the chapter where he spent 10 pages describing, in stultifying detail, the process of trying to determine the chances of extra-tard babies from a brother-sister coupling was just beyond belief. Hard to believe this is the same author who wrote The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Have you made your way through "I Will Fear No Evil" yet? It's the first Heinlein I ever picked up and read, and still holds the WTF* crown for me.

--Patrick
*by which I mean "I'm not sue this would really happen that way..."
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
PatrThom said:
Have you made your way through "I Will Fear No Evil" yet? It's the first Heinlein I ever picked up and read, and still holds the WTF* crown for me.

--Patrick
*by which I mean "I'm not sue this would really happen that way..."
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No, I hadn't even started that one yet. And now I'm not sure I want to.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

I haven't finished TEFL yet (though I have a copy), so I can't compare. Given a choice between the two, I would say "Friday" is a better story than IWFNE, and "The Number Of The Beast" better than both.

--Patrick
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
PatrThom said:
I haven't finished TEFL yet (though I have a copy), so I can't compare. Given a choice between the two, I would say "Friday" is a better story than IWFNE, and "The Number Of The Beast" better than both.

--Patrick
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I think Friday will be next on the list, my pops often tells me I should read it.
 
Sparhawk

Sparhawk

Friday is pretty good, really enjoyed NOTB. My two favorites are The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers, with a close third place of Stranger in a Strange Land.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Sparhawk said:
Friday is pretty good, really enjoyed NOTB. My two favorites are The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers, with a close third place of Stranger in a Strange Land.
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Those last 3 were all great and I prefer them in that order as well - and they raised my expectations a great deal, which I think is why TEFL is so disappointing. I mean, I felt like I was reading some sexually frustrated biology grad student's erotic fanfic about how everyone "in the year one million, after the ninth nucular world war", even his sisters and mother, wants to get pregnant by him, and he (sometimes reluctantly) plays along. I don't know about the rest of you, but "reluctance" is a difficult emotion for ME to translate into a stiffy, even where incest ISN'T a factor.
 
Sparhawk

Sparhawk

No kidding. You might just want to avoid "To Sail Beyond the Sunset," it's Lazarus Long's Mom's point of view and sexual escapades memoir. Seems the older that RAH got the more he focused on writing about sex.
 
WasabiPoptart

WasabiPoptart

Just finished The Scottish Prisoner by Diana Gabaldon. I am a complete sucker for her Outlander series and this is actually an offshoot from those novels. I also read Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights (yuck), and Great Expectations over the summer break. I was on a classics kick for a while.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Welp, I'm officially no longer a Heinlein fan. See, I'd read the Rolling Stones as a kid and Starship Troopers as a teen and I absolutely ate up The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Stranger in a Strange land was ok, in that "it's a classic so you GOTTA read it" kinda way. But these last three books I think are gonna have me setting him aside til further notice. As noted above, Time Enough for Love triggered my "WTF" senses, and I was shouting OH COME ON halfway through it. Never finished.

At this point, I should probably point out, that when I talk about "reading" a book, 9 times out of 10 I'm reading it out loud to the little woman. I think I've mentioned this before, but it's probably been a while.

So I try reading Friday, and right out of the gate there's a gang rape the protagonist tries to pretend she's enjoying. And that's the end of that book. As a last hail mary, I grab the next one in line, Number of the beast. It starts out kind of jarring, but piques the curiosity and then BAM an incest reference and 10+ pages of everybody trying to convince themselves that it's perfectly ok to be naked around everybody else, in a very "methinks the book doth protest too much, what is this, elizabethan ankle porn?" kinda way. That was the last of both of our patience. So now she's headed off to bed, and I'm trying to pick the next book to read and now I do a little research to try to avoid any more such literary potholes. The Cat Who Walks Through Walls sounds like a snorefest, but at least it doesn't have much of the aforementioned problems, unlike it's sequel To Sail Beyond the Sunset. I Will Fear No Evil is also setting off all kinds of alarms, and I hear bad things about Job: A Comedy of Errors.

It's disheartening. Like dropping by a friend's house and finding out he's not there, he's gone to a klan rally.

Well, I dunno what to read next. The Forever War maybe.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

GasBandit said:
I dunno what to read next. The Forever War maybe.
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Heinlein is one of the 'controversy is good' authors. You either put up with it or you don't read Heinlein. Kati related a quote to me about Heinlein which goes something like, "Heinlein writes sexual situations which Heinlein himself would never have gotten into, even on a dare."

You're probably also going to want to skip on Piers Anthony, Harlan Ellison, or any of the Witch World books.

How about you both take in some Pratchett or Stasheff, instead?

--Patrick
 
drifter

drifter

Wait, do you mean Harlan Ellison's writings are controversial? I know he's infamous for being an asshole, but none of his writing seemed all that outré. Although, admittedly I've only read a smattering of his total output.
 
AshburnerX

AshburnerX

Piers Anthony is MOSTLY alright during his Incarnations of Immortality series, though even On a Pale Horse (the one I've read) had a bit of it. Stay the HELL away from the Xanth series. It goes weird places.

I also recommend staying away from anything by Laurell K. Hamilton too (or at least anything she wrote after her divorce). She basically turned her supernatural detective series Anite Blake into something where sex is more important than just about anything else (the titular character literally has powers fueled by it at this point...) and where Anita is basically the cause of 90% of her own problems, yet refuses to change the underlying cause of this. She's not a terrible writer but she definitely changed after the divorce.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Heh, I read some Anthony when I was a kid, these days I steer clear of it for other reasons. The writing just... doesn't seem up to par. And for the record, I'm not a-scared of sex in my books, even wierd sex. It's just constantly having incest and rape dumped over my head over and over again like so many buckets of icy, smelly water just got too much there.
 
checkeredhat

checkeredhat

Decided it's been a while since I added to my zombie library, so went looking for a new zombie book. Chapters and Coles, the only two close by, were pretty barren as far as zombie books go, but I found Dead of Night by Jonathon Maberry. Same guy that wrote The King of Plagues that I just finished (Actually, the first book in that series, Patient Zero was the zombie book I was most interested in picking up but couldn't find).
Going to start reading it tomorrow.

And yeah, yeah, "Why not go on amazon?"
Well, I will. But I wanted a book for TOMORROW, dammit. I had thought I'd give reading that Wild Cards book a shot, but by like 17 pages in, I had realized that is not a series I want to pick up in the middle.
 
Hailey Knight

Hailey Knight

Started Nightworld by Maureen Noel the other day. At first I was into it, and then came a brief segment of awkward flirting--the special kind when you know you're watching a guy completely strike out--and I almost called it quits. Then I decided I was being an ass and pressed on. Glad I did, because I'm digging the weird scenario, the mystery, and the characters. Basic set-up: Whenever Sapphire goes to sleep, she dreams she's another person in another world, some rogue murderer. Whatever happens to her there affects her in the waking world--cuts, bruises, and apparently even getting pregnant. Then it seems people from that other world are coming to the real one to look for her.

I'm about 1/4 of the way through it and enjoying it. Has a fast pace, so I'll probably finish it over the weekend or shortly after.
 
checkeredhat

checkeredhat

Enjoying Dead of Night quite a bit. Overall the premise is silly, it's at once the most convoluted, least believable and yet somehow seemingly typical explanation for a zombie outbreak. And most of the characters are sort of caricatures of your typical horror movie characters as well. It's definitely a big love letter to zombie movies. But at the same time it's not poorly written and cheesy like a lot of zombie stories, it's got some great imagery and creepy stuff going on for sure. Definitely glad I picked it up. Actually enjoying it so much I just ordered Rot and Ruin off amazon.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
I just read I, Robot to the little woman. And I discovered that nothing makes her giggle more than 50s sci-fi vernacular. "Jumping Jupiter, that's swell!"
 
checkeredhat

checkeredhat

Still waiting for Rot and Ruin to arrive. This is already the longest I've ever waited for anything off of Amazon (And only the second longest I've ever waited for anything ordered online. The other being an ebay seller who was trying to rip me off by not actually sending me the item but spamming me with requests to rate my experience and assuring me it was sent out).
 
Yoshimickster

Yoshimickster

LordRendar said:
Who knows what the name of the Sherlok Holmes story is,where it is written by Sherlok instead of Watson.
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I've had the entire anthology for years...but I don't know sorry. Hardly put a dent in it, damn those things are wordy!

You've read the first one "A study in Scarlet" right? I freaking love the murderer's motive in that, that took balls to right.
 
LordRendar

LordRendar

I got the Ebook collection of all the Sir Arthur C. Doyle stories,but a friend of mine told me of this story,where after much prodding on Watsons side,Sherlock decides to write down a story of his own.I need to read this.
 
Yoshimickster

Yoshimickster

LordRendar said:
I got the Ebook collection of all the Sir Arthur C. Doyle stories,but a friend of mine told me of this story,where after much prodding on Watsons side,Sherlok decides to write down a story of his own.I need to read this.
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It sounds awesome. What I've always loved about Sherlock is that from reading his lines that if he existed he would be the most Aspergersy person to ever exist. Hell, in the first book Watson tells him about the solar system and Sherlock says he'll forget it because he only remembers things that are interesting to him! That is sooooooooooo Aspy.

I also finished Discworld book one a while back. That book is a freaking TRIP I tell you what.
 
Sparhawk

Sparhawk

Re-read Ender's Game and read Speaker for the Dead. I had a totally different point of view on Ender 20ish years after the first read. Card did a great job on this series.

Onward to Xenocide...
 
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