My favorite Brin by far. Pity the movie was a disaster…
I love Slow Horses and have read all of the sequels. The quality varies a bit but they are in general good reads, with a very nasty and biting British sense of humor, and some good quality spycraft by some very F’ed up characters.
Yeah, I am looking to read the next one. Wish the ebook wasn’t $10 though. I may see if the library carries it.
One thing that was odd in Slow Horses was the way the author would switch scenes without any kind of indicator, and often the dialog wouldn’t have an attribution, so it would stop me for a moment. Could be it was a formatting error on the Kindle and extra spacing was removed. Odd though.
Reading The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt, first in a space romp series. Started off well, liking it so far.
Poking through the science fiction stuff on Amazon, I see a series by a guy named Richard Fox, the Ember War Saga (9 books). Sounds kind of pulpy, the author himself describes them as Battlestar Galactica meets Mass Effect. Sounds up my alley but I thought I’d check if anyone is familiar with them, anyone read them? Worth a look or should I pass on by?
Looks like he’s an indie writer. He’s on Kindle Unlimited so if you subscribe I believe you get a free month, so his book will be free. You can unsub at the end of the month.
A lot of indie writers are quite good, and you may get more pulp stuff from indies than from the writers who go with the bigger publishers.
I finished Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I think it was great, but a bit long and a bit dense - but not in a bad way. It took a while, and Stephenson sure likes his thesaurus. Incredibly well put together with many threads and parallels that mesh together. Interesting ideas and characters. Glad I read it, but a book I wish I’d read earlier. In some ways it reminded me a bit about the experience of reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt.
Not sure what I’ll read next, probably something easy to digest.
In other words, typical Stephenson.
I don’t remember Snow Crash being this long and dense, but it’s been a while. Also, that one might be atypical.
I am considering reading the Expanse novellas, but seems like there’s no kindle collection of them. Bah!
Snow Crash is not, nor is The Diamond Age. His style became more verbose over time though, really starting with Cryptonomicon.
I’d actually say his later books have a less verbose style than his earlier ones. He just writes more. I read through Seveneves in about 4 days, Reamde and Anathem were about the same. Even DODO only took me a week or so. They seem like fairly light, but long reads to me.
I read Cryptomaniacon last year and felt about it the same way you do. Quite a read but over all a pretty good book. I recently bought Snow Crash and am looking forward to reading it.
It’s been a while since I read it, but I remember enjoying it a lot.
So no Peter Watts then. :)
I decided on Sweet Silver Blues (Garret PI #1) by Glen Cook.
Right now I’m rereading The Ophiuchi Hotline. I’ll be reading the series in preparation fot the new Eight Worlds book coming out.
This was pretty good. Shorter and shallower than it could have been, but the author is decent and the writing was tight. Looking forward to the second in the series which comes out in September.
Started the Slow Horse series, thanks to this thread. Liking it. Thanks for the recommendation.
Someone pretty please buy this book and tell us how it is!
Finished Sweet Silver Blues by Glen Cook. Fun fantasy/detective mashup, might read further in the series at some point.
@ChristienMurawski and I are in a writing group together (we’re both working on novels). One of our writing-group friends, Jeff, just released his first book in a trilogy. It’s a lady-pirate adventure novel set in an aggressively feminist world. Lots of bad language, so don’t read it aloud to kids… but please DO support our writing buddy by buying and reviewing this book!