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What are you reading?

Vampire_Freak said:
I just started reading HitchHikers guide to the Galaxy.

Hope it's good

It is good, but as you may know there are 5 books in total. I read the first 3 and a half-ish and lost interest, I think it gets a bit rambling after a while.

I'm currently reading Battle Royale. Apart from some occaisional translation mishaps it's very good. The style it's written in is quite unusual and takes some getting used to, but it tackles all the issues in a very blunt way that I like, and does occaisionally ring true of the way Britain and America are going politically. Very gripping and well worth a read. My friend lent it to me, I'm not sure why it took me 2 years to get round to reading it!
 
Vampire_Freak said:
I just started reading HitchHikers guide to the Galaxy.

Hope it's good

I liked the first one. Its very fun, but short. I havent started on the second one. Just the fact I read a book is amazing enough for me.

I read A Catcher in the Rye for my lit class. I really liked it. I read it all in two days (I only read at night...during the day its not the same). I normally dont get into school-assigned books.
 
JonSev said:
Vampire_Freak said:
I just started reading HitchHikers guide to the Galaxy.

Hope it's good

I liked the first one. Its very fun, but short. I havent started on the second one. Just the fact I read a book is amazing enough for me.

Hitchhikers is a great book. The humour is fantastic, though very clever and subtle. It's generally a good read though.

The rest of the series slowly get subtler and subtler and the humour is much longer in coming. It takes 3 or 4 pages to get out one of his funny theories and they come a long time apart (Bistromathetmics and Other People's Problem Zones are both excellent though from the third book).

I do love Hitchhikers, and Douglas Adams was a massively clever bloke, and a wonderful writer though. His ideas were stunning, even if he did really struggle to actually write stuff.

His best work was probably "Last Chance To See", which is a superb book about the 10 most endangered species. He goes hunting for them, to prove that even the ugliest, most dull animal is worht saving. Forget good PR animals like Panda's, Elephants and Rhino's, he goes looking for a 2 inch flightless bird in New Zealand that hasn't been seen for 14 years (or something). Well worht digging out!
 
Finished Robert Harris' Imperium, excellent book! He's taken rigorously researched facts about Rome's politics and turned it into such an easy read even I could follow it :D

Next up is Iain M. Banks' Feersum Endjinn, which has a reputation of being out-there sci-fi, will see....
 
Ok, finished Viaduct Child a while ago.

Have moved onto :

Hey Nostradamus! - By Douglas Coupland - Very good!
Mortal Engines - Philip Reve - Reccomended by a friend, very good also!
 
The Resteraunt at the End of the Universe by Douglas adams

so far pretty good with that british sense of humor!
 
Finished "Perfume." It's amazing, and has instantly jumped into my favorite top ten books, I can't recommend it enough. It's genuinely creepy, but beautiful at the same time, if that makes any sense.

I'm now a few chapters into "No Lifeguard on Duty," Janice Dickinson's autobiography. She is FAB! She writes surprisingly well really. It's honest, funny and downright bitchy. Everything you would expect from someone who claims herself to be "the world's first supermodel."
 
Saturday by Ian McEwan...
Bit too wordy, and remarkably little happening (67 pages in, and he's just about got out of bed) - not up to my Mum's usual standard of recommendations, and I might give up... once something better arrives.
 
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger


Bloody fantastic book so far. I'm sure many of you have read it...
 
I accidentally read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown at the weekend, but it doesn't make me a bad person, it was just there and happened to do it.

I think it's because it was a nice break from "The Cat in the Hat", which was getting a littlle tedious in the middle, so I went for a book that was a bit easier to read :p
 
Will said:
Saturday by Ian McEwan...Bit too wordy, and remarkably little happening
Lol, I had exactly the same problem with McEwan's Atonement, which is supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread. I got to page 70 and the introductory sequence was STILL going on, and I just couldn't be bothered.

I've ground to a halt about a third of the way into Iain M. Banks' Feersum Endjinn; it's got four story strands which I'm sure will weave together quite nicely by the end, but three of them are boring! And I'm not overly keen on sci-fi that keeps throwing invented words at the reader just for effect. Might speed read it just to see what happens.

Moved onto Dean Koontz' From The Corner Of His Eye, very good so far, and with an opening page containing this how can I resist? - "A roller coaster had something to do with his recovery, as did a seagull. And you can't discount the importance of Barty's profound desire to make his mother proud of him before her second death." Grabbed me straight away :D
 
Roundabouts of great britain.

I recommend it to all ages.
 
The more time passes from when I read Catcher, the more I think back and relate to the kid.

I'm reading Watchers by Dean Koontz. It's a really fascinating read. It's for AP Biology extra credit and I'm glad I picked it.

We're reading Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in English, and it's a pretty good book. It's about a tribe in Africa and missionaries come in and ruin things and such.
 
I finished reading the roller coaster book and now I am onto reading, Where's Wally and Guiness book of world records 1983-2007.
 
Well I just finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I can't believe what happened! And who would of thought it was Snape all along :p Great book, I did get a little lost though when they started going on about stuff from the previous book. But you can just work it out.
 
I've recently finished Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman's The Long Way Round.

Charlie Boorman certainly lives up to this name in this book about their journey across Asia and beyond on two motorbikes. A real adventure, especially if you ignore the fact they had a support crew the whole way and that the tone of the book is awfully smug.

Ewan, who I think has always appeared very humble and down-to-earth for a Hollywood celebrity never quite gets over the fact that he can't switch his celebrity off and travel annonymously.

Furthermore, for the most part, nothing that exciting actually happens in the book, there are few interesting anecdotes and the section on the "Road of Bones" is quite good, but ultimately, there is very little to sustain interest in the book, and definitely better travel books out there.
 
Ok, have gone through loads more books.

Am on:

John Wyndham: The Chrysalids
1984: George Orwell

And a few others...

Lovely books! 1984 is creepy (As it should be) and its very much like Half Life 2 at the moment!
 
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