Last Book You Read and Your Review of It

[Imperfectionist]

I just finished The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. It was insanely fantastic. She is the master of dystopian lit, though this one was more looking at the end of the world actually happen, and what you become when your role in society is destroyed, as well as bringing up the subject of end of the world religion.

I'm reading The Blind Assassin now, also by Atwood. But I can say already that it is amazing. A novel, within a novel, within a novel, and I can't figure out which of the stories I love the most.

Have you ever read The Handmaid's Tale? Because I absolutely loved that book but I wasn't sure if I should read any of her other stuff. Do you reckon they're better or worse comparitively?

[Rye]

The Handmaid's Tale was the first novel I read of hers, and I absolutely devoured it.

Needless to say, I think The Year of the Flood might be better, or at least comparatively good, since they're both dystopian, but in very different ways, and they're written a bit differently. The Blind Assassin is way too different to compare, and it's really more of a quiet drama, but I love that as well.

[Imperfectionist]

Cool, I may have to give them a read

[Bunny]

I'm currently in the middle of reading the third book from The Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks. Cliché title aside, the books are actually fairly decent and feature some interesting things. They read a little weak in some parts, but for the most part they are strongly written by a novice writer. The Way of Shadows and Shadow's Edge were the last two books that I read, the first two books of the trilogy; currently reading the third one.

[Raistlin]

I recently read Dexter by Design the fourth book in the Dexter series by Jeff Lindsay. It was pretty good. Lame ending, but still miles better than the third book. I love Dexter's thinking, but even that is starting to get a little old. I think Lindsay needs to shake things up a bit more (which is something the TV show has done much better than the books: better plot development).

[Miriel]

Some of these aren't super recent, but they're all books I've read in the last 3 months. Going from best to worst:



Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford
Re-read this one. Read it years ago but lost the book. Bought it again cause it's SO FREAKIN' FUNNY! It's one of those books that literally makes me laugh out loud. Cannot eat snacks while reading this book cause I'll spit it out. And it's awful because the book also makes you crazy hungry. It's funny, inspiring, educational. Really one of my all time favorites.

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
READ IT! It's such a fascinating read. Every half page or so, I'd stop and be like, "OMG DID YOU KNOW THAT.." to my boyfriend. It's full of crazy, gross, enlightening material. I feel like everyone should read this book. It should be mandatory.

Atonement by Ian McEwan
Beautiful.



The Hunger Games & Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
YA books, so they're really fast reads. I enjoyed it a lot though. It's pretty much a copy of Battle Royale, but who cares? I still liked the ride, even though it was pretty gruesome. Looking forward to the 3rd part in the trilogy to come out.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Didn't think I'd like it, ended up really enjoying it. Nice easy read. The audiobook is even better! One of the best I've ever listened to.



What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng by Dave Eggers
The writing style was sometimes quirky and nice, other times it just felt too forced. But overall, I enjoyed the story, even though it made me sad. I do wonder though what the story would have been like if Achak had written it in his own voice, rather than telling his story to Dave Eggers and having him write it.


The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - by Stieg Larsson
Soooo many people love this book! Read it for my book club and everyone else loved it. I thought it was ok. I'm just not into murder/mystery type books I guess.



Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris
Latest installment in the Sookie Stackhouse, Southern Vampire series. Took me like 2 hours to read? I thought it was kinda empty and boring. But Sookie/Eric action always makes me happy. Crazy how fast the author churns out these books.

Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings
Meh. The first book the the The Belgariad series. Didn't really make me all that interested to read the books that follow.




Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Hated the main character. Awful awful man. And he was supposed to be the hero? Only good thing about this book is the author's wonderful way with words.

Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind
One of the worst books I've ever read. Please, avoid.

[Imperfectionist]

Ooh I saw the film of Fast Food Nation! It actually put me off eating meat, i've cut down a lot XD Brilliant film. I didn't realise it was based on a novel though.

[Madame Adequate]

Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World 565-1206 - John Haldon.

I had to read this in great depth for my dissertation. It was an informative and interesting book, but there are two fairly serious problems. First is that Haldon never uses a word where he can use a paragraph. Quite a few times I saw something hugely convoluted that he could have conveyed more clearly with far fewer words. Second is that the book's structure isn't very good. The chapters ostensibly deal with various different aspects and developments of the east Roman empire, but the nature of the book means that such divisions are highly arbitrary. It's probably for the best that he didn't try to enforce them, but on the other hand they seem redundant in the extreme, and it can be rather tricky to find what you want when it's scattered among any of several chapters and each fragment adds just a little more to the whole.

Also, don't go into it without a working knowledge of Byzantine history. Haldon gives plenty of historical examples and explains how events influenced Byzantium, but there's no general overview of how everything fits together.

[champagne supernova]

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany[/I] by Bill Buford
Re-read this one. Read it years ago but lost the book. Bought it again cause it's SO FREAKIN' FUNNY! It's one of those books that literally makes me laugh out loud. Cannot eat snacks while reading this book cause I'll spit it out. And it's awful because the book also makes you crazy hungry. It's funny, inspiring, educational. Really one of my all time favorites.

You should read Anthony Bourdain. Kitchen Confidential is very good.

Haven't read Love in the Time of Cholera, but have read One Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez doesn't necessarily give you the nicest characters in the world. But Solitude is more depressing than Cholera, so wouldn't recommend it. But Marquez certainly can write.

And if you liked Atonement, read Amsterdam. Better novel. More succinct. Atonement drifts a little bit here & there. But both are excellent.

The last novel I read was Crime & Punishment by Dostoevsky. Yeah, it's very good. Hard to get through, but still can't figure out why he did it. There's a book where they tweet famous novels and I laughed when I saw Crime & Punishment's entry.

Currently reading War & Peace and Midnight's Children. Midnight's Children starts off well, but midway through you kind of wonder if you're just living in Rushdie's wet dream. Will try finish it off at some point.

War & Peace on the other hand is utterly bloated. Read about 3/4 chapters and think there are already 10 characters. Unfortunately, I don't have the space to appreciate it properly, so going to finish Midnight's Children first. Hopefully the irritation I have for it has passed.

Also trying to read Pale Fire by Nabokov. Possibly the hardest novel in the entire world.

So when I get some free time, I think I shall finish Midnight's Children, re-read Lolita and then continue with Pale Fire.

EDIT: Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger is a must read.

[Rye]

Pale Fire is an extremely difficult novel, I'm so intimidated to read it.

[The Man]

The last book I finished was The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson. Sanderson's skill with words isn't all that strong compared to that of a lot of other authors I've read lately, but he makes up for it with extremely imaginative magic systems and skilful plotting and world-building. The Mistborn series is an intriguing deconstruction of a number of standard fantasy tropes, and I felt it came to a fairly satisfactory end. Having completed all his solo novels for adults I would say that he was a superb choice to finish the Wheel of Time series, which I'm still considering a re-read of (although I'm probably going to wait until the final volume is out).

At the moment I'm reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He's made me think about a number of important issues in different ways than I'd previously considered them and thus I'd recommend it, although I don't necessarily agree with all of his conclusions. I have a number of other works I'm somewhere in the middle of but I haven't really been thinking about them enough to justify writing about them.

[rubah]

Vanity Fair-- the recurring moralizing got on my nerves, but it was mostly engaging. It's definitely an interesting look into the mind of the british public at the time, though.

[Rye]

Oryx and Crake - A parallel novel to The Year of the Flood, I personally think TYOTF should be read first to really understand the world of the two novels, though the latter was curiously enough written after Oryx and Crake. I'm currently obsessed with this horrible little world that Atwood has created.

I'm not quite done yet with it, but I'm really enjoying it. It's weird and interesting how the main character of this one is the most uninteresting and annoying recurrent "background" character in TYOTF, which is a book full of colorful and frightening characters that I would have liked to see more of. It would sound like the book is unenjoyable and a disappointment, making Snowman the main character, but sometimes it's necessary to see a character like that tell the story of his betters, in all the envy, awe and jealousy, and I think it succeeds in that way.

[Miriel]

You should read Anthony Bourdain. Kitchen Confidential is very good.

I've read it. I liked it, but not as much as Heat. I also loved Julia Child's My Life in France, and Ruth Reichl's food related books are lovely as well. Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything is good too, but the writing style is a little too blusterous for my tastes. I've just started on Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution, which is fascinating in a historical context sort of way.

Haven't read Love in the Time of Cholera, but have read One Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez doesn't necessarily give you the nicest characters in the world. But Solitude is more depressing than Cholera, so wouldn't recommend it. But Marquez certainly can write.

I enjoyed One Hundred Years of Solitude MUCH more than Love in the Time of Cholera. The main character of Cholera wasn't just not nice, he was a delusional, selfish, obsessive, rapist, pedophile.

[blackmage_nuke]

THe Hobbit (Im abit behind in times) great book except they dont include a description of elves and had I not seen the LoTR movies I wouldve assumed they were the shorter variety of elves because of they way the acted and since everyone else besides Gandalf up to that point were dwarf/hobbit sized. Other than that and the fact "goblins" randomly got changed to "Orcs" in the LoTR book I thought the book was brilliant the whole way through

Suzumiya Haruhi: Volume One: The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi, Not very descriptive, Had I not seen the anime i dont think i would be able to picture the scenes at all, but that might just be that all schools in Japan look the same and its written for that audience in mind. It still has a good story though and its nice to read the original source.