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Thanks, everyone.

 

I've missed you Raven! I hope you'll pop in more often. I'm also planning to buy fewer books this year. :)

 

Planning and doing are two different things.

 

I read (and heartily enjoyed) Daniel O'Malley's The Rook, and Stiletto. Thanks for recommending them. :smile:  

 

I read Stiletto last year, after picking it up for 99p on my Kindle.  It didn't have the originality of The Rook, in terms of story telling, and it was very uneven in places, but I still enjoyed it (Glad you did too!).

 

It wasn't a patch on the latest Peter Grant book, however.

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Three books in a month! Getting good at this!

 

On ‎19‎/‎10‎/‎2017 at 12:05 PM, ~Andrea~ said:

What were they?

 

Sorry, I missed this for some reason.  They were:

 

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Star Trek: The Final Reflection

By John M. Ford

 

This is the first Star Trek novel I've read (and finished) for years.  I used to read a lot of them as a teenager and collected a large number of the Titan re-issues that came out in the late eighties/early nineties.  This one was written in 1984 - pre-TNG - and has a very different take on the Klingons from what they would evolve into, but it did lay some of the ground work for what came later.  I never read the book at the time, but it was mentioned as an influence for Star Trek Discovery, so I dug it out and read it.  It's not the greatest book ever written, and it has certainly dated, but I didn't want to throw it out of the window as I did Star Trek: Forgotten History a few years back!

 

One for the fans.

 

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The Furthest Station

By Ben Aaronovitch

 

The first Rivers of London/PC Grant novella (and from what Ben Aaronovitch has been saying, it probably won't be the last).  Although looking forward to reading this, I was a bit wary as my previous, limited experience of novellas has largely been of stories that don't quite fit the format (they have either been padded or crammed/rushed).  This one, however, was a distilled slice of Grant, and worked very for me.  A good story, that makes good use of the characters and continues to expand the RoL universe. Also, from a book-geek point of view, it is a nice little hardback!

 

Highly recommended.

 

And yesterday I finished:

 

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Rivers of London

By Ben Aaronovitch

 

After reading the above I was inspired to go back and start re-reading the series again, and I'm glad I did because there is so much I have forgotten!  Great book - classic novice in a fish-out-of-water situation. if you like your policing with a dash of magic and haven't read this, do so now.

 

Highly recommended (and only 99p on Kindle at the moment!)

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On ‎29‎/‎01‎/‎2018 at 11:07 AM, Nollaig said:

How you doing 29 days in? :D

 

Happy reading, however many books you read :)

 

3.5. 

 

I was going quite well, but have been ground down by The Massacre of Mankind, Stephen Baxter's sequel to The War of the Worlds.

 

There is some good stuff in it, but it took a dog's age to get going and it is rambling all over the place. 

 

There will probably be a review when I finish it.

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Pff... You leave your thread alone for a week or so and look what riff-raff walks in... (Hullo!).

 

In answer to your question, yes and no...

 

The story is told through the eyes of a different character than the original, which allows Baxter to side-step having to replicate Wells writing style exactly.  That works well for the most part, but it falls over when he drops in phrases/lines from the original novel not as quotes - because the original book is a published work within this story - but as part of the new character's narration.  I found it rather jarring, to be honest, and a bit of an odd way of invoking the feel of the original (which I don't think this book does very well).

 

Overall, I wasn't that taken with the book.  It suffers from the same kind of escalation that very few sequels manage to carry off (to my mind this is more Independence Day 2 than Aliens, although that may be a bit of a harsh parallel to draw!).  It's certainly from the "More is better!" school of story telling.  Also, the way the narrator is kept at the center of the story is terribly contrived, and the book takes forever to get going.

 

There are some good ideas in the book though, and the use of contemporary real life people (such as Churchill) is interesting.  I also liked a section where events are told through the eyes of several different people around the world, but it's all too patchy and feels like a bag of ideas loosely held together by the main narrative.

 

I re-read War of the Worlds in preparation for reading this and where Well's original is concise and beautifully written, this is almost the exact opposite. 

 

I did write up a review when I finished it, but wasn't happy with it so I didn't post it.  Perhaps I should look at it again and have another go, but the above pretty much sums up my feelings about the book.  If I were being charitable, I'd give it 3/5, and wouldn't really go out of my way to recommend it (my sister loved it, however, but she married a Scotsman and lives in Wales so, like, how good is her judgement?).

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