What book did you just read and how was it?

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Networkn
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#2955569 17-Aug-2022 13:29

Just started book 5 of the Breakthrough Series by Michael C Grumley. Very entertaining, some genuine thriller moments, suspenseful and on the whole, likeable characters. Has a bit of everything, but ultimately quite accessible and I recommend.

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#2955571 17-Aug-2022 13:38

davidcole:

Any plot twists?

The usual plot twist is that your car doesn't have several of the described features.

Mike

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#2955579 17-Aug-2022 13:50

Or that if you don't pay the annual subscription fee, certain features stop working.

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#2955589 17-Aug-2022 14:15

David Baldacci 6:20 man. I've read all his books, and this one reminds me of some of his earlier, as a gripping page turner, and a good twist (or whatever page turning is referred to now in this eReader world)

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#2959382 25-Aug-2022 16:29

I have just discovered the Jack Widow books by Scott Blade. They are so close to an exact copy of the Jack Reacher books, I am amazed Lee Child has not gone after him for copyright infringement.

Jack Widow has a huge physique and never looses a fight.

He was a military cop but Navy rather than Army

He is tired of being a cop, so he now hitch hikes is way around America getting into scrapes and meeting women who are all the most beautiful woman he has ever seen since the last one. These women obviously always fall for his charms.

He carries just a toothbrush, and buys new clothes every few days so he never has to clean them.

He like to get his retaliation in before the other guys (never less than two or three of them) try to hit him. He has killed at least two people with just a punch so far (well in to book #2).

I have read a few comments about Jack Widow being a poor substitute for Jack Reacher, but we have to wait a year for each Reacher book, and they are finished in a couple of days, so I am happy to read about both characters. The writing is not quite as good as Lee and Andrew Child, but it is still very readable, and I am happy to recommend them.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/33271378-gone-forever?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=8gshJimSF8&rank=1

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#2960780 29-Aug-2022 14:28

TLD:

I have just discovered the Jack Widow books by Scott Blade. They are so close to an exact copy of the Jack Reacher books, I am amazed Lee Child has not gone after him for copyright infringement.

Even the covers look like a rip-off!

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vexxxboy

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#2960782 29-Aug-2022 14:36

TLD:

I have just discovered the Jack Widow books by Scott Blade. They are so close to an exact copy of the Jack Reacher books, I am amazed Lee Child has not gone after him for copyright infringement.

Jack Widow has a huge physique and never looses a fight.

He was a military cop but Navy rather than Army

He is tired of being a cop, so he now hitch hikes is way around America getting into scrapes and meeting women who are all the most beautiful woman he has ever seen since the last one. These women obviously always fall for his charms.

He carries just a toothbrush, and buys new clothes every few days so he never has to clean them.

He like to get his retaliation in before the other guys (never less than two or three of them) try to hit him. He has killed at least two people with just a punch so far (well in to book #2).

I have read a few comments about Jack Widow being a poor substitute for Jack Reacher, but we have to wait a year for each Reacher book, and they are finished in a couple of days, so I am happy to read about both characters. The writing is not quite as good as Lee and Andrew Child, but it is still very readable, and I am happy to recommend them.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/33271378-gone-forever?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=8gshJimSF8&rank=1

Funny you should say this because he has also written a series called Get Jack Reacher , with Lee Childs blessing, about Jack Reachers son and his journey trying to find Jack Reacher.

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#2982482 14-Oct-2022 08:33

I checked out a bunch of books from the library just before I got covid (waaay back in August) and have been working my way through them. I read Murder on the Orient Express and A Thousand Splendid Suns (by Khaled Hosseini). Murder was good, and engaging enough. Suns was amazing, easily as good as Hosseini's debut novel (The Kite Runner). It was stunning, gripping, and incredibly tragic. After I finished that incredible book I picked up the last of the books I had borrowed - HG Well's The War of the Worlds.

Oh dear.

Controversial opinion, I'm sure, but this is not a good book.

Written in 1898, I get that it was a different time, and possibly it was groundbreaking for the time, but I have found it to be a dreary, boring story that would be absolutely panned if it was released today. I'm barely 60% of the way through the book (despite not being a large book), and I feel like it's a punishment to read. The only reason I have perservered this long is that I hate leaving anything unfinished, but I'm close to giving up.

The book is highly descriptive, while revealing very little (except for descriptions of locations in England which mean very little to me without context). The initial invasion sets up the story, but so far it has been the same scene described over and over again - the Martians are advancing, destroying things with their Heat Ray and their Black Smoke, while the residents of the laboriously described towns and villages flee. The unnamed protagonist is our POV, but he's doing very little other than reporting what he is seeing. Occasionally the scrambling forces of our planet get a lucky strike against one of the Martian tripods, but there's no real sense of where the story is heading. There's a general sense of futility of resistance, but with only two characters of substance (and that's being extremely generous) - the main protagonist, and then later his brother (also unnamed) - there's no sense of how the story is going to be resolved. Will the protagonist strike a heroic blow against the invaders? Honestly, I couldn't give a toss at this point. I kind of hope the Martians just wipe us all out.

There's no character development, because it's told almost exclusively from a single character's POV, and only as description rather than interactions. The plot is incredibly thin, so there's little development there. What it feels like is a blueprint for a major Hollywood blockbuster - paper-thin characters, big imposing machines invading and blowing things up, and lots of menace without any real consequence.

Like I said - controversial opinion and lots of people who love this book (including a friend I spoke to about it on the weekend) will feel it is blasphemous to disparage the mighty HG Wells, but I honestly don't think it stands up to the test of time. Storytelling has evolved and become so much more interesting and complex than this. And for those who think I've been dumbed down by chewing-gum fiction, please note that my reading tastes are pretty broad (see above). Also, for comparison, I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) years ago and it was fantastic. So it's not just that it's "old" and hard to read. I think it's just that War of the Worlds is incredibly dull and boring, and I'm "this" close to dumping it and picking up a 400-page non-fiction on the partition of India for something more interesting and dynamic.

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#2982485 14-Oct-2022 08:42

I've just finished Stephen King's Fairy Tale.

Really good book and not even slightly horror-themed (as you can no doubt tell by the title).

The really big twist though? It's not set in Maine.

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#2982487 14-Oct-2022 08:46

networkn:

Expeditionary Force Book 1 by Craig Alanson.

Considering the extremely engrossing books I have been reading recently and the quality of the story, and writing, whilst I am soldiering on through this book, it's not exactly amazing right now. Interesting enough to keep me reading, and I hope that with 9 books in the series, things improve dramatically and soon.

I've read 9 of the 10 books and am 7% (according to my Kindle) of the way through book 10.

It's either your thing or it's not, but a wise-cracking beer can and a bumbling Army grunt jetting all over space is definitely my thing...but every now and then I skip a paragraph, when Alanson writes just a little too much into the sarcastic back and forth...

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networkn

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#2982493 14-Oct-2022 08:58

Handsomedan:

networkn:

Expeditionary Force Book 1 by Craig Alanson.

Considering the extremely engrossing books I have been reading recently and the quality of the story, and writing, whilst I am soldiering on through this book, it's not exactly amazing right now. Interesting enough to keep me reading, and I hope that with 9 books in the series, things improve dramatically and soon.

I've read 9 of the 10 books and am 7% (according to my Kindle) of the way through book 10.

It's either your thing or it's not, but a wise-cracking beer can and a bumbling Army grunt jetting all over space is definitely my thing...but every now and then I skip a paragraph, when Alanson writes just a little too much into the sarcastic back and forth...

Yeah, I think I am around book 5 or 6. I moved to another series to give myself a bit of a break because it can be a little same samey, but still reasonably interesting.

I'll get back to it in a while I guess.

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#2982495 14-Oct-2022 09:01

networkn:

Yeah, I think I am around book 5 or 6. I moved to another series to give myself a bit of a break because it can be a little same samey, but still reasonably interesting.

I'll get back to it in a while I guess.

Indeed it does get samey. I have also hopped around a bit. Listening to Podcasts and audiobooks instead of reading the 10th book. I do look forward to resuming again, but I am not quite ready.

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#2995354 13-Nov-2022 08:02

The Pasta Detectives - Rico, Oskar und die Tieferschatten.

According to the critical listeners, it would be "lonely top class" - but they belong to the age group of 11-14 year-olds. ;-)

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#2995378 13-Nov-2022 09:57

Some friends put me on to The Expanse books recently, and I am really enjoying them. It has lots of highly sympathetic characters with overlapping stories, and back stories that develop book by book. It's still not up there with Iain M Banks for SiFi but it's as close as anything I can remember. They are written by James S A Carey. There are eighteen books so far, half of which are short stories. I am a bit over half way through, and already feeling sad about getting to the end. What really surprises me is that I was not aware of the TV version. From the trailers, it has excellent production values and appears to follow the books closely. There are five seasons, and it gets 8.5 on IMDB Unfortunately, my wife hates SiFi, and there is too much of it to watch by myself.

I took time out from The Expanse when the latest Jack Reacher book became available. It's good, but not not crazy good.

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#2995436 13-Nov-2022 13:32

For those of you who enjoy hard sci-fi with engrossing world-building and utterly different alien cultures (such as in Iain Banks' Culture series), I can highly recommend the Spiral Wars series by Joel Shepherd. This also delves deeply into the good vs. evil thing of AI.

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