Sakura

Heya, would anyone be interested to read Frederick Douglass' biography with me? I'm assuming it's heavy fare and thought a group read is probably good for motivation and for sharing impressions. Or is this something everyone reads in school and no one wants to touch afterwards?

Hm, I learned a few poems as a teenager, but I'm not doing that anymore. I need my mental capacities for other stuff. But I still can do most of the Raven, Hymn of Baal the Great, Love Lost and some Taylor Mali.

Esmay Suiza had done her best to clean up before reporting as ordered to the admiral aboard her flagship, but the mutiny and the following battle had left her little time. Once a hero - Elizabeth Moon

I'm in an EVA suit, on the hull of a badly damaged space ship, docked at a gigantic repair ship, right beside an enemy mine stuck to said hull, trying not to get blown up. Fun times.

Eh, you don't need to pay people to give good reviews, more often then not you just need to give out review copies. I'm in a few communities where you can win books for a review and some posts on a reading group thread. I'm very often astonished how well my fellow readers like books that I consider poor quality at best. I don't usually give too much at full point reviews either, I like to read the middle ground once, they usually give the best insight on the good and the bad points.

I read a lot of Enyd Blyton when I was young, St. Clare's and Malory Tower and the like, though I believe the German versions where heavily edited to change the placement in time as add quite a few more books to the series'. Malory Tower had about 20 books in German up to Darrells marriage, and St. Clare had 25 or so. I also liked the three investigators, which was also expended a lot for the German marked, as well as TKKG. I might try to read the originals at some point, but I'm afraid to kill my nostalgia. And I read a lot of Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and Sherlock Holmes stuff, though that hardly counts as children's books.

German ones. I'm from Germany, so that would be the default.

That seems a strange choice of options. There are no second-hand bookstores where I live, there have not been any for about 15 years. I used to buy a lot from a independent bookstore because they had a big selection and nice staff, but over the years the store has shrunk quite a bit while their collection of expensive decorative items grew. They don't sell any english books anymore and I can't stand the new employee they have. So now I pretty much use their in-store cafe and buy my books from the chain-store around the corner, which has actually gotten quite a bit nicer since it's start, and though the collection of english books has not grown, at least they have a bigger book selection overall than the other store. I also buy a lot of my english books from amazon and my eBooks pretty much anywhere else it's cheap (no kindle).

Amra is a lucernian thief, a few steps above a pickpocket, as she says. Her friend Corbin, another thief, comes to visit and asks her to safe-keep a figurine, left over from a trade gone wrong, he wants to use as leverage against his client. But at the end of the night Corbin is dead and Amra in possession of a statue that a lot of powerful people want at all costs. But Amra is searching for revenge for her friend. Amra's world is a vaguely late medieval Swords and Sorcery kind of place. While Swords, Daggers and Crossbows are the weapons of choice the first arabesques do exist. Magic plays a powerful part, but there are also seers called blood witches, demons and people who make pacts with them, necromancers, philosophers and gods. And it seems all those parties are taking an interest of one kind or the other in Amras Quest for vengeance. Amra herself is as likeable a character as if rarely seen. She's a marked and scarred woman of distrustful and careful disposition with a clever, straight mind, but also loyal and brazen to a fault. She also has a dry and sarcastic humor that I like a lot. A good counterpoint is her companion, the mage Holgren. He has a more easygoing, joking temper and a unconcerned 'It'll work out' mentality. I like how the book managed it's information about the world. There are a lot of world-specific idioms used, that give the world more depth, but the book doesn't bog you down with a ton of unnecessary background information. Amra as the first-person narrator explains everything necessary to get all the later plot points and understand the story in full, but the world still keeps a lot of secrets since very little is explained just for the fun of it. At the end of the books there's a little dissertation on the history of the world, magic and gods, which is amusingly written and offers some new information. I was reminded of Harry Dresden for most parts of the story. Amra is just a regular person without magic or power, but gets involved in things that should obviously be far outside the scope of her abilities. She gets battered and bruised by fate, but nevertheless in the end she perseveres. As Harry Dresden she has powerful allies as well as powerful enemies, and her solid plans and loose tongue help and hinder the alternating. In short, I liked it a lot. It's not too long, well written and engaging, with a great female heroine. I actually red the two sequels shortly after, because I did not want to stop. :readingtwo: (Spoiler: they are awesome too, but especially the second book is quite different)

Yes, it's a pretty georgeous book. Pictures don't do it credit, it's very sparkly. It's one of the best modern sci-fi book I red. I feared the interview format might be very dry and distant, but it actually flows very well. I loved that the interviewer himself becomes an integral part of the story instead of being just the narrator. The interviews work quite nicely to create suspense and I liked how the focus would easily switch beween the personal lives of the crew members to the global scale and back without ever feeling wrong. The big scope is as necessary and interessing as the small, I liked that. Also, there where a lot of themes that I'm fond of like the moral of science and how science if influenced by politics, the responsibility of the individual vs. the group. And not a moral pointing finger in sight. I agree that there could have been a bit more variety. I liked the transcript of the satilite video and the telefone parts worked well too. It would have been nice to include a little more of that.

Oscar and Meg are best friends. Their houses are right beside each other and they can chat from their rooms windows. But then Meg has to move to New Zealand with her parents for half a year, and the friends come apart for a bit. Then suddenly Meg gets informed that Oscar has vanished and is presumed dead, a suicide case. She moves back home with her parents prematurely and tries to figure out where Oscar has gone to and what has happened to the formerly happy, popular boy. I have to admit, I did not like the book much. I felt both main charaters did not act as teenagers. You could has easily called them students or young adults and probably would not have noticed anything amiss. Only in their written communication you get some small glimses of teenage slang. As a contrast you get a villain so stereotypical high-school mean girl she's basically just a cut out, not an actual person with likes and dislikes, strength and weaknesses. She's just all bad. Also, the book throws in some magical, fairy-tail like elements in the beginning, but then kinda denies they exist and arguments them away. It has to do with Oscars habbit of baking apple tarts and giving them to people how are having a hard time and feeling down. It makes them instantly feel a lot better. They even mention he can smell their despair and delivers his tarts to people he doesn't even know. But then they do a backflip and just explain it away with logical means. It's a bit strange, since it kinda changes the overall tone of the book in diferent places. All in all, I found I missed some kind of meaning in it. There is a lot of talk about love and friendship, popularity and mobbing, secrets and lies, but nothing seemed to be meaningfull, personal or deep. Oscar is very distant throughout the whole book, Meg is a little better, but she hasn't anything relevant to say either. The autor uses a lot of flowering, sweeping language to talk about emotions and revelations, but they just seems meaningfull and deep until you looked at the actual content of the words and found that there's nothing there. It's just nice words and platitudes made to sound important. And that's sad, because I could see it as a pretty good book, if they just stuck to the magical realism, the fairy tail elements and actually found something emotional to say about it all. As it is I give it a 2 out of 5.

Has anyone tried some of his other books? He seems to have written plenty before Game of Thrones. I have Fevre Dream lying around here and I'm wondering if I should give it a go. I only red Game of Thrones. I liked his style of writing, but found it a little exausting. All the misery, so many characters to keep track of and political intrige, which I'm never a fan of. I tried Feast for Crows after, but I couldn't get into it. So I wonder if his older books are in a similar vein, or something completely diferent.

Thanks guys. I'll try out your suggestions, probably starting with the Strange Library, since I'm in the mood for shorter books right now. I have heard uniformly good stuff about IQ84, so that's certainly on the back burner.

I've red Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World as well as Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. I loved Hard-Boiled Wonderland, the whole weirdness of it, the fantasy elements as well as the characters and the split between the different worlds. Colorless Tsukuri Tazaki I did not like. It was not bad, the writing was engaging enough, but I found it too mundane. I hoped for more mystical explanations for the whole story and was very disappointed that there was pretty much no magic to the realism this time. I was thinking of going for The Wild Sheep Chase or Kafka on the Shore next. Maybe someone can offer some recommendations on which of Murakamis books are strong on the weird and magical.

Hi guys. I hope I have the right subforum for this request. I'm looking for an erotic book with a female, bisexual heroine. I also want a little more than just flowery description of vaginal sex. More variance in style and accessories would be very welcome. *winkwink nudgenudge* I hope someone might have some options for me.

I loved most of the Inspector Lynley series, but I thought it kinda got downhill a bit for me after the big twist. I just can't like Isabelle (though I don't assume that she's supposed to be likeable), and I wasn't into the more personal bits about Havers, so I can't really say why, since I like her a lot otherwise. I did like Just one evil Act a little better, mostly since there was not a lot of Isabelle, but damn, Havers is acting so immeasurable stupid in that one and Lynley is just a little better. And she gets off mostly scot-free, too. Why? That makes no sense to me. I hope Banquet of Consequenses will have a little enlightening on that subject, because I don't think I can accept it if her whole behavior last book will just be water under the bridge.

I'm about half-way through Graveminder. I stumbled on it at random, and I love it. It's interesting insofar as it is pretty much a typical low fantasy book, as I usually read, but written more in a style that reminds me of English crime novels.

I'm German, but I don't really like most of our traditional dishes. The only thing I can think of is Baumkuchen. Now, that's the best kind of cake, especially popular now, around Christmas.

I finally got Fated done. You'd think with maternity leave I'd have more time to read, but I barely manage to touch a book all day. Now I started on Poltergeeks and have the best intentions to get it done by the end of the week.

I like it. It's only been getting popular in Germany in the last few years, but I prefer it to carnival. Less drunken silliness than people usually exhibit during carnival season while being equally fun for the kids. Also, any reason to play spooky boardgames with friends and dress up is a good reason.

I don't care for exotic fruits much. I've tried a lot of them, but I think they are more sold for novelty rather than flavor. I love grapes, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, grapefruit/pomelo and granysmith apples. Everything that's a bit tart. I'd love to try Durian sometime. I've seen desserts with artificial durian flavor, but I don't think you'll come by the real thing easily.

For me it must be Lord of the Rings. It's such a classic, but I just found it boring to the extreme. I still finished it, always thinking: "Well, everyone loves it, it has to get better". Just that it never did.

I've started on Fated. It's kinda strange, reading the first part after the second. You get introductions that don't quite fit your understanding of the characters, since they changed in the first part.

I just block out the music when I read. I find background noise soothing, so that's why I still listen to music while reading, but I'm not really paying attention to it besides the fact that it's there. I'm more surprised that so many people need absolute silence to read. I wonder how you'd get any reading done at all, especially if you don't live alone.

I like some of the old-fashioned Sci-fi, but most modern stuff is nothing for me. For the most part the problem is, that authors often have very little idea how the stuff actually works, but still want to work off of existing devices and technology, instead of just imagining up something original and unique. That just breaks my immersion, since I work in the field, and have a decent idea when someone knows what he's writing about and when he's just throwing in random words he does not understand. I can't imagine that it would be better with VR. I think most teens would spot such shoddy writing equally fast as I do. Most are pretty tech-savvy, which would be why computers are such a popular theme. But, if an author has an idea what he's talking about, and bothers to do thorough research, the theme can be a lot of fun and very versatile.