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The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, Fyodor.

The Anvil of Ice, The Forge in the Forest, The Hammer of the Sun, by Michael Scott Rohan. Collectively the Winter of the World trilogy. I love these books.

How to describe them... ah, the writing isn't brilliant, from a prose point of view, but it's workable and more than readable. The characterisation is nothing special, although the source material gives it an edge. The setting is both original and unoriginal - essentially it's three books worth of "spot the North European myth" set around the last glacial maximum with a somewhat unusual twist given to normal fantasy standards. That he pinches so many myths is unoriginal; that he weaves them together so perfectly is why these books are among my very favourite fantasy novels. The plotting is very tight (this ain't no TV scriptwriter - yes, looking at you, GRRM - style "let's throw a hundred plot hooks out and randomly pick up on a few of them but not actually have a plan", it's not even a LotR write-and-rewrite thing, this is a meticulously planned trilogy with everything in the right place; a second read-through will be rewarding on account) and it all leads up to an excellent take on one of the nastier myths from the Scandinavian canon and the single most outrageous/spectacular/funny scene I've ever read in high fantasy.

(As an aside, both this and the same author's Spiral books suffer from being very hard to describe the plot with giving away enormous spoilers - it's like "the hero REDACTED travels to REDACTED and meets REDACTED where they REDACTED with the REDACTED" if you try!)

It's a crying shame that they're out of print, but that also means you've little excuse for not picking up a copy at £0.01 + P&P on t'internet. Especially if you like Norse myths and/or the Kalevala.

Also read Jesus on ThyFace: Social Networking for the Modern Messiah - social networking was big back then, and the book is a collection of excerpts from Our Lord's ThyFace pages. A bit hit-and-miss, but some laugh-out-loud funny bits.

Got a bunch of Hornblowers lined up, and the three non-sequels to the Winter of the World trilogy.

Weekends at Bellevue

Benjamin Hale - "The evolution of Bruno Littlemore"
It's a new book that was published on the 2nd of Feb, it's really good so far. A bit weird though.

Latest book of note on my book-reading blog is Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. Review is here:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp3366213.html#3366213

Stephen LaBerge's Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming

Witch Hill - Marcus Sedgwick.
A good book :3

Asperger's and Self-Esteem

Seven Roads to Hell: A Screaming Eagle at Bastogne
by Donald R Burgett

This guy was in the 101st Airborne (Screaming Eagles) in WWII. This is the second book of his I have read, love his writing style!

Camus's The Stranger. Great, great book.

I'm reading kind of a fun book. It's Renfield-Slave of Dracula by Barbara Hambly. It fleshes out the Renfield character while keeping the tone of the original novel. Just a good couch read.

The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson.

Currently reading between the following books....

The Rise And Fall Of Factory Records - James Nice
The Phaidon Atlas Of 21st Century World Architecture (This book is massive!)
Palestine - Joe Sacco

Here are some recent photography / art book purchases....

China - Edward Burtynsky
After The Flood - Robert Polidori
Motherland - Simon Roberts
Henry Darger - Klaus Biesenbach

Andrew Hudgins After The Lost War

I've also got bookmarks placed in Peter Ackroyd's Blake and Mircea Eliade's Shamanism but haven't picked up either of them in over a week. Bah.

I just finished The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.

It was an amazing book, though only a bit more than 200 pages long. I recommend it for everyone above the age of 14 on this site, though there is some material belonging to a higher age group. I think reading this book has helped me understand something important about certain social scenarios, and... Yeah. I feel good.

Last edited by ArtemisHolmes on 17 Feb 2011, 7:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hmm... I'll have to dig that up when I have more time. Renfield is one of my all time favorite fictional folks.

Right now, when I'm not reading textbooks, I'm reading Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes and Letters From a Stoic by Lucius Annaeus Seneca.