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What BOOK(s) are you reading?
barrowdown wrote: I finished
I also read The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell based on my brother's recommendation. I have not read Cornwell, but I though it was a fairly engaging historical fiction with a lot of ties to actual history. I am curious to read the rest of the series, which I have because my brother dropped off a box of books last time he visited.
I think I'm up to book 7 in that series. They're all fantastic. The TV adaptation on Netflix is also worth checking out. The cast is excellent.
I will say that the books start to get a little repetitive, as yet ANOTHER Dane warlord rises to power and threatens Alfred's kingdom, but it doesn't matter, because they're just so well done. Uhtred is a great protagonist, as he continues to do stupid, rash, hilarious things out of anger and spite. He does get a little Forest Gump-ish, in that he's seemingly present and responsible for all the major battles in this time period, but again, it doesn't much matter. It's historical FICTION. And nobody is better at this shit than Bernard Cornwell.
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Gary Sax wrote: Just finished The Last Mughal. Highly recommended. His ability to paint a portrait of this polyglot premodern place (Mughal Delhi), pre-nationalism, is breathtaking. And then to watch it all fall apart... it imparts the sense of civilizational sadness while still acknowledging the ways in which it was all fucked up.
I've been really interested in Dalrymple's new book on the East India Company as well. Return of a King was great, but Last Mughal hasn't made it to the top of the stack yet for me.
He's got a great knack for writing readable history.
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His use of primary sources in-text is, to me, out of this world. He's also so careful that primary sources do not only center on European accounts.
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- ThirstyMan
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Currently reading The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat.
Picked it up for $2 hardback in England, in an antique shop.
What a great story teller. All about a new corvette on convoy duties across the Atlantic in 1940.
As soon as I'm done with this it will definitely be King Arthur.
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Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the Pequod's voyage…
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane.
Every page is like this; every sentence, practically. It's funny, and harrowing, and interesting, and amazing. I want more books to be like this.
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barrowdown wrote:
I also read The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell based on my brother's recommendation. I have not read Cornwell, but I though it was a fairly engaging historical fiction with a lot of ties to actual history. I am curious to read the rest of the series, which I have because my brother dropped off a box of books last time he visited.
If you like Cornwell, you may also want to expand into his Sharpe's Rifles series.
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quozl wrote: I started the Icewind Dale trilogy by Salvatore this week. The one that introduced Drizzt. First book is so bad. Every hero character is overpowered and there is no chance any opposition will stop them. The villain is a moron (and purposefully so) and two heroes take on like 20 giants by themselves and only get a couple of scratches. It is so stupid. I have no idea how Drizzt became popular.
Oh wow. I haven't read that book in a million years. That bad, huh??
I still have that book somewhere, and I was thinking about reading it to my son (he's 10). We finished the first two Dragonlance Chronicles books, and he liked those. I hadn't read those books in many years either, but I have to say ... they're not bad. The characters are great, even if the world-building is pretty generic. Weis and Hickman also don't really sell the scale of this continent-spanning conflict, but I suppose you could argue that's nothing more than the backdrop to the adventures of this handful of characters.
My son hates Raistlin, which is just wrong. Maybe you have to be older, like a moody teenager, to really get Raistlin. He did like Sturm very much though, and was gutted at the end of Dragons of Winter Night. RIP, Sturm.
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